[BeetleB]

At the end of the day I'd like to see the data.

Somewhat related: There was a recent episode in This American Life that showed how struggling minority students actually became above average or near the top in subjects like calculus when forced to sit in classes for "advanced" students as opposed to "remedial" classes.

A number of universities (including some well known ones) have tried this - some for many years - so the data is out there. At least those universities showed that pushing struggling students even more than what you have in a typical course led to better outcomes than the remedial courses.

Different scenario than this submission, but it highlights the need to throw intuition away and focus on whether there is any data to support this.

[mullingitover]

I'm just waiting for AI to get good enough at tutoring that we can get one-on-one education. Bloom's two sigma problem[1] has already shown us that most students are nowhere near their potential, and tutoring is too expensive to give every student their own tutor so we're stuck with this inferior education system.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem

[ghufran_syed]

I’m currently reading “Surely you’re joking, Mr Feynman”, and this reminds me of his experience in high school where the teacher thought he talked too much and was too noisy because he was bored - so he gave him a copy of “Advanced calculus” by Woods to work through during class time and told him he wasn’t allowed to speak in class until he was done with it. He clearly found that a valuable experience.