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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29306 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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It would be cheap and extraordinarily simple to put 1000-student cohorts into different conditions and conclusively determine what is actually effective. It boggles my mind that such simple research hasn’t been done to conclusively put the issue to bed. What are we paying academics to do exactly? What are we paying the education bureaucrats to do? They have completely lost the plot. Fire all of them and replace them with a dozen highly motivated bloggers and we might actually get some conclusive answers to all of our questions. If some theorist has a new theory in education, let him prove it (double-blind controlled). Allot some money. Fuck, if you didn’t want to experiment on American kids, open up two schools in Nigeria for $400.

My God, even just paying kids to do an hour-long computer-driven program to determine the time-efficient benefit… like this shit costs nothing… fire every pedagogue and start over…

They did, they found it, and it doesn't matter.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Follow_Through_(project)

Teachers are much more interested in their self image than in student outcomes.

If you are looking at a dysfunctional system and wondering why people don't just do some tests, find what works, and do that, please understand that this is not how any of these systems work. "We need more data" is almost always an excuse to ignore results the people involved don't like the implications of, not an actual request for the rigorous sifting of knowledge from ignorance or bias. Whether it's teaching methods or school discipline or policing or any of a thousand other areas, they aren't wrecking things because they don't know better. They're wrecking things because they want to, and don't care about the consequences because they don't believe they'll suffer from them.

Well more correctly they’re wrecking things because they have a goal in mind that is served by wrecking things, and that goal does not line up with the stated goal of the organization.

It’s pournelle’s law, but it may not be the needs of the bureaucracy being served. It may simply be a calculation that upper class women feeling high status is more important than the success of poor children, which every society makes. It may be a decision that the most important thing is to listen to the experts, even if those experts are very knowably and obviously wrong(in this case because they are simply ignorant), and that it’s worth sacrificing good outcomes for to honor that rule. This, too, has abundant historical precedent. And it may be that they drink their own koolaide and no one ever points out the results, which, again, has abundant historical precedent. Never attribute to malice what you can attribute to callousness, sycophantic underlings, and a need to feel right.

A fair correction. Mine made it sound like wrecking is a terminal goal, which in most cases is not accurate.

but it may not be the needs of the bureaucracy being served.

Society is itself a bureaucracy.

Oh the testing has been done. We know what works and we know it conclusively. The educationalists just lie about it and do their own thing.

https://www.nifdi.org/research/recent-research/whitepapers/1352-a-brief-summary-of-research-on-direct-instruction-january-2015/file

Direct Instruction is, if not a panacea, then almost a panacea. They tested it in numerous studies, urban and rural schools in the US. They even tested it in Liberia where it works as well. It works on 'underprivileged' kids and smart kids. The effect doesn't wear off. It just works. Now the report I'm reading comes from the national institute for direct instruction, so they have something to gain. But their footnotes are full of studies! And sometimes people do advance ideas that are just generally good. Pasteur had something to gain from pasteurization but so does everyone else.

Is there any research how well DI works for teaching skills that involve motor coordination besides just factual learning?

IIRC, Caplan has a claim that there is evidence that one method works (at least better than others). What I vaguely recall hearing is that the method is just very straightforward and mechanical, like, there's a book that the teacher reads from, basically word-for-word, asking for responses at certain points and such. The problem is that teachers hate it, because they have the idea in their head that their job must be intensely personalized and creative ("We're artists!").

This is very vague recollection, so it could be someone other than Caplan, but I remember the gist of the story. I never dug into it to see if there actually is good experimental support for such a proposition. Lots of education research that goes against the narrative of teachers unions and other lefties gets super buried (see also: Roland Fryer).

EDIT: Below, sarker got at least the name of the thing: Direct instruction.

I remember some controversies about that as well.

If the problem is something like that it's actually quite difficult to find enough people who are both willing to work with small children all day, and willing to follow rigid instructional scripts, this seems like a good opportunity for technological augmentation. If the lessons are scripted, why does it have to be the childcare worker reading the script? Couldn't some kind of anthropomorphic chatbot say the script, and the childcare worker gets to focus on ensuring the kids are actually doing what they should, settling disputes, ensuring some degree of order, emotional regulation, and so on?

Something tells me there’s no shortage of people willing to work with small children and also follow rigid scripts. There’s a shortage of people willing to get master’s degrees and then do that. Now of course you don’t need a masters degree, or even really a bachelor’s, to do that, except as required in applicable law, but then you have to change the law for elementary school teaching to only require a two year degree. Good luck with that.

I think an even greater factor than the education requirement is all the other BS that goes along with being a teacher. Paperwork, compliance, that sort of thing. Plenty of people (especially women) would love to work with small children and teach them how to read etc. but have little interest or talent in filling out miles of regulatory forms, requests, records, etc.. Besides the natural demands of motherhood, I think this is by far the greatest reason teacher burnout rates are so high.

Yes, this. Also, liability. Also, group size.

It's easy to get both men and women to teach things like sports clubs, 4-H, or scout clubs -- with some other adult volunteers present and have similar cultural norms around behavior, families buy and maintain their own supplies, student choice, and groups of 10-12 kids.

It's when you're alone teaching mandatory scripted curriculum to ~20 kids, several of whom don't want to be there, with 504s, BIPs, IEPs, and MLSS procedures, all with their own reporting and compliance requirements that things get dicy.

Also probably true, but most people don’t realize that until they’re in.

Sure, that's why burnout rates are so high.

That is a fantastic point. There’s been an overall decline in “free natural labor”, having been replaced with stressful paid labor in every case. Teaching the young is something that both men and women naturally find enjoyable and would do without pay — but they wouldn’t do it in stressful bureaucratic conditions and they wouldn’t do it every day. Instead of factoring for this in our culture, we simply eliminate this natural teaching instinct and focus on paying the stress-laborers. This is clearly inefficient, because if you can get people to do prosocial helpful things for free it’s always going to be more efficient. Other ways natural labor has been replaced: advising council to members of your community (therapists, psychiatrists, job coaches)

This non-bureaucratic labor may be cheap or free but it's not legible. How does the state know teachers are actually teaching without the mountain of paperwork? Maybe kids are slipping through the cracks and no state official knows about it.

An adult is unlikely to claim to want to teach a classroom for free but instead just sit there doing nothing. You can also have parents decide, or administer a test every two weeks, or etc. There is a huge middle ground between our current bureaucracy and placing a person of ill repute inside a totally unchecked environment

What tells you that?

Too many credentialed interests.

If some theorist has a new theory in education, let him prove it (double-blind controlled).

Ok, I have to ask. How exactly would one run a double-blind controlled study on whether students learn better with phonics or with holistic context-and-rainbows-based teaching?

It sounds impossible to me. But then, there have been a number of extremely[1] clever[2] innovations[3] that solve problems I thought were unsolvable. So maybe I will learn something new and clever today.

[1] Intent to treat solves the problems of "sometimes people in the control group independently get the treatment" and also "sometimes when you tell people to do something they do something entirely different".

[2] Regression discontinuity design, when applicable, solves the "we want to establish causality but we have only observational data, wat do" problem.

[3] Falconer's formula solves the "I want to measure what fraction of some trait is specifically due to genetics rather than environment, but I have only observational data, wat do" problem.

Ok, I have to ask. How exactly would one run a double-blind controlled study on whether students learn better with phonics or with holistic context-and-rainbows-based teaching?

It sounds impossible to me

???

Have teaching be done by one set of people, and literacy testing by a completely different set of people, and mix the kids up at the time of the test, so that they don't know which kid learned in which way.

You can even anonymize the tests so that the people compiling the results have no idea which kid even wrote the test.

Blinding is usually a pretty trivial thing to set up.

That would be single blind, no?

Edit: maybe? Maybe not? Maybe words don't actually mean anything?

CONSORT guidelines state that [the terms single-blind, double-blind and triple-blind] should no longer be used because they are ambiguous. For instance, "double-blind" could mean that the data analysts and patients were blinded; or the patients and outcome assessors were blinded; or the patients and people offering the intervention were blinded, etc. The terms also fail to convey the information that was masked and the amount of unblinding that occurred (source)

I was wondering specifically how the people administering and receiving the treatment would be blinded. Outcome assessors could definitely be blinded - that's the part I was doubting.

Although for the record it turns out that I was wrong to doubt that, and there was a clever semi-solution for that, which was to tvir obgu gerngzragf gb obgu tebhcf, ohg va qvssrerag beqref jvgu n grfg va orgjrra. Which, as directly quoted from said study by McArthur et al, means that "it is highly likely this study used a double-blind procedure."

My understanding is that the best-practices as determined and accepted by education researchers have practically nothing to do with the standard practices actually used in schools. I regularly see friends in education complaining that grading (as opposed to mastery learning, for example), homework, and lectures (as opposed to project-based learning, for example) have pretty strong evidence against them but are nearly universal in actual schools.

The stuff /teachers constantly complains about sounds exactly like mastery learning. PBL sounds delightfully impossible to measure. Why are these supposed to be good?

I'm not sure what teachers you're talking about that are complaining about mastery learning. I've also never heard of it being used in a school.

Why are these supposed to be good?

*shrug* Not my area of expertise. Just examples of things that academic literature in education apparently supports and are taught to people getting education degrees training to become teachers but then are not used in actual schools. Or so my friends' rants tell me.

I'm not sure what teachers you're talking about that are complaining about mastery learning. I've also never heard of it being used in a school.

I sometimes browse /teachers for the cruel schadenfreude. Being required to keep seperate IEPs for every kid and instruct them at their exact level of mastery (and how this is basically an insane and impossible demand on time and attention and multitasking) is a very common complaint. Their descriptions seem like a very close match for the description of Mastery Learning in the wiki link you provided.

instruct them at their exact level of mastery

Part of the issue is that this isn't most IEP's. There are plenty written by some idiot which instruct teachers on precisely what to teach, i.e. "teach multiples of 5 for one week" and then teachers are legally required to follow through with it even if it doesn't make sense. They're very tough to change too.

My wife had an IEP which mandated IIRC 35 hours / week with a single student, meaning the kid was expected to get 1 on 1 tutoring the entire school day and that still wasn't enough because field trips etc. would set her back by 7 hours which couldn't ever be made up.

These could be corrected in pretty common-sense ways but the requirement to have everyone involved with the student (behavioral specialist, speech pathologist, counselor, teacher, resource teacher, resource lead, principal, aid, and so on) at the IEP meeting makes it tough to get done.

Ah, /r/teachers, that makes sense. Never visited there.

But that does match my understanding that mastery learning is practically impossible to implement with anything resembling our current model of lectures to large classes. I wasn't familiar with complaints about IEPs being used (abused?) that way, but it doesn't surprise me.

I think there actually is a pretty strong consensus among researchers that phonics is better, although I can't find a primary source like a survey or meta-analysis. But this consensus (or at least, reasonably strong weight of evidence) is mentioned e.g. in https://www.sciencenews.org/article/balanced-literacy-phonics-teaching-reading-evidence, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/06/education/learning/schools-teaching-reading-phonics.html, https://psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/2017-17326-001.pdf, and https://www.reallygreatreading.com/what-is-the-science-of-reading-and-phonics#:~:text=One%20of%20the%20key%20elements,key%20to%20successful%20reading%20instruction

The main problem seems to be that this hasn't made its way into graduate schools of education.

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