Bloom's 2 Sigma Problem

"I remember Salman Khan (of Khan Academy) talking about this a few years ago. He believed that the current accepted method of teaching - students attending lectures and sitting in classrooms getting knowledge from teachers, then later doing homework alone trying to apply it - needs to be inverted. Lectures, presentations, textbooks can all be online and automated. Teaching resources, limited as they are, are much better spent helping students specifically when they are stuck and need more personalized help. Of course this brings us to the more fundamental question - are schools more for learning or daycare?"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24257872

In high school I would get to school early and practice my instrument or hang out. My band friend was in remedial algebra and failing and got up enough courage to ask for help with his homework. On the second problem I noticed that he couldn't read his own handwriting and asked him to write cleaner. He started getting the highest grades in the class and saying it was easy.

When I started Algebra, I was trying to save paper by writing everything on one line ``A = B = C = D = answer`` which makes it hard to do things to "both sides" of the equation. I could mostly do the problems in my head but showing my work was impossible and it's easy to make trivial mistakes at any step that give you the wrong answer. My friend was using a whole sheet of paper per problem and showed me how to do it and then it got easy.

My point is that if five minutes with a peer can fix trivial, fundamental issues with a student's approach, imagine what a trained teacher or professor could do on a short one-on-one session with each student?

Here's a fantastically detailed 2019 review of replications of Bloom's work:

https://nintil.com/bloom-sigma/

As is oft the case, the conclusion is 'it's complicated'.

I loved learning about this phenomenon from Patrick Collision’s blog.

Anecdotally, this makes sense to me. Up until the 3rd grade my mother would work with me every single day on my homework. I was consistently number 1 or number 2 in my class.

This changed when my mother began spending more time with my siblings my homework than with mine. I personally believe simply having someone with you to walk you through problems makes all the differences in the world.

With mastery learning, it's the feedback loop that's making the difference. In some domains where the subject matter itself can be computationally modeled (such as math), it seems plausible that the feedback loop as well can be emulated by software. There have been many attempts and many failures to do so, but I'm optimistic and believe it's a matter of further investment and research.

It doesn't say whther the intervention was assigned randomly (and those assigned all stuck with it). Home environment and parental support has a huge influence and also those who get tuition (or stick with assignment to the tuition group) probably have strong parental support.

I’ve never learned anything in a classroom. I’ve always learned by doing or from a tutor.

Standardized education is a joke.

As others have said, it’s more about daycare than education.