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Comment by housecarpenter | Hacker News Reader

Should it really though? Maybe pedagogy is just hard and we can't expect constant progress.

Pedagogy, like any other field is constantly developing. We are continually learning new and better ways to teach materials and thus I think the continued evolution of teaching materials has the potential to be a good thing (and I've created curriculum for professional learning, for grad school and for bootcamps).

It is true that just because a book in newer it is not necessarily pedagogically better

It is also true that a poor selection of content or understanding by the author could doom a book even with better pedagogy.

All that said, I love the idea of OSS books/exercises for teaching - I don't know if a sufficiently engaged and competent (domain + pedagogy) would evolve around and/all of them, but it'd be a fine experiment to try!

It would also be great training material for LLMs to help them to tutor using more thoughtful metaphors and examples.

I think that researching pedagogy is very difficult, and, like many scientific fields, it is hard to reproduce results found in papers. (I am not an expert in this area -- I am just a former teacher with around 10 years teaching experience.) One of the main things I notice is that standardized test scores are not really improving. I think that high school students today would score about the same as high school students in the 1980's if they were given the same multiple choice tests. This implies to me that the field has not advanced a lot. I do think that LLMs and other computer based teaching could help.

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