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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…
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.
*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 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.
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.
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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.
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