Through the early spring of 1968, I wrote my dissertation, titled “An Application of Decision Theory to Education”. Teaching is full of decisions - what to teach, how to teach it, what to test, how to grade, what students to try to encourage and which ones to challenge. Decision theory, as described in “How to Measure Anything” by Douglas Hubbard, is a branch of mathematics, an offshoot of probability and game theory. I guess from Hubbard’s comments, that he and others are making progress in finding ways to apply the concepts to management and investment decisions.
I am interested in educational research and ways to improve schooling and instruction. It seems clear to me that the best teachers are intuitive and personally warm and friendly. I went to graduate school among high school math teachers and behaviorally oriented psych professors. They tended to be warm friendly people but their theories and lectures had no room for such concepts. I thought that decision theory offered a good framework for simulation games of tricky teaching and educational administrative situations and I still do.
Now that several universities have created departments of games and a fuller conception of what a game can be, I imagine that teachers and school administrators will be creating and using more games to sharpen their thinking about handing the many individual, group, social and political difficulties that emerge in teaching and running educational institutions. Over time, it is not to be expected that teachers and administrators will do everything by algorithms and computers but I do imagine that their thinking will be enriched by good support from advanced machines, software and specialists such as educational actuaries and statisticians.
I once floated a few trial balloons at the university where I taught for a new sort of training to educate data analysts who would support principals of schools, especially large high schools, and superintendents of large school districts. My balloons floated off into space but many of the concepts of good data analysis, risk assessment, scenario creation and analysis have the potential to improve school decision making.
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Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
Main web site: Kirbyvariety
