Comments on: More on Schooling, Deschooling, and the Null Hypothesis

By: Alex J.

Alex J. — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 20:22:47 +0000

One on one tutoring serves as a substitute for conscientiousness. It might help you pass the exam. You might even retain the particular skills, but you won’t gain the conscientiousness.

By: Bryan Willman

Bryan Willman — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 17:46:02 +0000

There are other constraints or “pins” – for example, seems to me that it is illegal to leave a sub-14 or 16 year old child home alone for any sustained length of time (various news stories about CPS cases around this.) (Friend pointed out that is is statistically safer to you leave your child at home when you drive to a store, but you can’t do that, so the child is exposed to the hazards of road travel per force.)

There’s another aspect of education that seems to be missed. We’ve talked about the value to children, and the value to parents, but many people miss the dominating value to *the rest of society*. As in everybody else wants every child to grow to up be employable, understand how to vote in elections, see the terrible errors in kiting checks or destroying mailboxes, and generally *fit into society*.

So to some extent, “we” don’t care what “treatment effects on income” there are, but “we” care a lot that people “behave”.

I think any analysis of the effects of education that fails to see it as a kind of indoctrination in how to behave in our society is incomplete.

By: Isegoria

Isegoria — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 17:36:31 +0000

I shouldn’t have said only problem. The other, bigger problem is that the effect isn’t two-sigma when other people try to replicate it, but just under one sigma.

The good news is that computer tutoring seems to achieve the same results as human tutoring.

By: Isegoria

Isegoria — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 17:29:53 +0000

I've done a little digging, and the only problem I've found with Bloom's Two-Sigman problem is that he used two different levels of mastery for his two mastery-based teaching methods. So, instead of showing a one-sigma leap from moving from ordinary classroom instruction to mastery-based classroom instruction and another one-sigma leap for moving from mastery-based classroom instruction to mastery-based one-on-one instruction, we see a one-sigma leap from moving from ordinary instruction to 80%-mastery-based instruction and another one-sigma leap for moving from 80%-mastery-based classroom instruction to 90%-mastery-based (where those percent scores reflect a passing "mastery" score on a unit test).