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TIL: The Two Sigma Problem

I'm reading Co-Intelligence by Ethan Mollick at the moment and the book makes reference to a 1984 paper by Benjamin Bloom called The Two Sigma Problem.

The paper states that students who receive their education through 1:1 tuition perform 2 standard deviations ("2 sigma") higher than students in conventional group-learning classes.

It also talks about things like how your friend group has a large impact on your academic performance, and schools can give kids more agency over their friend group by offering lots of extracurricular activities.

Overall a super interesting paper, and I read it with the assistance of ChatGPT. You can see the conversation I had here.