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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…
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?
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