Death Knell for the Lecture: Technology as a Passport to Personalized Education
By DAPHNE KOLLER
Our education system is in a state of crisis. Among developed countries, the United States is 55th in quality rankings of elementary math and science education, 20th in high school completion rate and 27th in the fraction of college students receiving undergraduate degrees in science or engineering.
As a society, we can and should invest more money in education. But that is only part of the solution. The high costs of high-quality education put it off limits to large parts of the population, both in the United States and abroad, and threaten the school’s place in society as a whole. We need to significantly reduce those costs while at the same time improving quality.
If these goals seem contradictory, let’s consider an example from history. In the 19th century, 60 percent of the American work force was in agriculture, and there were frequent food shortages. Today, agriculture accounts for less than 2 percent of the work force, and there are food surpluses.
The key to this transition was the use of technology—from crop rotation strategies to GPS-guided farm machinery — which greatly increased productivity. By contrast, our approach to education has remained largely unchanged since the Renaissance: From middle school through college, most teaching is done by an instructor lecturing to a room full of students, only some of them paying attention.
How can we improve performance in education, while cutting costs at the same time? In 1984, Benjamin Bloom showed that individual tutoring had a huge advantage over standard lecture environments: The average tutored student performed better than 98 percent of the students in the standard class.
Until now, it has been hard to see how to make individualized education affordable. But I argue that technology may provide a path to this goal...
The rest of the flava here.
The thirsty? I can't even begin to come up with *one* question out of the many that arise in my mind.
Why not see what comes up in the discussion? Have at it.
One thing I desperately want to point out to dear Daphne is that while yes, food production has increased exponentially in the last 50 years, the QUALITY of the food produced has decreased just as exponentially--even down to the nutrients in the soils we use and use and use to produce the wheat, corn, and soy that make up 70% of the average Western diet. Cf. Michael Pollan, Marion Nestle, et al.
ReplyDeleteSo yeah, more quantity, less quality. I'm sure that's what we're shooting for.
Why, Chrome, it sounds like you are describing education...
ReplyDeleteIn a world where we are not reliant on salaries, I would suggest that the internet is an ideal mode for delivering critical thinking online interactive modules, appropriately and gently designed with learning in mind.
But of course, we live in a capitalist world where we must earn a living and education must serve a customer. So sad; so much potential.
My kids are using the Khan Academy for their middle-school math; as a supplement to what they do in school. And as a supplement, it's phenomenal. But as a replacement for the teacher, it would suck.
ReplyDeleteI like the idea of offfloading all the "learn these concepts and test yourselves on them" stuff to videos on the web, leaving me to tutor individuals in problem-solving. I am interested to see that class attendance at the Stanford classes she discusses has actually increased; students learn, from what they do online, what they're actually having trouble with, and then come to class for more information and help.
This will work better in some disciplines than others.
Amen to everything above. I've said it before and I'll say it again: information transfer isn't the problem. If it were, Gutenberg, or at least cheap printing in the 19th century, would have made colleges and universities obsolete (after all, a textbook can offer explanations of a concept, exercises, and answers to those exercises; the ones I used in the 1970s and 80s certainly did, and, if used honestly -- not looking at the answers before doing the problems -- they worked pretty well). It may well be true that some people absorb information more easily when there is an aural as well as a visual and/or written component, but, if so, filmstrips would have revolutionized education (and many thought they would). It may also be that some people learn best when presented with a combination of written, visual, and aural information, plus exercises, chosen and delivered by an expert in the field who is also available to answer questions -- but that's a traditional lecture class. As far as I can tell, Khan academy and similar endeavors are a hybrid of a well-made filmstrip/video and a well-designed set of exercises. The only advantage I can see over at least 50 years is the fact that a series of exercises can be adjusted to automatically provide the student with harder or easier material, additional review on a particular topic, etc., based on prior experiences. That's definitely a good thing for classes in which the material can be learned through drill, but it's hardly revolutionary.
ReplyDeleteWhat the author calls a "flipped" classroom -- students absorb and perhaps practice manipulating information on their own, then join an instructor for more interactive sessions -- sounds like most of my high school classes, all of my college seminars, and the discussion sessions attached to many of my college lectures. It also sounds a lot like the way I teach writing, except that there is very little information transfer, and a lot of discovery-based skill-building activities both in class and between classes. It's an excellent and effective way to teach, and even transfers pretty well to hybrid and web-only formats, BUT. . .
It's time- and effort-intensive, and I'm run ragged trying to keep up with c. 90 students a semester (and would be run even more ragged if some of them didn't disappear -- and reappear at this time of year asking how to "catch up," but that's another subject, except that pacing, and the fact that students will resist that pacing, would definitely have to play a role in any effort at online interaction of the type the article describes). To the extent that I'm an effective teacher (and this is the time of year when I cycle rapidly between hope and despair, depending on which student I've just interacted with), it's because I do, indeed, offer a lot of individual tutoring/individualized education, in the form conversations in class and in conferences, answering email, and commenting on online posts, drafts, etc., etc. I also devise tasks that produce idiosyncratic, sometimes pretty messy (conceptually and syntactically) responses from students who are struggling to master new skills and concepts. It's hard work, and satisfying when things "click," even for a minority of the students, but there's simply no way to scale it up without dumbing it down. The professional associations concerned with my work (ADE, CCCC) say that I'd be even more effective if I had c. 1/3 less students, and I agree, whatever platform/locale/mode of instruction I'm using to interact with them.
Ever since Sputnik launched in 1957 there has been a concern from top to bottom as to the lack of preparedness of students when it comes to math and science.
ReplyDeleteIn mathematics, everything under the Sun has been tried-I lived through the "new math". The results have been less than stellar, to say the least.
As a professor of mathematics, I give students the same speech semester in and out: If you are shaky in basic arithmetic, you can't do algebra. If you are shaky in algebra you'll have a hard time in pre-calc and you'll be walking into a buzzsaw when it comes to calculus.
The single biggest problem I see in my classes is: a) students don't know their multiplication tables (3rd grade math); b) students don't know how to deal with fractions (4th & 5th grade math).
You would be amazed to see how many problems depend on these basic concepts: for example, in calculus, you can't simplify trig expressions in you don't understand the principle of adding and subtracting rational expressions (fractions).
Why we were able to learn these concepts 40-50 years ago and not today is well beyond my pay scale.
@ L.H. -- Just curious... When you say "shaky" on basic arithmetic, are you referring to theoretical know-how or basic computing ability? For example, I'm slow at doing basic math computations in my head, but I did well up through Calc III, so I'm wondering how that fits in with your assertion.
ReplyDelete@Dr. Mindbender:
ReplyDeleteI found much the same thing that Lord Humungus did.
I first noticed students who had poor trig skills when I was a TA in grad school over 30 years ago. How could anybody graduate high school and go into engineering without knowing how to calculate sines, cosines, and tangents?
I started my teaching job in the late 1980s and was shocked at how poor many of my students many of my students were. Most of them had finished high school a few months earlier and they couldn't properly calculate simple fractions for, say, determining the total resistance of 2 parallel resistors. Similarly, I noticed a poor command of basic algebraic skills for fundamental things such as determining the roots of a quadratic equation.
When I was in school, during the 1960s and early '70s, I learned multiplication and fractions in the elementary grades, algebra in Grade 9, basic trig functions in Grade 10 and simple derivatives in Grade 12.
I'm baffled that my students with their fancy calculators couldn't do what I was required to learn and all I had was pencil and paper, log and trig tables, and, possibly, a slide rule.
@Dr. Mindbender: I am referring to being able to do basic arithmetic with pencil and paper.
ReplyDeleteNo one can do long division because they don't know their multiplication tables.
They can't do prime factorizations because they can't figure out why a number is divisible by 2,3 or 5.
They can't simplify an expression such as (2x^2 + 4x)/x beacuse they don't know that (a+b)/c = a/c + b/c
I believe the problem is a fundamental failure in primary and middle school, with students being trained to pass standardized exams so that school districts are not penalized by NCLB. Furhtermore, the administrators and board of education don't want to face angry parents.
It is a gigantic chicken/egg dilemma, or, a snake eating its' own tail. You decide which is the appropriate analogy.
I teach technology, not math, and it's technology that is typically taught by others without requiring any math at all, but I'm not terribly popular with my students for the number of times and ways that I interject math into the work they need to do. I do it early and often, and I pull out the students who clearly don't get it and tutor them or send them for tutoring, because it doesn't matter how well you can program or develop databases or troubleshoot server problems: If you can't construct or solve a basic math problem, you're not going to be able to do your job right. I'm appalled at the level of math skills that I see in my students.
ReplyDeleteI posted a response to this article on the thread where I got slammed (linked above), which I'll repeat (with edits) here: There is a lot in this article that reflects how I teach a lot of my classroom-based courses. In my mind there is nothing worse than an instructor droning away at the front of a classroom doing nothing but flipping through bad powerpoints provided by the textbook publisher and doing nothing but reading the chapter to students who aren't listening anyway, then providing assessments that do nothing but evaluate whether they've memorized trivia from the book - I teach with way too many instructors who do exactly that. The model I use for a lot of my land-based courses is that students have to read the chapter before we cover it in class, and I force this by requiring them to complete review questions before they even come to class (they answer a random sample of 25 questions on the topic from a testbank of 100-150 questions, and if they don't pass they get a different 25 questions, until they get a passing score). This way when they come to class we can spend our time MUCH more productively: The time I spend in the front of the classroom is in explaining the concepts and aspects of the technology that are the most confusing to students, or putting the information in context of how they'll later apply it, or having a discussion about how they've used certain skills in their lives or what they think is more important to do as a professional, or doing a group problem solving exercise. Then once we've done that, students move on to labs, group exercises, or other things that are designed to help them apply what they've learned.
I am completely against using automated technology in place of real teaching - especially the tools that the technology textbook publishers are pushing on us that claim to automate grading "performance based skills" but instead just see if students click the right thing or type the right thing without in any way assessing whether they understand and can apply what they've learned. Tools such as those have their place as learning tools for online classes, for example, so that students can get timely feedbac on whether or not they did the right thing, but they have no business being used to assess performance-based skills.
But automated technology without question has its place in improving how we teach classes, if we use it for the right things and the right reasons. By automating some parts of the class, I can ensure that the students have read at least parts of the material, so that I can focus my time and theirs on helping make sure that they UNDERSTAND and know how to apply the material, in a way that keeps them far more engaged and teaches them far more than any droning powerpoint reader might ever teach.
@Lord Humungus:
ReplyDeleteI saw much of what you described as well.
In part, I attribute the problem to the calculators that are now available and have been allowed, and sometimes required, in certain courses.
Also, there's been a decline in techniques. Let me give an example.
When I was an undergrad in the mid-1970s, I was required to take an introductory electrical course. Some types of circuit problems require the solution of 2 or more simultaneous linear equations. Back then, students were required to show how they obtained their results by writing out each. If nothing else, it showed where the numbers came from.
About 25 years later, while I was finishing my Ph. D., I was a TA marker for that same course, with some minor changes added since I took it. Often, I saw the equations written out but the numbers appeared out of nowhere. Since that's often considered poor engineering practice, I penalized the students for not showing their solutions. I gathered that they used calculators which had functions on them for solving simultaneous equations, but saying "the calculator did it" wasn't, in my opinion, an acceptable answer.
I was later informed by the prof, who was a silverback and remembered how things were done in the old days, that it wasn't a "math" course, so I shouldn't have taken off marks for not showing their calculations.
Go figure.
Human beings generally take the course of least resistance. Children and teenagers even more so.
ReplyDeleteWhat is desired today is effortless learning. Ask a child to learn multiplication tables or write out a problem (or essay) and they'll whine, "But that's so HAAAAARRRRDDDD!"
Patience is no longer a virtue, and discipline has a negative connotation. That point was brought home to me some years ago when I saw an ad for tax return Rapid Refund. It showed a guy waiting day after day by the mailbox as the mail truck whizzed by, waiting for his tax refund. The voiceover said, "The old way requires patience." With rapid refund he was tossing his tennis racquet into the trunk with his gear and heading out to spend the refund.
The point is, now it's too much to expect the poor little snowflakes to sit still, pay attention and make the effort to LEARN something.
God knows, I wasn't the most stellar student. I did put more effort into my education when it was my money paying the tuition. I did have VA assistance, but once I cashed the check it was MY money, and I decided not to waste it.