2013 · Study · 2010–2013
Which teaching approaches closed the gap fastest
By 2013 we had enough cohorts to compare methods. The fastest gains were not in the rooms with the newest software.
We tested short, repeated practice against longer demonstration classes, and we tested a tutor at the shoulder against a workbook used alone. The learners who moved furthest were not the ones who had been shown the most features. They were the ones who had finished a real task, badly, and then finished it again.
Digital safety and responsible online behaviour belonged in the same modules as file systems and productivity tools. A candidate who can attach a document and cannot recognise a page that is pretending to be their bank has not been made safer by the certificate. We refused to split “skills” from “conduct”.
The charity rooms taught us something the early syllabuses had underweighted: the machine in the exercise has to resemble the machine at home. A perfect lab image, reset every hour, hides the clutter, the forgotten password, and the relative’s account that real life actually contains.
We published the comparison for the providers we worked with. The useful sentence was this: instruction closes the gap when the learner leaves with a finished artefact and a reason to trust it.