A group of scientists set out to study quick learners. Then saw they don't exist
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Re: A group of scientists set out to study quick learners. Then saw they don't exist
#2> This story was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.
that explains the smell.
Re: A group of scientists set out to study quick learners. Then saw they don't exist
#3Quick learners absolutely exist, or everyone would learn at the same rate in school.
I was regularly hamstrung by curriculae because I learned quickly. Schools chose to throw a bunch of busywork at me instead of deepening or questioning my understanding. "Your peers aren't on that yet." I don't care what my peers are doing. They made their decision about me years ago. If school can't be intellectually challenging then what's the damn point.
Re: A group of scientists set out to study quick learners. Then saw they don't exist
#4Big, if true.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and I'm not sure that single study meets the bar.
It is certainly a valid issue to measure starting point as well as ending point to measure learning rates, but to claim that this entirely accounts for apparent differences in learning rates such that there are no differences exceeding 1% just strains credulity.
Just looking at my own learning rates on different fields I can see myself picking up some things far faster than other things, and the reverse in friends and family (e.g., quickly picking up things I'm slower to learn).
Seems more like an intriguing start to more research rather than the conclusive tone presented in the article.
Re: A group of scientists set out to study quick learners. Then saw they don't exist
#5It seems unlikely that everyone learns at an identical rate, and the article itself seems to contradict that conclusion:
"The fastest quarter of students improved their accuracy on each concept (or knowledge component) by about 2.6 percentage points after each practice attempt, while the slowest quarter of students improved by about 1.7 percentage points."
That's a small difference in a single incremental component, but it represents a difference in learning rate of a whopping 35%; over ten practice attempt, the fast learner would've accumulated 26 percentage points of improvement, the slow learner only 17 percentage points. And there is a bit of a compounding effect, as the accumulated advantage of the fast learner would unlock progress on additional components that the slower learner lacked enough background for.
Add these two effects over the thousands of components that would make up a curriculum throughout a K-12 career and it wouldn't surprise me if you had top learners accumulating over twice the progress of their slower learning peers, and much of that knowledge would be in higher value components inaccessible to the slower learning students (eg, learning calculus and AP biology over geometry and basic science).
Re: A group of scientists set out to study quick learners. Then saw they don't exist
#6Quick learners absolutely exist, or everyone would learn at the same rate in school. I was regularly hamstrung by curriculae because I learned quickly. Schools chose to throw a bunch of busywork at me instead of deepening or questioning my understanding. "Your peers aren't on that yet." I don't care what my peers are doing. They made their decision about me years ago. If school can't be intellectually challenging the…
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Re: A group of scientists set out to study quick learners. Then saw they don't exist
#7Quick learners absolutely exist, or everyone would learn at the same rate in school. I was regularly hamstrung by curriculae because I learned quickly. Schools chose to throw a bunch of busywork at me instead of deepening or questioning my understanding. "Your peers aren't on that yet." I don't care what my peers are doing. They made their decision about me years ago. If school can't be intellectually challenging the…
If schools were run like Khan Lab School then they’d put students together by subject-matter capability, not age.
https://support.khanacademy.org/hc/en-us/articles/1150026831...
Re: A group of scientists set out to study quick learners. Then saw they don't exist
#8Quick learners absolutely exist, or everyone would learn at the same rate in school. I was regularly hamstrung by curriculae because I learned quickly. Schools chose to throw a bunch of busywork at me instead of deepening or questioning my understanding. "Your peers aren't on that yet." I don't care what my peers are doing. They made their decision about me years ago. If school can't be intellectually challenging the…
> what’s the damn point
To churn out proletariats who will be happy and replaceable little cogs in the capitalist machine.
No, for real, schools follow the same damn paradigm established in the Industrial Revolution. They have no interest in deepening your understanding and you can see that in the people hired to teach.
Re: A group of scientists set out to study quick learners. Then saw they don't exist
#9Quick learners absolutely exist, or everyone would learn at the same rate in school. I was regularly hamstrung by curriculae because I learned quickly. Schools chose to throw a bunch of busywork at me instead of deepening or questioning my understanding. "Your peers aren't on that yet." I don't care what my peers are doing. They made their decision about me years ago. If school can't be intellectually challenging the…
> what’s the damn point To churn out proletariats who will be happy and replaceable little cogs in the capitalist machine. No, for real, schools follow the same damn paradigm established in the Industrial Revolution. They have no interest in deepening your understanding and you can see that in the people hired to teach.
You are correct, but it's sad that education isn't about knowledge. We're forced by market conditions to seek money more than knowledge.
I've developed quite a cynical view of the world, with each new truth that's revealed about our society and the nature of people, my faith and trust lowers. But is it really cynical if, everywhere you look, you find evidence of its truth?
Rhetorical question but I think about it daily.
Re: A group of scientists set out to study quick learners. Then saw they don't exist
#10This is obviously complete nonsense, no need to read the article.