"In college, there’s far less social pressure to maintain popularity, and you’re actually valued for your intelligence. [...] The major difference to me in high school vs. college is the work in college–for me at least–is actually challenging and intellectually interesting."
I think Andrew's view of college is overly shaped by the fact that he went to an elite college at age 12. Had he matriculated at 18 he probably would have been bored as fuck. Especially if he was at a real college, i.e. one where the education and social dynamics were actually representative of the experience of the vast majority of college students.
Also, does he have any actual knowledge of the research that's been done on education? If he does, this interview certainly doesn't hint at it. Not to be overly critical, but I'm really not sold based on this interview.
I'm confused on whether you think that quote is from me or Andrew. I was asked to clarify just in case: that quote is coming from my own personal experience (and I updated the page to reflect that).
Andrew's not targeting college students, he's looking at younger children. He was still in public school up until 4th grade, where he was having attention problems. I would assume today's 4th graders are equally attention deficit when it comes to learning.
some new theories and applications to learning are coming out of neuroscience but I am unsure if Andrew specialized in that area at least from the interview.
The older neuroscience stuff we are already aware of that humans remember in 3s, 5s, and 7s of items, several channels used at once such as visual audio increases info percentage retained more so when skills re-used, etc.
Even if he did specialize in that area of neuroscience, it's largely irrelevant. Sociology and psychology are much more important for understanding how to do education right, followed by anthropology and cognitive development. There are definitely a few good insights from neuroscience, but it's not really a field that's produced many game changers, at least not yet. Even history is more important than neuroscience at this point.
Hi, I don't feel great about "calling you out", but I want to ask if you hold a degree, or have pursued extensive study (perhaps to the point of publishing a peer-reviewed article) in any of the fields of neuroscience, anthropology, psychology, sociology, cognitive development, or educational research?
Your reply comes off as highly authoritative, but I don't want to just default to trusting that you are an expert in every (or even any) field mentioned, and hence, are able to produce an authoritative hierarchy of their usefulness as applied to a specific unsolved problem.
No problem. I've taken a few classes on education and I've read a bunch of books on the research.
It would be difficult to defend any sort of hierarchy in a rigorous way, but there is generally a pretty good consensus on which findings are the most important. For example, the is a pretty broad agreement that if a kid shows up at school after having not eaten for three days and their parents have been beating the shit out of them, then they probably aren't going to learn very well regardless of what neuroscience theory you're using. And since these sorts of problems effect 80+% of the kids in many school districts, you basically have to design schools around these sorts of issues before you can really start optimizing the content. Albeit all of the research sort of fits together.
It's a good question though, so I'll throw up a Squidoo page with a bunch of the best books on education that I've found.
> several channels used at once such as visual audio increases info percentage retained more so when skills re-used
I'm not sure if you're refering here to the so-called "cone of learning" ("we remember 10% of what we read, 20% of what we hear, ..."), but if so, then from what I know this idea was debunked; it turns out to be a multiple-level iterative misinterpretation of a research paper on a completely different topic. I wrote about it some time ago; sorry for Google Translate, but I currently blog in Polish only:
I think Andrew's view of college is overly shaped by the fact that he went to an elite college at age 12. Had he matriculated at 18 he probably would have been bored as fuck. Especially if he was at a real college, i.e. one where the education and social dynamics were actually representative of the experience of the vast majority of college students.
Also, does he have any actual knowledge of the research that's been done on education? If he does, this interview certainly doesn't hint at it. Not to be overly critical, but I'm really not sold based on this interview.