Given that I’m already involved in the creation of similar system (Docademy.com), I figure I’ve finally found a thread on here where I have something to contribute :).
On the Dependency Tree
First some thoughts on your concept of a dependency tree. I started out thinking this would be the way to go, but I quickly ran into the problem others have mentioned on this thread: There’s no one dependency tree. When looking at concepts like basic math, it’s easy to think so, but the concept falls apart when you try to come up with a dependency tree for World History, the dependencies depend on the individual teacher.
The elegant solution to this is to tag individual learning resources (such as a video or chapter) with dependencies. The system will never give you a learning resource that requires B1 to learn B2 if you don’t know B1, but will serve up other learning resources that teach B2 WITHOUT needing an understanding of B1. This solves all the problem of your dependency tree solution, but has none of the down sides inherent in the rigidity of it.
On The Standardization of Education
I am also in the camp that the standardization of education is a net negative to society and the individual. My research shows that the most effective individuals are those who specialize in the things that they are good at, rather than trying to be well rounded.
However, that doesn’t change the fact that there might be certain skills which would be generally good to have. In that case, once you’ve solved the problem of being able to measure each skill individually, it’s trivial for companies and organizations to simply not accept people who don’t have these general skills. This would work similar to how modern Applicant Tracking Systems work, but it would allow you to get much more fine grained with the skills, and would have the benefit of being in a standardized format, rather than trying to parse variously formatted resumes.
After that, the free market would take care of the rest. If a group of skills truly allowed people to be generally more effective, the companies that screened for these skills would outcompete the companies that did not, and eventually they would be generally required for someone who wanted to function in society.
On Standardized Tests
You correctly assume that it’s important to be able to quickly identify if someone is good at a subject. However, the type of standardized tests you mention, those that can be easily parsed by a computer, are only appropriate for a small subset of skills. Consider the following examples:
You correctly use expected value calculations when prompted to do so for a test, but completely fail to do so when making real life decisions.
You know most of the established theory about how to write good fiction, but your actual stories are boring, uninspired, and not engaging.
You know how to shoot a basketball, how to dribble, and how to pass perfectly. But when trying to combine these skills in a game, you can’t execute.
Ultimately, what these examples show is that for many skills, knowing how to do them in a way that can be easily measured by a computer is different then being able to actually use them in the real world. Rather, a more effective way to quickly measure someone’s merit in a particular skill would take a portfolio approach. Under each skill it would list:
The learning resources they had used to learn that skill.
The standardized tests they had completed in the skill.
Real world projects they had completed using the skills.
Testimonials from the people they had worked on those projects with, and the people they learned with, talking about theiir abilities in those skils
On Motivation
The final problem you mentioned is motivation. You mentioned two problems in motivation
1 . Kids don’t know their prerequisites when trying to understand a subject.
This is fixed with the method above.
2 . Kids don’t connect what they’re learning with what they can do with it.
If you accept my premise above, that education shouldn’t be standardized, I think you’ve actually got this backwards. If you look into the school models that are more self-directed, such as Waldorf, Montesorri, or Sudbury, you’ll see that the students don’t go looking for something to learn, then figure out how they can use it. Rather, they choose a goal, a project, or an experiment, then learn the skills they need in order to accomplish or create it.
Therefore this ideal school would have a list of goals, projects, and experiments to work on, which would be tied to skills. Students could choose the goal they wanted to accomplish (or create their own), and the system would suggest learning resources that would teach them the necessary skills.
I’d also like to add some of the other issues I see with motivation that you didn’t mention.
3 . The lecture method of learning is low immersion and a poor way to keep students engaged.
To fix this, the main role of teachers would be helping students through completing their actual projects, and the teaching would happen more informally, as part of helping them complete the project. If it was a more in-depth subject for which the student needed a book or lecture, the student could request that, but it would never be FORCED on them.
4 . There’s absolutely no incentive for good teachers that motivate students to use their skills; they get paid the same as the bad teachers, and can use the same skills for other jobs which are much higher paying.
If students are free to choose their own projects, one would assume that some of those projects will be profit generating. To solve this problem, you would allow teachers a small stake in every project for which a student used their skill, as a bonus on top of their regular salary. This would incentive them to motivate the students to use the skills they teach.
Anyways, I pretty much live and breath this stuff, and would love to discuss it more with anyone who’s interested. If you’re seriously interested in pursuing a venture that brings into reality the concepts I’ve discussed above, and see the implications for things like meritocratic voting, disrupting education, and disrupting hiring, feel free to PM on here and we’ll talk.
If students are free to choose their own projects, one would assume that some of those projects will be profit generating. To solve this problem, you would allow teachers a small stake in every project for which a student used their skill, as a bonus on top of their regular salary. This would incentive them to motivate the students to use the skills they teach.
I don’t think it sets a good incentive, as it makes the teacher focus on getting students to do money making projects instead of the project that maximizes learning. It also creates a lot of complicated bureaucracy.
I don’t think it sets a good incentive, as it makes the teacher focus on getting students to do money making projects instead of the project that maximizes learning.
One of the problems with traditional high stakes testing is that it incentivizes almost the opposite. It causes teachers to focus on what is traditionally considered ’learning”, but ignores learning in a practical sense: Making sure students can use their knowledge in the real world, and are motivated to do so. I’d argue that using your knowledge to make money is in fact a good test for learning.
Do you have a suggestion for fixing the problem I mentioned that minimizes bureaucracy and provides proper incentives?
It’s nice to hear from someone interested in education!
On the Dependency Tree
I understand that dependency trees get fuzzy outside of things like math. My thinking behind it was basically that whenever I’m failing to learn something, the things preventing me are prerequisite pieces of information; doing a better job making sure the learner has the prerequisites would make learning more effective.
So I think I should have been clearer: I think that it’s impractical to really come up with a perfect dependency tree. My point really is that instruction always happens in a certain order, and that we could do a better job of choosing the order (when you teach what) by coming up with a useful dependency tree.
On The Standardization of Education
The downside of requirements is clear: the required lessons might not be what is best for you to learn. However, if you don’t require things, students may mistakenly forego opportunities to learn things that would be most beneficial for them (probably out of inexperience/immaturity). To me, this is a tricky trade-off and I’m not sure what the best way to handle it would be.
My loose intuition is that there should be much less requirements than there currently are, but still enough where you’d explore all the basic subject fields. What do you think the tradeoffs are, and why do you think they’re in favor of not standardizing? (I agree with what you said about having credentials for more specific skills, but there’s still the question of whether or not to require students to have certain skills.)
My research shows that the most effective individuals are those who specialize in the things that they are good at, rather than trying to be well rounded.
That makes sense, but all of the individuals you’re studying probably went through some sort of schooling that had some sort of requirements for them. So (presumably) your research shows that at a certain point, it’s best to focus your education rather than be well rounded. And there’s also the question of whether getting focused prevents you from exploring your interests.
On Standardized Tests
I love that portfolio approach! And I agree that people often “understand” something, but completely fail to apply it in their lives (which I think is strong indication that they don’t really understand it) For example, expected value, opportunity cost, fallacy of gray, 80⁄20 principle etc.
Rather, they choose a goal, a project, or an experiment, then learn the skills they need in order to accomplish or create it.
This is an intriguing idea. I’ve thought about it before. My opinion isn’t strong, but I sense that there needs to be a balance: sometimes you should let kids do this, but sometimes learning needs to be more bottom up.
I think that this “top-down” learning has an important advantage in that it motivates students, and for that reason I definitely get the sense that there’s a place for it. However, learning things just for the purpose of a project leads to a lot of “holes”/”not a strong foundation”, as I’m all too familiar with.
I taught myself web development and design, and made a website. It’s basically been learn as I go. I’m always looking stuff up and trying to figure it out. I “jump around” a lot, and I think the average time it takes for me to figure something out would be way lower if I moved progressively through the dependency tree rather than jumping around so much.
3 . The lecture method of learning is low immersion and a poor way to keep students engaged.
I definitely agree with that. I didn’t talk about it because I wanted to focus on the big picture. In hindsight, I think I should have talked about it though.
If students are free to choose their own projects, one would assume that some of those projects will be profit generating. To solve this problem, you would allow teachers a small stake in every project for which a student used their skill, as a bonus on top of their regular salary. This would incentive them to motivate the students to use the skills they teach.
I sense that most projects are unlikely to generate profit. Especially K-12. Maybe teachers would be more motivated if they had more time. Like right now they have to spend so much time on lessons and lectures and stuff, but if this was essentially done for them already, they’d have more time to help students with projects, and maybe that’d motivate them more.
My thinking behind it was basically that whenever I’m failing to learn something, the things preventing me are prerequisite pieces of information; doing a better job making sure the learner has the prerequisites would make learning more effective.
Just because you have identified a real problem doesn’t mean that the first solution you can think of is good.
I’ve thought through many others, and this is the best I’ve got.
Then why do you prefer that solution to the others you thought of? Articulating reasons why one alternative is better than another usually leads to a deeper understanding of the alternatives.
I understand that dependency trees get fuzzy outside of things like math. My thinking behind it was basically that whenever I’m failing to learn something, the things preventing me are prerequisite pieces of information; doing a better job making sure the learner has the prerequisites would make learning more effective.
I think that the approach I mentioned of tagging resources with skill prerequisites effectively does this, but rather it ends up creating several different branching dependency trees, rather than just one. Consider that if your goal was to “create a nuclear reactor”, and you didn’t know basic math, the system would have to be smart enough to suggest a learning resource that teaches addition before suggesting a learning resource that teaches advanced nuclear physics.
My point really is that instruction always happens in a certain order, and that we could do a better job of choosing the order (when you teach what) by coming up with a useful dependency tree.
The issue of finding the most efficient/useful dependency true is a separate, but important one. I think it’s probably best left to machine learning rather than human intuition. There are actually few organizations out there doing quite a bit of work on this already, Knewton is the one that first springs to mind.
My loose intuition is that there should be much less requirements than there currently are, but still enough where you’d explore all the basic subject fields. What do you think the tradeoffs are, and why do you think they’re in favor of not standardizing? (I agree with what you said about having credentials for more specific skills, but there’s still the question of whether or not to require students to have certain skills.)
I suspect my tendency to go towards no standards is a values/emotions based decision. I dislike the idea of one institution choosing the standards for everyone, as there’s too much opportunity to use that power to push a particular individual’s or group’s agenda.
However, the real answer here is that this needs to be tested in a lean manner, using randomized controlled trials. I have write ups for several systems of incentive’s or requiring liberal arts education, which I plan to test with Docademy, using different groups.
I sense that most projects are unlikely to generate profit. Especially K-12. Maybe teachers would be more motivated if they had more time. Like right now they have to spend so much time on lessons and lectures and stuff, but if this was essentially done for them already, they’d have more time to help students with projects, and maybe that’d motivate them more.
I think you’re right, that when the children are younger, they’re less likely to be skilled enough to generate profit. However, if you’re tracking exactly from whom they learn, and exactly what prerequisites they needed to learn their subjects, it’s possible to create a trickle down effect, so that the teacher who taught you addition when you were 4 gets a small stake in your project to build a nuclear reactor when you’re 24.
I also agree that less planning would motivate teachers more. I’ve volunteered and worked in schools for years, and this is a common complaint.
I ultimately think that you need to both raise the economic incentives, and lower the disincentives. The adherence rate for teachers after 5 years is 54%, and to raise that number to where it needs to be will require several large changes in how the teaching profession operates.
I ultimately think that you need to both raise the economic incentives, and lower the disincentives.
Hmm. I’m not sure that this is such a good idea, given that the motivation that one has for teaching seems to be strongly based on social rather than market motives, and introducing market incentives to a situation governed by social incentives has been known to just screw things up.
For example, my best friend has a daughter, and I’ve been giving her various books and games that either I used to enjoy, or which feel like they might be fun and useful for learning a mathematical mindset. I do this out of a general desire for her to have fun with them, learn useful things, and come to love science. Now if you told me that I’d get a cut out of her future earnings, it seems quite possible that that notion would start dominating my thoughts whenever I thought of giving something to her, and I’d start thinking stuff like “well, I could buy her this board game, but it’s kinda expensive and any individual game is unlikely to have a big impact by itself, so would it be a good investment? Probably not.” And she’d be worse off as a result.
It seems easy to imagine similar failure modes that would start cropping up once you encouraged teachers to, in effect, start thinking in terms of “how could I profit from this kid” rather than “what would be the best for this kid”. For instance, they might focus all of their efforts on the kids who showed the most talent and were already the most likely to succeed. They could even actively try to encourage the low-talent kids to drop out, so that they’d have more time to focus on the more promising ones. Or they could encourage their students towards careers that generally cause people to be unhappy but pay well, or teach the students attitudes towards life that promoted a focus on money above all else. Or, like those Israeli parents who started being more late once a fine was introduced and they could thus pay off their guilt for being late, some of the teachers might start thinking, “well if this kid doesn’t do well in life later on, I’m already paying the cost in the form of getting less money from them, so I don’t need to feel guilty about giving them a bad education”. Et cetera.
Intuitively at least, it would feel like a better idea to raise the social incentives, not the financial ones. Part of the reason why I’m happy to give my friend’s daughter stuff is that she’s not just any random child who I’ll never see again: she’s my best friend’s kid, which means that I should be hearing about how she’s doing for as long as I live. Maybe she’ll some day become fantastically successful at something, and then credit part of her success to the role I played in her life. Attempts to replicate this effect could involve making individual teachers responsible for their students for a longer time (so more “you’ll have this teacher for the next six years”, less “you’ll have six different teachers over the next six years”), or even just providing a means for the teachers to stay in some kind of contact with their students even when the teacher’s no longer teaching them.
I think this is true, and it’s something I have a lot about. What behaviors would this reward system actually incentivize?
I figured there would be two strategies teachers could use to maximize profit. One would involve as you said, focusing on the top students and taking them under your wing, making sure YOU are the one who teaches them as much as possible.
The other would be to instead focus on motivating and effectively teaching as many kids as humanly possible, regardless of their perceived potential, and simply playing the odds.
Other possible strategies would involve apprenticeship, in which your apprentice’s work would effectively pay for your retirement, or company training, in which even if an employee was not loyal, you could still make money from them after they left you.
I figured that these strategies were close enough to how I would desire teaching to work anyway, that it was worth a shot.
One downside would be that it would cause teachers to compete to teach kids, instead of working together to get the best learning outcome.
That being said,, there’s a lot being taken for granted above, not the least of which is that people won’t figure out some way to game the system. I’m open to split testing this approach, like I am with everything in Docademy. Do you( or any other commenter) know of any ideas to substantially increase the social incentives for teaching such that it could measurably change the turnover rate? I haven’t hit upon any yet, but I’m open to any suggestions thrown my way.
Do you( or any other commenter) know of any ideas to substantially increase the social incentives for teaching such that it could measurably change the turnover rate?
I would guess that being a teacher is a lot more fun if you don’t have to give students grades. Especially for someone who tries to be really fair grading seems to produce a lot of unnecessary work.
As far as the system goes in Germany, I think we just pay our teachers a higher salary and we have a low turnover rate. It might be that simply paying every teacher a decent salary is the way to go.
However, that doesn’t change the fact that there might be certain skills which would be generally good to have. In that case, once you’ve solved the problem of being able to measure each skill individually, it’s trivial for companies and organizations to simply not accept people who don’t have these general skills.
Filling your taxes is a nontrival skill in a country like Germany. It’s not taught in most German schools at all. Still most people succeed in filling their tax returns.
I’m not sure how this is relevant, it may be that I’m just missing your point here.
One thing that is a useful distinction to make here is that “school” in the classic sense of the word doesn’t apply to the system I’m talking about. If you learn something such as doing taxes, either through formal means, or through informal means, the goal of this system is to be able to track that you learned that, and show others that you can use it in meaningful ways. Moreover, if you haven’t learned it, the system should suggest efficient ways for you to do so.
The general argument is that you shouldn’t engage in what Nassim Taleb calls teaching birds to fly.
If you take a bunch of young doves and try to teach them to fly, you may pat yourself on the back when they indeed start flying. You might think that you are a great teacher because the doves actually fly.
I was once at a Barcamp where a teacher talks about her troubles of teaching young student how to use the technology of a Wiki. She made a good argument that every adult should be able to operate a Wiki.
Editing Wiki’s is something I learned on the side when I had the need to do so. People learn to fill their taxes when they have a a need to do so.
I think you want two things in an education system. One is project based learning.
The second is good learning of basics that you need for higher level skills.
Still trying to connect this to your original comment. Can you give an example of where you think my system would be insufficient, and what alternative you’re suggesting?
Can you give an example of where you think my system would be insufficient, and what alternative you’re suggesting?
I think the part that I quoted suggests that you get a list of what skills companies require and then work through that list teaching all those skills.
I think that’s a bad idea. Yes, companies might want their employees to be able to use a Wiki. On the other hand you don’t have to go out and specifically teach the skill.
I think that’s a bad idea. Yes, companies might want their employees to be able to use a Wiki. On the other hand you don’t have to go out and specifically teach the skill.
I think we’re in agreement here. My point there was that companies decide what skills they require for a position, and that if they decide to screen for generally useful skills such as rationality or self-control, this may give them a leg up on the competition (which would ultimately lead to every competitor screening for these same skills.) It was a response to azerners arguments for a standardized curriculum.
I tend to think that screening for a skill that someone can learn in an hour (like a Wiki) will limit your options and lead to less options for candidates, but who knows. Perhaps screening being very specific would cause you to only get candidates who had specifically groomed themselves for your position,and were therefore more motivated than the usual.
My point being that the free market will ultimately make these decisions and weed out what skills are useful to screen for, this system merely enables the companies to screen those skills n a more objective way than the traditional hiring process.
I tend to think that screening for a skill that someone can learn in an hour (like a Wiki) will limit your options and lead to less options for candidates, but who knows.
The interesting thing is that learning to use a Wiki isn’t the kind of skill that a school teacher considers to be easily teachable in an hour to her average student.
Seeing the plight of a teacher who tries to be modern and tech the kids to use modern technology has made me question the extend to which schools teach anything useful.
My point being that the free market will ultimately make these decisions and weed out what skills are useful to screen for, this system merely enables the companies to screen those skills n a more objective way than the traditional hiring process.
Okay, I’m in agreement with letting the market decide which skills employers want to hire for.
I think that both of you are assuming an average computer-proficient person when making estimates of how hard it is for someone to learn to use a wiki. An average person in general, or an average computer-phobic person, could have a much harder time.
E.g. one of my friends, who’s definitely quite intelligent but has issues with computers, did eventually learn to use wikis, but not before three or four different people had tried to teach them to her. (Or possibly she did learn them on each occasion but then completely forgot about them in the intervening time—I’m fuzzy on the details.)
Given that I’m already involved in the creation of similar system (Docademy.com), I figure I’ve finally found a thread on here where I have something to contribute :).
On the Dependency Tree
First some thoughts on your concept of a dependency tree. I started out thinking this would be the way to go, but I quickly ran into the problem others have mentioned on this thread: There’s no one dependency tree. When looking at concepts like basic math, it’s easy to think so, but the concept falls apart when you try to come up with a dependency tree for World History, the dependencies depend on the individual teacher.
The elegant solution to this is to tag individual learning resources (such as a video or chapter) with dependencies. The system will never give you a learning resource that requires B1 to learn B2 if you don’t know B1, but will serve up other learning resources that teach B2 WITHOUT needing an understanding of B1. This solves all the problem of your dependency tree solution, but has none of the down sides inherent in the rigidity of it.
On The Standardization of Education
I am also in the camp that the standardization of education is a net negative to society and the individual. My research shows that the most effective individuals are those who specialize in the things that they are good at, rather than trying to be well rounded.
However, that doesn’t change the fact that there might be certain skills which would be generally good to have. In that case, once you’ve solved the problem of being able to measure each skill individually, it’s trivial for companies and organizations to simply not accept people who don’t have these general skills. This would work similar to how modern Applicant Tracking Systems work, but it would allow you to get much more fine grained with the skills, and would have the benefit of being in a standardized format, rather than trying to parse variously formatted resumes.
After that, the free market would take care of the rest. If a group of skills truly allowed people to be generally more effective, the companies that screened for these skills would outcompete the companies that did not, and eventually they would be generally required for someone who wanted to function in society.
On Standardized Tests
You correctly assume that it’s important to be able to quickly identify if someone is good at a subject. However, the type of standardized tests you mention, those that can be easily parsed by a computer, are only appropriate for a small subset of skills. Consider the following examples:
You correctly use expected value calculations when prompted to do so for a test, but completely fail to do so when making real life decisions.
You know most of the established theory about how to write good fiction, but your actual stories are boring, uninspired, and not engaging.
You know how to shoot a basketball, how to dribble, and how to pass perfectly. But when trying to combine these skills in a game, you can’t execute.
Ultimately, what these examples show is that for many skills, knowing how to do them in a way that can be easily measured by a computer is different then being able to actually use them in the real world. Rather, a more effective way to quickly measure someone’s merit in a particular skill would take a portfolio approach. Under each skill it would list:
The learning resources they had used to learn that skill.
The standardized tests they had completed in the skill.
Real world projects they had completed using the skills.
Testimonials from the people they had worked on those projects with, and the people they learned with, talking about theiir abilities in those skils
On Motivation
The final problem you mentioned is motivation. You mentioned two problems in motivation
1 . Kids don’t know their prerequisites when trying to understand a subject.
This is fixed with the method above.
2 . Kids don’t connect what they’re learning with what they can do with it.
If you accept my premise above, that education shouldn’t be standardized, I think you’ve actually got this backwards. If you look into the school models that are more self-directed, such as Waldorf, Montesorri, or Sudbury, you’ll see that the students don’t go looking for something to learn, then figure out how they can use it. Rather, they choose a goal, a project, or an experiment, then learn the skills they need in order to accomplish or create it.
Therefore this ideal school would have a list of goals, projects, and experiments to work on, which would be tied to skills. Students could choose the goal they wanted to accomplish (or create their own), and the system would suggest learning resources that would teach them the necessary skills.
I’d also like to add some of the other issues I see with motivation that you didn’t mention.
3 . The lecture method of learning is low immersion and a poor way to keep students engaged.
To fix this, the main role of teachers would be helping students through completing their actual projects, and the teaching would happen more informally, as part of helping them complete the project. If it was a more in-depth subject for which the student needed a book or lecture, the student could request that, but it would never be FORCED on them.
4 . There’s absolutely no incentive for good teachers that motivate students to use their skills; they get paid the same as the bad teachers, and can use the same skills for other jobs which are much higher paying.
If students are free to choose their own projects, one would assume that some of those projects will be profit generating. To solve this problem, you would allow teachers a small stake in every project for which a student used their skill, as a bonus on top of their regular salary. This would incentive them to motivate the students to use the skills they teach.
Anyways, I pretty much live and breath this stuff, and would love to discuss it more with anyone who’s interested. If you’re seriously interested in pursuing a venture that brings into reality the concepts I’ve discussed above, and see the implications for things like meritocratic voting, disrupting education, and disrupting hiring, feel free to PM on here and we’ll talk.
I don’t think it sets a good incentive, as it makes the teacher focus on getting students to do money making projects instead of the project that maximizes learning. It also creates a lot of complicated bureaucracy.
One of the problems with traditional high stakes testing is that it incentivizes almost the opposite. It causes teachers to focus on what is traditionally considered ’learning”, but ignores learning in a practical sense: Making sure students can use their knowledge in the real world, and are motivated to do so. I’d argue that using your knowledge to make money is in fact a good test for learning.
Do you have a suggestion for fixing the problem I mentioned that minimizes bureaucracy and provides proper incentives?
Hey Matt,
It’s nice to hear from someone interested in education!
I understand that dependency trees get fuzzy outside of things like math. My thinking behind it was basically that whenever I’m failing to learn something, the things preventing me are prerequisite pieces of information; doing a better job making sure the learner has the prerequisites would make learning more effective.
So I think I should have been clearer: I think that it’s impractical to really come up with a perfect dependency tree. My point really is that instruction always happens in a certain order, and that we could do a better job of choosing the order (when you teach what) by coming up with a useful dependency tree.
The downside of requirements is clear: the required lessons might not be what is best for you to learn. However, if you don’t require things, students may mistakenly forego opportunities to learn things that would be most beneficial for them (probably out of inexperience/immaturity). To me, this is a tricky trade-off and I’m not sure what the best way to handle it would be.
My loose intuition is that there should be much less requirements than there currently are, but still enough where you’d explore all the basic subject fields. What do you think the tradeoffs are, and why do you think they’re in favor of not standardizing? (I agree with what you said about having credentials for more specific skills, but there’s still the question of whether or not to require students to have certain skills.)
That makes sense, but all of the individuals you’re studying probably went through some sort of schooling that had some sort of requirements for them. So (presumably) your research shows that at a certain point, it’s best to focus your education rather than be well rounded. And there’s also the question of whether getting focused prevents you from exploring your interests.
I love that portfolio approach! And I agree that people often “understand” something, but completely fail to apply it in their lives (which I think is strong indication that they don’t really understand it) For example, expected value, opportunity cost, fallacy of gray, 80⁄20 principle etc.
This is an intriguing idea. I’ve thought about it before. My opinion isn’t strong, but I sense that there needs to be a balance: sometimes you should let kids do this, but sometimes learning needs to be more bottom up.
I think that this “top-down” learning has an important advantage in that it motivates students, and for that reason I definitely get the sense that there’s a place for it. However, learning things just for the purpose of a project leads to a lot of “holes”/”not a strong foundation”, as I’m all too familiar with.
I taught myself web development and design, and made a website. It’s basically been learn as I go. I’m always looking stuff up and trying to figure it out. I “jump around” a lot, and I think the average time it takes for me to figure something out would be way lower if I moved progressively through the dependency tree rather than jumping around so much.
I definitely agree with that. I didn’t talk about it because I wanted to focus on the big picture. In hindsight, I think I should have talked about it though.
I sense that most projects are unlikely to generate profit. Especially K-12. Maybe teachers would be more motivated if they had more time. Like right now they have to spend so much time on lessons and lectures and stuff, but if this was essentially done for them already, they’d have more time to help students with projects, and maybe that’d motivate them more.
Just because you have identified a real problem doesn’t mean that the first solution you can think of is good.
It wasn’t the first solution I thought of. I’ve thought through many others, and this is the best I’ve got.
Then why do you prefer that solution to the others you thought of? Articulating reasons why one alternative is better than another usually leads to a deeper understanding of the alternatives.
Sorry, I don’t have time to do such a comprehensive write up.
I think that the approach I mentioned of tagging resources with skill prerequisites effectively does this, but rather it ends up creating several different branching dependency trees, rather than just one. Consider that if your goal was to “create a nuclear reactor”, and you didn’t know basic math, the system would have to be smart enough to suggest a learning resource that teaches addition before suggesting a learning resource that teaches advanced nuclear physics.
The issue of finding the most efficient/useful dependency true is a separate, but important one. I think it’s probably best left to machine learning rather than human intuition. There are actually few organizations out there doing quite a bit of work on this already, Knewton is the one that first springs to mind.
I suspect my tendency to go towards no standards is a values/emotions based decision. I dislike the idea of one institution choosing the standards for everyone, as there’s too much opportunity to use that power to push a particular individual’s or group’s agenda.
However, the real answer here is that this needs to be tested in a lean manner, using randomized controlled trials. I have write ups for several systems of incentive’s or requiring liberal arts education, which I plan to test with Docademy, using different groups.
I think you’re right, that when the children are younger, they’re less likely to be skilled enough to generate profit. However, if you’re tracking exactly from whom they learn, and exactly what prerequisites they needed to learn their subjects, it’s possible to create a trickle down effect, so that the teacher who taught you addition when you were 4 gets a small stake in your project to build a nuclear reactor when you’re 24.
I also agree that less planning would motivate teachers more. I’ve volunteered and worked in schools for years, and this is a common complaint.
I ultimately think that you need to both raise the economic incentives, and lower the disincentives. The adherence rate for teachers after 5 years is 54%, and to raise that number to where it needs to be will require several large changes in how the teaching profession operates.
Hmm. I’m not sure that this is such a good idea, given that the motivation that one has for teaching seems to be strongly based on social rather than market motives, and introducing market incentives to a situation governed by social incentives has been known to just screw things up.
For example, my best friend has a daughter, and I’ve been giving her various books and games that either I used to enjoy, or which feel like they might be fun and useful for learning a mathematical mindset. I do this out of a general desire for her to have fun with them, learn useful things, and come to love science. Now if you told me that I’d get a cut out of her future earnings, it seems quite possible that that notion would start dominating my thoughts whenever I thought of giving something to her, and I’d start thinking stuff like “well, I could buy her this board game, but it’s kinda expensive and any individual game is unlikely to have a big impact by itself, so would it be a good investment? Probably not.” And she’d be worse off as a result.
It seems easy to imagine similar failure modes that would start cropping up once you encouraged teachers to, in effect, start thinking in terms of “how could I profit from this kid” rather than “what would be the best for this kid”. For instance, they might focus all of their efforts on the kids who showed the most talent and were already the most likely to succeed. They could even actively try to encourage the low-talent kids to drop out, so that they’d have more time to focus on the more promising ones. Or they could encourage their students towards careers that generally cause people to be unhappy but pay well, or teach the students attitudes towards life that promoted a focus on money above all else. Or, like those Israeli parents who started being more late once a fine was introduced and they could thus pay off their guilt for being late, some of the teachers might start thinking, “well if this kid doesn’t do well in life later on, I’m already paying the cost in the form of getting less money from them, so I don’t need to feel guilty about giving them a bad education”. Et cetera.
Intuitively at least, it would feel like a better idea to raise the social incentives, not the financial ones. Part of the reason why I’m happy to give my friend’s daughter stuff is that she’s not just any random child who I’ll never see again: she’s my best friend’s kid, which means that I should be hearing about how she’s doing for as long as I live. Maybe she’ll some day become fantastically successful at something, and then credit part of her success to the role I played in her life. Attempts to replicate this effect could involve making individual teachers responsible for their students for a longer time (so more “you’ll have this teacher for the next six years”, less “you’ll have six different teachers over the next six years”), or even just providing a means for the teachers to stay in some kind of contact with their students even when the teacher’s no longer teaching them.
I think this is true, and it’s something I have a lot about. What behaviors would this reward system actually incentivize?
I figured there would be two strategies teachers could use to maximize profit. One would involve as you said, focusing on the top students and taking them under your wing, making sure YOU are the one who teaches them as much as possible.
The other would be to instead focus on motivating and effectively teaching as many kids as humanly possible, regardless of their perceived potential, and simply playing the odds.
Other possible strategies would involve apprenticeship, in which your apprentice’s work would effectively pay for your retirement, or company training, in which even if an employee was not loyal, you could still make money from them after they left you.
I figured that these strategies were close enough to how I would desire teaching to work anyway, that it was worth a shot.
One downside would be that it would cause teachers to compete to teach kids, instead of working together to get the best learning outcome.
That being said,, there’s a lot being taken for granted above, not the least of which is that people won’t figure out some way to game the system. I’m open to split testing this approach, like I am with everything in Docademy. Do you( or any other commenter) know of any ideas to substantially increase the social incentives for teaching such that it could measurably change the turnover rate? I haven’t hit upon any yet, but I’m open to any suggestions thrown my way.
I would guess that being a teacher is a lot more fun if you don’t have to give students grades. Especially for someone who tries to be really fair grading seems to produce a lot of unnecessary work.
As far as the system goes in Germany, I think we just pay our teachers a higher salary and we have a low turnover rate. It might be that simply paying every teacher a decent salary is the way to go.
Filling your taxes is a nontrival skill in a country like Germany. It’s not taught in most German schools at all. Still most people succeed in filling their tax returns.
Hi Christian,
I’m not sure how this is relevant, it may be that I’m just missing your point here.
One thing that is a useful distinction to make here is that “school” in the classic sense of the word doesn’t apply to the system I’m talking about. If you learn something such as doing taxes, either through formal means, or through informal means, the goal of this system is to be able to track that you learned that, and show others that you can use it in meaningful ways. Moreover, if you haven’t learned it, the system should suggest efficient ways for you to do so.
The general argument is that you shouldn’t engage in what Nassim Taleb calls teaching birds to fly.
If you take a bunch of young doves and try to teach them to fly, you may pat yourself on the back when they indeed start flying. You might think that you are a great teacher because the doves actually fly.
I was once at a Barcamp where a teacher talks about her troubles of teaching young student how to use the technology of a Wiki. She made a good argument that every adult should be able to operate a Wiki.
Editing Wiki’s is something I learned on the side when I had the need to do so. People learn to fill their taxes when they have a a need to do so.
I think you want two things in an education system. One is project based learning. The second is good learning of basics that you need for higher level skills.
Still trying to connect this to your original comment. Can you give an example of where you think my system would be insufficient, and what alternative you’re suggesting?
I think the part that I quoted suggests that you get a list of what skills companies require and then work through that list teaching all those skills.
I think that’s a bad idea. Yes, companies might want their employees to be able to use a Wiki. On the other hand you don’t have to go out and specifically teach the skill.
I think we’re in agreement here. My point there was that companies decide what skills they require for a position, and that if they decide to screen for generally useful skills such as rationality or self-control, this may give them a leg up on the competition (which would ultimately lead to every competitor screening for these same skills.) It was a response to azerners arguments for a standardized curriculum.
I tend to think that screening for a skill that someone can learn in an hour (like a Wiki) will limit your options and lead to less options for candidates, but who knows. Perhaps screening being very specific would cause you to only get candidates who had specifically groomed themselves for your position,and were therefore more motivated than the usual.
My point being that the free market will ultimately make these decisions and weed out what skills are useful to screen for, this system merely enables the companies to screen those skills n a more objective way than the traditional hiring process.
The interesting thing is that learning to use a Wiki isn’t the kind of skill that a school teacher considers to be easily teachable in an hour to her average student.
Seeing the plight of a teacher who tries to be modern and tech the kids to use modern technology has made me question the extend to which schools teach anything useful.
Okay, I’m in agreement with letting the market decide which skills employers want to hire for.
I think that both of you are assuming an average computer-proficient person when making estimates of how hard it is for someone to learn to use a wiki. An average person in general, or an average computer-phobic person, could have a much harder time.
E.g. one of my friends, who’s definitely quite intelligent but has issues with computers, did eventually learn to use wikis, but not before three or four different people had tried to teach them to her. (Or possibly she did learn them on each occasion but then completely forgot about them in the intervening time—I’m fuzzy on the details.)