Dive Brief:
- Educational psychologist Benjamin Bloom wrote about the 2 Sigma Problem in 1984, identifying the benefits of one-on-one tutoring using mastery learning techniques, but the strategy has long been cost-prohibitive for broad use.
- TechCrunch reports that startups have taken on the challenge, launching online mentorship programs in recent years, including Udacity’s coaches, Thinkful’s structured online mentorship program, and the on-demand mentorship services of HackHands.
- While a 2004 study out of Harvard corroborated Bloom’s findings, there has been no scientific study about the impact of online mentoring, specifically — but if such strategies have results anywhere near those for one-on-one tutoring using mastery learning techniques, the improvement to student outcomes would be immense.
Dive Insight:
Bloom’s study showed that students who were mentored one-on-one by tutors, who made sure they mastered each topic before moving on to the next, performed two standard deviations better than their peers who learned in traditional classrooms. Two standard deviations, or two sigma, put the average tutored student above 98% of the students in the control class. This is considered a problem because knowing how much it would help does not make it any more feasible to spend money on individual tutors for every student in a class.
Beyond online tutoring programs to address scale, adaptive learning will help future students. Competency-based education programs have incorporated adaptive learning to make sure students don’t waste time on content they already know, instead prompting them with course material in subjects they have yet to master. As the tech gets better, scalability should, too.