Bloom's two sigma problem (2020)

> Nonetheless, Bloom was on to something: Tutoring and mastery learning do have a degree of experimental support, and fortunately it seems that carefully designed software systems can completely replace the instructional side of traditional teaching, achieving better results, on par with one to one tutoring. However, designing them is a hard endeavour, and there is a motivational component of teachers that may not be as easily replicable purely by software.

I've been working on an implementation of mastery learning and other related techniques called Trane (https://github.com/trane-project/trane/) for the past three years or so. Mastery learning is the main one, but it also integrates spaced repetition, interleaving, mixing difficulties, and reward propagation (doing well or bad in an exercise affects how related exercises are scheduled).

I think it works pretty well, but you need to pair it with proper pedagogy of the skill you want to learn and the proper curriculum. The latter is the hardest part, so it's being my main limitation. I've used some external resources to build courses, and they work well, but obviously it would work much better with a full curriculum built from the ground up.

Currently working on Pictures Are For Babies (https://picturesareforbabies.com/), which is meant to do just that for literacy. I am hoping to do a first release soon. As for the motivation angle, the solution in this particular instance is fairly simple. Use the software to enforce scheduling andpedagogy,y and a human tutor to provide emotional and social support. This division allows any literate person to become an effective tutor with a few hours of training.

I am hoping that the average student can complete the whole curriculum in five years. That would mean that (assuming they start at between 4 and 5 years old), the average student would have college-level reading and writing skills by the time they are nine or ten.

Most complete explanation so far is in the pedagogy page: https://picturesareforbabies.com/home/pedagogy/