Headline, March 29 2022/ STUDENTS : ''' '' LEARNING GAINS LEVITATION '' '''

STUDENTS : 

''' '' LEARNING GAINS

 LEVITATION '' '''

THE LESSONS OF LEARNING LOSS : Reinventing Education will help close the learning gap, says Sal Khan, founder of Khan Academy.

EDUCATION was in crisis even before the pandemic. In 2018, data from the Programme International Student Assessment {PISA} showed that 50% of students across 24 countries were not proficient in maths.

Since the pandemic hit, multiple studies have shown that sporadic access to learning over the past two and half years has made the situation even worse.

This is not just an intellectual debate about declining test scores. It is a leading indicator of hundreds of millions of young people not being able to lead purposeful lives that allows them to participate in the economy and society as a whole.

'' What is more, a less educated population is one that is more susceptible to instability and demagoguery, which harms everyone.''

Although this moment may be deeply unsettling, we can look to history for guidance on how to make things better. We have a tool kit that allows us to give broad access to best practices from the past : personalisation and mastery learning.

FEW PEOPLE received a proper education in the 4th century BC, but if you were, say, the son of the King of Macedonia, yours was better than most. Alexander the Great had Aristotle as his personal tutor. I imagine that Aristotle did what any great tutor would do : 

Focus on discussion and practice, and tweak interaction based on what the student needs most. Young Alexander is still having some trouble understanding the Pythagros's theorem? No problem. We will just spend a little more time on it.

Alexander already has a knack for military tactics?No need to bore him with things he already knows; we can move on to more stimulating things.

Throughout most of human history, those lucky enough to get an education had some variation of this personalised mastery-based experience.

Fast-forward to the 18th and 19th centuries, when the utopian idea of free public education began to be introduced, and it was not economically possible to giving everyone a personal tutor.Instead, we borrowed ideas of manufacturing from the Industrial Revolution to give a much broader group of students something much more cost-effective.

Batch the students by age; move them at fixed pace through standardised curriculums; access what is retained periodically; and  sort the ''product'' [ that is, the students ] after 10-12 years into career tracks based on these assessments.

A student does not quite understand exponents yet? Too bad; it's time to move on to lagorithms - even though it is impossible to learn logarithms without proficiency in exponents.

Well-resourced families did not fret because they were still able to hire supplemental tutors, ensuring that the personalisation and mastery still happened.

The tools now exist to alleviate the tension between personalisation, mastery and cost. And pandemic-induced learning loss means that it has never been more crucial that people use these tools.

The Honour and Serving of the Latest Global Operational Research on Learning Loss, Education, and the Future, continues. The World Students Society thanks author The Economist.

With respectful dedication to The Global Founder Framers of !WOW! - Leaders, Parents, and then Students, Professors and Teachers of the world.

See Ya ll prepare for Great Global Elections on - The World Students Society - The exclusive ownership of every student in the world : wssciw.blogspot.com and Twitter - !E-WOW! - The Ecosystem 2011 :

Good Night and God Bless

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless