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Show Notes

Teaching ‘the scientific method'

Superb post from @mfordhamhistory, on how we can teach students the discipline through a curriculum of case studies: https://t.co/Akgpv6D3NT

— Harry Fletcher-Wood (@HFletcherWood) January 10, 2017

Original post by Michael Fordham

‘1. Disciplines are characterised as much by their internal differences as their similarities.

2. There is no Platonic ideal of each discipline

3. Generalised models of disciplines rarely reflect what happens on the ground

All of these points lead me to great scepticism about curriculum theories in history, science or other disciplines that work by distilling the ‘essence’ from those disciplines, and teaching those. I am not all convinced that we can teach children ‘the scientific method’ in a general sense before they have learnt a number of cases of scientific research in practice.

History teachers have produced numerous examples of this over the last few years. Steve Mastin, for example, designed a scheme of work in which he taught his pupils how one historian (Eamon Duffy) had worked with a particular body of source material to answer questions about the impact of the reformation in England. Rachel Foster has a similarly well-cited example where she designed a scheme of work around the way two different historians (Goldhagen and Browning) had interpreted the same source material (a report from a police battalion involved in the Holocaust) in quite different ways. In examples such as these, children are taught about a specific example of where historians have undertaken research. Over time, as pupils learn more and more cases of disciplinary practice, we can then teach them the similarities and differences between different approaches: we thus end with abstract ideas, rather than beginning with them.

This means that I would suggest the following as an alternative way of teaching disciplinary practice to school children. Rather than distil some general, abstract ideas about ‘how the discipline works’, we would be better off specifying a range of specific cases of disciplinary practice for children to learn, from which we can as teachers tease out the similarities and differences in approach that characterise our respective disciplines.'

Is Growth Mindset a Hoax?

Original article by Tom Chivers, about hype of Growth mindset, being able to do everything from help struggling students to bring peace to the middle east.

‘Scott Alexander, the pseudonymous psychiatrist behind the blog Slate Star Codex, described Dweck’s findings as “really weird”, saying “either something is really wrong here, or [the growth mindset intervention] produces the strongest effects in all of psychology”.
He asks: “Is growth mindset the one concept in psychology which throws up gigantic effect sizes … Or did Carol Dweck really, honest-to-goodness, make a pact with the Devil in which she offered her eternal soul in exchange for spectacular study results?”

Strongest evidence from Timothy Bates' research…

‘Bates told BuzzFeed News that he has been trying to replicate Dweck’s findings in that key mindset study for several years. “We’re running a third study in China now,” he said. “With 200 12-year-olds. And the results are just null.

“People with a growth mindset don’t cope any better with failure. If we give them the mindset intervention, it doesn’t make them behave better. Kids with the growth mindset aren’t getting better grades, either before or after our intervention study.”

Dweck told BuzzFeed News that attempts to replicate can fail because the scientists haven’t created the right conditions. “Not anyone can do a replication,” she said. “We put so much thought into creating an environment; we spend hours and days on each question, on creating a context in which the phenomenon could plausibly emerge.'

Reply by Scott Alexander. http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/01/14/should-buzzfeed-publish-information-which-is-explosive-if-true-but-not-completely-verified/

‘it mentions a psychologist Timothy Bates who has tried to replicate Dweck’s experiments (at least) twice, and failed. This is the strongest evidence the article presents. But I don’t think any of Bates’ failed replications have been published – or at least I couldn’t find them. Yet hundreds of studies that successfully demonstrate growth mindset have been published. Just as a million studies of a fake phenomenon will produce a few positive results, so a million replications of a real phenomenon will produce a few negative results. We have to look at the entire field and see the balance of negative and positive results. The last time I tried to do this, the only thing I could find was this meta-analysis of 113 studies which found a positive effect for growth mindset and relatively little publication bias in the field.'

‘I guess my concern is this: the Buzzfeed article sounds really convincing. But I could write an equally convincing article, with exactly the same structure, refuting eg global warming science. I would start by talking about how global warming is really hyped in the media (true!), that people are making various ridiculous claims about it (true!), interview a few scientists who doubt it (98% of climatologists believing it means 2% don’t), and cite two or three studies that fail to find it (98% of studies supporting it means 2% don’t). Then I would point out slight statistical irregularities in some of the key global warming papers, because every paper has slight statistical irregularities. Then I would talk about the replication crisis a lot.'

‘Again, this isn’t to say I believe in growth mindset. I recently talked to a totally different professor who said he’d tried and failed to replicate some of the original growth mindset work (again, not yet published). But we should do this the right way and not let our intuitions leap ahead of the facts.

I worry that one day there’s going to be some weird effect that actually is a bizarre miracle. Studies will confirm it again and again. And if we’re not careful, we’ll just say “Yeah, but replication crisis, also I heard a rumor that somebody failed to confirm it,” and then forget about it. And then we’ll miss our chance to bring peace to the Middle East just by doing a simple experimental manipulation on the Prime Minister of Israel.'

Using private school instructional techniques in a public school

Greg Ashman pointed me to an article by Joe Kirby on how public schools can adopt some of the practices that high achieving private schools implement, without the massive cost barriers.

e.g., ‘Teaching writing is heavily guided, even up to sixth form. In History, for instance, starting point sentences are shared for each paragraph of complex essays on new material. Extensive written guidance is shared with pupils. Sub-questions within each paragraph and numerous facts are also shared.'

Does class size matter?

Original article by Valerie Strauss
(read whole article)

How do visible disadvantage impact student outcomes?

Original post by Megan Smith.

Asking students to raise their hand to signal their achievement (when they knew an answer) highlights differences in performance between students, making it more visible. This can lead to students in lower social classes, or with lower familiarity with a task, to perform even worse than they would have. In other words, highlighting performance gaps with no explanation for the gap can make the gap even wider! However, making students aware of the fact that some are more familiar with the tasks, due to extra training, can mitigate these issues.

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