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As far as I can tell from reading the discussion section of the original paper, they unfortunately didn't address either a compounding effect or the fact that a small difference could accumulate over time. With the caveat that I may be misinterpreting the table, they did show that students with higher initial knowledge had faster learning rates [0]. That seems to be consistent with some students gradually accumulating an edge that grows over time, even if prior knowledge due to having more opportunities is also a factor, which is the authors' hypothesis. However, those rates were in log odds, meaning they decreased over time in percentage terms. That's only within the same task, so I don't think that rules out other types of compounding.

I will say that a student who consistently learns slightly faster and over the course of their entire education ends up drastically more skilled as a result would definitely be a faster learner, but that seems more muted than most people's intuitions of a "fast learner" or someone with a "knack" for a subject.

[0]: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2221311120#t02

> That's a small difference in a single incremental component, but it represents a difference in learning rate of a whopping 35%

I guess I see the glass as half full, because that’s easy to overcome.

If a top learner is only 30% better, an average person could study for an hour and a half instead of an hour and easily surpass them. Time management is the ultimate superpower, and it’s something you can get better at, not something you are born with.

> an average person could study for an hour and a half instead of an hour and easily surpass them

They would need to do this consistently every day for their entire school career.

Also, what if it's exactly this behaviour that creates the top (book) learners to begin with?

In my experience, most people just don't have any interest or motivation to sit and work hard on book learning things every single day for years on end.

Some people want to do work on practical stuff, others want to spend their time on athletics, and yet others want to spend time involved in social activities say creating music or other kinds of performance art etc.

It could also be that learning rate drops the more time you spend during the day as brain gets fatigued. And in addition what if it drops more for the same people who already had a lower speed.

> I guess I see the glass as half full, because that’s easy to overcome.

It means that some will effectively be at grade 8 level in grade 12, that is not easy to overcome.

> an average person could study for an hour and a half instead of an hour and easily surpass them

That is just for homework, you won't get 50% longer schooldays. 50% more work means you have to spend many hours extra every day to learn as much as the faster kids do just by going to class. And that time is lower quality, you make much better connections when you don't strain yourself by spending all day studying.

If this is true, which I think it is, this bring another, very important question: How this article got published? Who initiated it, who paid for it and why? What was the motive behind this publication?

"This story was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education."

I'm sure The Hechinger Report wants to promote the idea that achievement gaps can be closed by simply giving The Hechinger Report more funding.

Look, the politburo has demanded that there be no difference in learning rates and thus there shall be no differences in learning rates.

At least among castes. Can you imagine a world where an epsilon-minus semi-moron has a learning rate equal to an alpha-plus?

To add to this, not all students are working on problems at the same rate either. I’d be willing to bet a good portion of fast learners spend more time thinking about these things. By the time I took my first and only programming class in school I’d already been writing in basic and putting together batch scripts to manage launching games. Of course I picked up pascal much more quickly than my peers because I’d already spent a considerable amount of personal time tinkering in the space. Same with math. I probably spent a lot more time thinking about that than most of my peers. I’d zone out in unrelated classes trying to figure out ways to extrapolate or repurpose math tricks I’d learned because it was interesting to me. So I appeared to be a very fast learner. But was I? I still spent longer than most of my peers on those subjects.

> And there is a bit of a compounding effect, as the accumulated advantage of the fast learner would unlock progress on additional components that the slower learner lacked enough background for.

I’m not sure about this. Could you give an example (any subject) that would help me understand?

Math is the canonical one. You need arithmetic to get to algebra. You need algebra to get to geometry. You need geometry to get to calculus. Everything builds on each other, so you can’t skip to calculus when you barely know how to add.

There is a component of most domains where you figure out the fundamental building blocks and you can learn a bunch of different branches in any order without much overlap, but that’s usually after the initial mastery equivalent to math’s calculus.

Understood and I agree. What I’m not convinced of is that learning speed would have a compounding effect because of this. If we assume a vacuum where the only difference is learning speed than any leaps the fast learner make by combining previous knowledge would eventually be made by the slow learner. It’s just a linear control (assuming all else is the same) and subject / lesson shouldn’t matter.

I could see plenty of real world impacts of course. Discouragement / encouragement due to peer comparisons, limited availability of resources like teachers, etc.