Eric Loken and Andrew Gelman wrote,
Being empirical about teaching is hard. Lack of incentives aside, we feel like we move from case study to case study as college instructors and that our teaching is a multifaceted craft difficult to decompose into discrete malleable elements.
More recommended excerpts here. Pointer from Jason Collins.
They refer to statistical quality control. Deming would describe what educators do as “tampering.” By that, he means making changes without evaluating the effect of those changes.
I think that there are two obstacles to using statistical techniques to improve teaching. One obstacle is causal density. It is not easy to run a controlled experiment, because there are so many factors that are difficult to hold constant.
But the more important obstacle may be the Null Hypothesis, which is that you are likely to find very discouraging evidence. Sometimes, I think that what the various consumers of teaching (administrators, parents, students) want is not so much evidence that your teaching methods work. What they want is a sense that you are trying. Teaching is not about teaching. It is about seeming to care about teaching.
Of course, if student motivation matters, and if students are motivated by believing that you care, then seeming to care can be an effective teaching method. I recall a few years ago reading a story of Indian children attempting distance learning, with the computer guiding the substance of their learning supplemented by elderly women acting as surrogate grandmothers, knowing nothing about the subject matter but giving students a sense that someone cared about their learning.
This post by Bryan Caplan on this subject is great:
How I Teach When I Really Want My Students to Learn
School looks to me like it is mostly a long test and so finding ways to get everyone to learn is not so productive because then you have failed to properly grade the students from poor to great.
It is prohibitively expensive. I don’t think it ever happens outside of parenting (which now that I mention it may raise some questions for me about his more kids theory). My personal favorite anecdote is that I played tennis through high school. Never very good, I worked hard at it. Later I figured out I was holding the racket wrong. Nobody ever took the time to show me how to hold the tennis racket.
One of the best ways to learn material is to try to teach that material to someone else. Assuming some desire to do a good job, then the student/teacher finds the holes in their understanding as well as start to see where confusion reigns. Trying to explain what you’ve learned to a “grandmother” who knows little more of the lesson than to take a skeptical attitude and ask questions can be a very effective learning process for the student. Works in managing technical experts as well.
Of course, to do such in a classroom is to move from the “sage” lecture to the discussion with instructor as coach methods.
This is akin to what I thought was the Montessori (and medical residency) approach. Every time I talk to a Montessori teacher about this they have no idea what I am talking about.