The era of artificial intelligence

What is the role change of Teachers?

Future school direction: “Making all students experience the success of learning.”

The reason why schools exist is to allow all students to experience success in learning. Designed to provide education to all citizens in industrial society, current schools are a very successful system for efficiently providing educational opportunities to all students. Still, they are very vulnerable to allowing individual students to experience the success of learning. It is most important to sympathise with the reason for the school’s existence: “making all students experience the success of learning” in the future school direction.


The most crucial principle of school system design is average-oriented education. The content and speed of the curriculum are set according to the average level according to the age of the students. The curriculum is designed to consider the range and speed of the middle group of students nationwide to operate mass education. Accordingly, the same content is taught at the same rate according to the age of students in classrooms across the country. One of the many alternatives that have been attempted to overcome these average-oriented lecture-style classes can be said to be ‘one-to-one tutoring’.


Will one-on-one customised education be effective?

Criticism has been raised since the 20th century that traditional lecture-style classes are creating students who cannot adapt to school by delivering predetermined learning content to all students in the same way without reflecting individual students’ learning levels, learning speed, learning needs, and cultural differences. In 1968, Benjamin Bloom proposed the “Mastery Learning” theory to all students to succeed in learning. For complete understanding to occur, it is necessary to identify the time required for learning and provide learning time suitable for individual students. It can be said that the fatal problem is that the current school offers the same learning time for individual students without considering the time required.


Results of Learning in Complete Learning Theory

• Learning outcomes = (time spent on learning) / (time required for learning)

Two strategies can improve learning outcomes by applying Bloom’s complete learning theory. The first is a strategy that accurately identifies and minimises the time required for learning by students corresponding to the denominator. First, it emphasises the essential thing to grasp individual students’ aptitude and class understanding, which can be interpreted as a diagnostic evaluation. After learning the learner’s characteristics, it is possible to reduce the time required for individual students by improving the quality of classes by using appropriate teaching methods.

The second is to accurately identify the time required for individual students and then use personal teaching strategies to succeed in learning. The education community has made various efforts to utilise the most efficient teaching strategies students need.

Many empirical studies have been conducted on the educational effect of ‘one-to-one tutoring’. The most representative study can be an experimental study by Bloom (1984). It announced that one-to-one tutoring could statistically increase the ‘2-standard deviation’ (2-sigma) learning effect. This result, also called the “2 Sigma Effect,” can have significantly impacted the education community.



Source: Bloom, B.S. (1984). The two sigma problem: The search for methods of group instruction as effective as one-to-one tutoring. Educational Researcher, 13(6), 4-16.
According to Bloom’s research results, feedback through formative evaluation based on traditional lecture-style classes has a significant educational effect. Furthermore, it was shown that one-to-one tutoring by teachers increases the average of students’ academic achievement by 2 o’clock compared to the standard of students who took traditional lecture-style classes.

Since then, various follow-up studies have been conducted, and most of them have been positively supported by Bloom’s research results. Corbett (2001) reported that in learning the programming language of LISP, students solved 40% more problems and increased the correct answer rate by 25% in the final evaluation when using a computer-based tutoring system.

Can customised education be implemented by reducing the number of students per class?

Many educators sympathised with Benjamin Bloom’s theory of complete learning and the direction of “one-to-one tutoring,” Various efforts were made to implement it. The most representative and large-scale educational experiment conducted in the United States is to reduce the number of students per class to provide customised education. This can be collectively referred to as a ‘class size reduction (CSR) project’.

The most representative CSR project to improve educational performance is the ‘Student/Teacher Achievement Ratio (STAR) Project’ in Tennessee. The STAR Project is a study on the educational effect of class size reduction over four years from 1985 to 1989 in Tennessee, USA. The STAR Project sampled 79 schools and 300 classes in 42 school districts in Tennessee, and a comparative study was conducted on 7,000 students from kindergarten to the third grade of elementary school. For the experimental design, the close group was set as a “regular class” consisting of 22 to 25 students. The experimental group was formed as a “small class” composed of 13 to 17 students and a regular/aid group adding assistant teachers to the standard class. As a result of the study, it was reported that students in small classes showed higher achievements in both the Stanford Achievement Test and the Basic Skills First compared to those in general courses.

The results and implications of the class size reduction study conducted in the United States are summarised. First, in class size reduction studies conducted in the United States, most of the educational effects of small classes were positive, but some studies showed negative results. Second, the educational impact of class size reduction was more positive in lower grades than in higher schools. Third, the educational effect of small classes has more positive effects of reducing work in terms of teacher activities than in terms of student activities.

Through the results of these class size reduction studies, it is worth paying attention to what decisions the United States has made in terms of the policy. If the results are presented, policy decisions were made to expand financial support to strengthen the capacity of teachers while maintaining the size of the class at the time. The reason is that the educational effect is insignificant compared to the finances that need to be invested in class size reduction. Reducing the class size increased the learning effect in the lower grades, but it was not found that the learning effect steadily increased.

In addition, it was considered necessary that it was not easy to find the educational effect of class size reduction as you went up to higher schools. The implications of CSR research in the United States can be seen that reducing class size alone does not achieve as much learning effect as expected through financial investment. To increase the impact of class size reduction, it can be seen that innovation must be made in terms of educational content and teaching and learning methods while reducing class size.

Source: Trinity Tuition College (www.trinitytuitioncollege.com.au)

Written by: Donghyeon Lee