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Personalized Learning: the Best Education Or the Worst?
theodp writes: In an exclusive interview with Education Week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg talked about why he is shifting his K-12 giving priorities to personalized learning. While acknowledging that there's not yet any independent, large-scale research to show personalized learning's effectiveness, Zuck argues that "the model just intuitively makes sense." But just days later, Fordham University professor Mark Naison wrote in the Washington Post about why the personalized learning efforts of 'a growing number of those with investment capital seeking profitable outlets,' which presumably includes Zuck, make him 'incredibly pessimistic' about the future of public education. That Zuck — like fellow personalized learning cheerleaders/funders Bill Gates and former U.S. Education Chief Arne Duncan — seemed to be unaware of studies on personalized learning studies that date back to the '70s is troubling. But people don't "Like" 40+ year-old Ed.gov papers, so Zuck could be forgiven for not seeing them and, as a result, believing that the personalized learning plan dashboard his Facebook engineers knocked out truly is the ground-breaking solution to 'one of education's biggest problems' that Melinda Gates cracks it up to be.
I don't know who said, "the more you know, the more you realize you don't know," but this is not the conclusion a great number of intelligent people automatically arrive at.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
While acknowledging that there's not yet any independent, large-scale research to show personalized learning's effectiveness, Zuck argues that "the model just intuitively makes sense."
All sorts of things "just make sense" that are actually completely wrong when objectively examined. That's why we do experiments to see if they actually work before rolling them out in a big way. Basing policy on a hunch is REALLY stupid unless you have no other choice and this is not one of those times where we have no other choice. Maybe he's in the test phase but it sure doesn't sound like an experiment. It's annoying how Zuckerberg (and Gates) thinks that because he was successful in software that it somehow qualifies him to be something more than a bank account for areas of endeavor where he demonstrably has no special expertise or insight. At least Gates no longer has a day job so conceivably he has the time to actually devote to the details of these issues. There is no way Zuckerberg actually has enough time to really do much more than parrot what the people he hired are telling him.
The problem with 40+ years old studies on computer aided learning is the computing lanscape has changed so much since then they are mostly irrelevant. Even the University of Illinois at Urbana is making the shift offering on-line education.
Achille Talon
Hop!
You can't effectively teach 1-10th grade math in the same class. So we age-tier because we think that's a reasonable approximation of skill-tier or just to split it up so you've had all the parts of the curriculum. Or think why you have divisions in leagues, you learn by playing roughly equal levels with a few better, a few worse than yourself but if you're just trivially beating them or being crushed you learn nothing. That doesn't mean I think individual learning is the one true answer, you learn a lot of valuable lessons explaining and being explained to, cooperating, correcting each other and so on. But ideally you'd do that with your peers in skill.
If you have some time dedicated to working individually it'd be a lot easier to create a dynamic, personalized schedule where you are in peer groups with others of comparable skill. Today it's mostly impossible to say follow the class of the grade above you because then you have something else, either you must jump a year in every subject or you're pretty much stuck where you are. Of course there's also other concern like like a stable social group you can develop inter-personal relations and skills with but it's not like you exclusively played with those in your class anyway. In the pauses between classes you'd play with other kids anyway.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Yes, all the studies showing problems with personalized learning are simply showing that we had not yet figured out how to do it well. There is simply no way that a one-size-fits all bureaucracy can educate as well as a system with tools that allow teachers to tailor activities to individual children. The problem is that personalized education is a much harder problem than many believe. It is easy to make an app that adapts the math problems assigned to a student's performance. But it is much harder to produce group learning activities that match varied skills. And if you put kids each on a single computer which is 'personalized', you can be sure they will learn less than if they are working together learning the social skills and executive function needed to succeed in the world. Eventually we'll succeed in personalizing teaching of social skills, executive function, reading, and math. But it is a hard problem.
In many ways the problem is like artificial intelligence. It is a much harder problem than people thought. But that doesn't mean that it is impossible and as parts of it are solved it slowly changes everything.
I find that personalized meal service - where you provide your specific preferences and dislikes, along with any allergy information and your personal weight and fitness goals, is by far the most effective way to enjoy your meal and maximize your health. In fact, as a billionaire, its the only way I can see to get and keep everyone healthy. It just takes some planning and seed funding to create a few proof-of-concept restaurants that can do just that. After that it should be simple to, for example, provide the exact same personalized service to the entire deployed military forces for their daily meals.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
In my own experience, I benefited from moving beyond my peers in mathematics and in language. I could definitely see a tiered learning, where the tiers were broken down by ability and/or subject and not arbitrary age. We constantly test our students, so why not make those tests actually mean something? Then, you get your high school diploma when you actually are able to demonstrate proficiency with the subjects and you're not held back going over subjects that you've already "mastered" just because of your age.
And quite honestly, if the US federal government stopped placing such a high priority on enabling (read: funding) every person to go to college and instead sunk that money into the K-12 public education system, maybe we would have much better results with kids coming out of high schools and able to enter the work force at better than minimum wage jobs, and college could once again go back to being for more specialized education.
Yes, all the studies showing problems with personalized learning are simply showing that we had not yet figured out how to do it well.
No, we know exactly how to do it *well*. Each student's parents just need to hire an individual full-time tutor for their kid, who can then teach them in whatever way best suits that individual kid.
The problem is that we haven't found a way to to it *economically* or *practically* for all those students whose parents can't afford to hire an individual tutor.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
This will be one more poorly thought out wild faddish lurch in educational policy, to the detriment of kid's education. I don't mean that PL is bad or wrong, but that this, like most changes in education will be introduced in a way that will tend toward failure. There's a long list of essentially good ideas that have been horribly botched by taking them to Broadway before the bumps and wrinkles in the script have been ironed out. The smart way to eventually get to an eventual large scale educational change is to start small with testing in very small pilot projects, iterating them independently until one or several paths to good outcomes, and just as importantly, paths to avoid, are identified. And then, scale up to bigger pilot projects. New issues will probably pop up at a new scale, and then after really seeing how it works, and IF it works, really scale up. But that requires long term, realistic planning and leadership that can look out to the horizon. A scarce resource. In the meantime, most investment should remain in iterative improvements in the mainstream - getting and creating more qualified teachers - through better training and for the most difficult disciplines, math, physics science, extending the budget to get people who really know, love and can teach hard to teach subjects. People love to flog "the new math" and Common Core, but if you look at content and intent, they are excellent ideas, but both needed radically different introduction, and needed a lot of the wrinkles sorted out. I was one of the few lucky kids who truly benefited from "the new math". I had good teachers who "got it", who had a fair grasp on sets and modular math and and .... at an elementary level. When I hit those topics later, I wasn't lost. It all made sense.
Don't step on the baby.
The problem is that we haven't found a way to to it *economically* or *practically* for all those students whose parents can't afford to hire an individual tutor.
But we have. The problem is, that it leaves certain kids "behind" and we've pledged "No Child Left Behind". So instead of getting the most out of everyone, we fail to get the minimum out of way too many. Some kids aren't going to succeed, regardless of how much effort we spend. The problem is, we can't just leave them behind either.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.