If you listen to podcasts at all, I highly recommend subscribing to Freakonomics by Stephen J Dubner. I learn something new about the world or myself from each episode. For example, even though “Bad Medicine, Part 1: The story of 98.6” is about the medical field in general and poor diagnostics in particular, I think it’s an allegory for Education.
For example, Dubner asks Anupam Jena, a healthcare economist and physician at Harvard Medical School, about discredited medical interventions, such as blood-letting, lobotomies, and trepanning.
DUBNER: So when you look back at the history of medicine, do those interventions strike you as kind of shameful — you can’t believe you’re in the profession that tried things like that — or is that just part of the trial-and-error process that you accept?
JENA: I certainly wouldn’t call it shameful. The only thing that’s shameful is when someone doesn’t believe that they have the potential for being wrong and they don’t have that desire to inquire further about whether something actually works or doesn’t work. But the idea of trying things, particularly trying things that have a really strong plausible pathophysiologic basis, I think that there is nothing wrong with that. In fact, that’s what spurred scientific discovery and many of the treatments that we have now.
I think many of the educational practices we have inherited began in much the same way. The causal link between teaching method and learning seemed plausible, and so the teaching method became standard practice. Vinay Prasad, an assistant professor of medicine at Oregon Health & Science University, talks about how these traditional methods resist correction.
PRASAD: You know, if you think about medical science, for thousands of years what was medicine but something that somebody of esteemed authority had done for many years, and told others that it worked for me, so you better do it… The reality was that what we were practicing was something called eminence-based medicine. It was where the preponderance of medical practice was driven by really charismatic and thoughtful, probably, to some degree, leaders in medicine. And you know, medical practice was based on bits and scraps of evidence, anecdotes, bias, preconceived notions, and probably a lot psychological traps that we fall into. And largely from the time of Hippocrates and the Romans until maybe even the late Renaissance, medicine was unchanged. It was the same for 1,000 years. Then something remarkable happened which was the first use of controlled clinical trials in medicine.
Again, I’d argue that many of the theories of teaching and learning are eminence-based. There is quite a bit of scholarship into the science of teaching and learning, however[1]. Few educators choose to read the literature[2], and few schools make it a regular practice to distill and disseminate the ongoing research for and to their teachers — and Education is the worse for it.
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Two resources come to mind: the Learning Scientists’ blog and Learning and the Brain blog and annual conference. ↩
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For example, if you were to make a multiple-choice question, how many options would you provide students? Three, four, or five? The ten-year-old research surprised me until I saw it confirmed by experiment in 2014. ↩