Don’t expect the revolution to come from within though. It never happens that way … it will be those who are close to, but not in the education system, that recognise when all the pieces are in place for a new approach. After all, it wasn’t the music industry that brought us iTunes.

Perhaps the best way to explain this is to imagine a student who is trying to work on a topic or question that they’re struggling with. Cue student:

“Our student encounters a problem that they can’t understand or work through. Frustration begins to build. The tutor will use scaffolding (guided prompting that pushes the students thinking) to encourage them to think about the problem in hand, to use existing knowledge and tools to try to approach the problem. Feedback along the way helps to both monitor the process and guide the student when they are either wrong or unsure. The process is highly interactive, unlike say watching a video or reading a book, which is passive. It is also granular, which means that the problem is broken down in to small steps and at each stage, the student understands if they’re right or that they are wrong and need to repair their thinking. In other words, a student can’t go far wrong. This is an intense process that reinforces existing knowledge, creates new knowledge and repairs faulty understanding.”

It is this process of scaffolding, feedback and interaction that seems to offer the most effective improvement in understanding.

Intuitively, you’d assume that one-to-one support from someone who has a good grasp of a subject must help. It’s obvious, isn’t it? People wouldn’t keep paying if it wasn’t delivering results, so you could say that the continued existence and growth of the tutoring industry is a vote of confidence in it’s effectiveness. But up until now, I’d never really thought to ask if anyone had independently tested to see if this was true.

It turns out they have. A number of academic studies have been carried out to gauge how effective tutoring is in improving educational performance, including Bloom (1984, Educational Researcher), Evens & Michael (2006, Erlbaum) and Chi et al (2001, Cognitive Science). The fact that they’ve been published in reputable, peer reviewed academic journals, should give us a fair degree of confidence in the results. They’re certainly not ‘marketing studies’ sponsored by tutoring agencies. These studies compared groups of students who received human tutoring with students who received no tutoring at all and then measured the results. The studies consistently showed that tutoring improved performance and whilst we have to be extremely careful about translating statistical results into real life examples, the studies suggest that in a group of 100 students, tutoring would make the difference between finishing 50th in the class (no tutoring) and 21st in the class (with tutoring).

So in answer to our question, not only can we say, “yes tutoring works”, but by how much. That works for me.

Fine tuning economic performance is the subject of endless open debate and ideas, but it always seems to me that education is very much the poor cousin, with the same old tired ideas doing the rounds. If we are going to competitive as a country, we need to find a way to let new ideas see the light of day in our education system. Vinod Khosla, the legendary venture capitalist and backer of many new ideas, put it pretty well in a recent article, ”we have also had too much punditry from experts in education instead of just trying hundreds of new ways of doing things”.

If we are going to give our children the chance to succeed in the modern world, we shouldn’t be prissy about where good ideas come from. It’s too important an issue for vested interests to hold sway. The world’s major corporations realised some time back that you can’t maintain competitiveness by doing the same things in the same way, only a little bit better, you have to constantly rethink what you are doing, why you are doing it and how you are doing it. It’s time for us to embrace this spirit in education and find a hundred or even a thousand new ways of doing things.

1. Not understanding how your market (and customer) ticks. In (minute) detail.

2. Thinking that marketing effort compensates for poor product

3. Thinking that a great product needs no marketing

4. Getting your pricing wrong

5a. Thinking that being cautious will get you somewhere eventually

5b. not understanding that being brave is not the absence of fear, it’s about being scared but doing it anyway

6. Having a great idea and doing nothing about it

7. Not understanding that failure is part of the process

In a flash.

Perhaps it’s time for us to wake up. The tech world sees itself as the fixie riding, liberal voting saviours of the planet, but are we really the biggest pimpers of them all? Am I missing something or is there a serious dearth of, well serious projects out there?

So here goes, the golden rule of revision:

“it is far better to repetitively go over the material for a bit, day after day, than it is to cram in a long session the night/week before”

Why is this so? Because only through repetition can you move information from the conscious brain to the unconscious brain. Repetition is how the human brain learns.  When you’re panicking in the exam room, it’s easy for you to forget what’s in the conscious brain. Put another way, footballers, who by definition are good at football, continue to train over and over again so that the moves become unconscious. So do dancers at the Royal Ballet, people learning to drive or barristers in the High Court. It’s how we humans learn skills and it’s why the person who says they did no work and gets A*’s was lying. This is the trick used by crammers and by teachers who come in late to ‘get you up a grade’.

P.S. Of course, this assumes that you know what material will be in the exam (the syllabus will tell you) and that you understand it (just keep asking the teacher until you do).

1. Access.

Robert Woodruff, President of The Coca-Cola Company in the 1920′s, best summed this up when he said he wanted his product, “within arm’s reach of desire”. I do too. I want ubiquity; to be able to ‘consume’ a book/music/film anywhere, at anytime and without restriction, so long as I’ve paid the relevant fee for access rights. Meaningless access restrictions based on the way things used to be done in the film/book/music industry are probably my biggest beef with the way media companies are handling the transition to digital. Territoriality (geographic lockout) in books and music, staggered release dates for films .. they all get in the way of me consuming media the way I want. There are numerous documented examples, like the time last summer when my daughters heard a song in France (Mika by the way) that they subsequently wanted to buy in the UK. Not available. How crazy is that? It represents lost revenue and encourages piracy.  Amazon and Apple have both reaped the benefits of making things quasi-easily available and purchasing as simple as possible, but they’ve done it in that walled garden, AOL-kind of way that’s typical of early markets but which never stands the test of time. The market is too big for one or two players to be sufficiently creative or powerful to control it.

2. Discovery.

This is the tricky bit. In a world of massive over-supply of art, books, music and film, it should be less about products ‘cutting through the noise’ and more about a sophisticated ecosystem of matchmaking: me to a product I might like. Don’t you have that nagging feeling that you’re missing out on something great (I hate missing out), but which may not appeal to everyone?It’s not a search problem, but a discovery or find problem. For the young, we have an easy answer – friends. They have the time and the inclination to spend hours listening to stuff, watching stuff, reading stuff. There’s kudos in finding something good first and then telling everyone else. But as we get older, tastes diverge and the time to ‘discover’ diminishes. The problem is further complicated, because depending on whether it’s a film, a song, a book or a piece of art, the time taken to ‘sample’ it can vary dramatically. Think of books versus music. I can listen to ten seconds of a song and decide if I like it. I can also listen to it whilst driving/running/changing a nappy. Try that with a book, even an ebook. Some things, by their very nature, take more effort to ‘consume’. It might take 5 seconds to look at a picture, 3 minutes to listen to a song, but Harry Potter novels range between 76,944 – 257,045 words and the average reader ‘consumes’ around 250 words a minute. Over 200,000 new books are published every year and that excludes self-publishing. Given that I have yet to see a reliable way to recommend art of music to me, what hope is there for books? Facebook tell me the answer is to let them record all the ‘likes’ etc; of my friends and they will help me. Amazon have a recommendation engine. My feedback to both of them – nah. In the short to medium term, I think the answer is some form of aggregated, active curation. You can’t actually choose the book for me, but you can certainly narrow it down and make some suggestions that I will take up (or not) that will allow you to improve your suggestions. The big bands, authors, film makers, those universally accepted to be good, will always find a decent audience. It’s hard to believe that The Beatles or Zeppelin or Adele or Shakespeare would ever struggle to find an audience; it’s the ones in the middle that struggle – those that ‘some’ people think are good. We need a massive burst of creativity to solve this problem – I love that my favourite bookshop, Mr B’s in Bath is now streaming real books to people on a monthly basis. Streaming, a digital concept, has changed direction and taken up home in the physical world. That’s what I call clever. And exciting.

You can find more at The Thing.