Can we model the educational process?

Can we model the educational process?

Operational analysis has not yet made a contribution to the improvement of the educational process. There are several reasons for this. First, relative to the magnitude of the job of teaching our youth, financial support for educational research and analysis has been much smaller than for other problem areas, e.g., health.

The second difficulty is in the relationship between operational analysis and theory. The more complete the theory, the better the system designs resulting from analysis. For education there is no theory. Worse, there are few efforts to develop such theory. It must be recognized, however, that the phenomenon called learning is very complex.

The lack of theory means that the system design proceeds with more uncertainty. Large “safety factors” must be built in. This means that educational systems have to be expensive.

Large, continuing financial support is required; first, to build up present school systems, so that they perform well under existing, changing circumstances; and, second, to support research that will provide theories and models which in turn will lead to more effective learning systems.