Educated Learning

Learning How to Learn.

Why the Well Educated Have Trouble Learning

Barriers to Learning

How to overcome the biggest roadblock to learning for highly successful professionals and exceptional students.

We naturally expect top ranked students and successful professionals in the sciences, engineering, medicine and business to be adept learners, so it may come as a surprise to find that these people actually have a high propensity for one of the most difficult problems when it comes to learning.

Don't Get Defensive

The problem I am talking about might be considered a matter of pride, or it may be thought of as a fear issue. The point is, when you are going to learn something, your present knowledge will be challenged. Your world view will be questioned. You will face occasional failure. All of these events will trigger your natural defenses to protect your pride and self image. That "defensiveness" is a major road block to learning.

An article by Chris Argyris suggested that professionals and successful students have not experienced enough failure to have learned proper methods to cope with the feelings of shame, guilt or inadequacy that go with failure. Whether that is the case or not, it is true that all people dislike being challenged about their knowledge or skills and will naturally tend to blame circumstances or other people for their own failures. Although this attitude is natural, it is not conducive to learning. In order to learn, you must be willing to accept that you will make mistakes, you will experience failures and you don't know everything. You don't even know everything you need to know to do what you're doing --nobody ever does.

Recently, an article by Henry L. Roediger and Bridgid Finn in Scientific American Online, talked about the educational conditions that most of us grew up in. The errorless learning model, based on the idea that if students make errors, they will learn the errors and be delayed in learning the correct information, was the rule for most of us in the US today. Teachers would often drill students over and over in close succession to avoid allowing them to forget. But research by Nate Kornell, Matthew Hays and Robert Bjork at U.C.L.A. published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition showed that learning improves if conditions are arranged so that students make errors. Their research showed that people learn better and remember longer if they are subjected to very challenging tests on the material they studied. It seems that you will recall better in the future if you struggle, even unsuccessfully, to recall information and reason about a problem before you recieve an answer. This research and similar efforts have led to some useful tips for learning: Before studying any subject, first come up with questions regarding what you really want to know about the subject. By challenging yourself this way and forcing yourself to recognize, in a concrete manner, what information you lack, you improve your chance of learning it.

Don't feel bad about your lack of knowledge: it is simply a fact of life. We are always doing the best we can with the knowledge we have. One way to deal with this uncertainty, a method common to many in leadership positions, is to believe that you do know all you need to. As a survival method, this works pretty well. You face the world with absolute certainty, feel like you are in control and you can be commanding and inspiring as a leader. The unfortunate side effect is that you close your mind to learning. You can't accept that you may be wrong, you can't accept that you're not fully equipped for the task and you won't tolerate challenges to your ideas, methods or actions. Another way to deal with uncertainty, a way that is more conducive to learning, is to simply become comfortable with being uncertain. You can still be a powerful, decisive leader, you just realize that you don't know everything, but neither does anyone else.

I wish I could help you resolve the discontinuity between the fact that great leaders tend to be absolutely certain of their goals and methods and the fact that such certainty closes the mind to learning, but I can't. The best I can do is suggest that you learn to accept your own fallibility so that you may learn, but also realize that the great leaders you aspire to emulate were just as fallible whether they realized it or not.

When you find yourself becoming defensive, feeling challenged about your knowledge or ability, step back and recognize that your reaction is one of fear. You don't need to be afraid and you don't need to be absolutely right. Allow yourself to question your knowledge and ideas just as you would someone else's. Listen, you may learn something.

T. Troy Stark
troy@starkeffects.com
www.starkeffects.com

The Kids Can't Read - What Science Has to Say

Recently, there has been quite a bit of consternation in California (see California Does Little to Ensure All Kids Read by Third Grade ), over the low percentage of students that read at grade level. In my opinion, a considerable contributor to the problem we've created is a wishful, almost magical, model of how we read and the methods we have used to teach reading based on that model.

The model I'm referring to is the idea that great readers can scan a page of text and turn words, or sentences, or even whole paragraphs directly into meaning without going through the clunky, time consuming, and seemingly unnecessary step of audio/vocal reconstruction. After all, why waste time hearing what you're reading? What could possibly be gained by that. We seem to intuitively believe, or imagine, that the meaning could get into our minds directly from the printed words. This probably has some connection to our experience with computers which can transfer whole books in few seconds - but I don't think any machine to date has accomplished what we would recognize as reconstructing meaning from all that text. The result of this erroneous model in our heads about how we read is that we try to teach reading without some essential first steps.

What does science have to say about our model? Well, it turns out that a researcher named Stanislas DeHaene has written a book “Reading in The Brain” which describes what “we” know about the process of reading. As he describes it, that thing you did way back when you were learning to read, where you created phonemes from letter combinations on the page and then put them together to actually hear the word in your head, that really does take time. When you get good at it, it will take a minimum of 300ms to turn a word into meaning – or a little quicker as you turn whole phrases into meaning while you read. Sorry, but that is just the physics of brain action. Direct translation of printed text into meaning in your mind is a myth. You will always “hear” what you read, or you won’t be reading.

(See this article from SDSU about how the deaf read).

Accepting the myth as reality, without critical questioning, has led to programs for teaching reading which focus on picking up information from the pictures, or the context, or just jumping to conclusions from the first letter for example. Such programs have wasted the best years of too many student’s learning opportunities.

Based on both the science of how reading is done, like Stanislas DeHaene’s book describes, and the data from all the experiments conducted on teaching people how to read, we do have a pretty good idea of the best methods to teach young people this critical skill. Like it or not, and some people really do not – maybe because they see it as boring, the best method is to begin with helping a student recognize the sounds we put together into words (phonemic awareness) and then basic phonics, teaching the sounds represented by letters and letter combinations. It does take some time, but, in the long run, it saves much more time as a student will develop this skill quickly and then be able to start reading real content – a much needed activity to prepare one for higher education and/or a career. See The Knowledge Gap for this argument. Come to think of it, this skill is essential just to participate in the culture of modern civilization. Let’s stop wasting our young student’s time on our magical thinking about reading. Let’s use what we know works!

NICHD: What is the best way to teach children to read?

T. Troy Stark
troy@starkeffects.com
www.starkeffects.com

MOJO in a Wristband

I was walking through a mall this weekend and saw a cute little kiosk with a pretty little sales clerk. Of course, I had to read the sign. I assumed it was a simple jewelry kiosk, some fasion trend I hadn't seen before. But, no. This kiosk claimed the ability to immediately improve my balance, strength and energy just by putting a wristband on my arm. Being "just a little skeptical" I walked up to the kiosk to get the pitch. She explained that the wristbands had a special hologram embedded into them that "worked with my body's natural frequencies" to improve blood flow, my energy, balance and strength. Wow! Who could possibly believe such nonsense. Oh wait, maybe the people that just wouldn't believe in the magical powers of magnets will fall for this instead (more likely the same people would fall for both).

This tendency for people to simply accept that something they don't really understand, like holograms, will have some power that borders on magical is mind boggling to me. I would be better off just accepting that people will believe magical claims to any or all of the "mysteries" I studied in quantum physics classes, electro-optics courses or even just religious history courses and I could make a fortune selling all this magic.... if only I had no conscience.

T. Troy Stark
troy@starkeffects.com
http://www.starkeffects.com

Gaians Vs Medeans

Peter D. Ward has a new book in stores "The Medea Hypothesis: Is Life on Earth Ultimately Self-Destructive?" (Princeton University Press, 2009). Ward is a rare polymath but is usually referred to as a paleontologist. In his new book he presents the Medea hypothesis (named after the murderous mother in greek mythology) which is in direct contrast to the Gaia hypothesis put forth by scientist and futurist James Lovelock, which asserts that life constantly adjusts Earth's control systems to keep the planet in a habitable homeostasis.

Ward claims that most mass extinctions were caused by microorganisms rather than asteroids or comets. According to Ward, when Earth warms up enough that there is a reduced temperature differential between the poles and the tropic, we lose the driver behind ocean mixing. Without mixing, only the uppermost layer of the ocean remains oxygenated, and anaerobic bacteria that producing poisonous hydrogen sulfide gas thrive. The levels of hydrogen sulfide in the atmosphere eventually become lethal poisoning living creatures and shredding the ozone layer. "This is life killing itself off," Ward says.

Carbon dioxide, the cause of this catastrophic warming, has been supplied by volcanic floods that churned out enough CO₂ to shut down ocean mixing. But thanks to the actions of humankind, the delicate balance that keeps Earth habitable is once again in danger. "All you need is enough [warming] to reduce the temperature difference between the poles and the equator, and the whole system goes down," Ward says.

Volcanic floods were better than we are at putting out the carbon dioxide (and they'll likely prove quite proficient at it again sometime in the future). Experts set 350 parts per million as the maximum acceptable level for atmospheric CO2 while we are already at 390ppm. Geologic events that wiped out life in the past raised the levels to 1,000 ppm. Of course, we are slower, but still effective since things are likely to get very ugly for human life along the way even at our slow pace. Most of us are unlikely to see the near complete anihilation of life by the hydrogen sulfide producing micro-organisms. Instead we will see the more near term and obviously anthropomorphic misery such as displacement, war and famine unless we can learn to cooperate on a global scale with common goals. If we do survive our own political self destructive behaviors and attitudes we will still have to deal with the loss of arable land and the rising sea changing the world's maps, but we will probably have air to breathe.

It is fairly clear to me that the earth's feedback systems do self-adjust to some extent, but extreme Gaianism is nonsense. Unless, you consider that the earth's systems are doing just fine even if one of the adjustments was to eliminate us. It is also fairly clear that living systems do tend to cycle with a self destructive phase as part of that cycle. Again, when the cycle starts over something thrives, even if we aren't there to observe.

Are there any real solutions: Probably not, but there are things that will make life better while it lasts. Nuclear energy production (fusion, if possible, but there are difficult waste issues in either type of nuclear power production), efficient solar energy, better use of microbes to produce food and fuel are a few potential improvements. All of these are currently untenable technologies. Hope is the driver that will make these technologies a reality. Sharing scientific know-how and cooperative research just might make them possible.

If we are complete Medeans and we don't have long term hope for improving this world, we won't do anything. If we are complete Gaians and expect the world will just take care of us, we won't do anything. We only remember the people who did something.

Troy Stark
http://www.starkeffects.com/

What Qualifies as Medicine?

Debates about the proposed Health Reform bill usually center on the costs or savings anticipated. sometimes they center on the expected changes in performance of the medical community. But Sen. Tom Harkin (D, Iowa) added a provision to ensure that alternative medicine providers get their share. Why do we even have to consider this? If a medical procedure can be shown to be effective it won't be "alternative" anymore. Sen. Harkin is the guy who forced Harold Varmus to resign as head of NIH by creating the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM). That institution has done at least one thing to aid medicine: They have done a good job of using rigorous placebo-controlled double-blind studies to prove the total lack of efficacy for a long list of herbal "cures". Why don't we just use taxpayer's money to support Kevin Trudeau and his "Cures They Don't Want You to Know About". Oh wait, we did support that millionaire for a while -we gave him room and board and then made sure he couldn't sell actual cures -just the information.



T. Troy Stark
http://www.starkeffects.com

God Believes What You Believe.

The study of psychology can reveal a lot about us. It often gives us a mirror to help us realize what we are doing from the point of view of others. It can also show us the faults in our own thinking, something god is unlikely to do according to this new study.

" News Office Homepage:
Study: Believers’ inferences about God’s beliefs are uniquely egocentricNovember 30, 2009
Religious people tend to use their own beliefs as a guide in thinking about what God believes, but are less constrained when reasoning about other people’s beliefs, according to new study published in the Nov. 30 early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Nicholas Epley, professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, led the research, which included a series of survey and neuroimaging studies to examine the extent to which people’s own beliefs guide their predictions about God’s beliefs. The findings of Epley and his co-authors at Australia’s Monash University and UChicago extend existing work in psychology showing that people are often egocentric when they infer other people’s beliefs.
The PNAS paper reports the results of seven separate studies. The first four include surveys of Boston rail commuters, UChicago undergraduate students and a nationally representative database of online respondents in the United States. In these surveys, participants reported their own belief about an issue and their estimation of God’s belief, along with their assessment of beliefs held by others, including Microsoft founder Bill Gates, Major League Baseball’s Barry Bonds, President George W. Bush, and an average American.
Two other studies directly manipulated people’s own beliefs and found that inferences about God’s beliefs tracked their own beliefs. Study participants were asked, for example, to write and deliver a speech that supported or opposed the death penalty in front of a video camera – an exercise known to affect people’s reported beliefs. Their beliefs were surveyed both before and after the speech.
The final study involved functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure the neural activity of test subjects as they reasoned about their own beliefs versus those of God or another person. The data demonstrated that reasoning about God’s beliefs activated many of the same regions that become active when people reasoned about their own beliefs.
The researchers noted that people often set their moral compasses according to what they presume to be God’s standards. “The central feature of a compass, however, is that it points north no matter what direction a person is facing,” they conclude. “This research suggests that, unlike an actual compass, inferences about God’s beliefs may instead point people further in whatever direction they are already facing.”
But the research in no way denies the possibility that God’s presumed beliefs also may provide guidance in situations where people are uncertain of their own beliefs, the co-authors noted.
Citation: “Believers’ estimates of God’s beliefs are more egocentric than estimates of other people’s beliefs,” Nov. 30, 2009, early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, by Nicholas Epley, Benjamin A. Converse, Alexa Delbosc, George A. Monteleone and John T. Cacioppo.”
Funding: University of Chicago Booth School of Business, the Templeton Foundation, and the National Science Foundation."

Full Potential

I'm absolutely amazed at how many people still argue that intelligence is not a valid description of human behavior. Anyone with more than a dozen acquaintances can tell you which of them are the more intelligent. On first meeting someone, most of us quickly evaluate their intelligence, so I'd be very surprised if intelligence is not something that can be objectively measured, with at least as much accuracy and meaning as how good looking someone is. (OK, I actually think IQ can be evaluated a bit more objectively.)

It has been my experience that neither social background nor education has any real impact on intelligence. One's occupation does not seem to predict their intelligence either, though performance in any occupation does. Of course, how long a particular occupation will retain someone of high IQ definitely depends on how interesting that person finds the work and that is quite unpredictable. And, some occupations will be quite limiting for someone without a high enough IQ to perform. For example, you don't find many theoretical physicists with an IQ below 120 though they do come in a wide range of social skill.

Since education, social class and most other environmental factors seem not to have any real effect on IQ, an assertion based only on personal experience, it seems quite reasonable to look for genetic markers. And, since no race is excluded from producing brilliant people those genetic markers must be more basic to humans than are the markers for race. I think the search for such genes is well worth the effort. Note however, that being born with particular traits cannot be blamed entirely on genes. It seems that a great deal of what we are born with is a matter of chance. I'm not even implying environment during development, but rather just chance. I suspect you are born with a particular IQ or g for the same reasons you are born with particular fingerprints.

If I'm right, then a more important question is how to educate people so that we, and they, get the most from what they are born with. I think "no child left behind" should be replaced with "no child's potential left underdeveloped".

-Troy Stark
troy@starkeffects.com
http://www.starkeffects.com/

Intimidated by Experts!

Activity in some of your more important brain regions such as the anterior cingulate, a part of the prefrontal cortex involved in critical analysis of what you see and hear, is suppressed at exactly the time that it needs to be engaged. Brain imaging research shows that the areas of your brain that you rely on to “watch for mistakes” are calmed down by the voice of authority. When we perceive someone to be an expert or an authority our defenses against nonsense are lowered. We are much less critical of the advice we receive when it comes from someone we classify as an expert.

Such an automatic obedience response may serve a good purpose in situations where the authority has our best interest in mind but, that doesn’t happen often. Many, if not most, of the interactions we engage in involve authority figures experts. These people advise us on financial matters, fashions, relationships, careers and religious views. A great many of these people we see as experts for no other reason than they told us so. Yet, that is enough for us to dispense with the critical analysis of what they tell us and we end up doing silly things like pouring our money into mutual funds controlled by experts, listening to the critics about movies, taking the advice of political experts and even buying that product you saw on late night TV because the “scientific expert” told you all the benefits.
The reality is our society depends on experts. Unfortunately, the light side of that reality is that experts are less reliable than random chance when it comes to decisions we need to make. Just compare several years of any mutual fund to the S&P 500 or any predictions of political experts or futurists and you’ll see that a blind fold and a dart board would have done better. And, of course, there is the dark side where people masquerade as experts simply because we are more likely to buy what they are selling when they do.

Evidence based decision making is the only way around this problem. Scientific methods absolutely depend on real evidence, but you can’t assume the scientist (expert) really looked at the evidence until you analyze it yourself. Take into account what the experts, authorities and “leaders” tell you, but then wake up and put forth the effort critically analyze what you hear. Such reasoning is not easy and the majority of people in any society will never do it, but that doesn’t have to be you. Question authority. Reason about statements you hear and follow them to their logical consequences. Think –it isn’t illegal yet.

Troy Stark troy@starkeffects.com

Positive Thinking and the Self Development Industry

I recently read a short book that laid out a more scientific approach to success than I have seen before. The book was Gladwell's "Outliers: The Story of Success". The thesis of the book is that we have been lied to about what creates success and that there is more chance and timing (timing we simply can't control) than we are ever led to believe. Invariably, the stories we hear about success emphasize the character of the person that achieved that success with a suggestion that we will be that successful too, just as soon as we conquer ourselves, but the truth is that success, and I mean really big success, depends on being the right age to accomplish something when the once in history situation arises. Simply put: you must be in the right place at the right time with the right set of skills and you had no way of knowing how to make that happen in advance.



Books on self development have predominently focused on a positive mental attitude telling you "You can achieve anything you believe strongly enough in." These have lead to some absolute nonsense like "The Secret" and others (I love the ones that claim a basis in Quantum Mechanics) proposing the view that you will recieve back from the infinite universe whatever you send by your thoughts to be amplified by that universe. Of course, if you fail, it is your fault for not having the right attitude -you must have held some doubt all along.

Well, reality is what it is and I'm afraid the PMA nonsense leads to the kind of "irrational exuberance" and "pathological hope" that characterises anyone that believes that reality depends on their thoughts (solopsists) and inconvenient physical truths can be overcome by the right attitude or belief -like those with schizophrenia or religious ferver. This PMA stuff also leads to real depression when you must blame yourself for all the failure that you have experienced and all the failure you will experience.



So, I'm going to give you the truth about success as succinctly as I can: If you are going to try to accomplish anything worth accomplishing you are going to fail. You are going to fail more times than you will succeed. Don't "blame" yourself for this, it is simply the way life is. You must make mistakes to learn and you must expect failures on your path. If you are ever going to succeed, you will simply have to learn to adjust and then keep trying. Perseverence is a necessity here. And there is a good use for PMA when it is done right. Your thoughts don't change the universe until you act on those thoughts -and your attitude is nothing more than how you deal with all the failures and struggles. The proper attitude puts things in proper perspective -you expect failure and you intend to keep adapting and trying until you learn how to accomplish your goal. Persistence will overcome many obstacles. Your attitude is a question of how you decide to feel about the things that happen. Oh, here is another important point. It isn't all about chance and timing either, as even Gladwell's book acknowledges that those who succeed are those that put in the time and effort to be ready when chance drops by. If you are not trying to do anything then no opportunity will ever show up. You must have put in the time and effort to develop your skills before opportunity will come along. Which skills you develop should depend on what you actually enjoy doing since there is no way to know in advance what the opportunity is going to look like and I guarantee that hindsight will show you that you developed the wrong skills for most of the opportunities that happen along, but that isn't the point. The point is that you enjoyed developing yourself.