Lone Gunman

Thanks to our illu­sory supe­ri­or­ity we con­sis­tently over­es­ti­mate our per­for­mance on tests, and, with­out qual­ity feed­back, rapidly become obliv­i­ous to the gaps in our knowl­edge. Fur­ther­more, many con­sider test­ing to be an inef­fec­tual tool for assess­ing per­for­mance and errors to be coun­ter­pro­duc­tive to learning.

Chal­leng­ing this pre­con­cep­tion is research sug­gest­ing that mak­ing mis­takes on tests–and being informed of them–is an inte­gral part of the learn­ing process.

We tend to assume that the best way to con­sume and remem­ber infor­ma­tion is through the appli­ca­tion of rig­or­ous, extended study. What we fail to see, however, is that the process of try­ing to work through a prob­lem to which we don’t know the answer focuses our atten­tion on it in a way that sim­ply study­ing it does not. The desire to get the answer right, and the frus­tra­tion of fail­ure, is partly to account.

But there’s another ele­ment as well. When we strug­gle to learn some­thing, and fail, the moment we finally get the answer it imprints itself more deeply on our mind than it would have had strug­gle and fail­ure not pre­ceded it. […]

If I had to iden­tify one over­ar­ch­ing les­son from  our study it would be this: When you make mis­takes, don’t just let them slip by — cor­rect them. Cre­ate chal­leng­ing learn­ing envi­ron­ments, make mis­takes and then learn from them.

There is much in com­mon here with the evidence-based approach to teach­ing.

The non-profit organ­i­sa­tion Teach For Amer­ica has, for two decades, been track­ing huge amounts of data on its thou­sands of teach­ers and the results they get from their stu­dents. By min­ing the data, test­ing hypothe­ses and refin­ing hir­ing and train­ing prac­tises con­stantly, the organ­i­sa­tion says it is now start­ing to cre­ate a reli­able pro­file of a suc­cess­ful teacher.

For years, Teach for Amer­ica selected for some­thing called “con­stant learn­ing.” As [Steven Farr, head of train­ing and support,] and oth­ers had noticed, great teach­ers tended to reflect on their per­for­mance and adapt accord­ingly. So peo­ple who tend to be self-aware might be a good bet. […]

But in 2003, the admis­sions staff looked at the data and dis­cov­ered that reflec­tive­ness did not seem to mat­ter either. Or more accu­rately, try­ing to pre­dict reflec­tive­ness in the hir­ing process did not work. […]

The results are spe­cific and sur­pris­ing. Things that you might think would help a new teacher achieve suc­cess in a poor school—like prior expe­ri­ence work­ing in a low-income neighborhood—don’t seem to mat­ter. Other things that may sound trifling—like a teacher’s extracur­ric­u­lar accom­plish­ments in college—tend to pre­dict greatness.

Other fac­tors that indi­cate whether a prospect would likely become an excel­lent teacher:

• A mod­icum of knowl­edge on a sub­ject (Bachelor’s-level study pre­dicts bet­ter results in the class­room, whereas a Master’s in Edu­ca­tion has no impact).
• Con­stantly re-evaluation.
• Avid recruit­ment of stu­dents and their fam­i­lies into the process.
• Ensur­ing that every­thing con­tributes to stu­dent learn­ing (main­tain­ing focus).
• Exhaus­tive, pur­pose­ful planning—for the next day or the year ahead—by work­ing back­ward from the desired outcome.
• Relent­less work ethic (“refus­ing to sur­ren­der to the com­bined men­aces of poverty, bureau­cracy, and bud­getary shortfalls”).
• A track record, rather than just an atti­tude, of perseverance.
• The best indi­ca­tor: a mea­sur­able past per­for­mance of achieve­ment (GPA and “lead­er­ship achieve­ment” specifically).

Update: Cedar Riener points to a short video (3m 44s) cre­ated by his col­league, Dan Will­ing­ham, on why merit pay based on test scores is a bad idea: “there is not a way to eval­u­ate teach­ers fairly by using test scores”.

I always put up a men­tal bar­rier when read­ing arti­cles such as this as I am of the opin­ion that it is dif­fi­cult to suc­cess­fully pro­duce gen­er­al­i­ties about a sub­set of peo­ple unless you are quite inti­mate with their idiosyncrasies.

Philip Guo over­came this bar­rier in his arti­cle look­ing at the con­ver­sa­tional behav­iours of “geeks, nerds, and other highly-smart tech­ni­cal peo­ple”. These behaviours:

• Strug­gling with turn-taking.
• Obsess­ing over cor­rect­ness and completeness.
• Pre­fer­ring exact numer­i­cal responses.
• Using tech­ni­cal terms with­out check­ing for understanding.
• Focus­ing on the how rather than the what or the why.
• Favor­ing com­plex­ity and detail over sim­plic­ity in descriptions.
• Rapidly enu­mer­at­ing long lists of items.
• Show­ing a lack of inter­est in out­ward appearances.
• Evan­ge­liz­ing their favorite technologies.

The Hacker News thread dis­cussing this arti­cle is also wor­thy of a casual look.

In what is likely the most exten­sive pro­file of author James Pat­ter­son I’ve read, we are bom­barded by a plethora of incred­i­ble sta­tis­tics: Pat­ter­son out­sells John Grisham, Stephen King and Dan Brown com­bined; he authored one in every 17 hard­back nov­els bought in the U.S. since 2006; and he has writ­ten 51 New York Times best­sellers to date (35 of which went to the num­ber one slot).

As the most bor­rowed author in Britain, Pat­ter­son appears to owe his suc­cess to two things: his back­ground as a collaboration-dependant adver­tis­ing exec­u­tive at J. Wal­ter Thomp­son and the increas­ingly risk-averse pub­lish­ing houses. On the former:

Pat­ter­son and his pub­lisher […] have an uncon­ven­tional rela­tion­ship. Despite [his] sup­port staff and his prodi­gious out­put, Pat­ter­son is inti­mately involved in the pub­li­ca­tion of his books. […] He han­dles all of his own adver­tis­ing and closely mon­i­tors just about every other step of the pub­li­ca­tion process, from the design of his jack­ets to the tim­ing of his books’ release to their place­ment in stores. […]

To main­tain his fre­netic pace of pro­duc­tion, Pat­ter­son now uses co-authors for nearly all of his books. He is part exec­u­tive pro­ducer, part head writer, set­ting out the vision for each book or series and then ensur­ing that his writ­ers stay the course. This kind of col­lab­o­ra­tion is sec­ond nature to Pat­ter­son from his adver­tis­ing days, and it’s cer­tainly com­mon in other cre­ative indus­tries, includ­ing tele­vi­sion. But writ­ing a novel is not the same thing. […] Books, at least in their tra­di­tional con­cep­tion, are the prod­uct of one person’s imag­i­na­tion and sen­si­bil­ity, ren­dered in a sin­gu­lar, unre­pro­ducible style and voice.

For the lat­ter, you can see the large para­graphs I would excerpt by search­ing for “The story of the blockbuster’s explo­sion” and “Barnes & Noble was caught in the cross­fire “.

I also enjoyed Patterson’s thoughts on writ­ing for an audience:

If you want to write for your­self, get a diary. If you want to write for a few friends, get a blog. But if you want to write for a lot of peo­ple, think about them a lit­tle bit. What do they like? What are their needs? A lot of peo­ple in this coun­try go through their days numb. They need to be enter­tained. They need to feel something.

Reflect­ing on her career as a sci­ence writer (she started as a tech­ni­cal writer at IBM before grad­u­at­ing into sci­ence jour­nal­ism), Dava Sobel–author of the award-winning book Lon­gi­tude–offers some thoughts on what it means to be a full-time author of pop­u­lar sci­ence books:

Both my par­ents loved to read, con­vinc­ing me by their behav­ior that the best way to hold someone’s atten­tion was with a book.

The pub­li­ca­tion of Lon­gi­tude in 1995 — and its unex­pected suc­cess - trans­formed me into a full-time author of books. I greatly enjoy the more in-depth research required for book-length projects. Some­one once said to me, “I would hate your job. It’s like writ­ing one col­lege term paper after another.” That’s exactly what it’s like, and exactly what I love best about it. Peo­ple may have the impres­sion that book tours and pub­lic appear­ances are the most excit­ing times in an author’s life. […] But writ­ing is really about sit­ting alone in a room, and the high­lights occur in that room, with no one else as wit­ness, in the small moments of the day when the work goes well.

Dava notes that she is cur­rently work­ing on a play about Coper­ni­cus: a piece she describes as “a com­plete depar­ture” from her usual style, albeit with the famil­iar theme of “the great trans­for­ma­tion of humankind’s world­view through science”.

Of course science-book-as-play isn’t new: Tom Stop­pard’s Arca­dia is a play “con­cern­ing the rela­tion­ship between past and present and between order and dis­or­der and the cer­tainty of knowl­edge” that was short­listed by the Royal Insti­tu­tion for the Best Sci­ence Book Ever award.

via @mocost