Probably this post; this claim has been highly controversial, with the original blog post citing a 2006 paper that was retracted in 2014, and whose original author wrote a meta-analysis that supported their conclusions in 2009. Here’s some previous discussion (in 2012) on LW. Many people have comments to the effect of “bimodal scores are common in education” with relatively few people having citations to back that up, in a way that makes me suspect they’re drawing from the original retracted paper.
I really appreciate you looking this up. Now it is clear that these claims are controversial.
Nevertheless, the question still is what learning ability refers to: Is it the ability to comprehend learning material that explains the topic well, or is it the ability to come up with the simple explanations yourself? It seems that the OP refers to the latter. The first kind probably has lower variation. Also, this means that when measuring learning ability, you should ensure that all involved people have access to the same “source”. I would be interested in hearing the OP’s thoughts on that.
I couldn’t find it quickly, but I think that I read this on codehorror.
Probably this post; this claim has been highly controversial, with the original blog post citing a 2006 paper that was retracted in 2014, and whose original author wrote a meta-analysis that supported their conclusions in 2009. Here’s some previous discussion (in 2012) on LW. Many people have comments to the effect of “bimodal scores are common in education” with relatively few people having citations to back that up, in a way that makes me suspect they’re drawing from the original retracted paper.
I really appreciate you looking this up. Now it is clear that these claims are controversial.
Nevertheless, the question still is what learning ability refers to: Is it the ability to comprehend learning material that explains the topic well, or is it the ability to come up with the simple explanations yourself? It seems that the OP refers to the latter. The first kind probably has lower variation. Also, this means that when measuring learning ability, you should ensure that all involved people have access to the same “source”. I would be interested in hearing the OP’s thoughts on that.