1) not sure what "integrate the separate sciences" means in this context. They're separate for a reason. The fact that the different disciplines may have overlap may or may not be of importance at the high school level where the basics are still being learned.
2) Yes. Hands-on is vastly underrated yet almost any science requires skinned knuckles and steady hands. There's just *stuff* you have to fit together and make work and bolt down. A good deal of science is jackleg engineering and you don't learn that stuff by understanding theory. That science fair project is a case in point. Your daughter had to design the experiment, trying to foresee as many confounding factors as possible, construct it and figure out how to solve the inevitable problems that arise when ideas are converted to physical stuff.
3) Yeah, in the sense that the various resources available via computer or the web are cataloged for the student so they don't have to do the legwork to find a tool on the web every time they run into a problem such a tool might help them with. Otherwise, it's still a physical world we all live in and before you dive into simulations you ought to, as nearly as possible, have hands-on experience.
4) If they learn how to build an experiment and why you'd want to, they'll be about as scientifically literate as it's possible to be.
I would stay away from that school. The students will not get foundational knowledge in science. This FOSS thing doesn't even have a textbook. It's the equivalent of fuzzy math. It pretentiously refers to students as "young scientists" before they have a grounding in science, a grounding they won't get. It's all incoherent "inquiry" stuff. The FOSS joke is being pushed around here, too. The FOSS thing I am familiar with only goes to fifth grade. Maybe you are dealing with a different FOSS.
Wow. I would love to teach at this school.
I totally understand and hear your concerns, though. A couple of thoughts.
First of all, many of the things that I remember best from school were taught in a connected, interdisciplinary context. I remember them because they all fit together into a coherent story - if I remembered one piece, much of the rest came along with it. This is MY style of learning, not everyone's (although I think it is shared by many). Think about and talk to your daughter about how she learns and remembers best. Ask her to recall the details of things she learned that were taught in different ways. The promise of a curriculum of this sort is that kids might not "cover" as much material, but might walk away remembering much more, and remembering it for a longer time.
Second, ask to see student work from the various courses (at both schools!). You can get a sense of the rigor from what the students produce. Depending on how much energy you have to put into this project, ask the students themselves to talk to you about the work. See what they know, how confident they are in their knowledge, how they handle unexpected questions.
Third, it seems like those upper-division courses are more traditional and designed for those who don't want to be simply scientifically literate (there's little doubt that the foundation courses will result in kids knowing what they need to know to think through important scientific questions facing our world today), but who are considering careers in science. If that sounds like your daughter, look into the realities of fitting those classes into one's courseload, and your own daughter's motivation (will she take them even if they're not required? what if it forces her to choose between an extra science and some other interesting elective?).
Hope that helps.
Is THAT science program accepted for college admissions at the universities your daughter may apply to? Here in California, they base the h.s. science curriculum on the Univ. of California admissions requirements.....which require a lab component for each course (biology, Chem., physics, and AP Bio.
But, Science is just one component of the school. How else does "SHS" fit in with your daughters (and your) list of requirements?
Oh, you know, you are SO luck to have a CHOICE of schools.
A Different, (home-grown?) FOS
Jenny-
You've got FOS, not FOSS. I'd be concerned about FOSS, as instructivist mentions.
Your concern (with FOS) is different: Can you trust your daughter to an NSF-funded program "developed in conjunction with the College of Computer Engineering and the College of Education at the University of Michigan?"
You might Google: "practices in science education can have a mythical quality"
Perhaps the day will come when parents have data to enable informed consent!
Allen's right; "If they learn how to build an experiment and why you'd want to, they'll be about as scientifically literate as it's possible to be."
And, for what it's worth, project-based science courses have a much better track record of keeping girls interested in careers in science than more traditional programs.
From the descriptions of the courses, it sounds like the SHS is big into discovery learning through lab work as opposed to a more direct instruction type methods. The problem and the reason why you are likely suspect of the offerings is because notwithstanding all the feel-good teacher talk, discovery learning is just not an efficient way to transmit knowledge to students. And, there is now ample evidence that proves it.
take a look at this edweek article:
With those changes coming, new attention is being paid to methods of teaching science, and what works best. The National Research Council is conducting a series of studies aimed at exploring topics such as the role of the laboratory in science classrooms and how states should assess students’ knowledge in the subject.
That renewed interest was also obvious with the release of a widely distributed study conducted by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh, which was detailed at a national science “summit” sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education earlier this year. The study found that students taught through direct instruction were more likely on average to become “experts” in designing scientific experiments—an important step in the development of scientific-reasoning skills—than those taught through what is often called discovery learning.
Moreover, the students who showed expertise in designing those experiments through direct instruction performed just as well as those who developed similar expertise through discovery paths on a separate test of their broader scientific judgment—countering some previous claims that direct instruction produces weaknesses in that area.
...
But Mr. Engelmann, who retired last year as a professor of special education at the University of Oregon, sees a place for direct instruction in the teaching of science, too. Teachers of science subjects would not be asked to abandon classroom experiments, he said, but rather save that work until they were certain students had a mastery of the basic material.
“In the time it takes them to do one experiment or one relationship,” Mr. Engelmann said, “you could probably do 20 relationships.”
...
California state officials have recently debated how best to lead students through those basic scientific concepts. Earlier this year, state officials settled on a guideline for instructional materials that says at least 20 percent to 25 percent of K-8 class time be devoted to hands-on activities, as long as those experiments are connected to state standards.
_________
In his book Academic Child Abuse, Engelmann relates an informal study he performed where a class of special ed students, who were there because they had failed sciencec class, were taught using direct instruction competed against a class of honors students who were taught using lab heavy discovery methods, such as what the SHS offers. At the end of the study, the special ed kids outperformed the honors students on the post test.
Once you know this, you don't have to set up an experiment to figure out why the school doesn't offer academically rigorous AP classes -- you can't transmit enough knowledge with all those labs and still teach all that is required to pass the AP tests. And, having lots of kids fail the AP tests would be, to put it mildly, embarrassing for a school that is not compulsory.
These comments are terrific. I'm wondering about a couple of things though.
None of these courses are required. The state has miserably low grad requirements. And the school districts requres two years of HS science in any courses in order to graduate.
SHS is very flexible, and my daughter could easily take other courses, like AP Physics, at the big high schools. Easily is relative, I guess. She'd have to ride the shuttle bus five minutes to the other HS.
Also, a number of kids take science at the university.
My sense is that this could work, depending on the teacher. It appears to be difficult to teach.
I think my daughter will do this, in part because forbidding her to go here would probably guarantee lousy school learning and achievement. She's 14, and wants to go. I guess my job will be to monitor what happens. I'll certainly post details here.
Stil, it seems somwhat odd to pick a school just so that you hace the pleasure of taking the course you'll need to suceed in college at another, better, school.
Do students actually need AP courses to succeed in college?
Chris, I didn't think the discussion was limited to just AP courses. ("Also, a number of kids take science at the university.")
Jenny's concern was that the regular science courses weren't sufficiently rigorous as college prep courses. At least with AP there's some indicia of a standard being adhered to and a selection of instructional material that is supposed to be covered.
And since we're talking science courses, it's a good bet that college major will be in a hard science or engineering (i.e, the few that are academically rigorous). Graduation from such majors favors the well perpared students who have to struggle with a crushing courseload of new material and don't need to be burdened with trying to learn material they should have mastered in high school. WIth AP courses, science and calculus in particular, you need a pipeline of courses that is perparing the students for the AP course. Successful AP courses have not only good AP courses but good feeder pipelines preparing the students. A broken pipeline is just as bad as a broken terminal course and it sounds like the SHS school's pipeline may be broken. The question parents really want answered is why aren't these courses AP courses?
With regard to KDeRosa's comment, I hope I didn't come across as an advocate of discovery learning.
Education in science requires filling your head with a certain amount of "stuff". Kids have to understand that a mole isn't necessarily a furry critter that eats your tulip bulbs and that Avogadro's number doesn't actually belong to Avogadro. That "stuff" can be taught via experiments but in many cases duplicating some seminal work is either too time-consuming, too dangerous or too complex for a high school student. It would just be an inefficient way to pass on the knowledge.
But, science doesn't occur in theory, it occurs in the real, flesh-and-blood world so some part of an education in science requires experience in the complexity and willfulness of experiments you perform yourself.
To quote from the article KDeRosa linked:
Mr. Klahr emphasized that the type of direct instruction used in his experiment should not be linked to the very highly scripted, “extremely controlling” models he has seen espoused by some advocates. For him, direct instruction necessitates some combination of direct explanation of material and classroom experimentation.
Amen brudda. You have to have at your disposal a certain volume of "mere" facts but you also have to understand those facts in the context of the world which they describe.
You have to have at your disposal a certain volume of "mere" facts but you also have to understand those facts in the context of the world which they describe.
I'd go even further and argue that these science neophytes in high school (and to a lesser extent at the undergrad level) simply do not have enough domain knowledge to get much out the highly scripted ham-fisted science lab experiments (which barely resemble anything approaching real science in any event) that are typical presented at the high school level.
The main value of thewse science experiements at this level is a fun diversion from the typical classroom activities, but lets not pretend much learning is going on in these labs.
Sorry about the (more than usual) typos. To clarify:
I'd go even further and argue that these science neophytes in high school (and to a lesser extent at the undergrad level) simply do not have enough domain knowledge to get much out of the highly scripted ham-fisted science lab experiments (which barely resemble anything approaching real science in any event) that are typically presented at the high school level.
The main value of these science experiments at this level is that they are a fun diversion from the typical classroom activities, but let's not pretend much learning is going on in these labs.
That "stuff" can be taught via experiments but in many cases duplicating some seminal work is either too time-consuming, too dangerous or too complex for a high school student. It would just be an inefficient way to pass on the knowledge.
Thomas Sowell mades one of the best observations regarding the folly of discovery learning
Discovery learning is just one of the many fads in education circles today. Only someone with no real knowledge or understanding of the history of ideas could take such a fad seriously.
It took more than a century of dedicated work by economists of genius to arrive at the analysis of supply and demand that is routinely taught in the first week of Economics 1. How long are novices in economics supposed to flounder around trying to "discover" these same principles?
Nobody believes that the way to train pilots is to let them "discover" the principles of flight that the Wright brothers arrived at -- after years of effort, trial and error. Would anyone even try to teach people how to drive an automobile by taking them out on a highway and letting them "discover" how it is done?
The issue is not what sounds plausible but what actually works. But judging one method of teaching against another by the end results that each produces is the last thing that our fad-ridden educators want. That is at the heart of their objections to having to "teach to the test" instead of engaging in "creative" teaching and "discovery learning" by students -- as they arbitrarily define these terms, and simply assume that these methods work.
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There is almost no existing evidence (even by the loose standards we permit in education research) that discovery learning is in any way effective in teaching novices, such as children. Certainly, almost every time direct instruction has gone up against discovery learning programs -- discovery learning invariably loses. Yet educators, including more than one commenter on this site, continue to cling to it and defend its use.
I'm wondering what the attraction is that make it so alluring in view of all its failures. Could one of the teachers and/or education researchers fill me in?
Have the high schools disclosed where their graduates matriculate, and how well they do in college? How many kids take AP at the big HS, and how well do they do?
American pragmatism (promoted by Dewey) became romantic progressivism under Kilpatrick at Teachers' College. (according to E. D. Hirsch) It's very appealing to future-oriented BoBos (David Brooks' "Bourgeois Bohemians"). A better name for this "philosophy of education" might be "romantic scientism," since their alleged "journals" publish opinion pieces (rather than research).
An alternative to these philosophies is "integral humanism," which is systematically promoted (through the "hidden curriculum") at Chaminade-Julienne HS in Dayton, OH, where Martin Sheen and RFK Center's Emily Goldman were recently impressed by students' commitment to social justice.
Scott Elliot's story is here:
http://www.daytondailynews.com/
b...real_stars.html
(Not all Catholic high schools do as good a job; CJ stands out because the brothers (Marianists) and sisters (SNDdeN) have roots in evading France's Reign of Terror--like the Bishop in Les Miserables)
So, given the choice between "progressive" and "progresive a la Rickover," what if your really want integral humanism?
I envision good science education as a combination of foundational knowledge and demonstrations / experimentation. A lot of science deals with things and demonstrations make matters interesting and memorable. But demonstrations and hands-on activities don't have much meaning without foundational knowledge. The "enquiry" fanatics that dominate science education effectively prevent that foundational knowledge from taking root because of their hostility to textbooks and explicit instruction.
re: do kids needs AP courses to succeed in college?
The issue is more that there are probably actual STANDARDS for what's taught in AP chem, physics, and bio. If you didnt' receive a decent high school chem or physics class, it will be EXTREMELY difficult to do well in science in college--not impossible, of course, but difficult. Most high school science courses are abyssmal, and trying to even determine what they teach is difficult. But AP classes have standard curricula.
Instructivist and KDeRoda are exactly correct: discovery by itself can't work; why in the world would 3 years of discovery science be enough to duplicate archimedes, plato, newton, hooke, boyle, kelvin, cavendish, rutherford, darwin, watson, crick, mcclintock, fermi, schrodinger, feynman, etc. etc. etc.?
The labs won't teach ANYTHING on their own. Usually, without massive domain knowledge and experience, labs dont' even produce good enough data to mimic known results close enough for equivalent results. ( If I have a lab where I measure the charge of an electron and I get 3, + or - 2, instead of 1, what the heck have I learned?)
I think there's a belief that discovery learning is "natural" and natural is better--the same way that the bushmen of the kalahari are better than americans in suburbia (they are more noble and closer to nature) or women having babies in rice patties is better than hospitals. but I'm sure that's just a part of the mentality.
Jenny-- I say let her go. You are absolutely correct about what could (will) happen if you do not let her go.
You will guide you daughter. She will listen to you and I am sure she will do the right thing and get into a wonderful college.
Encourage her to start looking at minimum college entrance requirements at a variety of schools. She will understand what she needs to do and will thrive.
Good luck --
Elizabeth
Jenny,
Let your daughter read this comment thread and have her use her analytic powers to refute the arguments made by Instructivist and KDeRosa as a means of convincing you that she should attend the SHS.
At the very least the arguments presented here will open her eyes and hopefully lead her to question why she finds the small school attractive. Also, such an analytic process will demonstrate to her the process of making decisions via reasoning rather than intuitively or emotionally.
The problem with their arguments is that they are probably irrelevant to this decision.
Just because a curriculum is designed around problems doesn't mean students don't get "foundational knowledge" or have to reinvent the wheel via extreme discovery learning. These course descriptions all mention that students "study" and "research" important ideas before trying to solve problems. They are not necessarily floundering around in ignorance all year.
I think Jenny's concern about "coverage" is pretty relevant, however. It's a tradeoff. My own feeling is that learning fewer things very well (rather than many things not very well) is a more productive activity for most students.
U.S. curriculum is a mile wide and inch deep as it is. But that's a value judgment in many ways.
The school probably tracks recent graduates. If you are really concerned, Jenny, you should ask for some anecdotes (or numbers, if they have them) about former students who went on to study science in college. How many students left the high school interested in studying science in college? How many were successful? You probably already thought of this, but I thought I would just throw it out there.
Chris, you're showing your educrat blind spot -- an unwavering admiration for all things "discovery" and/or "designed around problem" despite the mounting evidence that these instructional techniques aren't as effective. And, the reason why they are not as effective is firmly rooted in cogntive science -- they do not provide sufficient distributed practice (which leads to automaticity), they lead to students discovering/learning misrules (which have to be unlearned which is far more difficult than learning it right the first time), they do not focus on teaching foundational facts (which are critical pre-skills to critical "higher-order" yhinking skills), and because of their very structure it is much more difficult to conduct the necessary formative assessment of the students to determine what they've failed to learn and to adjust the teaching accordingly.
All the supposed benefits of discovery learning (extreme ot otherwise) still remain illusory at this stage of the game.
I've already cited an exemplary study that shows that students taught via direct instruction "were more likely on average to become 'experts' in designing scientific experiments—an important step in the development of scientific-reasoning skills" and " performed just as well as those who developed similar expertise through discovery paths on a separate test of their broader scientific judgment."
This is, of course, the one area that proponents of discovery learning always tout and now we know it is bunk. And let's not forget the area that direct instruction taught children always excel -- performing the thousands of calcuations they must learn how to solve in their science courses if they expect to continue the study of science at the undergrad level and beyond. This is because the direct instruction studnets have more time practicing solving these calculations since they're not floundering away in the lab performing contrived pseudo-science experiments.
Of course, the ability to evaluate the effectiveness of any instructional program at SHS would be to look at what the students learned after completing the course. So, for example, we could look at the student's AP test scores compared to demographically similar students taught using a direct instruction approach .. oh wait, SHS doesn't offer AP courses effectively preventing any direct comparison -- isn't that convenient.
My own feeling is that learning fewer things very well (rather than many things not very well) is a more productive activity for most students.
As it pertainas to this discussion, this is a false dilemma. My criticism is that in the typical discovery learning course, students are necessarily learning fewer things, but, more importantly, they are also not learning them very well -- which we want. The advantage of direct instruction is that it allows students to learn more things and allows them to learn those things better. Direct instruction is all about "mastery learning" after all, and that is exactly what we want.
KDeRosa,
That evidence you cite probably isn't relevant - that's my point.
If you read the actual Klahr article, you will see that the students in the "discovery learning" condition received *no* evaluations and *no* feedback at all from the experimenters/teachers. Nothing at all. It was completely unstructured; the students in that group were basically unsupervised and let loose to play with stuff. Is this what's going to happen at SHS? I doubt it.
It isn't necessarily direct instruction that worked for the experimental group of students; it could be the fact that students were interacting with the teacher at all for all we know. It's a very weak research design.
My point is designs like that and critiques like Sowell's are a caricatures of classrooms.
I'm not arguing against "direct instruction" or for "dicovery learning" here; I'm just saying the arguments and evidence presented in this thread are probably not relevant to the actual science program at this school.
Chris, I understand your point. But. you make it sound like this was the only study ever conducted that shows direct instruction beating out some version of discovery learning/constructivism.
My point is designs like that and critiques like Sowell's are a caricatures of classrooms.
It wasn't always this way now was it?
The extreme caricature version of constructivism/"discovery learning" was once "the only" version until we found out it didn't work. The version we have today is the fighting retreat version which is still as untested as it ever was and still fails to outperform the more traditional curricula it seeks to supplant.
They'll just keep on adding back all the things I've indicated are in the direct insruction curricula until they get acceptable results.
Yet the fact remains -- there is no evidence to support the premise that discovery learning (unless in very small dosages) is in any way useful or promotes student achievement.
You wouldn't give your child a drug with such a spotty track record, so I'm wondering why you'd want to subject him or her to a similairly untested instructional program.
I'm just saying the arguments and evidence presented in this thread are probably not relevant to the actual science program at this school.
And that's because the science program in this school has no firm research base or field testing behind it and no evidence of a successful implementation in this school specifically. At least if the school offered AP courses we'd have an idea if the program was successful or not.
In short, for a parent/student to select such an instructional program would require something not much short of blind faith which would be quite the cavalier attitude for anyone aspiring to pursue a hard science or engineering degree where upwards of 2/3s of the students usually wash out because they are not adequately prepared to do the work. With tuition at colleges being what it is today, who wants to waste a few years of tuition finding out the hard way they made a bad (uninformed) decision back in high school.
Well, this is a bit tangential because I'm not under the impressions she is choosing between this program and a Direct Instruction program in science. Still, I think it's interesting and thank you for continuing this conversation with me.
I'm not an expert in science education, but I'll say this; I've never seen convincing evidence that extreme direct instruction or extreme discovery learning is the most effective approach in any domain.
I *have* seen evidence that letting students grapple with problems (sort of "discovery") and then experience teacher-guided discussions or explanations (sort of "direct instruction") is more effective than either extreme. This is consistent with much of what we know in cognitive psychology and there's classroom-based evidence to support this.
If you go back to the Klahr (2004) piece that you described as an "exemplary" evidence in favor of DI, this is exactly what happens with the intervention group. The students who did very well experienced both a student-directed component and a teacher-directed component. Here's what happened:
- Students used wooden ramps and balls to design four of their own experiements without any preparation or teacher intervention
- Teacher demonstrates several experiements in whole-class setting
- Students discuss why the experiments are or are not confounded
- Teacher explains why the experiements are or are not confounded
There are pieces of this that resemble discovery learning (the first half of the lesson) and pieces that resemble DI (the conclusion of the lesson), but it's not exactly either. It's just sound instruction.
"The problem with their arguments is that they are probably irrelevant to this decision."
By all appearances, one of the schools is devoted to an "inquiry" approach which in all likelihood means an unsystematic, incoherent approach without a good textbook and a solid foundation. In that sense my comments seem relevant.
I taught science in a large city to disadvantaged children. A so-called inquiry approach without a textbook was mandated from above. I saw with my own eyes that such an approach is delusional and leads to utter failure. These pupils were blank slates and had no study habits. The thought that these misbehaving louts would suddenly embark on a journey of disovery is comical in the extreme.
It's just sound instruction.
And we know this how? What if we used that unproductive time wasted during the discovery phase, doing something more efficient and productive?
The Klahr study didn't show that this mixed class was the best way, just better than pure discovery.
I *have* seen evidence that letting students grapple with problems (sort of "discovery") and then experience teacher-guided discussions or explanations (sort of "direct instruction")
There is lots of different kinds of "direct instruction," much of it poorly done. However, what your sort of "discovery" programs never seem to be able to beat is the Direct Instruction variety of well-researched, field-tested, extreme version (which doesn't necessarily include some minimal inquiry techniques) of direct instruction. Your anecdotal evidence notwithstanding, I know of no commercially available (i.e., replicatable) mixed-mode curriculum that has ever beaten a well implemented DI curriculum.
Do you know of any Chris? Because I'm with you in that I think the mixed-mode classes sound more fun in theory, so I'd like to know of any of these fun curricula that also performs best.
It's like the difference between socialsim and capitalism. I dream of living in those socialist paradises I keep hearing about but never actually see, in the meantime I'm stuck working like a dog in the real world for my capitalist overlords
Well, I was thinking of the kind of thing that Schwarz et al. did several years ago (1999?). They had three groups of college students make predictions about experiments after participating the following conditions:
1.) a "discovery" group spent the whole time working with data from past experiments with very little teacher supervision
2.) an "instruction" group read a chapter on the topic and then listened to a follow-up lecture by the teacher
3.) a "mixed" group mworked with the data group 1 did for half the time and then listened to the same lecture group 2 listened to.
The third group outperformed the other groups by far. It's a straightforward finding that isn't necessarily applicable to all educational contexts, but it's evidence like this (and the Klahr study) that incrementally convinces me there's a lot of value to this approach.
I'm not an expert on curriculum by any means; it's not what I study. So I don't know of any packaged, easy-to-implement programs based on this foundation or how they would compare to DI. There might not be any out there.
My suspicion is that the activity-based introduction is effective because, besides the motivational/fun value, the model activates relevant prior knowledge among students that will help them get more out of follow-up lectures/demonstrations/discussions led by the teacher. My concern, however, is that certain types of students will get more out of this than others (due to varying levels of prior knowledge and interest in the content of the activity). If that's the case, DI may very well outperform this mixed model in some situations. Of course, one could always argue that better implementations of DI or better mixed models would result in different outcomes, so I don't see this issue being resolved any time soon.
Chris, these are the types of studies I was referring to also.
What those studies tell us is that pure discovery learning is not efective (big surprise) and that spending half the class self studying isn't either (also not a big surprise). What we really want to know is whether filling the other half of the "instruction" class with real instruction would produce better results than the mixed class.
One of the problems with these kinds of generic cog sci studies is that there is too much variability in defining what the "instruction" and "discovery" consist of.
Effective instruction is all about keeping the studnets engaged and active during the presentation. This is why Di scripts their lessons because most teachers aren't very good at this and need help.
As to the resolution of the issue, you are correct in that there is not presently enough field testing of most instructional programs for us to draw many conclusions. Teh entire industry of education needs to become more scientific before we can expect better than the random results we've been getting from them.
I strongly agree that a big problem of basic research in this area is that many are careless when using labels like "discovery", "constructivist-based", "instruction" or even (lowercased) "direct instruction". It's often the case that published reports use these vague labels and don't do a good job of describing what *actually* happens in the classroom. It really limits what we can know about effective ways to teach and learn.
Direct Instruction is at an advantage in this area because lessons are clearly defined and should be easy to replicate. Of course, implementation issues are always going to complicate things, even with DI. If teachers don't know the scripts well, for example, the results can be less than impressive.
Anyway, yes, the entire industry needs to more rigorous and scientific in studying these issues. DI looks good in many ways, but I do regret that other reasonable (ie, not extreme discovery) approaches have not been studied carefully enough so that we can say with more confidence 1.) how well it works and 2.) which situations it works best in relative to other approaches out there.
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