Where should we go from here?

Create a research agenda for creating a tutor-like environment for education. Where should our attention be placed? What tools are emerging that we could use to give people access to something even better than an individual tutor?

I'm still torn on what the main focus is here. It seems like, of the literature we've seen, most has been focused on technological solutions to the 2 Sigma Problem. This is good, but in a lot of the subsequent literature in the 90s we pursued technological replacements for the tutor, which ended up as rather fruitless searches.

What I want to know is: why didn't more research follow the mastery learning thread that Bloom himself started? Mastery learning was far more effective than anything else at approaching the 2 sigma level, but we seem to have given up on that option and instead focused on what we can do to make a computer act like a human being. Why on earth would we abandon the most promising pedagogical approach? Well, I mean apart from the fact that it is totally incompatible with the No Child Left Behind approach to education where we divide up learning into totally inauthentic and arbitrary chunks and proscribe an approach to teaching that is not only frustrating for the teachers but entirely contrary to everything we know as best practice; other than that, of course, why would we do this?

I appreciated the Chi, et al. study that sought to find out what about the tutoring experience made it effective. Its findings suggested that it isn't the tutor's bank of knowledge that makes a difference, (the "suppressed tutoring" was just as effective as "normal" tutoring) but rather the structure; the interactive environment that is making a difference.

So what I want to see us do is to explore the pedagogy of tutoring and find out how to change our classroom structures to better replicate it (or tear down the classrooms altogether). Especially in an age where internet technology allows access to information that a "sage on the stage" didn't need to memorize, we have such a capacity to change the way we teach and learn. Web 2.0 and communicative technologies allow us to extend the reach of the human tutor and the interactive environment. Instead of trying to figure out how to make computers think like humans, let's try to use our computer technology to increase the capacity and number of human tutors.