Did you get IRB approval for these human studies on children?
I’m not sure which is more absurd: the IRB approval process or the very idea of high school. I’ve often asked people to consider a thought experiment where everyone on Earth suddenly forgets that our educational system as we know it ever existed. Would we really reinvent it just like it is now? Hearing how it worked, would we scream in terror and cancel anyone who had taken part? (Status quo bias much?)
When I was studying stand-up comedy, I actually developed a bit in which I play-acted a researcher proposing high school to an ethics board. It went like this:
RESEARCHER: “I was thinking we could stick 35 sleep-deprived teenagers in a room for an hour and expose them to academic stimuli. After that, we’ll do some tests on them.”
BOARD: “I see. Tell me more about your subjects.”
RESEARCHER: “Well, they’re minors, obviously.”
BOARD: “Okay…”
RESEARCHER: “And most of them will be enrolled against their will.”
BOARD: “And how long will you need them?”
RESEARCHER: “6 sessions a day for four years.”
BOARD: “Wait, hold on. Sample size? How many kids are we talking about, here?”
RESEARCHER: “All of them.”
BOARD: (mutterings among themselves) “Well, it sounds like everything is in order...”
Are you familiar with Direct Instruction, which is reminiscent of the Mennonite school?
Someone (probably on LW) pointed me to Direct Instruction a few years back, so yes, I’m acquainted with it. Because of the emphasis on staying fully reviewed on all relevant prior knowledge, I saw it as having obvious promise for technical subjects like math, in the hands of the right teacher. I was less convinced it made a good fit elsewhere, perceiving (perhaps unfairly—I didn’t dig too deeply) some big negative trade-offs:
Like with my whole-class Anki, it seems heavily reliant on the teacher’s high-energy snake-charmer charisma. This makes it difficult to sustain for much of a class period and demands a great deal from a teacher who tries to do it all day long, day after day. This also makes it difficult to broadly among teachers with different personalities.
It sounds brittle with regards to roster variance. Specifically, it seems pretty insistent on having everyone in the room up to speed. With careful tracking/grouping of students, this can be achieved, but in practice, kids move in to your school part way through the year and aren’t on the same page. Or you only have the one or two teachers for that grade level math, so the slowest kids are in the same boat as the sharpest. I would think that one or two stragglers would grind the class to a halt, and that this would be statistically inevitable in larger classes. (I don’t know if this makes DI math worse than the status quo, where plenty of students are fall behind and get lost, but with less fanfare and hold-up for everyone else.)
Have you ever tried SRS for muscle memory?
No. I’m not seeing how that would work, or how that would be relevant to what I do, but I’m certainly curious. Do you have examples?
I don’t know how they were thinking of it, but theoretically you can put any action into an Anki card:
do a problem from chapter 1.5 of the linear algebra textbook
play through X specific piano piece
do five pushups
(though I doubt that the spaced repetition algorithm will really help with that last one)
I can further imagine that a skill which operates largely on muscle memory, like a martial art, could be done similar. “Do five kicks” could help you get the muscle memory behind that specific kick into your head, as long as you can be an accurate judge of how well you performed the kick.
Thank you for the detailed response! I used it for learning knot tying. It seemed to work, wanted to know if anyone else had tried it for anything like that.
Did you get IRB approval for these human studies on children?
Are you familiar with Direct Instruction, which is reminiscent of the Mennonite school?
Have you ever tried SRS for muscle memory?
I’m not sure which is more absurd: the IRB approval process or the very idea of high school. I’ve often asked people to consider a thought experiment where everyone on Earth suddenly forgets that our educational system as we know it ever existed. Would we really reinvent it just like it is now? Hearing how it worked, would we scream in terror and cancel anyone who had taken part? (Status quo bias much?)
When I was studying stand-up comedy, I actually developed a bit in which I play-acted a researcher proposing high school to an ethics board. It went like this:
RESEARCHER: “I was thinking we could stick 35 sleep-deprived teenagers in a room for an hour and expose them to academic stimuli. After that, we’ll do some tests on them.”
BOARD: “I see. Tell me more about your subjects.”
RESEARCHER: “Well, they’re minors, obviously.”
BOARD: “Okay…”
RESEARCHER: “And most of them will be enrolled against their will.”
BOARD: “And how long will you need them?”
RESEARCHER: “6 sessions a day for four years.”
BOARD: “Wait, hold on. Sample size? How many kids are we talking about, here?”
RESEARCHER: “All of them.”
BOARD: (mutterings among themselves) “Well, it sounds like everything is in order...”
Someone (probably on LW) pointed me to Direct Instruction a few years back, so yes, I’m acquainted with it. Because of the emphasis on staying fully reviewed on all relevant prior knowledge, I saw it as having obvious promise for technical subjects like math, in the hands of the right teacher. I was less convinced it made a good fit elsewhere, perceiving (perhaps unfairly—I didn’t dig too deeply) some big negative trade-offs:
Like with my whole-class Anki, it seems heavily reliant on the teacher’s high-energy snake-charmer charisma. This makes it difficult to sustain for much of a class period and demands a great deal from a teacher who tries to do it all day long, day after day. This also makes it difficult to broadly among teachers with different personalities.
It sounds brittle with regards to roster variance. Specifically, it seems pretty insistent on having everyone in the room up to speed. With careful tracking/grouping of students, this can be achieved, but in practice, kids move in to your school part way through the year and aren’t on the same page. Or you only have the one or two teachers for that grade level math, so the slowest kids are in the same boat as the sharpest. I would think that one or two stragglers would grind the class to a halt, and that this would be statistically inevitable in larger classes. (I don’t know if this makes DI math worse than the status quo, where plenty of students are fall behind and get lost, but with less fanfare and hold-up for everyone else.)
No. I’m not seeing how that would work, or how that would be relevant to what I do, but I’m certainly curious. Do you have examples?
I don’t know how they were thinking of it, but theoretically you can put any action into an Anki card:
do a problem from chapter 1.5 of the linear algebra textbook
play through X specific piano piece
do five pushups
(though I doubt that the spaced repetition algorithm will really help with that last one)
I can further imagine that a skill which operates largely on muscle memory, like a martial art, could be done similar. “Do five kicks” could help you get the muscle memory behind that specific kick into your head, as long as you can be an accurate judge of how well you performed the kick.
Thank you for the detailed response! I used it for learning knot tying. It seemed to work, wanted to know if anyone else had tried it for anything like that.
In any case I’m glad you didn’t bother to jump through the IRB’s hoops; admittedly my impression of them is colored by Scott Alexander’s https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/29/my-irb-nightmare/.