Learning needs to be effortful to be effective

Schools of education have a very poor reputation for a reason.

There's analysis done on the "teacher quality" (based on student results) and the amount of teacher training (at these schools). There's basically zero difference between an emergency qualified teacher with no education qualifications, and someone with a masters or PhD of education.

Quote - https://caldercenter.org/sites/default/files/1001059_Teacher...

> Our results suggest that only two of the forms of teacher training we study influence productivity. First, content-focused teacher professional development is positively associated with productivity in middle and high school math. Second, more experienced teachers appear more effective in teaching elementary math and reading and middle school math. There is no evidence that either pre-service (undergraduate) training or the scholastic aptitude of teachers influences their ability to increase student achievement.

The evidence is that teachers learn literally nothing (or overall nothing - maybe they learn some good things and some harmful myths) in teacher college. They might learn a bit of math, which helps them teach math. IIRC it's also found that doing a PhD in education can be helpful in teaching classes with a heavy essay writing focus.

It's not surprising, since a lot of what gets taught in teacher college is junk psychology from the 1930s, and the essays of the kind of people who do a PhD in education. Here's a few of the biases that they tend to have (IMO):

* Education experts did OK at school, and think that the fundamentals are boring because their white upper-middle-class parents helped them learn phonics and the times tables.

* Education experts are often not actually good at much other than essay writing and year 10 math, and don't see the point of hard sciences like pyschology.

* There's plenty of smart people who go into education, but they do it because they want to teach, not be a researcher.

I could go through some of the poor content in education degrees (like the hero of education experts Vygotsky, who I'm not convinced many have even read other than through n-th hand sources where people write "the student is thus about to construct knowledge through scaffolded tasks in the zone of proximal development (Vygoskly, 1930something)", but you'd be lucky to find many teachers who agree on what any of that means (other than be common sense "don't make it too hard to follow").

Is it really a wonder that Cletus, who got a job in rural school in Alabama with no more qualifications than being able to write his name correctly teaches just as well (according to research) as someone with a PhD in education?

The good research is in psychology departments - people who study the science of learning are generally pretty well informed on it.

I'll make a guess it's because of the think-act-observe(read) loop.

I do my PhD in management as part of organization studies, I know some good folk doing education. So don't be too disappointed in the beginning, it might be just your profs, or your uni. Just search quickly with Google Scholar, and there is this Fischer et al. (2010) that looks like a good summary responding to your comment. If my impression from my colleagues is correct, UK seems to be a good place for grad school in education. Just from an epistemological standpoint there is Mahadevan (2020) and Romani et al. (2018) where you can see where the field is going.

Fischer, K. W., Goswami, U., Geake, J., & Task Force on the Future of Educational Neuroscience. (2010). The future of educational neuroscience. Mind, Brain, and Education, 4(2), 68-80.

Mahadevan, J. (2020). Ethnographic studies in international human resource management: Types and usefulness. German Journal of Human Resource Management, 34(2), 228-251.

Romani, L., Barmeyer, C., Primecz, H., & Pilhofer, K. (2018). Cross-cultural management studies: state of the field in the four research paradigms. International Studies of Management & Organization, 48(3), 247-263.

My Masters degree was in Instructional Psychology! I hardly ever see it referenced as a field of study.

Wondering whether it subconsciously helps to have some sort of (automatic) expiration timer associated with things that end up in your "learning inbox".

I know from myself that I tend to bookmark and save many interesting talks/videos and articles for later, but often I never end up revisiting them; information hoarding in some sense.