Earlier this year I profiled an evaluation study of Teach to One, a blended learning program that attempts to computationally assess student competence and use that assessment data to prescribe lessons for students. In my profile, I tried to help translate Douglas Ready’s technical evaluation for a lay audience and interpret the signficance of the study. The folks from TeachToOne then responded with some additional data and thoughts.
Tina Rosenberg from the New York Times offers her impressions of the program in today’s Fixes column. She writes:
But the next step is the real innovation: the educational equivalent of an air traffic control system. Each student's daily exit quiz is fed into an algorithm, which produces the next day's schedule for each student and teacher. (Teachers get a preview, and can override the schedule.) If a student has mastered a skill, on to the next one. If not, she gets another day's instruction, this time through a different modality. (The algorithm is aware of which modalities work best for her.) It's an enormous departure from traditional teaching.
Tina’s piece is worth reading, it captures some of the optimism in experiments with emerging ways of having computers partner with teachers, along with apprpropriate skepticism about the impacts, especially relative to the costs.
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