Benjamin Bloom's 1980s study found that 90% of individually tutored students performed as well as or better than the top 20% of a conventional classroom. A Harvard study reported mentored maths students outperforming classroom peers by 200% on standardised tests. The problem is cost - no state system can fund a teacher per child all day - which is why small-group tutorials with periodic one-to-one exist.

What is an interesting discovery?

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In the early 1980s, a man by the name of Benjamin Bloom conducted a study which would expose a problem in the modern education system that stays unresolved till this day.

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In a nutshell, the research team took a cohort of students with similar academic abilities and split them into 2 groups.

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The 1st group were put in a conventional classroom environment, 30+ students per teacher. On the other hand, each student in the 2nd group was given their own personal tutor to go through the content with.

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After a few weeks, all the students were given a test to take based on the content they covered within the research period.

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Which group do you think performed better?

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Obviously, the 1-2-1 group.

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However, the surprise was more from the sheer magnitude by which the 1-2-1 students performed better compared to their classroom peers.

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Students receiving 1-2-1 tuition generally scored 2 whole standard deviations higher than their conventionally taught counterparts.

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In simple terms, this meant that 90% of the individually tutored students performed as well as or better than the top 20% of students in the conventional classroom setting.

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These findings are also supported by a study conducted by Harvard University, which found that individually mentored math students outperformed their classroom peers by 200 percent on standardised state math tests.

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The reason for this difference, the author of the 1st study suggests, is because 1-2-1 tutoring facilitates mastery learning.

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Mastery learning is, essentially, where the teacher stays on the same topic until the student has fully mastered it before moving onto the next one.

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I don’t think it takes a genius to realise such a model simply isn’t feasible in a classroom full of 30+ kids. Some kids will be able to master a topic very easily, while others will need 8 or 9 lessons on the same one. Due to budgeting and time constraints, the whole curriculum is scheduled right from the start of the year, 3 lessons on this topic, etc.

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Of course, simply replacing all education to 1-2-1 teaching would be great, but clearly that isn’t economically viable. No school or government could afford to pay 1 decent teacher £100+/hr for a single student for 8 hours of the school day every single day. Heck, most of us would struggle to pay for a lesson priced at that amount every single week.

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And, thus from this study came the aptly named 2 sigma problem - How can the education system replicate the results of 1-2-1 tuition in a conventionally taught setting?

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How do we tackle this problem at Ucademy?

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Anybody who takes tuition with us is probably aware that most of our students undergo live group tutorial classes. So the question arises, how exactly did we look at the results of this study and adapt it to our educational model?

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Well, based on many evidential data, we developed a 2 prong approach to delivering top quality education.

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What are small group tutorials?

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Evidence has shown that one way to reduce the impact of large classroom teaching is by making groups smaller. This allows for more mastery learning to take place. It is much easier to cater lessons towards 5 or 6 kids rather than 30.

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Another way we try to make the environment more conducive to mastery learning is through grouping students together. We put kids with similar ability levels in the same classes so that topics which 1 student may find difficult in that class, usually the other kids also struggle with.

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What is interspersed 1-2-1 tuition?

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However, to really polish our student’s skills up to that top grade standard, we also conduct 1-2-1 tutorials throughout the examination year for each student.

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This allows the tutor to really dig in and find the areas which the pupil might struggle with and remedy any issues.

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This 2 prong approach allows us to provide students with the benefits of tutor groups (social learning and developing group-based learning skills), as well as give the opportunity for students to fully master a topic with tutors individually.

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What do you guys think?

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How do you think the education system should deal with the results of this study? Simply ignore it because the solutions appear too economically unviable, or come up with a more creative approach?

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What else is worth reading?

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What research supports these methods?

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