It has to do, I think, with screen size issues, and maybe Android.

Reading on a Note 8 (large phone), and for years before (Note 5, Note 3), when I hold the phone in portrait orientation … once I type into the text box a bit, it grows and covers the submit button.

If it’s only a line or two, sometimes I can hit the invisible submit button behind the comment text box, but if it’s more than that line, I can’t.

Only recently, I’ve succeeded in addressing this 10y issue by rotating my phone to landscape, which doesn’t resize the textbox, thus not covering the submit comment button.

I think I can sweep the factory lighting effect “someone is paying attention to me” under the “intent” rug.

How much attention I pay to what I’m doing has something (a lot) to do with social pressure.

That said … I agree that this facet of intent is a part of improvement and that I didn’t call it out.

And the last words heard by the offender, heretic, and Breaker of the Faith shall be, Lies, damned lies, and statistics!

Other notes: a professor, the quintessential product of the system, will never produce a meaningful reform to the system; the state has no interest in producing citizens capable of thinking for themselves; it’s quite difficult for a less-intelligent adult to meaningfully teach a more-intelligent child; if we (for some value of “we”) really, truly cared about any of this, we would re-order our civilization such that “teacher” would be a great and manly profession, highly paid, highly desired, and to call oneself a “teacher” would be a great privilege, rather than being something performed, for the most part, by the women who couldn’t get much of anything else going.

The Great CVLR Plan of Education Reform: Construct really great libraries of marble, wood, gold, and faraday; fill them with the smell of ancient, leather-bound books; and lock the literate cheeldrin in them for eight hours a day. If you don’t care enough to have a library of the classics, you don’t care at all — you shouldn’t even have a school, much less a bloodsucking teacher’s union. Purveyors of daycare should be called what they are: babysitters… of babies. The illiterate and unread, toddlers and up, can be given pellet guns and released into the forests to spend their days learning something-anything as far away from the merciless fat well-unionized terrorists as possible.

There’s also the “someone is paying attention to me” effect.

Remember that the early “time and motion” guys found that making random changes to the workplace produced just as much effect as the carefully planned ones; speculation stemmed from that which led to the suspicion that what might have been more important to things improving was that someone, anyone, was paying attention to the employees.

Kid sitting in a classroom with thirty other students is not going to do as well with that impersonal sort of instruction as one who is one-on-one with someone else, regardless of the quality of instruction. Johnny responds to attention, period. That’s just the way it is.

What’s worth looking at, in my opinion, is examining just what the hell creates this effect; it’s almost placebo-like, in terms of monitoring performance. If you have someone on-scene, and watching, small groups do better than if left alone, even if the monitor has zero clue what the hell is going on. It’s the psychology of it all–”We’re being observed…”.

Learning is (effectively) ALL learning to do.
Learning to do requires several items

1. Intent — student must be focused in the moment on doing/learning. Focused on the hot redhead or the next game ain’t gonna work.

2. Practice — student must be doing, not listening/reading. Until they are good enough

3. Feedback — if a student isnt expert enough, or even if they are … student must have a feedback system in place to warn them if they go astray.

Of course tutoring works. It addresses the 3 big issues in learning … unless the tutor is too cute.