[HN Gopher] Lots of people in education disagree with the premis...
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Lots of people in education disagree with the premise of maximizing
learning
Author : JustinSkycak
Score : 24 points
Date : 2024-07-09 15:00 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.justinmath.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.justinmath.com)
| taylodl wrote:
| This article is a bit terse, but at least it hits one thing: math
| is a different subject than most, math is a _skill_ - just like a
| sport or learning an instrument (or learning a foreign language,
| for that matter) and mastering a _skill_ is different than
| acquiring knowledge about a subject.
|
| The problem is we don't point out that difference to students and
| inform them how that difference should change their approach. For
| example, I told my kids that math is a skill, and like all
| skills, practice is required for mastery. It's not math
| _homework_ , it's math _practice._ That 's not a cutesy
| statement, either. They understood that even if they had no
| homework assigned, they should still spend a few moments
| practicing their math. That approach paid-off in spades!
| mncharity wrote:
| > math is a different subject than most, math is a _skill_
|
| Interesting framing. It prompted me to wonder, what aspects of
| science education are taught as a skill, are what aren't but
| could/should be?
|
| Scientific argumentation/dialog (part of science literacy)
| seems occasionally taught as a skill. Perhaps roleplay,
| reflective practice, and drill, are then underutilized?
|
| An order-of-magnitude sense of size is regrettably very not
| taught as a skill. So despite being taught primary through
| undergraduate, and being part of most every science and
| engineering curricula, it's very little _used_ by other
| content, and even graduate student grasp is often weak.
| Teaching a sense of size as a skill, as a framework for
| organizing one 's knowledge of the physical world, might be an
| interesting opportunity.
|
| Much of intro physics seems taught as plug-and-chug skills. So
| being a "skill" seems at least somewhat orthogonal to
| transferability, utility, etc. Is applying physics to your
| everyday life ever taught as a skill? Or an experimentalist
| mindset?
| lkdfjlkdfjlg wrote:
| > And there are plenty of teachers who are incentivized to use
| easy, fun, low-accountability, hard-to-measure practice
| techniques that keep students, parents, and administrators off
| their back.
|
| I've been visiting schools in London and I've noticed that
| teachers/headmasters "sell" their schools with claims that their
| schools are "inclusive" or use "play based learning" or "great
| activities" etc. Everything and anything, but being serious about
| learning. I kind fo get the impression that the approaching to
| schooling is to get kids off parent's backs. Like "we'll take
| them, they'll have fun, don't worry about it". Extremely
| frustrating.
|
| If anyone has here experience with schools in London, shoot me an
| email and lets talk? (email in profile)
| JustinSkycak wrote:
| There's a lot of that too in the USA. Unfortunately, the
| strategy works because the learning debt doesn't come due until
| the students graduate, and at that point, it's somebody else's
| problem.
|
| Parents get sold an idea that their kids are learning, but this
| learning isn't actually verified along the way, so nobody is
| held accountable for making it happen.
|
| (Sure, the kid might say they're learning and the teacher might
| say they're doing a great job, but can you really trust that
| when both parties are incentivized to say that learning is
| happening and penalized for saying that it's not?)
|
| By the time the kids graduate, the learning debt is so massive
| that it's easier to just change the narrative. Johnny got
| smacked in the face by math class at college and no longer
| wants to be an engineer? It hurts too much to accept the truth
| that life could have been different if he had seriously learned
| math in high school. So instead it's "ah well, engineering is
| hard and Johnny was never really cut out for it." Or even
| "Johnny's engineering class is unfair."
| mncharity wrote:
| Years ago I was watching so-called "best practices" videos on
| teaching estimation in early primary. I was astonished. Often
| the skill being coached seemed to be participative
| performance in a collaborative pretense of understanding.
| What to do, and not do, so we can both pretend learning has
| occurred and move on. With the teachers themselves largely
| unclear on the concepts.
|
| Ongoing formative assessment is usually closely associated
| with instruction, with attendant conflicts of interest. I
| wonder if say LLMs, might transformatively permit fine-grain
| and adaptive assessment. So a "what have you been learning?"
| dialog for objective identification, and then assessment
| across the objective neighborhood. With potential for
| tutoring of course. But here emphasizing a possibility for
| rapid verification of learning.
| JustinSkycak wrote:
| > Often the skill being coached seemed to be participative
| performance in a collaborative pretense of understanding.
| What to do, and not do, so we can both pretend learning has
| occurred and move on.
|
| And the more you do that, the more you're shutting off any
| possibility of any learning occurring in the future
| (because the student will not have acquired the
| prerequisites for whatever they're supposed to be
| learning).
| lkdfjlkdfjlg wrote:
| Think you could find a link?
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| The book systemantics claims that systems exist to perpetuate
| themselvesand not to perform the function for which they were
| created.
|
| This is working as expected for the school systems which were
| created to make drones for the factories and to appease the
| Communist revolutionaries in the 1800s.
| bglazer wrote:
| Yes, spaced repetition and regular testing are effective in a
| purely mechanical sense. They're good ways to acquire knowledge
| and skills. But, it's really worth noting second order
| considerations. Does the median student enjoy the testing and
| repetition enough to be motivated to do them? Do they understand
| the utility or applications of the skill? Are you even teaching
| the right set or sequence of skills? I think these considerations
| have gotten more traction in recent years, possibly at the cost
| of acquiring the skills themselves. That said, I don't think the
| cynicism in the article about teachers just wanting fun easy
| activities is warranted. They have to consider other things than
| the most mechanically effective methods of learning.
| gnicholas wrote:
| I thought this was going to be about the no-child-left-behind
| mindset, which results in teachers spending most of their time
| focusing on the slowest learners and very little time on students
| who are already at/above grade level. That mindset is certainly
| common in our school, and learning for the latter students is
| closer to flatlined than maximized.
|
| Maximizing learning via SR is interesting, but it seems like it's
| the furthest thing from our kids' teachers' minds.
| JustinSkycak wrote:
| That's a fair point about what you expected to read. That said,
| while I agree that "teach to the slowest learners" is common
| and results in flatlined learning for at/above-grade-level
| students, I would argue it's somewhat orthogonal to the claim
| "disagree with the premise of maximizing learning."
|
| If you teach to the slowest learners, then it's still possible
| you might agree with the premise of maximizing learning (for
| the slowest learners). So, I can't use "teach to the slowest
| learners" to argue that many people disagree with that premise
| in an absolute sense (for all learners).
| gnicholas wrote:
| I considered mentioning in my first post that the school's
| behavior does not maximize overall learning because such a
| large portion of the students are at/above grade level. It is
| possible that their method of teaching the below-grade level
| students is consistent with maximizing learning for those
| students. I would think that for students who are behind, you
| would want to increase engagement/fun in order to increase
| the likelihood of maximizing learning in the long run. If you
| just wanted to get their scores up that year, you might focus
| more on drills instead.
| hardenedapple wrote:
| I am very doubtful of the suggestions that those arguing against
| testing and spaced repetition are just not trying to help people
| grow.
|
| My 6 month old is currently learning a whole host of things, and
| we are doing repetition and watching his growth -- so no
| disagreement on the premise that these things are good. But we
| are also making great pains to ensure that he is playing, is
| always happy doing new things, and doesn't have to continue if he
| gets overwhelmed and/or bored. We do this because the mentality
| of someone when learning is a huge factor in what they get out of
| the activity.
|
| I had the impression that the current push against testing and
| repetition is because it ended up with children hyper-focussed on
| "passing the test" skills but not spending the time to question
| things too deeply and gain that understanding that actually helps
| the workforce (like Feynman noticed in Brazil).
| shkkmo wrote:
| I would point out that "repetition" is not all equal. Education
| has a tendency to front load lots of repetition which creates
| boredom and disengagement. The spacing of repetition is often
| poorly done and rarely individualized.
|
| Part of what makes "spaced repetition" so effective is that the
| spacing is customized based on performance and you aren't forced
| to keep frequently practicing the things you know well and can
| focus that effort on the things that aren't quite clicking.
|
| As testing becomes more standardized, it does a worse job of
| assisting with the education process and serves only as a
| measurement tool. Tying funding to standardized test results
| turns them into a gamifies metric that actively makes education
| worse.
|
| Edit: I believe an important goal of education should be to
| instill joy in and desire for learning. These are important for
| the kinds of self directed practice that are key to making
| progress because we have a some natural sense for what challenges
| us and what doesn't. This should be supplemented by experts
| explaining how skills link together and build on top of each so
| we know how to learn a skill that is currently too hard to
| practice directly.
| JustinSkycak wrote:
| I agree that spaced repetition is often done poorly and needs
| to be customized based on performance.
|
| Just putting this here because you might find it interesting: I
| spent several years building a fully-individualized spaced
| repetition system that not only
|
| 1) works in a hierarchical knowledge domain (where repetitions
| on advanced topics "trickle down" to update the repetition
| schedules of simpler topics that are implicitly practiced), but
| also
|
| 2) minimizes the number of reviews by choosing reviews whose
| implicit repetitions "knock out" other due reviews (like
| dominos), and
|
| 3) calibrates the spaced repetition process to each individual
| student on each individual topic (student performance and topic
| difficulty are competing factors).
|
| You can read more about it here if interested:
| https://www.justinmath.com/individualized-spaced-repetition-...
| dongobread wrote:
| I get what this piece is trying to say, but it's ignoring the
| fact that schools are trying to maximize learning with pupils who
| often don't want or care about learning (unlike with athletes or
| musicians who are generally learning their craft by choice).
|
| A significant part of teaching disinterested students (not just
| in a grade school but in general) is about making the subject
| interesting enough that students will want to spend time on
| learning and continue to delve further in their free time.
|
| If you're trying to teach someone web development, would you have
| them churn through a stack of predetermined bootcamp-style
| projects, or would let them try to build something they have
| personal interest in? I bet the latter method would turn out much
| better for the student in the long run.
| robocat wrote:
| Mathematics is mostly not that useful. Unfortunately most useful
| skills are not explicitly taught by our education system.
|
| Negotiation. Cooperation. Compromise. Communication. Soft-skills
| are poorly taught and hard to learn. We mostly learn these skills
| subconciously. Even when trying to learn them conciously it is
| difficult.
|
| Mathematics hasn't been of much use to me over decades of working
| in software. 90% of my degree in electronic engineering was
| mathematics (I didn't know better). Some skills needed for my
| software practice: (a) focusing on the right problem (b) talking
| to users (c) concentrating on usability (d) design skills (e)
| negotiation, (f) obstinacy in the face of problems outside of my
| control (g) choosing who to work with.
|
| University level mathematics is clearly required in some software
| domains.
| dave333 wrote:
| Spaced repetition should be automated by inserting it into the
| most popular games that education authorities can license in
| bulk. So students get to play their favorite games for free but
| they have to do spaced repetition learning to get to the next
| level in the game. Doesn't require school buildings or teachers.
|
| Teachers should be incentivized based on the grades gained by
| their students during their tutelage. So grades gained = grade
| after - grade before summed over all students.
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