People who are regularly bombarded with several streams of electronic information do not pay attention, control their memory or switch from one job to another as well as those who prefer to complete one task at a time, a group of Stanford researchers has found.
That’s a good summary, but here’s my favorite quote from the article.
“They’re suckers for irrelevancy,” said communication Professor Clifford Nass, one of the researchers whose findings are published in the Aug. 24 edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “Everything distracts them.”
It’s weird that we spend so much time trying to cram knowledge into students’s heads when—if we show them how to identify reliable research—they can find the answers on their own. Meanwhile, we completely overlook the fact that we’re—I’m talking about teachers as well as students here—are completely unequipped to deal with the fire hose of information coming at us. I’m pretty sure that we’d a much bigger return on our investment if we focused on process skills rather than how well a kid can remember what they could’ve just looked up on their iPhone.
Embeded above is a video from the 2009 TED Global Conference held in Oxford, England. Dan Pink, author of A Whole New Mind and the forth-coming new book, is speaking on the subject of motivation. Pink points out that there is a enormous gulf between what science knows about motivation and what businesses—and I argue, education—practice.
Carrots and sticks work, but only some of the time and only as long as the task is rudimetary or mechanical in nature. If, on the other hand, the task at hand requires the old noodle, the exact opposite is true. Rewards hurt our ability to think outside the box.
Pink argues that, in these situations, intrinsic motivation is exponentially more valuable. He adds that three main factors contribute to our intrinsic motivation: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Pink focuses on business in his talk, but I think that there are a lot of implications for the educator as well.
Pink talks about the fact that active management worked great for industrial businesses where compliance was required for efficiency. Our current model of education is based on the same industrial framework. When we lecture and monitor our student’s note taking, we’re asking them to be compliant—not creative. To make matters worse, we construct high-stakes systems that impair cognitive functioning. It’s one thing for business to ignore science—although it doesn’t seem particularly wise—but it’s exponentially more detrimental to ignore science in our classrooms.
Adam Ostrow of Mashable posted an article “The Algorithm That Predicted Swine Flu” earlier today. The general synopsis is that a company—Replikins, Ltd—predicted the swine flu epidemic a year ago. Many scientists have come out of the woodwork over the last few weeks claiming to have made similar predictions (evoking the hindsight bias), but Replikins [...]
