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Comment by BrenBarn | Hacker News Reader

In my experience a significant proportion of "evidence-based best pedagogy practices" is hogwash. I'm pretty anti-AI, but going against education-school dogma isn't a reason to avoid AI.

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Why do you say so? What is your experience?

I recently did a course on teaching bachelor-level education, and had to study a couple of books. They all seemed to quote their sources and I got the impression that they're rooted in science.

It's science-based in a sense, but a pretty weak sense. I did some work with education researchers and my impression was that their methodologies were quite haphazard and they were sometimes just trying to find a way to "tell a story" that they already had in mind. Also, my impression is that a lot of the research on "best practices" is based on relatively limited comparisons between schools or teaching methods, and there is insufficient evidence that this or that is truly a "best practice" in a more general sense. I also interacted a good bit with education grad students when I was in grad school and they almost uniformly seemed to have no coherent sense of what they were doing or what their field actually knew. I've known people who had similar experiences with education schools elsewhere.

I've also read news stories and stuff that support the idea that a lot of "education education" is of questionable value. This story is pretty old by now but has stuck with me: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2010-may-10-la-oe-zi... . A relevant quote:

> Of the 1,300 institutions awarding graduate degrees for teaching, Harvard’s director of teacher education told a 2009 conference, only about 100 prepared students for the classroom. The rest, she added, “could be shut down tomorrow.”

Some of these experiences/articles are about teaching K-12 schools rather than teaching college, but there would have to be a pretty huge difference between the two for me to think that college-level pedagogical theory was meaningfully better than that for younger ages, and I've seen nothing to give me that impression.

I’ve put that article on my reading list. Yes, I think it’s true that there are situations where the science is used to support “telling the story”. As a counterpoint, I got taught about the “illusion of learning”, where it’s pretty clear that a regular college lesson (teacher droning from a PowerPoint), retention is down the drain. So we teachers know that a good curriculum should incorporate repetition and exercises.

Now the question is, are these curriculi being rebuilt? Here in The Netherlands, yes.

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