I seriously doubt that 75% of fourth graders read as bad as the examples at the beginning. But what troubles me more is that people go to universities to study education, and yet after all these years, they still seem to have no clue about how to teach a diverse group of young kids. Yet, they're often very confident in their teaching methods.
I'm not very familiar with the field, unfortunately, but it is my understanding that there is not much of a scientific method applied to teaching theories. As in, not just armchair theorizing, but more like A/B testing. I know, it's a hard problem, but so are many science problems, and Rome doesn't have to be build in one day. But where is the progress?
If anything, I keep hearing how kids today are doing worse than they did some generations ago. Well, it's probably difficult to even compare these different times, and certainly no-one would advocate going back to - god forbid - striking with a cane etc. But didn't anyone notice that in the course of changing the way kids are taught in school, their performance fell by the wayside?
I mean, even if half of the above claim were true, and some ~37 percent of 4th graders couldn't read properly, that would already be outrageous. But surely, that didn't happen over-night -- where were the corrective measures along the way?
Can you blame everything on changed societal habits? TV, playstations and smart phones at an early age instead of books? Somehow I doubt it.
From friends that have suffered through education degrees, it doesn’t sound like the field sees itself as a part of the scientific community at all.
There’s a disproportionate focus on, frankly, ideological indoctrination. Even if you agree with the underlying ideologies that doesn’t seem like an ideal system for producing excellent educators.
The little methodological trainings that do take place are often grounded in fads or cults of personality rather than scientifically proven effectiveness research.
It sometimes feels as if the US as a society delegated the design of k-12 education to a few hundred experts, that turned out not be experts, and never checked back to see whether we had made a mistake.
There are mountains of education research out there. Some collages actually do focus on it, but the real goal is to prepare people for the workplace by jumping though whatever hoops are mandatory.
Research is largely ignored because what actually determines what’s used is politics not some rigorous validation of what works. We do a lot of standardized testing in the US not because it’s particularly useful, but because it’s been privatized and the only way for those companies to make even more money was even more tests. Which meant they needed to convince people more testing was needed, which worked.
Luckily it’s shocking easy to educate most people, almost like young kids brains where setup to learn stuff…
In general literature reviews are the best starting off point.
However, I don’t know what if anything would be relevant to you. If you’re helping kids with dyslexia learn to read then that’s very different than normal tutoring etc.
Really though research tends to have really narrow focus such as classroom lighting.
This was something that I and a friend found surprising when he was studying to become a primary school teacher in the UK. A lot of the education for teachers in the UK is effectively 18th century philosophy taught uncritically - the likes of Rousseau, etc...
We both have a university background in philosophy (we both did the US equivalent of "majoring" in it, and I went to graduate level) and what we found disturbing was how uncritical and non-evidence based the teaching of teachers was. It seems like a fair bit of non-practical teaching of teaching, at least in the UK, is ideological indoctrination. They aren't "doing philosophy" in the sense that you would in a philosophy course where you are meant to be critical in your engagement, but are being told to accept philosophical arguments as doctrine.
So in a way its not surprising to me that teachers fall for other doctrinal ways of teaching.
You go to linguistics departments and they actually do stuff around evidence based child language acquisition, meanwhile teaching colleges ignore that and teach an unreflective centuries old ideology about how children learn.
There appears to be a big cultural gap between say linguistics departments and education departments.
This was exactly my experience. I had to pass a review board before I began my senior year, and it was essentially an "ideological indoctrination" examination. I said what they wanted to hear. What else was I going to go with the 3 years of education that I had already purchased? I was fortunate to study at a college that emphasized field-based experience, because it was the only degree-related value that I left with.
In the end, I spent more hours earning my degree than using it. I work in software now.
Oh, it's not a stated set of requirements. I would describe it as more of a culture. The review board didn't hand me a standardized test or anything. They just asked a lot of questions about my personal outlook on the field of education. I already mentioned this in another comment below, but what they really want to hear is "it's a mission".
I did some searches for teaching being a mission, and that's pretty distressing that they demand that you work for money and then also work extra because it is "a service".
Yeah, pretty much this. It's all part of the "it's a mission" mentality that leads to teachers being over-worked and under-paid. Everyone else has a job. You have a calling!
In my education degree program, in the intro class we spent time every week discussing recent research papers we had read. I was interested in practicing, not doing research, but when selecting schools there were clearly some that had a research focus and some that had a practical focus.
> I'm not very familiar with the field, unfortunately, but it is my understanding that there is not much of a scientific method applied to teaching theories. As in, not just armchair theorizing, but more like A/B testing. I know, it's a hard problem, but so are many science problems, and Rome doesn't have to be build in one day. But where is the progress?
My father's job was to visit primary school teachers to evaluate them, give them advice and organize teacher's continuous education. That was in France, so it's most likely a different system than the US. He regularly bemoaned that education was way too politicised, any new minister of education would try to make their mark by grabbing a new fad with no regards to the scientific validity behind that fad and would ask people like my father to organise classes for primary school teachers who would then be told to follow that fad.
This happened for reading methods (luckily the whole language phenomenon known as "méthode globale" didn't last very long in France), the debate on constructivism, etc...
Psychology is already quite lousy as a science, which has hardly made progress in 100 years, but educational sciences bungle somewhere below even social psychology. There's no reproducability, there's no idea of how the learning process works, let alone how to organize a curriculum. They've got no idea what they're doing, yet populate the school boards and ministeries, and mandate methods and topics.
We should take training teachers more seriously, pay them properly, and let them use time-honored methods until there's something that's truly better. A teacher, if close enough to the pupil, will be able to see what works and what doesn't.
> Psychology works just fine in marketing, advertising, politics,
Does it really? I think there isn't even good data on the effectiveness of marketing and advertising, let alone on the correctness of psychological theories used. Marketing and advertising run on common sense and FOMO.
> I think there isn't even good data on the effectiveness of marketing and advertising
Thinking that is a kind of proof that marketing and advertising work - to get people to believe they aren't being profoundly influenced by marketing and advertising.
I happened to work in academic cog/neuro-sci research, and have ended up programming for a company that's doing some form of market research, but I haven't seen that data. Sure, advertising works, but how, and to what extent? There's a bunch of competing frameworks, each with their own research school, but it's more marketing than science. 20 to 30 dissimilar points on a 2D grid with a linear regression line, that's their evidence.
Marketeers are an easy target, though. They can't afford to ignore it, so they buy into some of those theories. And drop them just as easily. But they have to pretend it works.
If you've got good data on marketing effectiveness, I'd like to see it.
The original assertion was that psychology works just fine in marketing and advertising, and you asked "does it really?" Here you say, "Sure, advertising works".
While quantitative data on how it works and how effective it is might be lacking, the point is that it does work. The remaining questions are of the "more study is needed to draw any conclusions" kinds of objections that the tobacco industry used to obfuscate the hazards of smoking and that the petrochemical industry uses today to prevent action on global warming. It's is this kind of uncertainty and doubt that I'm asserting is why so many people are still unclear about how much influence marketing and advertising have over their choices.
I think there are successful people in those fields who have honed a good intuition for psychology. That doesn’t mean the science behind it is good though.
Just to steelman for a second but educational research is obviously quite hard (long horizons, large costs including opportunity costs, vulnerable groups necessitating careful ethical standards and consideration).
I'd still give the folks involved a D-, but the average evidence being weaker than Psych is to be expected given equal investment.
But then there's no worth in that research (apart from trying to find a way to more reliable theories). Bad research should be ignored, not taken as "evidence based".
A common trait in the US political system. "If the person on the other side of the aisle disagrees with me on points A, B, and C, but agrees with me on point D then I need to reevaluate my position on point D." I noticed this when the pandemic began. For about a week when we first went into lockdown my very conservative and very liberal friends were all worried about getting the virus and what the effects might be. But I knew even before it happened that this mentality wouldn't last and that eventually people would look around and go "wait, we're on the same side as THOSE people? Something isn't right!"
> I'm not very familiar with the field, unfortunately, but it is my understanding that there is not much of a scientific method applied to teaching theories.
My impression from [1] is that a great many studies, reviews and independent reports about teaching children to read.
Of course, no matter how careful your study is, the results will be controversial when parents find they don't understand their child's school work any more.
Siegfried Engelmann from the University of Oregon developed a science based method for teaching reading. With simple ideas like making sure the letters were distinguishable, teaching the most common letters first, teaching the sounds the letters make before teaching the names of the letters, immediate feedback on reading mistakes, etc...
I've seen many "science based methods" in my lifetime, and they are contradictory. I am not an expert in the subject of education, which means I cannot evaluate what is really science based. I could do this of course - but my day job is as a programmer and when I'm done with that I just want to make sawdust or music, not do more research.
Sure, but all methods teach kids to read. Science of education should include effectiveness. Things such as how well they comprehend, how fast they read, what disabilities they have... note that the above list logically should be in conflict and society should debate the best method bases on the different measures to find good compromises.
The science of how kids learn to read (at least for English an phonetic languages like it) is pretty much settled. But how curricula are built on the theory is another question.
And studies show that the "cueing" approach is not effective or even counter-productive. Yet how those curricula are laid out with "leveled books" allows children to appear like they know how to read at advancing levels. Actually they're just memorizing and using context clues to "read", without being able to read the words in isolation.
That's what makes the "whole language" approach so insidious: it can be years before parents and teachers recognize that the kids can't really read. And in some cases, breaking the bad habits of guessing and using context instead of decoding makes it take even longer to properly teach the kids to read.
For teachers to be able to correct, there needs to be some level of social trust - parents need to trust that when a teacher corrects their child, they're doing it out of a desire to act in the child's best long-term interest: In loco parentis. The teachers also need to be backed up by their administration and even the law.
That doesn't exist anymore. Which means even when teachers notice (and they have), they can't do anything about it because if they try they will be pilloried. The parents will freak out ("How DARE you correct my Jayden?"), the administration will bend immediately to avoid lawsuits ("You're absolutely right, Ms. Arsehole. Of course we'll keep this from happening again and move Jayden."), and if the media gets involved they have an incentive to turn it into a culture war piece that further erodes that trust: ("Teacher enforces hetero-patriarchial dress code standards on teen girl/Teacher shuts down student's FREE SPEECH by not letting him rant about how awesome Andrew Tate is for 15 minutes.")
tl;dr: Social conditions must be met for parent apes to accept non-parent apes helping to raise their children. These conditions are not presently being met; there is an assumption of hostility rather than good-intent. Nobody is going to let anyone A/B test kids because nobody would ever let their kid be in the group that didn't do as well/nefarious intent would be ascribed. (They're experimenting on our kids! THINK OF THE CHILDREN!)
I'm not sure how to untangle the increasing polarization from the decaying of our social fabric and the inclusion of examples was primarily so people didn't take the points and warp them to only fit their ideology and turn them into more culture war bait + I think it's important to note that the media class on both major political sides in the US have very similar incentives to act poorly and stoke knee-jerk fear. And to demonstrate that from what I've observed a lot of educational decisions are made from very emotional places - that is one major roadblock to treating education efforts scientifically. I felt like just saying 'it's the parents, admins, and media' wouldn't necessarily get across that the obstacles are not well-thought out or nefarious but rather a result of everybody being in a heightened state of constant emotion.
Any advice? I definitely could have been less 'culture warry' about it, and you're right to call me on that. Thanks!
I think what I'm most reacting to is the parenthetical "quotations", which are straw men, of course. There may be an element of truth to them, but if you're not literally quoting somebody, adopting their perspective needs to be done thoughtfully and empathetically.
I hear you that they are bring emotional, and that needs to be reflected, but just like there is truth in your post although it came of as a bit inflammatory to me, there is truth in those emotions as well. Distill that instead of dismissing it.
You did well by saying, "it's important to note that the media class on both major political sides in the US have very similar incentives to act poorly and stoke knee-jerk fear." By giving examples of it, you're falling into the same trap that the media does. Exciting prose isn't always better prose.
> I'm not very familiar with the field, unfortunately, but it is my understanding that there is not much of a scientific method applied to teaching theories. As in, not just armchair theorizing, but more like A/B testing. I know, it's a hard problem, but so are many science problems, and Rome doesn't have to be build in one day. But where is the progress?
There isn't much, for a multitude of reasons:
- teachers are overloaded with non-teaching related bullshit. Tons of standardized tests, school excursions, extracurricular activities, enforcing disciplinarian measures, working as an effective social worker for students in need, fundraising, classroom repairs, organizing basic supplies, filing exceptions for books to be in school libraries, dealing with absolutely moronic parents (both those that refuse to discipline their children and those who flood teachers in bullshit complaints because "muh religion"/"freedumb")... with the exception of discipline enforcement and the standardized test flood, none of this should be done by teachers but by admin staff. But there isn't much admin staff in schools, there isn't much assistance or building maintenance/cleaning/upkeep budget, and so teachers do it on their own just to keep the lights on, if barely.
- there aren't many teachers in the first place, and the older ones often lack the motivation to further their own knowledge - some of them actively discourage new teachers from trying out what they learned in university because "we always did it this way".
- closely related to the above: "concerned parent" activist groups disrupt that as well, for a multitude of their reasons. Some because "we had to go through the same shit in my time", "what doesn't kill you makes you harder" (I'm referring to corporal punishment here, which is shockingly legal for private schools in 48 states, in public schools in 18 states of which 15 still practice this barbarity [1]), some because they object to basic stuff such as sex ed on religious reasons... the list is endless.
- frankly said, no one cares about education. Big Labor doesn't care, they need dumb grunts for slaughterhouses, farms, restaurants and other menial work who don't object to exploitation. The Army doesn't care, they need dumb grunts to send into the meat grinder. And there are enough privileged children where the parents take care for good private schools to fulfill the needs of employers needing actually intelligent people.
- there are almost no feedback loops in the system other than the standardized tests, which are problematic on their own.
- a lot of school students' performance is related to poverty and hunger - what few scraps of improvements have been made in the last decades have been long since eroded because poverty has exploded...
It's hard to fairly measure and evaluate "merit" for teachers. You can be the best teacher of the world, prepare every single lesson for hours according to the most modern scientific standards - and yet have half your class fail in tests because they literally didn't have anything to eat since the warm school-provided lunch yesterday. Food scarcity is a problem affecting at least 75% of US school districts [1], it's gotten way worse since the COVID assistance ended [2], and it has been shown in studies to be closely linked to performance [3] (hardly a surprise for anyone who ever had to experience food scarcity).
The teacher unions do have a point there, because introducing anything "merit" based only punishes those teachers and school districts for stuff they can't control, much less actually solve.
Unions are on the rise, and we need them to seize more power in every sector of labor to fight against extreme wealth inequality. I fully support the teacher's unions. More often than not, they include resources for their students in their negotiations.
> I mean, even if half of the above claim were true, and some ~37 percent of 4th graders couldn't read properly, that would already be outrageous. But surely, that didn't happen over-night -- where were the corrective measures along the way?
You are in deep denial. People have been shouting from the
rooftops about this for generations.
For example from another story posted here today:
Frustrated by high failure rates in eighth-grade algebra, San Francisco Unified decided in 2015 to delay algebra till ninth grade and place low, average and high achievers in the same classes. The goal was to improve achievement for black and Hispanic students, preparing more for advanced math.
Of course the opposite happened. Now these high schoolers test at a 5th grade level. Who on earth made this call? What qualified them to just decide this? What was their thought process and motivation? Now that it backfired in spectacular fashion will there be any repercussions for them at all?
Corrective measures are apparently not possible when issues get politicized. I think the US simply has too much money which causes inverse incentives around problems of this nature.
There is like, zero chance, this could happen in Korea for example (I am not Korean btw least you accuse me of jingoism) -- such people would be shunned from society for fucking up like this once.
I'm not very familiar with the field, unfortunately, but it is my understanding that there is not much of a scientific method applied to teaching theories. As in, not just armchair theorizing, but more like A/B testing. I know, it's a hard problem, but so are many science problems, and Rome doesn't have to be build in one day. But where is the progress?
If anything, I keep hearing how kids today are doing worse than they did some generations ago. Well, it's probably difficult to even compare these different times, and certainly no-one would advocate going back to - god forbid - striking with a cane etc. But didn't anyone notice that in the course of changing the way kids are taught in school, their performance fell by the wayside?
I mean, even if half of the above claim were true, and some ~37 percent of 4th graders couldn't read properly, that would already be outrageous. But surely, that didn't happen over-night -- where were the corrective measures along the way?
Can you blame everything on changed societal habits? TV, playstations and smart phones at an early age instead of books? Somehow I doubt it.