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It does sound ridiculous if you put that requirement in the context of the current education system. What I am imagining is a system with a much more granular a

It does sound ridiculous if you put that requirement in the context of the current education system. What I am imagining is a system with a much more granular assessment model that can be done at the student's own pace. So if a student fails to get 100%, they should spend the next 10min relearning the content and retaking the assessment.

dagw 12y ago
Won't that simply lead to cycles of cram-reguretate-forget? Real understanding comes from seeing how that thing you learnt last year connects to that thing you learnt last week connects to that thing you learnt in that other class.
- coenhyde 12y ago
  There would be reassessment of the same content many times in the following weeks/months/years.
  - dagw 12y ago
    This seems to imply giving purely multiple choice computer graded (and possibly even computer generated) tests. Otherwise each school would have to have a small army of teacher doing nothing be creating and marking hundreds of tests every week. I'm very much of the opinion these types of tests can only test a very small subset of knowledge and don't give very useful feedback. Going back to my original example, how would you usefully phrase something like "What where some of the root causes of the start of World War I" as a series of multiple choice questions? Given that the important part of the question is not to get the answer 'right', but to pick a handful possible causes and successfully argue for them. Even in something like math which is probably the subject best suited for multiple choice, it is still a poor option since seeing the steps the student choses to try to answer the question are often more important and more illuminating than whether or not they get the answer right.
SiVal 12y ago
What you're describing is often referred to in education debates as the "mastery approach" to education. It is a system that used to be commonly employed by private tutors teaching the children of aristocrats and by master craftsmen training apprentices. When done well, it is extremely efficient, because at each step in the learning process what you teach is 1) the most important thing that 2) the student is fully ready to learn. "Fully ready" does not use 100% as its benchmark, though, because that would make the process less efficient. You just need to be good enough that you are well-prepared to learn the next step. You achieve, let's say, Level 45 (picturing your learning of a skill as climbing a ladder), which means you're ready to move on to Level 46. Level 46 assumes you can use all the skills learned up through Level 45, so it makes use of them, with the result that your Level 45 skill continues to improve with use as you learn Level 46. When you move on to 47, your use of 46 and 45 will continue to improve those skills. So "mastery" of Level 45 does not mean 100% before moving on to Level 46 but means a level of competence that can be used successfully. With continued use, all previous levels will asymptotically approach 100%.
- chii 12y ago
  this 'mastery' system sounds great for things that can be separated into levels. STEM subjects tend to be doable (and so is skill based crafts like woodwork). But what about things like english literature? how to interpret Jane Eyre? how to compare and contrast west side story and romeo and juliet?
  - SiVal 12y ago
    Reading levels have been a feature of literature study for centuries. Literary works have been "graded" (assigned levels) and sequenced for a very long time. Also, even a single, significant work, such as a work by Shakespeare, would be broken into levels, with the basic plot learned first, then later some memorization of important passages, then more analysis of the language, then a study of the historical events that formed the background of the story as well as the history that was taking place as Shakespeare was writing, then, with all of that in place, a consideration of the themes and subtle messages of the work and comparisons to other works. Since the mastery approach paid such close attention to readiness, prerequisites were better thought out. The prerequisites for literature at a certain level were not merely lower levels of literature. They also included the study of history, languages (Latin first, then Greek), rhetoric, and so on. There's no single, objectively correct sequence, even for STEM subjects. But a master teacher can learn from experience what should be learned first, and to what level, to make a student fully ready to learn any given thing. Then take many experienced masters, put them together, and have them carefully work out a prerequisite tree from which they derive a sequence of instruction.

dagw 12y ago

Won't that simply lead to cycles of cram-reguretate-forget? Real understanding comes from seeing how that thing you learnt last year connects to that thing you learnt last week connects to that thing you learnt in that other class.

coenhyde 12y ago
There would be reassessment of the same content many times in the following weeks/months/years.
- dagw 12y ago
  This seems to imply giving purely multiple choice computer graded (and possibly even computer generated) tests. Otherwise each school would have to have a small army of teacher doing nothing be creating and marking hundreds of tests every week. I'm very much of the opinion these types of tests can only test a very small subset of knowledge and don't give very useful feedback. Going back to my original example, how would you usefully phrase something like "What where some of the root causes of the start of World War I" as a series of multiple choice questions? Given that the important part of the question is not to get the answer 'right', but to pick a handful possible causes and successfully argue for them. Even in something like math which is probably the subject best suited for multiple choice, it is still a poor option since seeing the steps the student choses to try to answer the question are often more important and more illuminating than whether or not they get the answer right.

SiVal 12y ago

What you're describing is often referred to in education debates as the "mastery approach" to education. It is a system that used to be commonly employed by private tutors teaching the children of aristocrats and by master craftsmen training apprentices. When done well, it is extremely efficient, because at each step in the learning process what you teach is 1) the most important thing that 2) the student is fully ready to learn. "Fully ready" does not use 100% as its benchmark, though, because that would make the process less efficient. You just need to be good enough that you are well-prepared to learn the next step. You achieve, let's say, Level 45 (picturing your learning of a skill as climbing a ladder), which means you're ready to move on to Level 46. Level 46 assumes you can use all the skills learned up through Level 45, so it makes use of them, with the result that your Level 45 skill continues to improve with use as you learn Level 46. When you move on to 47, your use of 46 and 45 will continue to improve those skills. So "mastery" of Level 45 does not mean 100% before moving on to Level 46 but means a level of competence that can be used successfully. With continued use, all previous levels will asymptotically approach 100%.

chii 12y ago
this 'mastery' system sounds great for things that can be separated into levels. STEM subjects tend to be doable (and so is skill based crafts like woodwork). But what about things like english literature? how to interpret Jane Eyre? how to compare and contrast west side story and romeo and juliet?
- SiVal 12y ago
  Reading levels have been a feature of literature study for centuries. Literary works have been "graded" (assigned levels) and sequenced for a very long time. Also, even a single, significant work, such as a work by Shakespeare, would be broken into levels, with the basic plot learned first, then later some memorization of important passages, then more analysis of the language, then a study of the historical events that formed the background of the story as well as the history that was taking place as Shakespeare was writing, then, with all of that in place, a consideration of the themes and subtle messages of the work and comparisons to other works. Since the mastery approach paid such close attention to readiness, prerequisites were better thought out. The prerequisites for literature at a certain level were not merely lower levels of literature. They also included the study of history, languages (Latin first, then Greek), rhetoric, and so on. There's no single, objectively correct sequence, even for STEM subjects. But a master teacher can learn from experience what should be learned first, and to what level, to make a student fully ready to learn any given thing. Then take many experienced masters, put them together, and have them carefully work out a prerequisite tree from which they derive a sequence of instruction.