[ExI] focus

[Stuart LaForge]

Bill W wrote:


> stuart wrote - Many science and math teachers will now provide formulas
> used during tests for the students instead of having them memorize what
> they are.

Actually I did not write that; SB Ballard did.

> My question, as always, is where are the data.  Education
> depts. in my experience, love theories and hate collecting data on them. 
> For all we know, memorizing multiplication tables is a bad idea; or it's
> a great idea.  We cannot go by what we did and how we turned out. Trouble
> is getting good data from experiments run by educators. bill w

Yes, I would agree with pretty much all of that. Educators typically
borrow a lot of theory from psychologists but are generally several years
behind. For example educators are still pretty keen on the sensory
learning styles such as visual, auditory, and kinetic despite these
concepts being borrowed from neurolinguistic programming which has largely
been discredited in psych circles.

But it is very challenging to educate students and ethically use them as
research subjects at the same time. The variability in students' natural
abilities make it difficult to set up proper control groups. Plus usually
the educators conducting the studies don't teach while those that teach
don't conduct research at least at the pre-university level.

So yes, it is difficult to get trustworthy data in education science.

Stuart LaForge