The 2 Sigma Problem

Stanford students in a traditional classroom were paired with Hewlett-Packard engineers who received videos of the lectures. The HP engineers viewed the videos then designated one of their number to be the “tutor” for the group. The group then discussed and reviewed the material. The engineers outperformed their traditional classroom-based counterparts.

Gibbons, J., Pannoni, R. and Orlin, J. (1996). “Tutored Video Instruction: A Distance Education Methodology that Improves Training Results.” Paper presented at the American Society of Training and Development International Conference and Exposition, Orlando, Florida, June 3.

I just re-discovered a Department of Education report titled “Harnessing Innovation to Support Student Success: Using Technology to Personalize Education.” The PDF is available here.

I plan on talking about this today in class if you have a chance to read it before coming today.

Here are some additional resources from our class discussion today:

Prisoners of Time PDF – The 1994 report from the National Education Commission on Time and Learning states that, “Learning in America is a prisoner of time. For the past 150 years, American public schools have held time constant and let learning vary.”

“THE BALANCING ACT: COMPETENCIES OF EFFECTIVE TEACHERS AND MENTORS IN DEGREE PROGRAMS FOR ADULTS,” by Carol Schneider, George 0. Klemp, Jr., and Susan Kastendiek. This is the study that compares excellent teachers with everyone else.

The Five Minute University

Check out the Declining by Degrees site:

http://www.decliningbydegrees.org

Mike Bush shared the following resources from Dexter Fletcher that make reference to the 2-sigma problem.

The 2008 Educational Researcher piece, “Learning Anytime, Anywhere: Advanced Distributed Learning and the Changing Face of Education,” can be access online if you are on the BYU campus here. If you are off campus, you will have to authenticate or get access through your local library.

Fletcher, J. D. (1992). Individualized systems of instruction. In M. C. Alkin (Ed.), Encyclopedia of educational research (6th ed.,
pp. 613–620). New York: Macmillan.

Fletcher, J. D. (1997). What have we learned about computer-based instruction in military training? In R. J. Seidel & P. R. Chatelier (Eds.), Virtual reality, training’s future? (pp. 169-177). New York: Plenum.

Fletcher, J. D. (2004). Technology, the Columbus effect, and the third revolution in learning. In M. Rabinowitz, F. C. Blumberg, & H. Everson (Eds.), The design of instruction and evaluation: Affordances of using media and technology (pp. 139–157). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

In 1984, Benjamin Bloom identified a learning dilemma he dubbed the “2 Sigma Problem”–tutored students perform two standard deviations better than students who learn via conventional methods. Noting that one-to-one tutoring is “too costly for most societies to bear on a large scale,” Bloom challenged researchers and teachers to “devise teaching-learning conditions that will enable the majority of students under group instruction to attain levels of achievement that can at present be reached only under good tutoring conditions.” The purpose of this seminar will be to reexamine Bloom’s dilemma and challenge after a quarter Century of intervening innovation and research. Beginning with Bloom’s 1984 article, the class will conduct a meta-analysis of the student performance literature. The class product will be a multi-authored article aimed at answering these questions: (1) Are we any closer to closing the 2 sigma gap? (2) If not why? (3) How cam researchers and teachers facilitate broadly realized levels of achievement on par with those realized via one-to-one instruction?