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I worked with a lot of schools in my last company and unfortunately I don't think extensive research is the best road either. While I totally understand your po

I worked with a lot of schools in my last company and unfortunately I don't think extensive research is the best road either. While I totally understand your position, this excuse is also used for only allowing pen and paper for math in highschool by teachers. It takes a crazy amount of time to extensively research and prove things in education for a few reasons: There is opposition to doing the research because teachers/parents don't want their students to be the first. It's really hard to make random control groups because schools want to put kids in classrooms by their process, not the whims of the researchers. It's expensive and mostly controlled by the big granters (ex. Gates Foundation). Results are often looked at via testing measures (which if you look at assessments, sometimes they were proven by having 400 white kids in an affluent school use, aka not representative). And so, we have a bit of an issue. Almost no one teaches math via a spreadsheet even though most adults do. It isn't researched on the implications. Data science as a class to qualify for credit to get into college is greatly contentious because it isn't proven. Even though it is clearly important to our current era. In addition, teachers are human and so they don't necessarily teach with the 100% best proven methodologies day in and day out. So I think it's important to realize that education is human. It's flawed and messy and isn't aligned to the best methods already. Sometimes you get lucky with a teacher that works for you and sometimes not.

williamcotton 2y ago
My wife is an active, publishing education researcher who is currently doing in-classroom research related to technology. It's really hard to make random control groups because schools want to put kids in classrooms by their process, not the whims of the researchers. IRBs won't let this happen in actual classrooms. The allowed approach is typically extracurricular summer schools where everyone is aware of the research component. But this is only for a certain kind of quantitative research. Qualitative research doesn't necessarily need nor benefit from a control group as it can be carried out in situ. Isn't it worth the effort to do the research instead of just seeing what happens when venture-backed companies introduce their for-profit wares into the classroom?
- gopher_space 2y ago
  > Isn't it worth the effort to do the research instead of just seeing what happens when venture-backed companies introduce their for-profit wares into the classroom? On the IT side of things a while ago it was mainly about grabbing as much hardware as possible and then waiting for them to get bored and fuck off.
ndriscoll 2y ago
Certainly computers/calculators are useful sometimes (in particular when analyzing measured data), but for say 95% of mathematics, pen+paper seems appropriate? Taught properly, it's a highly pictorial subject and pen+paper is an extremely flexible medium.
- mlyle 2y ago
  A primary way that computers could ultimately help is additional ability to individualize content and to provide students with spaced repetition of practice on topics. I am building systems in these areas for my students, but they're offline (they print out and automatically grade worksheets to track student competence in areas).

williamcotton 2y ago

My wife is an active, publishing education researcher who is currently doing in-classroom research related to technology. It's really hard to make random control groups because schools want to put kids in classrooms by their process, not the whims of the researchers. IRBs won't let this happen in actual classrooms. The allowed approach is typically extracurricular summer schools where everyone is aware of the research component. But this is only for a certain kind of quantitative research. Qualitative research doesn't necessarily need nor benefit from a control group as it can be carried out in situ. Isn't it worth the effort to do the research instead of just seeing what happens when venture-backed companies introduce their for-profit wares into the classroom?

gopher_space 2y ago
> Isn't it worth the effort to do the research instead of just seeing what happens when venture-backed companies introduce their for-profit wares into the classroom? On the IT side of things a while ago it was mainly about grabbing as much hardware as possible and then waiting for them to get bored and fuck off.

ndriscoll 2y ago

Certainly computers/calculators are useful sometimes (in particular when analyzing measured data), but for say 95% of mathematics, pen+paper seems appropriate? Taught properly, it's a highly pictorial subject and pen+paper is an extremely flexible medium.

mlyle 2y ago
A primary way that computers could ultimately help is additional ability to individualize content and to provide students with spaced repetition of practice on topics. I am building systems in these areas for my students, but they're offline (they print out and automatically grade worksheets to track student competence in areas).