Cognitive Bias - are you aware?

What is cognitive bias?
A cognitive bias is a mistake in reasoning, evaluating, remembering, or other cognitive process, often occurring as a result of holding onto one's preferences and beliefs regardless of contrary information. 

Psychologists study cognitive biases as they relate to memory, reasoning, and decision-making.

What might cognitive bias look like in education?

The Hawthorne effect

This is named after an experiment at the Hawthorne Factory in the US.

Keen to find out how their staff could be more productive, the owners of the factory observed them. Knowing that they were being watched, the employees worked much harder and productivity increased. When they were no longer being observed, productivity returned to normal rates.

This has some interesting implications for teacher observations, as it is difficult to give someone feedback on how they are doing if your mere presence alters how they act. Having regular low-stakes observation that focuses on feedback rather than judgement should go a long way to remedying this.

Likewise, if pupils are undergoing an intervention to improve a particular area and they know they are part of an intervention, it will probably impact their subsequent behaviour. This is why subtle and stealthy interventions are likely to have greater impact.

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How reliable is research?

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When you add the tag 'research states that...' or 'evidence shows that...' it doesn't actually mean that the claims are genuine. Education is now being subjected to a new wave of 'knowledge' that uses 'research kite marks' to authenticate approaches, resources and techniques. But are these claims believable?

As we enter the Easter holidays, it might be a good idea to draw a comparison with the 'research' that has informed the debate about whether chocolate is good for you or not.

Who is funding it?

Chocolate manufacturers have poured huge sums into funding nutrition science that has been carefully framed, interpreted and selectively reported to cast their products in a positive light over the last 20 years.

For example, studies published last year found:

• chocolate consumers to be at reduced risk of heart flutters
• women who eat chocolate are less likely to suffer from strokes
• consuming chemicals, called flavanols, in cocoa was linked to reduced blood pressure. 

In 2016, eating chocolate was linked to reduced risks of cognitive decline among those aged 65 and over, while cocoa flavanol consumption was linked to improved insulin sensitivity and lipid profiles – markers of diabetes and cardiovascular disease risk.

Most studies on chocolate and health get industry funding, but this isn't highlighted.

“Industry-funded research tends to set up questions that will give them desirable results, and tends to be interpreted in ways that are beneficial to their interests,” - M Nestle NYU.

Are meta analyses based on fair reports & research?

The public are also misled into believing chocolate is healthy through what scientists refer to as the “file drawer effect”. Two of the aforementioned studies – those on blood pressure and markers of cardiovascular health – are meta-analyses, meaning they pool the results of previously published research. The problem is that science journals, like the popular media, are more likely to publish findings that suggest chocolate is healthy than those that conclude it has no effect, which skews meta-analyses. 

“It’s really hard to publish something that doesn’t find anything,” says Dr Duane Mellor, a nutritionist at Coventry University who has studied cocoa and health. “There’s a bias in the under-reporting of negative outcomes.”

How are control groups set up?

Unlike in drug trials, those taking part in chocolate studies often know whether they are being given chocolate or a placebo. Most people have positive expectations about chocolate because they like it. They are therefore primed, through the conditioning effect – famously described by the Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov – to respond positively. They may, for example, become more relaxed, boosting levels of endorphins and neurotransmitters, and triggering short-term physiological benefits.

Lessons to learn?

• Be sure you know who funded the research
• Check that meta studies are based on balanced views
• What methodology was used to get the results

Rethinking Giftedness

How are you supporting More Able pupils?

This short clip from Citizen Film was created after hearing from pupils about the labels they had received growing up. Many of the pupils had been labelled as “gifted” or “smart,” when they were in school, and these labels, intended to be positive, had given them learning challenges later in life.

Most people realize that it is harmful to not be labelled as gifted when others are. The labelling of some students sends negative messages about potential. However those labels could be damaging for those who receive them too. 

At Stanford many pupils were labelled as gifted in Kindergarten or 1st grade and received special advantages from that point on, raising many questions about equity in schools. But labels and ideas of smartness and giftedness carry with them fixed ideas about ability, suggesting to pupils that they are born with a gift or a special brain. 

When pupils are led to believe they are gifted, or they have a “math brain” or they are “smart” and later struggle, that struggle is absolutely devastating. Pupils who grow up thinking that they have a special brain often drop out of STEM subjects when they struggle. At that time students start to believe they were not, after all, gifted, or that the gift has “run out” as one of the students in our film reflects.

In the film, which I really recommend that you watch, we also hear from students from a local elementary school who shared their experiences of learning without labels. Their school does not give students the idea that some students are smart or gifted and has instead shared our youcubed messages and videos about the high potential of all students to grow and change their brains. Their math community values all kinds of learners and communicates that all students have interesting and unique ideas to share. The teachers know that careful problem-solving takes time, conversation, and lots of questions from everyone. The fourth graders who are interviewed illustrate the different ideas students can develop when they are given messages of brain growth and high academic potential for everyone, rather than messages of high academic potential for only some students.

Jo Boaler - Youcubed

Click here for the video

Click here for the website

Reading Comprehension

What does comprehension require? Broad vocabulary, obviously. Equally important, but more subtle, is the role played by factual knowledge.

All prose has factual gaps that must be filled by the reader. Consider

“I promised not to play with it, but Mum still wouldn’t let me bring my Rubik’s Cube to the library.” 

The author has omitted three facts vital to comprehension: 

1. you must be quiet in a library; 
2. Rubik’s Cubes make noise; 
3. kids don’t resist tempting toys very well. 

If you don’t know these facts, you might understand the literal meaning of the sentence, but you’ll miss why Mum forbade the toy in the library.

In one experiment, pupils — some identified by a reading test as good readers, some as poor — were asked to read a passage about football. The poor readers who knew a lot about football were three times as likely to make accurate inferences about the passage as the good readers who didn’t know much about the game.

Current education practices show that reading comprehension may be misunderstood. It’s treated like a general skill that can be applied with equal success to all texts. Rather, comprehension is intimately intertwined with knowledge. That suggests three significant changes in schooling.

1. Look at decreasing the time spent on literacy instruction in early years. Early in Primary pupils can spend 56 percent of their time on literacy activities but 6 percent each on science and social studies. This disproportionate emphasis on literacy backfires later  when children’s lack of subject matter knowledge impedes comprehension. Another positive step would be to use high-information texts earlier - historically, they have been light in content.
2. Second, understanding the importance of knowledge to reading ought to make us think differently about year-end standardized tests. If a child has studied New Zealand, she ought to be good at reading and thinking about passages on New Zealand. Why test her reading with a passage about spiders, or the Titanic? If topics are random, the test weights knowledge learned outside the classroom — knowledge that wealthy children have greater opportunity to pick up.
3. Knowledge needs to be deliberately built into the curriculum. What are the key facts and understanding that we want pupils to have acquired and how are we planning to deliberately cover it?

Impact of Neglect

This article gives a clear idea of why some of our most vulnerable pupils struggle to develop the behaviours that we take for granted.

Click here for the full article

Dylan Williams - Growth Mindset

“I have often said, what is interesting is not what works in education, but under what circumstances does it work,” says Dylan Wiliam, emeritus professor of educational assessment at UCL Institute of Education.

This comment came amid a broad-ranging discussion on what impact educational research should have on an individual teacher’s classroom. See the link below to listen to more from the Tes Podagogy podcast series.
Click here to listen to the full podcast

Marginal gains: Small changes that make a big difference to your teaching

Teachers can learn a lot from the world of competitive sports when it comes to making small changes to improve their practice.


Walk into a newsagent, pick up a random running magazine and have a quick flick through it. You will be assailed with advice on improving your speed, going the distance and avoiding injury – all of it based on the latest scientific research. But when you look more closely at the research, you will see that they are talking about shaving a second each mile from your marathon time or exercises that worked with elite athletes under expert supervision. These are marginal gains that make all the difference to the professionals but may do very little for the average weekend warrior.


Read the full article here:

https://www.tes.com/news/school-news/breaking-views/marginal-gains-small-changes-make-a-big-difference-your-teaching

Insights Leadership Survey

Participants in the Equality & Diversity programme - faciliitated by The Best Practice Network & Jill McMillan Consultancy - recieved their Insights Leadership Styles survey results this week.

This initial survey is crafted from Insights Discovery. To begin with the participants took an online evaluation - which lasts approximately 20 minutes. Each individual then received a unique Insights Discovery Personal Profile which highlighted their own strengths and weaknesses, communication styles, approach to problems and value to the team.

The profile also outlined that person's unique "colour mix" - Sunshine Yellow, Cool Blue, Earth Green and Fiery Red.

Everyone has a different combination of these traits or colours, and when an individual understands this combination, and why they think and act in the way they do, they can start to work more harmoniously and effectively with others. 

No one is a single colour - we are all of them

The findings unearthed during the profiling process will then be explored in greater depth as part of a dedicated workshop for you and your colleagues. 

Click here for a link to find out more