Over the years, researchers have continuously looked for ways to improve the educational performance in the United States. Today, social scientists might have discovered a solution to physicist Richard Feynman's derision to education research in 1974.
In recent years, there have been burgeoning concerns over educational performance in the United States. Despite boosting its efforts to conduct more experiments in finding effective ways to educate, educational performance scores continuously declined.
"There are big schools of reading methods and mathematics methods, and so forth, but if you notice, you'll see the reading scores keep going down-or hardly going up-in spite of the fact that we continually use these same people to improve the methods," Feynman wrote in his work titled, "Cargo Cult Science."
Fortunately, Harvard economist Roland Fryer found consistent results in education research that could shed some light regarding the educational performance of students including test scores and graduation rates. In Fryer's survey paper, he found that school played a significant role in the improvement outcomes of students, not the community or the home.
Fryer also stressed that an increasing evidence pointed out school as the most conducive place for the "magic of learning" to happen. Unfortunately, Fryer's findings were in stark contrast with what conservatives and liberals think that families and communities need to be fixed or inequality should be reduced for education to improve, Bloomberg View notes.
Another interesting finding in Fryer's survey was the effectiveness of high-intensity tutoring or one-on-one mentoring in the educational performance improvement of students. This finding was also opposing the claims of some education researchers that nothing works in education, as mentioned in the blog post titled, "The Null Hypothesis in Education is Hard to Disprove."
Meanwhile, Fryer's survey also proved that disadvantaged or less fortunate students can also improve their educational performances if given sufficient assistance and attention. Educational performances in charter and other schools also have the potential to improve if certain policies like frequent teacher feedback will be implemented in the right way.
Speaking of tutoring, Portland Community College is reportedly cutting a free literacy tutoring program for refugees and immigrants. According to The Oregonian, the community college will eliminate its Volunteer Literacy Tutoring program effective Jun. 30.
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