Bloom's 2 Sigma Problem: What 1-on-1 Tutoring Research Tells You About How to Read | Chapterly Blog
Bloom's 2 Sigma Problem: What 1-on-1 Tutoring Research Tells You About How to Read Quick Answer: In 1984, educational psychologist Benjamin Bloom reported that students taught one-on-one with mastery-learning techniques outperformed conventionally taught students by approximately two standard deviations — the average tutored student scored above 98% of the conventional class. He called the challenge of reproducing that effect at scale "the 2 sigma problem." For most of forty years, no method had reliably closed the gap. For a nonfiction reader, the research is direct: comprehension on the first read is not what produces the effect — frequent, low-stakes correction of your own misunderstanding is. The reading practices that approximate one-on-one tutoring — generating your own explanation, getting it questioned, surfacing what you got wrong, doing it again later — are the practices that close the 2 sigma gap on your own books. For forty years, the Bloom finding has been the largest published effect size in education research. It is also one of the most uncomfortable, because it points at a fact most readers prefer to avoid: the gap between how well you would learn with a careful tutor and how well you learn on your own is enormous,...