It feels to me that the venn diagram between "students that fully engaged with the material" and "students that learned well from the material" is going to basically be a circle for any teaching method.
The tricky question at the forefront of education research is, at least in my mind, trying to thread the needle between effective techniques that students don’t like, ineffective techniques that students do like, and poorly defined techniques that administrators like. And on top of all that student self-reports aren’t actually very reliable indicators of learning progress at all!
This first sentence is the best summary of educational problems I've ever read, thank you.
I think we've all had a few teachers who seem able to teach 2-10x more effectively than normal; they all seem to do it in different ways. I read recently the Gates Foundation felt they'd found nothing statistically significant in their billion+ dollars of teaching philanthropy.
The most plausible education improvement proposal I'm aware of is individual tutoring. This truly does seem to work well, and I think it's why there's so much interest in agentic tutoring. Perhaps we need a TeachBench to get some hill climbing done by the frontier labs.
Students don't like being told they're bad at something. Students don't like being told to do the thing they're bad at. They especially don't like having to constantly repeat this in a loop until they've caught up with the rest of the class, while other students get to enjoy their free time.
Yeah you'd need to compare this method with some classic method as a control. Otherwise "engagement" is just an indirect measure of how much the students studied.