HSBC Climate Partnership

HSBC Climate Partnership

A very innovative and admired corporate-NGO partnership

Is making mistakes an essential part of learning

The answer is yes. A study led by Jason Moser at Michigan State University, expands on this essential part of learning “making mistakes” and how it helps one in learning faster. The question at the heart of the paper is simple: Why are some people so much more effective at learning from their mistakes than others? After all everybody screws up. But what follows is important. Do we ignore the mistake, brushing it aside for the sake of our self-confidence? Or do we investigate the error seeking to learn from the snafu?

The Moser experiment is premised on the fact that there are two distinct reactions to mistakes, both of which can be reliably detected using electroencephalography (EEG). The first reaction is known as error related negativity (ERN). It appears about 50 milliseconds after a screw-up and is believed to originate in the anterior cingulate cortex, a chunk of tissue that helps monitor behaviour, anticipate rewards and regulate attention. This neural reaction is mostly involuntary, the inevitable response to any screw-up. The second signal, which is known as error positivity (Pe), arrives anywhere between 100-500 milliseconds after the mistake and is associated with awareness. It occurs when we pay attention to the error, dwelling on the disappointing result. In recent years, numerous studies have shown that subjects learn more effectively when their brains demonstrate two properties: 1) a larger ERN signal, suggesting a bigger initial response to the mistake and 2) a more consistent Pe signal, which means that they are probably paying attention to the error, and thus trying to learn from it.

In this new paper, Moser et al. extends this research by looking at how beliefs about learning shape these mostly involuntary error-related signals in the brain, both of which appear in less than half a second. More specifically, the scientists applied a dichotomy first proposed by Carol Dweck, a psychologist at Stanford. In her influential research, Dweck distinguishes between people with a fixed mind-set — they tend to agree with statements such as “You have a certain amount of intelligence and cannot do much to change it” — and those with a growth mind-set, who believe that we can get better at almost anything, provided we invest the necessary time and energy. While people with a fixed mind-set see mistakes as a dismal failure — a sign that we aren’t talented enough for the task in question — those with a growth mind-set see mistakes as an essential precursor of knowledge, the engine of education.

The experiment began with a flanker task, a tedious assignment in which subjects are supposed to identify the middle letter of a five-letter series, such as “MMMMM” or “NNMNN.” Sometimes the middle letter is the same as the other four, and sometimes it’s different. This simple change induces frequent mistakes, as the boring task encourages people to zone out. Once they make a mistake, of course, they immediately regret it. There is no excuse for misidentifying a letter.

While performing the flanker task, subjects wore an EEG cap, a monitoring device filled with greased electrodes that records electrical activity in the brain. (Unlike fMRI, EEG gives researchers excellent temporal resolution, allowing them to precisely measure a sequence of neural events. Unfortunately, this comes at the expense of spatial resolution, making it difficult to know where in the brain the signals are coming from.)

It turned out that those subjects with a growth mind-set were significantly better at learning from their mistakes. As a result, they showed a spike in accuracy immediately following an error. Most interesting, though, was the EEG data, which demonstrated that those with a growth mind-set generated a much larger Pe signal, indicating increased attention to their mistakes. (While those with an extremely fixed mind-set generated a Pe amplitude around five, those with a growth mind-set were closer to fifteen.) What’s more, this increased Pe signal was nicely correlated with improvement after error, implying that the extra awareness was paying dividends in performance. Because the subjects were thinking about what they got wrong, they learned how to get it right.

How Computers are Transforming Teaching and Learning

Courtesy of: TeacherPortal.com

Back Pain and MRIs

Back pain has reached epidemic proportions. The figures are sobering - there is a 70 percent chance that you will suffer from it at some point in your life and a 30 percent chance that you have had a back pain attack in the last 30 days. At any point of time about 1 percent of working age Americans are incapacitated by their lower lumbar regions and treatment is pretty much expensive accounting for $26 billion per year which is about 3 percent of the total health care spending. 

There has been a marked difference in the way we treat back pain with the discovery of MRI in the 1980s. Previous to that doctors had very little information or idea about the lower back region which is an exquisitely complicated body area full of tiny bones, ligaments, spinal discs and minor muscles. In the absence of information the only recourse that a doctor could take was to advice bed rest and surprisingly this proved to be a very effective remedy in that 90 percent of the patients got better within seven weeks. With the discovery of  MRI in the 1980s doctors have a stunningly accurate image of the lower back region but ironically that has made the problem worse. The machine simply gives too much of information and doctors as a result are unable to distinguish the significant from the irrelevant. The stunningly accurate images of the lower lumbar regions seen through an MRI are often misleading. The disc abnormalities which are apparent are seldom the cause of chronic back pain. In a 1994 an interesting study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, obtained images of the spinal regions of 98 people who had no history of back pain whatsoever. The images were then sent to doctors who didn't know that the patients weren't in pain. The result was shocking. The doctors reported that two-thirds of these normal patients exhibited "serious problems" such as bulging, protruding, or herniated discs. In 38 percent of these patients, the MRI revealed multiple damaged discs and nearly 90 percent of the patients exhibited some form of disc degeneration. These structural abnormalities are often used to justify surgery which sounds quixotic for people who have no history of back pain.

Similarly a large study published in the Journal of American Medical Association (JAMA) randomly assigned 380 patients with back pain to undergo two different types of diagnostic analysis. One group received x rays while the other group got diagnosed using MRIs which provided the doctors with much more detailed information about the underlying anatomy. Which group fared better? There was no difference in patient outcome. The vast majority of people in both groups got better - thus clearly more information didn't lead to less pain. But stark diff fences emerged when studies looked at how different groups were treated. Nearly 50 percent of the MRI patients were diagnosed with severe disc abnormalities requiring intensive medical interventions. These treatments were obviously more expensive and they had no measurable benefit.

Thus there is a danger of too much information and it can seriously interfere with our understanding. When the prefrontal cortex is overwhelmed, a person can no longer make sense of the situation. Correlation is confused with causation and people end up making theories out of coincidences. MRIs make it easier for doctors to see the lower lumbar region in vivid details highlighting all sorts of disc problems and so they reasonably conclude that these structural abnormalities are the cause behind back pain. They are usually wrong. Medical experts are now encouraging doctors not to order MRIs when evaluating back pain. A recent report in the New England Journal of Medicine, that MRIs should be used to image the back only under specific clinical circumstances - such as patients with a strong clinical suggestion of underlying infection, cancer or persistent neurologic deficit. In the latest clinical guidelines issued by the American College of Physicians and the American Pain Society, doctors were strongly recommended ... not to obtain imaging or other diagnostic tests in patients with non-specific low back pain. In too many cases expensive tests proved worse than useless and all the vivid imagery and detailing got in the way of effective diagnosis. Doctors thus performed better with less information.

 This interesting write up with some amount of editing on my part has been taken from the chapter titled "Choking on Thought" from,  How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer, Mariner Books, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Boston, New York, 2010.

Techno Pedagogy

My interest in actually understanding effective integration of techno pedagogy in teaching learning made me design a pre test and a post test on "rotation and revolution" a topic taught in grade 6 and which is much used and abused due to lack of clarity on fundamentals on the part of the teachers leading to extremely confused students. In fact in one of my recent field trips an HM who has been teaching the topic for close to a decade admitted in front of everyone that he cannot answer the questions raised by me and my team members on the topic and thereby clarify the hard spots and requested for help. In fact we explained the students and the teachers present through activities and animations and questioned the students after that to check whether they have understood. The results were encouraging.

 There are a number of hard spots in this topic and the most difficult part is the internalization of rotation, revolution and inclination of earth's axis at one go and it's effects. Tests were conducted for students of grade 7. We did have a control group and an experimental group and compared the scores. 

In one of the schools in Berhampur the tests show a marked difference and students who scored zero in pre test have scored 12 which happens to be the minimum score, in the post test and a number of them have scored very high marks. The reasons for this are mentioned below:

1. We had a resource group meeting for geography teachers the day before, exclusively focused on this topic and I was present in the meeting. The meeting started with a PPT titled insights which mentioned the hard spots in this topic and the reasons for them being so.

2. Some excellent animations were shown and hard spots analysed and explained. The teachers were very interested and said that they had never thought that this topic can be so interestingly dissected to understand each and every hard spot through corresponding animations.

The same test was done in a school in Cuttack and I was again present. The only difference being that although animations were given to the teacher handling the experimental group and she went through the same the marks did not show much of a difference when compared with the control group. The reasons can be stated as follows:

1. The teacher did not get sufficient time to go through the animations and understand the same. She spent about 30-45 minutes in going through the animations before the session.

2. As a consequence there was not proper planning and sequencing of the transaction process.

3. Some of the animations used in the resource group meeting in Berhampur were not shown.

Conclusion:

While it is good to train and provide teachers with all the support the teacher needs to focus on the content and plan out the transaction process. Too much of information unless internalized leads to confusion rather than clarity. It distracts rather than focuses. Our brains are designed to focus on a limited number of things at one time. This proves that technology unless properly handled leads to a situation that is worse off rather than better off. 

In the latter case although the teacher had been teaching the topic for a long time close to 5 years almost, still providing her with information on the hard spots lead to a worse off situation as she was distracted due to the information overload and could not give much time to focus.

Based on our experience this far we are now planning resource group meetings on specific subject areas focused on specific topics with a thorough preparation on the same by the team members

School Visits

I normally visit two districts a month and try to find out what is working and what is not working at the school level - and this is of utmost importance from the programmatic point of view. School visits  almost always provides a fresh perspective and interactions with the teachers and students tests one's assumptions and pre-suppositions thereby preventing the onset of a fossilised thinking process - which is the bane of most of the ICT interventions - a disconnect between plan and reality. Even the best designed ICT interventions have failed because of an absence of reality check followed by mid-point corrections at the policy level. We often start with tall promises as it is the easiest thing to do and break those promises at the earliest opportunity again because it is the easiest thing to do. The need for a shift from a procurement model to an output oriented model is imperative and the success of all ICT interventions is predicated on this somewhat tectonic shift.
My visits to a number of schools spread over the six districts did reveal an interesting mix. My observations are mentioned below:
I seriously feel ownership is the biggest issue at the school level. At a macro level this is a systemic problem and the school only mirrors the larger system. The absence of an ICT4E policy lies at the core.
The direct consequence of the absence of an overarching framework is the absence of a total system planning (factoring in all costs including deployment, training and maintenance etc.) resulting in a "procurement approach" rather than a "output oriented approach." Thus we are involved in a quixotic situation whereby we are "pre-occupied with painting the tower turrets while the castle is crumbling."
The centralised training part is working well but the fine print is missing. To close the gap the trainers need to increase their level of awareness which calls for a wider reading habit. They should be choosing words carefully and ensure that the trainees understand the full implication of the trainer - rather than being under the impression that the trainees have understood the point. In many instances I feel that even the trainer has not understood the point but has gone about the training in a very methodical manner without deep knowledge. For example I have never found a single teacher as of now who has correctly understood my question - as to whether technology integration is a technology or a pedagogic decision. Most of the trainers (might be all of them also - I am not very sure) have missed out on the subliminal part - it is pedagogy which weaves together technology and content knowledge and this requires a very through understanding. People like Dr. puny a Mishra, have been researching for years in this domain space and a number of TPACK based lesson plans are available on the web, like the one which I have forward edge you all. I hope team members read through the mail and try to cultivate a genuine interest in this area as it is pretty complicated and scratching the surface hardly leads to anything.
At the school level infrastructural and other issues like ownership are there but even then I have found glimpses of brilliance in our teachers and students. In a govt. set up we will obviously encounter problems and many of them will be outside our control. But then if each of us feels that we have a responsibility towards the system, towards, the school and most importantly towards the students, than we can start making small inroads, in as far as impacting student learning outcomes in a positive manner is concerned. Well this is an inside out approach and not an outside in approach. We need to internally feel that we are adding value to our lives and doing something purposeful.
A thorough understanding of a teachers portfolio for the ensuing month and a genuine interest in helping them out in delivering their lessons well is the need of the hour. This requires a thorough ground work, meticulous planning and a hunger to excel in our field of endeavour. We are set on the right track and if we have worked this hard so far we can surely make a dent on the system and make the critical stakeholders stop and listen to the serious work that we are doing. If you internally feel confident that you have done a thorough job than it is as good as done.

THE SCIENCE OF SUCCESS: The Surprising Secret to Selling You

THE SCIENCE OF SUCCESS: The Surprising Secret to Selling You: There is no shortage of advice out there on how to make a good impression – an impression good enough to land you a new job...
Heidi Grant Halvorson's latest write up posted on the HBR blog, really makes you think when you hire the next candidate or put yourself up as a candidate, ready for an interview.