What are the implications of these educational experiments?

See what you think of this article I also encourage you to view the TED talk video (not the video at the beginning of the aritcle, but the one referenced further down). It is a bit long, but I think you will find it of interest.

The article starts off provocatively by suggesting that everything that we think we know about education may be wrong. This may be a bit of an exaggeration, but the experiments do challenge a lot of common notions of education, such as student resistance to education and need for constant testing.

I do not have any teaching experience. I did some substitute teaching when I went to college, between the end of the college year and the end of the public school year. My experience is very consistent with what Sugata Mita describes.

I was not given anything to teach, so I gave the student some recreational math programs. You have to picture the situation. The weather has gotten warm. The year is almost over, and the class has a substitute teacher. There was no reason to expect any interest in the problems. I was therefore quite floored by the enthusiasm with which the students attacked the problems. I have since learned that teachers sometimes give recreational problems as a reward for students who have finished their assignments.

Students are eager to learn. They enjoy being challenged. Learning to use the Internet provided a huge incentive for the students in the experiment to improve their language skills. One of the things brought out in the video is that the experiment works better if the students share a computer. This provides a synergistic effect with the students learning from one another. The video also talks about the large effect of having people monitor the students’ activity and offer encouragement.