Shayan Doroudi

Interesting!

Also, I think Bereiter's story complicates the story being sold in Sold a Story. (Though he's one of the founders of Direct Instruction, he's gotten hardly any airtime...) I'm thinking of writing something on this, if I have time. @mpershan

For the record though, Bereiter describes Direct Instruction (when it was originally developed) as not behaviorst, and in fact, "totally atheoretical." He gives a nice answer to what behaviorism is missing here: youtu.be/RdL3zXLGk54?list=PL…

Is there actually evidence that the implementation in the UK worked? @jeffrey_bowers shows that systematic phonics instruction didn't have the effect many people think it did. Either way, it is something to learn from!

Can you finish the thread? 😃

That said, I think cognitivism (information-processing psych) can look like behaviorism in many ways, so I wouldn't say reading wars/math wars are between behaviorism and cognitivism, but more behaviorism/cognitivism vs. post-information-processing cog sci approaches.

Seeing examples and quotes from Engelmann, @Mr_Raichura, and automated attempts at DI the past couple weeks, I see a lot of Skinner. And this isn't completely disparaging, because I think there are a lot of misconceptions about Skinner. See this post: nitter.gq/EdTechMuser/status/130…

According to @DTWillingham (in the fittingly titled Why Don't Student Like School?), it's both. The cognitive demand needs to be enough that it's interesting but not too much that it overwhelms them.

I must admit, this is pretty funny (though sad).

The SAT also at least used to have an experimental section that would not be counted as part of your score, so students would often wonder/guess which section that was. (The goal behind that is to fit the parameters of questions to ensure future tests are fair.)

That's true, it's more opaque. You can probably guess if you got a harder or easier section. The GRE has been doing this for a long time, so you can look at how people have discussed that before.

It's not perfect, but the people behind are invested in making sure scores are comparable within and across sessions. (You could also ask how is it fair that someone else got a different version of the test with easier questions?)

Computerized adaptive testing has been around since the 1970s. The GRE used it for decades. There is a whole methodology (item response theory) dedicated to ensuring tests like this are fair.

In case it wasn't clear, my point is, if the demo is not impressive or used mediocre content, we shouldn't expect much from the app as a whole.

There's been a lot of hype about Alpha's tech (maybe more Timeback than this) and use of learning sciences. They finally released a demo (which I appreciate). They are incentivized to put the most impressive 30 second demo they have, and this is what they gave.

One day before this.

But by all means, I would love to see an adversarial collaboration of a well-designed study that DI and inquiry-based experts agree should lean in favor of one or the other approach. If you all could get along enough to do this, that would be really great.

I mean, many researchers see the evidence pointing in a different direction: pdf.sciencedirectassets.com/… (yes you responded to this paper, but see their response).

“They think the way you toughen kids up is to get them to clean a bathroom, and the way you get them to learn is to power through it as quickly as possible,” Professor Willingham said, adding, “These are naïve theories of psychology.”

The New York Times article on Alpha School is long. I admittedly did not read all of it, but I am glad I skimmed through the end to see the mic drop ending by @DTWillingham: nytimes.com/2026/10/23/us/al…