[growingkittens]

The long-term impact is much more ambiguous to measure.

I paid particular attention in school when a teacher would explain why they were trying to teach us something. I noticed the same patterns of teaching among different teachers in the same school system, and how it all worked together to reinforce the skills we needed. (Note: many of my peers experienced the "extra" work as pointless, because they didn't understand the long-term implications).

Teachers who don't understand educational theory can't work as part of an educational system without additional training. In the meantime, their students miss out on long-term skill building.

This situation makes me think of technical debt. A short-term fix with long-term, ambiguous problems that are difficult to unravel.

[sesm]

Good point. In short, I would rephrase it as "if your measurement doesn't show the difference between trained and untrained teachers, maybe your measurement is wrong?"

There 2 other plausible hypothesis that the article ignores:

1. What if untrained teachers are effective because they learn on the job from trained teachers? Which means that you have to have certain % of trained teachers to keep the system alive.

2. What if trained teachers become less effective because they drop their standards looking at how untrained ones work? This is a common phenomenon at workplaces, and I've seen it happen in software development many times.

[dan-robertson]

What’s a concrete example of one of the explanations for a reason you were given for your being taught something?

[growingkittens]

Most of what I remember involves "transferability" - the ability to take a skill in one area and apply it in a different context. One way to teach this involves combining subjects, such as practicing reading and comprehension skills in math class with word problems.

There is a keyword I am forgetting which would make this comment easier to answer in detail. If I remember it I will post again.

[xboxnolifes]

Not who you replied to, but the bad one I always got was "You'll need to know it for college".