Why Johnny Can't do Algebra: Or Why Our Schools are Broken, and How Big Data Can Help

Abstract

Over the past century, we've had increasing numbers of methods, validated with a great deal of scientific rigor, to help our students learn more effectively. Yet those methods have rarely moved into practice. The reality of our schools has increasingly lagged the state-of-the-art. Effective educational interventions tend to work at a small scale, so long as a single individual continues to make a heroic effort to drive them forward. Once that individual leaves, the state-of-the-practice reverts to ineffective classroom methods based on plausible-sounding best practices and pseudoscience. Our failure to improve schools has less to do with what we know about teaching-and-learning, and much more to do with our organizational and incentive structures. The rise of educational digital technology, and the associated rise of educational big data, provides an opportunity to change how we measure educational outcomes, and thereby shift many of our incentive structures to better support student learning and growth.

Bio

Dr. Piotr Mitros is the Research Director of Next Generation Psychometrics and Data Science at the Educational Testing Service. Previously, Piotr was the Chief Scientist of edX, an MIT/Harvard education initiative which evolved out of his work as a Research Scientist at MIT. His current interests focus on the changing ways in which educational measurement will play a role in improving student learning outcomes in the 21st century: understanding how assessments and organizational/incentive structures in education interact, how big data and learning process data enables measurement of both finer-grained and more complex skills, evolving cultural expectations around data, privacy, and assessment, and similar issues. Email address: pmitros@ets.org