The 2 Sigma Problem: The Search for Methods of Group Instruction as Effective as One-to-One Tutoring
1984/06/01 by BENJAMIN S. BLOOM, Benjamin S. Bloom · 2,458 citations
Arts and Humanities · Psychology · Social Sciences · #Artificial intelligence #Class (philosophy) #Computer science #Corrective feedback #Curriculum #Diverse Music Education Insights #Educational Environments and Student Outcomes #Formative assessment #Mathematics education #Pedagogy #Psychology #Subject (documents) #Subject matter #TUTOR #Teacher Education and Leadership Studies #Teaching method
paper · doi:10.3102/0013189x013006004
published in Educational Researcher 13(6), 4-16 (SAGE Publishing)
openalex publication_date 1984/06/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
Abstract
T w o University of Chicago doctoral students in education, Anania (1982, 1983) and Burke (1984), completed dissertations in which they compared student learning under the following three conditions of instruction: 1. Conventional. Students learn the subject matter in a class with about 30 students per teacher. Tests are given periodically for marking the students. 2. Mastery Learning. Students learn the subject matter in a class with about 30 students per teacher. The instruction is the same as in the conventional class (usually with the same teacher). Formative tests (the same tests used with the conventional group) are given for feedback followed by corrective procedures and parallel formative tests to determine the extent to which the students have mastered the subject matter. 3. Tutoring. Students learn the subject matter with a good tutor for each student (or for two or three students simultaneously). This tutoring instruction is followed periodically by formative tests, feedback-corrective procedures, and parallel formative tests as in the mastery learning classes. It should be pointed out that the need for corrective work under tutoring is very small.
Cited by
- Interpreting Effect Sizes of Education Interventions
- Using design thinking to improve psychological interventions: The case of the growth mindset during the transition to high school.
- Effectiveness of Intelligent Tutoring Systems
- Effects of Feedback in a Computer-Based Learning Environment on Students’ Learning Outcomes
- The Relative Effectiveness of Human Tutoring, Intelligent Tutoring Systems, and Other Tutoring Systems
- A Randomized Trial of Individual Tutoring for Elementary School Children with Reading and Behavior Difficulties
- What Does the Credential Still Certify? Cognitive Stewardship for AI-Mediated Education
- EduGuard: A Safe RAG-Based LLM Tutor for Programming Education
- The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance.
- AI tutoring can safely and effectively support students: An exploratory RCT in UK classrooms
- The Effect of High-Frequency, Automatically-marked Formative Assessments on Student Outcomes in A-Level Sciences
- AITutor-EvalKit: Exploring the Capabilities of AI Tutors
- CleverBirds: A Multiple-Choice Benchmark for Fine-grained Human Knowledge Tracing
- Effectiveness of PBL curricula
- Cognitive Tutors: Lessons Learned
- Integrating generative AI and load reduction instruction to individualize and optimize students' learning
- A Social-Cognitive Framework for Pedagogical Agents as Learning Companions
- A review of automated feedback systems for learners: Classification framework, challenges and opportunities
- Marked Pedagogies: Examining Linguistic Biases in Personalized Automated Writing Feedback
- From Frustration to Fun: An Adaptive Problem-Solving Puzzle Game Powered by Genetic Algorithm
- Artificial Intelligence and Education: End the Grammar of Schooling
- Chrysalis: A Unified System for Comparing Active Teaching and Passive Learning with AI Agents in Education
- TeachLM: Post-Training LLMs for Education Using Authentic Learning Data
- AI tutoring outperforms in-class active learning: an RCT introducing a novel research-based design in an authentic educational setting
- Future-Proofing Programmers: Optimal Knowledge Tracing for AI-Assisted Personalized Education
- Reinventing Systems for Equity
- The Effortless Trap: Productive Struggle, AI, and the Illusion of Learning
- From Negative Evidence to Learning Opportunities: Investigating Informal Formative Assessment Practices in an L2 Classroom
- A systems approach to AI and education in a post-digital world
- The affordances and constraints of mathematics tutoring in immersive, collaborative, and dynamic virtual reality environments
- State of the art and practice in AI in education
- Aprendizaje personalizado facilitado por tecnologías digitales. Tendencias, retos y perspectivas
- SimCoachCorpus: A naturalistic dataset with language and trajectories for embodied teaching
- Technology functions for personalized learning in learner-centered schools
- Adaptive Task Assignment in Online Learning Environments
- VLEngagement: A Dataset of Scientific Video Lectures for Evaluating Population-based Engagement
- Training for Obsolescence? The AI-Driven Education Trap
- Smart drugs for cognitive enhancement: ethical and pragmatic considerations in the era of cosmetic neurology
- Collaborative dialogue patterns in naturalistic one‐to‐one tutoring
- RPKT: Learning What You Don't -- Know Recursive Prerequisite Knowledge Tracing in Conversational AI Tutors for Personalized Learning
- Lessons From the Physics-Education Reform Effort
- Is it time for a science counterpart of the Benezet-Berman mathematics teaching experiment of the 1930's?
- Opportunities and Challenges of LLMs in Education: An NLP Perspective
- How to Imagine Educational AI : The Filling of a Pail or the Lighting of a Fire?
- ParaStudent: Generating and Evaluating Realistic Student Code by Teaching LLMs to Struggle
- Findings of MEGA: Maths Explanation with LLMs using the Socratic Method for Active Learning
- AI Tutors vs. Tenacious Myths: Evidence from Personalised Dialogue Interventions in Education
- Educators' Perceptions of Large Language Models as Tutors: Comparing Human and AI Tutors in a Blind Text-only Setting
- Design and Evaluation of a Tutor Platform for Personalized Vocabulary Learning
- Student Variability in Learning Advanced Physics
- Pedagogical Relations in the Postdigital Classroom
- AI Tutoring Outperforms Active Learning
- The Revolution Has Arrived: What the Current State of Large Language Models in Education Implies for the Future
- Why AI will not Democratize Education: a Critical Pragmatist Perspective
- Adapting University Policies for Generative AI: Opportunities, Challenges, and Policy Solutions in Higher Education
- Dialogic Pedagogy for Large Language Models: Aligning Conversational AI with Proven Theories of Learning
- Intent Matters: Enhancing AI Tutoring with Fine-Grained Pedagogical Intent Annotation
- An effective metacognitive strategy: learning by doing and explaining with a computer‐based Cognitive Tutor
- pyBKT: An Accessible Python Library of Bayesian Knowledge Tracing Models
- The effectiveness of intelligent tutoring systems on K‐12 students' reading comprehension: A meta‐analysis
- Atelier: Repurposing Expert Crowdsourcing Tasks as Micro-internships
- Team Formation for Scheduling Educational Material in Massive Online Classes
- Mathematics teachers’ use of assessment for learning to promote classroom diversity of learners
- Phonemic Awareness Instruction Helps Children Learn to Read: Evidence From the National Reading Panel's Meta‐Analysis
- Review of intelligent tutoring systems using bayesian approach
- Learning from human tutoring
- Atelier
- Improved Learning in a Large-Enrollment Physics Class
- Особенности микробного пейзажа у пациентов с острыми гнойными парапроктитами
- Cognitive Computer Tutors: Solving the Two-Sigma Problem
- Building a Better World with our Information: The Future of Personal Information Management, Part 3
- Sycophancy is an Educational Safety Risk: Why LLM Tutors Need Sycophancy Benchmarks
- Heterogeneity of variance in experimental studies: A challenge to conventional interpretations.
- Intelligent Tutoring Systems
- Application-Driven Pedagogical Knowledge Optimization of Open-Source LLMs via Reinforcement Learning and Supervised Fine-Tuning
- No knowledge but through information
- Multilingual Performance Biases of Large Language Models in Education
- Education for Incarcerated Juveniles: A Meta-Analysis
- What is assessment for learning?
- Efficacy of a Computer Tutor that Models Expert Human Tutors
- Recommender system for learning SQL using hints
- Stochasticity Is Not the Hard Part: Reduction and Complexity in Instructional Sequencing over Prerequisite DAGs
- Online Pedagogical Tutorial Tactics Optimization Using Genetic-Based Reinforcement Learning. [europepmc]
- Robot education peers in a situated primary school study: Personalisation promotes child learning. [europepmc]
- Effectiveness of Adaptive E-Learning Environments on Knowledge, Competence, and Behavior in Health Professionals and Students: Protocol for a Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. [europepmc]
- Engaging medical students in problem-based search and study of the biomedical literature. [europepmc]
- Biofunctional Understanding and Conceptual Control: Searching for Systematic Consensus in Systemic Cohesion. [europepmc]
- Establishing a computational biology flipped classroom. [europepmc]
- The Importance of Teachers' Need for Cognition in Their Use of Technology in Mathematics Instruction. [europepmc]
- Differences in personalized learning practice and technology use in high- and low-performing learner-centered schools in the United States. [europepmc]
- LEADOR: A Method for End-To-End Participatory Design of Autonomous Social Robots. [europepmc]
- AI-based adaptive personalized content presentation and exercises navigation for an effective and engaging E-learning platform. [europepmc]
- Intelligent tutoring systems for word problem solving in COVID-19 days: could they have been (part of) the solution? [europepmc]
- Enhancing a student productivity model for adaptive problem-solving assistance. [europepmc]
- The Flipped Learning and Blendspace to Improve Pupils' Speaking Skills. [europepmc]
- Children's learning-by-teaching with a social robot versus a younger child: Comparing interactions and tutoring styles. [europepmc]
- Proactive and reactive engagement of artificial intelligence methods for education: a review. [europepmc]
- Australian teachers' views on how primary science education can be improved. [europepmc]
- Implementing adaptive e-learning for newborn care in Tanzania: an observational study of provider engagement and knowledge gains. [europepmc]
- Adapting training in real time: An empirical test of adaptive difficulty schedules. [europepmc]
- A practice-based approach to teaching antimicrobial therapy using artificial intelligence and gamified learning. [europepmc]
- Adaptive training instructional interventions: A meta-analysis. [europepmc]
- Evaluating the implementation of the Pediatric Acute Care Education (PACE) program in northwestern Tanzania: a mixed-methods study guided by normalization process theory. [europepmc]
- A multi-institution longitudinal randomised control trial of speaking up: Implications for theory and practice. [europepmc]
- Generative artificial intelligence in graduate medical education. [europepmc]
- On opportunities and challenges of large multimodal foundation models in education. [europepmc]
- The Double-Edged Sword of Anthropomorphism in LLMs † . [europepmc]
- Transforming education: tackling the two sigma problem with AI in journal clubs - a proof of concept. [europepmc]
- The role of metacognitive experience: Can feedback training affect kindergarteners'monitoring accuracy? [europepmc]
- AI tutoring outperforms in-class active learning: an RCT introducing a novel research-based design in an authentic educational setting. [europepmc]
- Issues of AI and human resource development: applications in education and the arts. [europepmc]
- Balancing stability and flexibility: investigating a dynamic K value approach for the Elo rating system in adaptive learning environments. [europepmc]
- Research on the current status and influencing factors of knowledge, attitude and practice of occupational therapy among ICU healthcare professionals in Jiangsu Province: a cross-sectional study. [europepmc]
- The cognitive and ethical crossroads: a qualitative study of academic integrity, emotional landscapes, and generative AI integration in nursing education. [europepmc]
Related