!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
Streamline Training & Documentation
Streamline Training & Documentation
Thursday, April 08, 2010
A Critical Thinking/Problem Solving Rubric
As part of a volunteer project I do every year, I have contact with a number of local high schools. This year's project began last week, and, in checking online to see whether there had been any changes in the administration at Springfield High School of Science & Technology, I came upon a rubric (pdf) for critical thinking and problem solving that seems worth sharing.1
The rubric evaluates five dimensions of critical thinking and problem solving:
Concepts
Procedures
Analysis
Solutions
Conclusions
For each dimension, the rubric specifies distinguishing characteristics of mastery at the Exemplary, Accomplished, Developing, and Beginning levels. These characteristics are reproduced below (with some editing).
Concepts
Exemplary — Creatively and thoroughly demonstrates complete understanding and the relationship of complex concepts, hierarchical thinking, and multi-faceted problems, employing evaluative synthesis.
Accomplished — Completely demonstrates understanding and the relationship of complex concepts, hierarchical thinking, and multi-faceted problems.
Developing — Demonstrates understanding and the relationship of complex concepts, hierarchical thinking, and multi-faceted problems.
Beginning — Does not demonstrate understanding and the relationship of complex concepts, hierarchical thinking, and/or multi-faceted problems.
Procedures
Exemplary — Clearly identifies specific problem(s) and integrates complex ideas. Employs formulas, procedures, principles, or themes accurately and/or creatively. Selects sufficient relevant data/information.
Accomplished — Identifies specific problem(s) and integrates complex ideas. Employs formulas, procedures, principles, or themes accurately. Selects sufficient relevant data/information.
Developing — Does not necessarily identify specific problem(s) or integrate complex ideas. Employs some formulas, procedures, principles, or themes. May have some inaccuracies and/or insufficient or irrelevant data/information.
Beginning — Does not identify specific problem(s) or integrate complex ideas. Inaccurately employs formulas, procedures, principles, or themes. Has insufficient or irrelevant data/information.
Analysis
Exemplary — Insightfully and accurately interprets and comprehensively evaluates information, positions, or perspectives that balance opposing points of view.
Accomplished — Accurately interprets and comprehensively evaluates information, positions, or perspectives that balance opposing points of view.
Developing — Provides weak or incomplete evaluation of information, positions, or perspectives.
Beginning — Misinterprets or incorrectly evaluates of information, positions, or perspectives.
Solutions
Exemplary — Gives exceptionally clear, coherent, and cohesive solutions, incorporating the most effective method to solve the problem. Explains multiple solutions, anticipating questions.
Accomplished — Gives coherent and cohesive solutions, incorporating effective methods to solve the problem. Explains solutions clearly.
Developing — Gives simple or abbreviated solutions with some minor inconsistencies or omissions. Explains solutions with only partial clarity.
Beginning — Gives simple or abbreviated solutions with significant inconsistencies or omissions. Presents ideas in a fragmented manner with no clear or coherent order.
Conclusions
Exemplary — Conclusions are accurate, detailed, complete, well-supported, logical, consistent with the available evidence, and often unique.
Accomplished — Conclusions are generally accurate, complete, logical, and consistent with the available evidence.
Developing — Conclusions are imperfectly accurate, complete, logical, and consistent with the available evidence; there may be minor inconsistencies or omissions.
Beginning — Conclusions are inaccurate, incomplete, illogical, and inconsistent with the available evidence.
__________ 1 Previous posts dealing with critical thinking rubrics are here, here, and here.
You will probably recognize line 625 in the excerpt below from Alexander Pope's "Essay on Criticism." The excerpt comprises lines 610 to 642. Such shameless bards we have, and yet, 'tis true, There are as mad abandoned critics, too. The bookful blockhead ignorantly read, With loads of learned lumber in his head, With his own tongue still edifies his ears, And always listening to himself appears. All books he reads and all he reads assails From Dryden's Fables down to Durfey's Tales. With him most authors steal their works or buy; Garth did not write his own Dispensary. Name a new play, and he's the poets friend Nay, showed his faults — but when would poets mend? No place so sacred from such fops is barred, Nor is Paul's Church more safe than Paul's Churchyard: Nay, fly to altars; there they'll talk you dead, For fools rush in where angels fear to tread. Distrustful sense with modest caution speaks, It still looks home, and short excursions makes; But rattling nonsense in full volleys breaks, And, never shocked, and never turned aside, Bursts out, resistless, with a thundering tide.
But where's the man who counsel can bestow, Still pleased to teach, and yet not proud to know? Unbiased, or by favor, or in spite, Not dully prepossessed, nor blindly right; Though learned, well-bred, and though well-bred, sincere, Modestly bold, and humanly severe, Who to a friend his faults can freely show, And gladly praise the merit of a foe? Blessed with a taste exact, yet unconfined; A knowledge both of books and human kind; Generous converse, a soul exempt from pride; And love to praise, with reason on his side?
Note: The Wikipedia entry for John Dryden's Fables, Ancient and Modern is here. You can read about Thomas Durfey here. The Wikipedia entry for Sir Samuel Garth is here.
Working People of Holyoke I: Commitment to Learning
In 1990 William F. Hartford, an independent scholar, published Working People of Holyoke: Class and Ethnicity in a Massachusetts Mill Town, 1850-1960. His book is a detailed study that helps one understand how workers in Holyoke's factories — principally paper and textile mills — gradually, and with plenty of setbacks, arrived at somewhat improved wages and working conditions, only to see the mills close as owners shifted production south, where wages were lower.
The passage below, from Chapter 6, touches on learning activities — one dimension of the workers' efforts to improve their lives in the years after 1905. As they struggled to preserve some semblance of independence [i.e., having an independent voice in community affairs], trade-union respectables [as opposed to "saloonists," who tended to have a relatively casual connection to the industrial workforce] displayed an intense commitment to learning, not only for themselves but for all working people. The Dynamiters [a group of Holyoke trade unionists who met every Saturday evening] regularly badgered the state legislature to appropriate funds for university extension classes, and individual members ... periodically organized adult-education programs for local wage earners. Even more important than these efforts was the meaning that trade-union respectables attached to education. In their quest for knowledge they were not seeking to emulate or impress the local bourgeoisie. Rather, they saw learning as a valuable resource that could be used to engage life's problems. The Dynamiters thus maintained a file of the Congressional Record and other reference sources that members consulted to frame legislative petitions, contest the actions of local authorities, and challenge the assertions of visiting academics who, as the Springfield Republican's Sunday correspondent observed, "came [to Dynamiters Hall] hotfoot for argument and got it good and plenty." [p. 127]
In Chapter 7, Hartford offers an example from the mid-1920s of one of the more formal programs sponsored by the Dynamiters Club: A course on "Labor Problems in Modern Society" conducted by Paul Douglas, then a professor at Amherst College, covered such topics as wealth and income distribution, recent wage movements, family-allowance systems, unemployment insurance, and the history of organized labor. During discussion periods, particpants debated whether centralized labor markets reduced unemployment, why welfare capitalists [owners who adopted a paternalistic approach to labor relations] so often opposed worker organization, and what impact technological innovation had on trade unionism, among other questions. [p. 169]
At one point, Barry notes: Not all scientific investigators can deal comfortably with uncertainty and those who can may not be creative enough to understand and design the experiments that will illuminate a subject — to know both where and how to look. Others may lack the confidence to persist. Experiments do not simply work Regardless of design and preparation, experiments — especially at the beginning, when one proceeds by intelligent guesswork — rarely yield the results desired. An investigator must make them work. The less known, the more one has to manipulate and even force experiments to yield and answer.
Which raises another question: How does one know when one knows? In turn this leads to more practical questions: How does one know when to continue to push an experiment? And how does one know when to abandon a clue as a false trail?
No one interested in any truth will torture the data itself, ever. But a scientist can — and should — torture an experiment to get data, to get a result, especially when investigating a new area. A scientist can — and should — seek any way to answer a question: if using mice and guinea pigs and rabbits does not provide a satisfactory answer, then trying dogs, pigs, cats, monkeys. And if one experiment shows a hint of a result, the slightest bump on a flat line of information, then a scientist designs the next experiment to focus on that bump, to create conditions more likely to get more bumps until they become either consistent and meaningful or demonstrate that the initial bump was mere random variation without meaning. [pp. 263-264]
From Part III, Chapter III, of Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments. . . The animosity of hostile factions, whether civil or ecclesiastical, is often still more furious than that of hostile nations; and their conduct towards one another is often still more atrocious. What may be called the laws of faction have often been laid down by grave authors with still less regard to the rules of justice than what are called the laws of nations. The most ferocious patriot never stated it as a serious question, Whether faith ought to be kept with public enemies? — Whether faith ought to be kept with rebels? Whether faith ought to be kept with heretics? are questions which have been often furiously agitated by celebrated doctors both civil and ecclesiastical. It is needless to observe, I presume, that both rebels and heretics are those unlucky persons, who, when things have come to a certain degree of violence, have the misfortune to be of the weaker party. In a nation distracted by faction, there are, no doubt, always a few, though commonly but a very few, who preserve their judgment untainted by the general contagion. They seldom amount to more than, here and there, a solitary individual, without any influence, excluded, by his own candour, from the confidence of either party, and who, though he may be one of the wisest, is necessarily, upon that very account, one of the most insignificant men in the society. All such people are held in contempt and derision, frequently in detestation, by the furious zealots of both parties. A true party-man hates and despises candour; and, in reality, there is no vice which could so effectually disqualify him for the trade of a party-man as that single virtue. The real, revered, and impartial spectator, therefore, is, upon no occasion, at a greater distance than amidst the violence and rage of contending parties. To them, it may be said, that such a spectator scarce exists any where in the universe. Even to the great Judge of the universe, they impute all their own prejudices, and often view that Divine Being as animated by all their own vindictive and implacable passions. Of all the corrupters of moral sentiments, therefore, faction and fanaticism have always been by far the greatest.
The Tendency to Stereotype Can Strengthen as One Ages
Another reason to give emphasis to developing critical thinking habits has emerged in recent research. It seems that as one ages there is a tendency to give greater rein to stereotypes in one's thinking. More precisely, as reported at Miller-McCune.com, researchers have found that "older people have difficulty suppressing stereotypes, which means many may become prejudiced against their will."
One study was conducted by William von Hippel and Gabriel Radvansky, psychology professors at the University of Queensland and Notre Dame, respectively. They found that older adults are "relatively more likely to draw and remember stereotypic inferences." Specifically, when reading stories involving characters, such as African Americans and Jews, who are susceptible to stereotyping, the older experimental subjects were more likely than the younger subjects to embed in their memories versions of the stories that included stereotyped views of the characters.
A second study, by Radvansky, von Hippel, and Nicholas Lynchard, a graduate student in psychology at Notre Dame, offers a method for deterring this tendency to stereotype more firmly as one ages. Providing counter-stereotypic information in a narrative makes a big difference. The researchers explain:
... when counter-stereotypic information is explicitly provided at encoding [i.e., when a narrative is first read], older adults are no more likely than younger adults to rely on stereotypes, and are similarly capable of altering their interpretation of a situation when information suggests that interpretation is incorrect.
This result indicates that people can help each other steer clear of stereotyping by speaking up when stereotypes are brought into a conversation. Employees' calmly rejecting stereotypes that stray into discussions with colleagues is certainly something organizations should support.
The fabled course on "Justice" (aka Moral Reasoning 22) that Michael Sandel has been teaching at Harvard since 1980 is now available in a video version that you can access online or on PBS. Harvard and WBGH Boston co-produced the series of twelve hour-long episodes.1
Each episode is divided into two half-hour segments, as summarized in the listing below. Please note that the brief descriptions I give here the barest sketches of the content. Fuller synopses are provided at the "Justice" website. The dates in the listing let you know when a particular episode becomes available online. The first two episodes are already available, and a new episode will be added each Sunday through November 29.
The Twelve Episodes of "Justice"
9/13 The Moral Side of Murder Would you kill one person if you knew doing so would save five other people?
The Case for Cannibalism Is the principle of utilitarianism right? Should we always do what ever will produce "the greatest good for the greatest number"?
9/20 Putting a Price Tag on Life Is it possible to put a price on a person's life? If so, how exactly do you do it? Do you follow the principle of utilitarianism? some other principle?
How to Measure Pleasure Is John Stuart Mill right that utilitarianism is compatible with protection of individual rights?
9/27 Free to Choose What are the arguments for and against libertarianism?
Who Owns Me? Is progressive taxation defensible?
10/4 This Land is My Land How valid is John Locke's view that all people have inalienable rights to life, liberty, and property?
Consenting Adults Is Locke right that tax laws passed by a majority, but not by 100% of the people in a society, are legitimate?
10/11 Hired Guns Should a nation's army be formed via conscription, or on a volunteer basis?
Motherhood for Sale Is surrogate motherhood OK?
10/18 Mind Your Motive Is Kant right that a good act has moral worth only if it is done for the right reason, namely out of a recognition of duty?
The Supreme Principle of Morality Is Kant's concept of the categorical imperative sound? (The categorical imperative directs us to "identify the principle expressed in [an] action, and then ask whether that principle could ever become a universal law that every other human being could act on.")
10/25 A Lesson in Lying When, if ever, is lying OK? When is being misleading equivalent to lying?
A Deal is a Deal Is John Rawls right that we can derive fair principles only if we do so by imagining ourselves behind a "veil of ignorance" that prevents us from knowing our own personal socio-economic position?
11/1 What's a Fair Start? Is Rawls right that the only fair distribution of income, wealth, and opportunities is one that is equal for all members of society?
What Do We Deserve? A recap that compares libertarianism, the meritocratic principle, and John Rawls's views concerning the distribution of income, wealth, and life opportunities.
11/8 Arguing Affirmative Action What are the pros and cons of affirmative action?
What's the Purpose? Is Aristotle right that "justice is a matter of fitting a person's virtues with an appropriate role"?
11/15 The Good Citizen Is Aristotle right that "those citizens who contribute most to the purpose of the community are the ones who should be most rewarded?" What is the purpose of any given community?
Freedom vs. Fit Does Aristotle give too little consideration to individual rights?
11/22The Claims of Community Do people have obligations to their community, above and beyond obligations to humanity in general?
Where Our Loyalty Lies Can obligations of loyalty to a community or country outweigh universal duties?
11/29 Debating Same Sex Marriage How do you decide if same sex marriage is OK?
The Good Life "Is it necessary to reason about the good life in order to decide what rights people have and what is just? If so, how is it possible to argue about the nature of the good life?"
Accompanying Materials
The video for each episode is accompanied by a number of collateral resources:
Synopses of the two segments
A public discussion circle (forum)
A particular justice or fairness issue on which you can vote Yes or No
A quiz to help you review
A short list of related readings
Two discussion guides, one at the beginner level, the other advanced
Teaser questions for the next episode
If you'd like to watch a trailer for the "Justice" course, with beautiful footage shot in Harvard's Sanders Theater, you can go here.
As a final note, if you're interested in knowing more about Sandel's book to accompany the course, Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do?", published this month, you can read about it here.
__________ 1 As explained in an article in the September 26, 2009 edition of the New York Times, the video footage of class sessions comes from 2005 and 2006.
The concept of "mindfulness" has numerous definitions in writings on psychology, business management, and self-help.1 While I'm interested in any useful insights people have to offer on achieving "mindfulness" through meditation techniques, or through following such suggestions as, "When you are stuck in traffic, pay attention to your breathing, or the sky, or the sights around you,"2 etc., what I want to focus on here is the notion of mindfulness developed by Ellen Langer, a professor of psychology at Harvard.
Langer defines mindfulness as "a flexible state of mind in which we are actively engaged in the present, noticing new things and sensitive to context" (The Power of Mindful Learning, 1998). As an example of how this type of mindfulness can be cultivated, you can have a look at the report (pdf) on training of tourism managers that Gianna Moscardo, a professor of business studies at James Cook University in Queensland, Australia, published in the Journal of Tourism Studies in 1997.3
Moscardo investigated whether she could use exercises aimed at increasing mindfulness to produce more flexible thinking and effective problem-solving in students.
Her experiment involved four groups, which ultimately became three when the two experimental groups were combined. The experimental groups were given the following exercise: I would like you to think of yourself as the manager or director of a regional tourist authority whose responsibilities include promotion and development of the tourist products available in your region. You have been asked by your board of directors to consider opportunities in your region for the “seniors” market, that is people over the age of 65. The following questions are about the development of activities for this group of visitors.
1. Make a list of tourist activities or experiences that you believe could be appropriate for “senior” travellers.
2. Can you think of any advantages that “senior” travellers have over other travellers for enjoying their holidays? Please list them below.
3. Can you now list below any restrictions that might exist for “senior” travellers.
4. Finally, I would like you to imagine yourself as a “senior” traveller and I would like you to write a paragraph which describes your ideal holiday. Remember this is your ideal holiday for when you are 65 years or older.
The experimental groups were then asked to:
consider the region that you have been studying in the previous practicals and I would like you to design a two day tour in your region for a small group (8-12 people) of “senior” visitors. Write out the itinerary below and include information on the type of transport you would use, the accommodation, the places to be visited and the activities that would be available.
Three further tasks were similar. One involved identifying problems a group of disabled travelers and their families "might have in enjoying a holiday in your region." The next asked for solutions to these problems. The final task was to mock up a brochure with suggestions for how tourists could spend their time enjoyably if they were caught in a spell of bad weather.
The control group was given the same set of four tasks, but without the preceding exercise.
There was also a comparison group that was asked to "design a two day tour in your region for a small group (8-12 people) of visitors." Their responses were used to garner "baseline data on the range and type of activities on offer in the regions [the students were studying] for tourists in general."
Though the results did not uniformly support the hypothesis that "mindfulness training exercises would encourage more flexible, less stereotyped thinking about a range of tourist situations," the overall pattern was consistent with the hypothesis.
The moral of the story is that you can expect better results in terms of flexible thinking and creativity if you take active steps to get learners to think afresh about what categories are appropriate for sorting information in a particular situation, and to consider the issues in the situation from the perspectives of all relevant parties.
__________ 1 You can get an idea of the range of definitions of "mindfulness" from a 2008 post on Delany Dean's blog.
A few days ago I wrote about Daniel Willingham's views on learning styles (he says research demonstrates that there is no such thing), and now would like to comment on what he has to say about teaching critical thinking.
In the Summer 2007 issue of American Educator, Willingham, a professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Virginia, talks about the difficulty teachers have when they try to help students strengthen their ability to think critically, by which he means "seeing both sides of an issue, being open to new evidence that disconfirms your ideas, reasoning dispassionately, demanding that claims be backed by evidence, deducing and inferring conclusions from available facts, solving problems, and so forth."
Willingham's basic argument is that "[t]he processes of thinking are intertwined with the content of thinking." Therefore, it "makes no sense to try to teach critical thinking devoid of factual content." And, in addition to acquisition of relevant knowledge, development of critical thinking requires considerable practice.
Willingham reports that experience with programs specifically designed to teach critical thinking shows that they are not very effective. Given sufficient practice, students learn how to apply critical thinking strategies to the particular areas of knowledge that the examples in the programs deal with. Outside of these areas, students are likely to know they're supposed to think critically, but not actually be able to do so because of too little specific knowledge and/or practice in different content areas.
Because of people's inability, even after considerable training, to consistently apply critical thinking in all situations where doing so is appropropriate, Willingham says that critical thinking can't really be classified as a skill. He goes on to say,
This understanding that critical thinking is not a skill is vital. It tells us that teaching students to think critically probably lies in small part in showing them new ways of thinking, and in large part in enabling them to deploy the right type of thinking at the right time.1
In Willingham's view, the need to have a knowledge base in order to do a good job of deploying critical thinking in an area like science, makes it essential to combine teaching of content with teaching of strategies for analyzing information and arguments critically. Willingnam cites a meta-analysis of forty experiments investigating methods for teaching scientific problem solving which
showed that effective approaches were those that focused on building complex, integrated knowledge bases as part of problem solving, for example by including exercises like concept mapping. Ineffective approaches focused exclusively on the strategies to be used in problem solving while ignoring the knowledge necessary for the solution.
In a sidebar at the end of the article, Willingham sums up his recommendations for teaching students to think critically:
Special critical thinking programs aren't worth it.
Instead, thinking critically should be taught in the context of subject matter. Also,"students must be given opportunities to practice — preferably in the context of normal classroom activity." This is something I heartily endorse, and I would hope that its successful implementation is picked up in tests such as the College Learning Assessment.
Critical thinking is not just for advanced students. "Virtually everyone is capable of critical thinking and uses it all the time ... The difficulty lies not in thinking critically, but in recognizing when to do so, and in knowing enough to do so successfully."
Student experiences offer entrée to complex concepts. "Although critical thinking needs to be nested in subject matter, when students don't have much subject matter knowledge, introducing a concept by drawing on student experiences can help." One example Willingham cites is illustrating the principle that "correlation does not imply causation" by discussing the high correlation between "consumption of ice cream and the number of crimes committed on a given day. With a little prodding, students soon realize that ice cream consumption doesn't cause crime, but high temperatures might cause increases in both."
To teach critical thinking strategies, make them explicit and practice them. Willingham suggests proceeding in three stages:
"The first time (or several times) the concept is introduced, explain it with at least two different examples ... [L]abel it so as to identify it as a strategy that can be applied in various contexts, and show how it applies to the course content at hand."
"In future instances, try naming the approrpriate critical thinking strategy to see if students remember it and can figure out how it applies to the material under discussion."
"With still more practice, students may see which strategy applies without a cue from you."
Although Willingham is most directly concerned with teaching in schools, his advice is a good guide for business training, as well.
__________ 1 Willingham does observe in a footnote: "... it is important to note that for people with extensive training, such as Ph.D-level scientists, critical thinking does have some skill-like characteristics. In particular, they are better able to deploy critical reasoning with a wide variety of content, even that with which they are not very familiar."
Lucius Annaeus Seneca Marble bust from the 3rd century, after an original bust of the 1st century (Staatliche Museen, Berlin)
Continuing my occasional theme of the value of pursuing the liberal arts, here are some excerpts from Seneca the Younger's essay, "On the Shortness of Life" . . .
It is a general complaint among mankind ... that Nature is niggardly: our allotted span is brief, and the term granted us flies by with such dizzy speed that all but a few exhaust it just when they are beginning to live. And it is not only the unthinking masses who bemoan what they consider the universal evil: the same sentiment has evoked complaints even from men of distinction. Hence the cry of that prince of physicians (Hippocrates), "Life is short, art long." ...
It is not that we have so little time but that we lose so much. Life is long enough and our allotted portion generous enough for our most ambitious projects if we invest it all carefully. But when it is squandered through luxury and indifference, and spent for no good end, we realize it has gone, under the pressure of the ultimate necessity, before we were aware it was going. So it is: the life we receive is not short but we make it so; we are not ill provided but use what we have wastefully. Kingly riches are dissipated in an instant if they fall into the hands of a bad master, but even moderate wealth increases with use in the hands of a careful steward; just so does our life provide ample scope if it is well managed.
Why do we complain of Nature? She has behaved handsomely; life, if you know how to use it, is long. One man is possessed by an insatiable avarice, another by assiduous application to trifling enterprises. One man is sodden with wine, another benumbed by sloth. One man is exhausted by an ambition which always depends on the votes of others, another is driven over every land and sea by the trader's urge to seek profit. Some are plagued by a passion for soldiering, and are incessantly bent upon threatening others or anxious about others' threats. Some are worn out by self-imposed and unrequited attendance upon the great; many busy themselves with the pursuit of other men's estates or in complaints about their own. Some follow no plan consistently but are precipitated into one new scheme after another by a fickleness which is rambling and unstable and dissatisfied with itself; some have no objective at all at which to aim but are overtaken by fate as they gape and yawn. I cannot, therefore, question the truth of the great poet's dictum, uttered with oracular impressiveness: "Slight is the portion of life we live." [The name of this poet is now unknown.] All the residue is not living but passing time.
[. . .]
Many a man will say, "After my fiftieth year I shall retire and relax; my sixtieth year will release me from obligations." And what guarantee have you that your life will be longer? Who will arrange that your program shall proceed according to plan? Are you not ashamed to reserve for yourself only the tail end of life and to allot to serious thought only such time as cannot be applied to business?
[. . .]
The only people really at leisure are those who take time for philosophy. They alone really live. It is not their lifetime alone of which they are careful stewards: they annex every age to their own and exploit all the years that have gone before. Unless we prove ingrate, it was for us that the illustrious founders of divine schools of thought came into being, for us they prepared a way of life. By the exertions of others we are led to the fairest treasures, raised to the light out of the darkness in which they were mined. No age is forbidden us, we have admittance to all, and if we choose to transcend the narrow bounds of human frailty by loftiness of mind, there is a vast stretch of time for us to roam. We may dispute with Socrates, doubt with Carneades, repose with Epicurus, transcend human nature with the Stoics, defy it with the Cynics. Since Nature allows us to participate in any age, why should we not betake ourselves in mind from this petty and ephemeral span to the boundless and timeless region we can share with our betters? ...
Robert Frank, a professor of economics and management at Cornell, has a thought-provoking column in today's New York Times. (An earlier version appeared in The Guardian in May.)
Frank contrasts Adam Smith's views of the dynamics of competition with those of Charles Darwin:
Smith’s basic idea was that business owners seeking to lure customers away from rivals have powerful incentives to introduce improved product designs and cost-saving innovations. These moves bolster innovators’ profits in the short term. But rivals respond by adopting the same innovations, and the resulting competition gradually drives down prices and profits. In the end, Smith argued, consumers reap all the gains.
The central theme of Darwin’s narrative was that competition favors traits and behavior according to how they affect the success of individuals, not species or other groups. As in Smith’s account, traits that enhance individual fitness sometimes promote group interests. ...
In other cases, however, traits that help individuals are harmful to larger groups. For instance, a mutation for larger antlers served the reproductive interests of an individual male elk, because it helped him prevail in battles with other males for access to mates. But as this mutation spread, it started an arms race that made life more hazardous for male elk over all. The antlers of male elk can now span five feet or more. And despite their utility in battle, they often become a fatal handicap when predators pursue males into dense woods.
In Darwin’s framework, then, Adam Smith’s invisible hand survives as an interesting special case. Competition, to be sure, sometimes guides individual behavior in ways that benefit society as a whole. But not always.
Individual and group interests are almost always in conflict when rewards to individuals depend on relative performance, as in the antlers arms race. In the marketplace, such reward structures are the rule, not the exception. The income of investment managers, for example, depends mainly on the amount of money they manage, which in turn depends largely on their funds’ relative performance. ...
In cases like these, relative incentive structures undermine the invisible hand. To make their funds more attractive to investors, money managers create complex securities that impose serious, if often well-camouflaged, risks on society. But when all managers take such steps, they are mutually offsetting. No one benefits, yet the risk of financial crises rises sharply.
The solution, Frank argues, is regulation "to reconcile conflicts between individual and collective interests."
Schurenberg asks Shell to talk about several central points made in the book, which "is directed specifically at how to be effective at persuading people within a complex organization."
First and foremost is the importance of discerning the other person's point of view and then using that knowledge to shape your approach to persuading the individual that something you're proposing is a good idea. (This principle applies to groups of people as well. You need to be able to determine the general perspective of your audience so that you can design what you say in a way that maximizes the audience's receptiveness.)
A related proposition is that you can't force the other person to change his/her mind. What you can do is remove barriers to the other person's actually hearing what you are trying to get across.
Schurenberg proceeds to step into the other person's shoes and asks about how to resist persuasion. Shell argues,
The best antidote to persuasion is a skeptical attitude. People who get persuaded [to do things they regret] tend to get caught up in ideas that appeal to their self-interest or hold out the promise of a simple solution to a big problem. The best antidote to that is critical thinking.
For a more detailed summary of the The Art of Woo, you can read the article Knowledge@Wharton published at the time the book came out. Key points include the four-step process Shell and Moussa recommend for selling an idea internally:
Polish your idea, and survey the social networks that will get you to decision makers.
Address the barriers to having what you say actually heard. Shell and Moussa call out five barriers as the most common:
Contrary beliefs
Conflicting interests
Negative relationships
Lack of credibility
Use of a persuasion channel that is a poor fit to the audience and situation (see below)
"Pitch the idea in a compelling way." I.e., the person doing the persuading needs "to figure out exactly what problem their idea addresses, how their idea will solve it and why their idea is better than both the status quo and available alternatives."
Secure both individual and organizational commitments — a largely political process.
Shell and Moussa provde a pair of tools in appendices to The Art of Woo that can help you with self-assessment of your persuasion style and of the channels you tend to use in your efforts to persuade — either because the channels are organizationally expected or because of personal inclination.
The five persuasion styles Shell and Moussa measure in the Persuasion Styles Assessment are laid out in the graphic below.
Shell emphasizes, "Whatever your style is, it can be effective. It all depends on the fit with the person across the table and the circumstances."
The Six Channels Survey is intended to help Woo readers "understand both how these six channels work and when they should adjust their pitch ... to appeal to different kinds of audiences."2 The six channels are:
Authority — emphasis on using formal position or rules.
Rationality — emphasis on using reasons.
Vision — emphasis on organizational goals, purposes, and aspirations.
Relationship — emphasis on liking, similarity, and reciprocity.
Interests/Incentives — emphasis on using trades and compromises.
Politics — emphasis on managing perceptions and building consensus.
If you have an hour to spare, you can get the basic Shell presentation on influence, persuasion (influence with a goal or point of view), and negotiation (a special case of persuasion in which at least one party believes there is a conflict of interest) by watching a video of the talk Shell gave to Google employees in February of last year. (The talk begins at 3:09.)
__________ 1 Shell published an earlier book on negotiation— Bargaining for Advantage : Negotiation Strategies for Reasonable People (Penguin, 2006) — that has been quite well-received. The book has gone into a second edition; the first edition, published in 1999, has been translated into 14+ languages.
2 Shell and Moussa have adapted their six persuasion channels from schemas defined by previous researchers, notably, David Kipnis and Stuart Schmidt (see, "Profile of Organizational Influence Strategies," University Associates, San Diego, 1985), and Gary Yukl and Cecilia Falbe (see "Influence Tactics and Objectives in Upward, Downward and Lateral Influence Attempts," Journal of Applied Psychology, Vol. 75, 1990, pp. 132-140).
The Shortage of Critical Thinking Skills Among Chinese MBA Students
Back in 2007, when Marc Andreessen was still writing his blog (it seems to have gone on permanent hiatus in August of last year), I mentioned that Andreessen recommends that "high potential people who want to excel throughout their careers and make a significant impact on their fields and the world" bypass the liberal arts in college in favor of a "substantive" concentration in a field such as engineering.
This is not a view I share, so I was naturally interested in a counter-perspective offered by Randy Pollock, a consultant based in China who taught MBA students there for two years. In a newspaper column published earlier this month, Pollock laments the shortage of critical and creative thinking skills he encountered among the students. For instance, the difference between a summary of a fact situation, and an analysis of same, was hard for his students to grasp and had to be repeatedly re-explained.
In his peroration, Pollock argues that
Ultimately for China, becoming a major world innovator — and by extension, a robust economic power — is not just about setting up partnerships with top Western universities or roping off elites and telling them to think creatively. It's about establishing an intellectually rich learning environment for young minds. It's about harnessing the same inventive energy of the street markets and small-time entrepreneurs and putting it in the schools.
The Chinese don't need expensive free-agent scientists. They need a new farm system — and about 10 million liberal arts professors.
For reference, a summary of basic critical thinking skills can be found here.
Xavier de Souza Briggs on "Getting Things Implemented"
If you want a compact, rich introduction to the issues organizations must manage in order to devise and implement strategies that produce valuable outcomes, you will be well-served by working through the materials Xavier de Souza Briggs put together for a week-long course he delivered this January, just before taking a two-year leave from his MIT faculty appointment in urban studies and planning, to become Associate Director for General Government Programs at the US Office of Management and Budget.
Creating public value, and The craft of political management (negotiation and coalition building)
Basic questions that need to be addressed: "What is worth implementing [What produces value?] and why? How does one go from concept to capacity and then 'production'? ... How to get things done responsibly and ethically when decisions cannot simply be imposed, downward and in a straightforward way, in a hierarchy?" Briggs emphasizes, "We want to be able to distinguish strong ideas, weakly implemented from bad ideas. These distinctions are often not easy to make — but are hugely important for the support we can build for good ideas."
Developing and changing organizational strategy
Here Briggs is talking about devising the means for accomplishing the organization's agreed mission. "The overall [strategic] challenge (and opportunity) is a powerful alignment: Lining up the value-creating idea with what the environment will support and what the organization (or team or alliance) is actually capable of producing." A key lesson: "There's no substitute for organized capacity, beyond any charismatic, smart, or otherwise talented individual."
Strategic collaboration (partnerships and alliances), and Performance management
Some key lessons about collaboration: "Effective collaboration often demands that implementers play a wide variety of roles well (strategic, operational, mobilization-focused, etc.)." "Collaboratives evolve through stages, navigated jointly: agreeing on a problem, developing strategy, implementing ('co-producing' change)." "Collaboratives can have wider ripple effects (political participation, policy reform, etc.)."
The key lesson about performance management: "Systems of performance measures and rules and incentives coupled with them ('management') should align with broader strategies."
Core elements of operating capacity: organizational structure (e.g., by function, by customer segment), operational processes (mapped so as to highlight, e.g., bottlenecks), human resources
Key lessons: Organizational restructuring "invites resistance, requires political capital, proof of concept, supportive coalitions, etc." "Strategic human resource management addresses flows ([employee] entry, development, exit) and targets (motivation, reward, performance)."
Thinking like an implementer, and Leadership (especially, leading change)
A key lesson: An effective implementer recognizes implementation issues (e.g., lack of funding, lack of operating capacity, opportunities for delivering more value, etc.) and develops skill in generating strategic options for addressing the issues.
Some core leadership concepts: exercising leadership vs. exercising authority; technical challenges (well-defined problems with known solutions) vs. adaptive challenges (fuzzy problems, unknown solutions); leadership styles; the need for a repertoire of various elements of emotional intelligence. Exercising leadership "is particularly important for motivating adaptation and risk taking, and thus deep change, in how implementation systems work."
Please note that the above outline greatly condenses and simplifies what Briggs teaches. To get a fuller account of the principles he espouses, you can download pdf files of his lecture notes and study questions here. Briggs's materials are a model of accessibility and practical expertise, structured in a way that requires students to think about the assigned readings (including a number of case studies) in critical fashion.
Each section of the course (generally, two sections per session) ends with a summary of take-away lessons. For example the first lesson from the first session is that "having a goal is not the same as having a clear, actionable value proposition." A related lesson is that "Effective implementers must often help to define ends (value propositions), not just political or operational means."
The course concluded with a take-home exam which, in keeping with the rest of Briggs's materials, places the emphasis squarely on critical thinking and intelligent application of the concepts covered in the class ("value creation, political management, organizational strategy, collaboration, performance management, organizational design and process redesign, human resource management"). Briggs emphasizes quality, not quantity, in students' responses to the seven "word problems" he sets, as you can see by reading through his instructions for the exam and the sample solutions he provides (pdf files).
In an earlier post, I discussed the Implicit Association Test (IAT), developed by Mahzarin Banaji, a professor of ethics in the psychology department at Harvard, and Anthony Greenwald, a psychology professor at the University of Washington. The test is used to assess the types and degree of unconscious bias a person may have. The most frequently used version of the test assesses unconscious bias against blacks.
It’s also worth noting that the IAT presents race in an extremely stylized way. The test flashes images of faces deliberately cropped so as to exclude hairlines, chins, and cheekbones. The rules instruct the subject to look at the faces for only an instant before pressing the appropriate key. It’s rare that we encounter actual people in such circumstances: divorced from social context; bereft of the telling nuances of grooming, attire, and demeanor that guide us in social encounters. … Of course, the test’s authors would insist that this is the point: the faces are cropped so as to isolate race as the sole variable. It’s the point, but it’s also the problem. Real people aren’t walking avatars of their racial identity. Real people have a lot of other relevant characteristics as well, so associative bias may often be outweighed by other individual characteristics.
And on a personal level, there’s something invasive and uncharitable about the IAT, which evaluates us based on our most primal and unguarded impulses rather than on those improved and refined by conscious effort. The truest self is not necessarily the unguarded self. Just as an author deserves to be judged on his carefully edited final manuscript and not on a surreptitiously obtained first draft, so too perhaps critics should wait for the finished product — outward behavior — rather than seek access to the unedited, unconscious mind. As Banaji and Greenwald are careful to point out, people can overcome implicit biases through deliberate effort. [The Race Card, pp. 192-193]
You can watch an hourlong video of Prof. Ford talking about his book here.
In its March 26 issue, the New York Review of Books published an article by Amartya Sen, winner of the 1998 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, that presents his view of the current economic crisis and what to do about it, both for short-term recovery and for long-term economic growth and distributional equity.
Sen addresses three issues:
First, do we really need some kind of "new capitalism" rather than an economic system that is not monolithic, draws on a variety of institutions chosen pragmatically, and is based on social values that we can defend ethically? ...
The second question concerns the kind of economics that is needed today, especially in light of the present economic crisis. How do we assess what is taught and championed among academic economists as a guide to economic policy — including the revival of Keynesian thought in recent months as the crisis has grown fierce? More particularly, what does the present economic crisis tell us about the institutions and priorities to look for? Third, in addition to working our way toward a better assessment of what long-term changes are needed, we have to think — and think fast — about how to get out of the present crisis with as little damage as possible. [link added]
In addressing the first question, Sen makes clear that he is opposed to the notion that what we need is a "new capitalism" — some sort of modification of unfettered capitalism that would, supposedly, ensure greater economic stability than the current system exhibits. Rather Sen argues for
a clearheaded perception of how different institutions actually work, and of how a variety of organizations — from the market to the institutions of the state — can go beyond short-term solutions and contribute to producing a more decent economic world.
Sen goes back to the work of Adam Smith, often cited by devotees of laissez-faire economic policies. After reviewing Smith's views concerning what markets are good at, and what they tend to leave undone (e.g., assuring broad availability of education), Sen sums up his own thinking:
If we were to look for a new approach to the organization of economic activity that included a pragmatic choice of a variety of public services and well-considered regulations, we would be following rather than departing from the agenda of reform that Smith outlined as he both defended and criticized capitalism.
Sen goes on to argue that financial markets are currently under-regulated, saying that, in a world of complex financial instruments and transactions, "Accountability has been badly undermined, and the need for supervision and regulation has become much stronger."
Sen also wants policymakers to review the thinking of Arthur Cecil Pigou, who "was much more concerned than Keynes with economic psychology and the ways it could influence business cycles and sharpen and harden an economic recession that could take us toward a depression (as indeed we are seeing now)." Pigou argued that "undue pessimism" plays an important role in perpetuating an economic downturn, a point that Sen considers relevant to our current troubles:
One of the problems that the Obama administration has to deal with is that the real crisis, arising from financial mismanagement and other transgressions, has become many times magnified by a psychological collapse.
Sen also endorses Pigou's concern for designing policies that promote not only general economic growth, but also distributional equity. Sen says:
There is a critical need for paying special attention to the underdogs of society in planning a response to the current crisis, and in going beyond measures to produce general economic expansion. Families threatened with unemployment, with lack of medical care, and with social as well as economic deprivation have been hit particularly hard. The limitations of Keynesian economics to address their problems demand much greater recognition.
Sen is particularly concerned to make the case for establishing universal health care as part of the set of policy changes adopted in response to the current crisis. He also recommends attention to environmental conservation and improvements in public transportation.
Several previouspostshaveoutlined practical steps one can take to counteract any tendency toward bias in decision-making (a tendency that might very well be unconscious).
The most recent useful treatment of this subject that I've come upon is an article in the February 2009 issue of the Harvard Business Review in which Andrew Campbell and Jo Whitehead of Ashridge Strategic Management Centre, and Sydney Finkelstein, a professor of management at Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business, look at sources of bias in business decision-making, how to recognize indicators that bias exists in a particular case, and what to do to counteract the threat of making a biased decision.
The three safeguards Campbell, Whitehead, and Finkelstein recommend, all quite plausible and even predictable, are:
Accumulating further experience and/or doing further analysis.
Introducing further debate of the issue and potential solutions — to ensure "that biases are confronted explicitly."
Imposing stronger governance — i.e., requiring "that a decision be ratified at a higher level... Stronger governance does not eliminate distorted thinking, but it can prevent distortions from leading to a bad outcome."
As a follow-on both to yesterday's post concerning Will Thalheimer's work on use of questions in classroom training, and to an earlier post dealing with Harvard prof Eric Mazur's techniques for helping his students truly learn the physics concepts covered in his classes, I'd like to call attention to "ConcepTests," introduced by Mazur some years ago and now used at a number of institutions, generally in science and math courses.1
... developed a method, Peer Instruction, which involves students in their own learning during lecture and focuses their attention on underlying concepts. Lectures are interspersed with conceptual questions, called ConcepTests, designed to expose common difficulties in understanding the material. The students are given one to two minutes to think about the question and formulate their own answers; they then spend two to three minutes discussing their answers in groups of three to four, attempting to reach consensus on the correct answer. This process forces the students to think through the arguments being developed, and enables them (as well as the instructor) to assess their understanding of the concepts even before they leave the classroom.
You can listen to Mazur and some of his students discuss this teaching approach in the video below.
In a business setting, even if the subject of classroom training is not so technical as organic chemistry or calculus, using ConcepTests can be a helpful tool for ensuring participants truly grasp central concepts and retain what they learn in class. Training participants have to process information for themselves — articulate the concepts in their own words, and connect the information they're learning to other ideas and to realistic work situations.
Bringing together the findings of years of research, Keith Stanovich, a professor of human development and applied psychology at the University of Toronto, has just published an accessible account of why high intelligence, as measured by intelligence tests, does not guarantee highly rational thinking.
taking appropriate action, given one's goals and beliefs
holding beliefs commensurate with available evidence
Stanovich works with a tripartite model of thinking. The three components are:
the autonomous mind — "gut reactions." More specifically, the autonomous mind produces affective responses to situations (e.g., anger at being cheated), previously learned responses that have become automatic (e.g., steering automatically in the direction of a skid on an icy road), conditioned responses (e.g., feeling better after taking a pill even if it's a placebo), and "adaptive modules that have been shaped by human evolutionary history" (e.g., face recognition). As its name suggests, this component of thinking operates without conscious attention. However, it can be consciously overridden by the algorithmic mind if prompted to do so by the reflective mind (see below).
the algorithmic mind — takes in information (which may or may not be accurate and may or may not be classified correctly) and responds according to a conscious thought process analogous to running of a computer program. The response is fully appropriate if it optimally helps achieve a rationally chosen goal (arrived at through reflective thinking — see below). The information processing carried out by the algorithmic mind can be applied to both real and hypothetical situations. A person's efficiency in using the algorithmic mind is reflected in his/her IQ score.
the reflective mind — chooses goals, relates goals to beliefs about the world, tests beliefs against evidence, and chooses action that is optimal given the aforementioned goals and beliefs. Determines when hypothetical thinking is needed to evaluate a situation and make a decision. A person's effectiveness in using the reflective mind is reflected in the degree of rationality of his/her behavior and decisions. The degree of rationality depends on the person's thinking dspositions, e.g., his/her procilivity for being actively open-minded. A key point is that variation in thinking dispositions is not perfectly correlated with intelligence.
In What Intelligence Tests Miss, Stanovich explains that
... rationality is a more encompassing construct than intelligence. To be rational, a person must have well-calibrated beliefs and must act appropriately on those beliefs to achieve goals — both properties of the reflective mind. The person must, of course, have the algorithmic-level machinery that enables him or her to carry out the actions and to process the environment in a way that enables the correct beliefs to be fixed and the correct actions to be taken. Thus, individual differences in rational thought and action can arise because of individual differences in intelligence (the algorithmic mind) or because of individual differences in thinking dispositions (the reflective mind). To put it simply, the concept of rationality encompasses two things (thinking dispositions of the reflective mind and algorithmic-level efficiency) whereas the concept of intelligence — at least as it is commonly operationalized — is largely confined to algorithmic-level efficiency. (p. 33)
Stanovich adds:
It is important to note that the thinking dispositions of the reflective mind are the psychological mechanisms that underlie rational thought. Maximizing these dispositions is not the criterion of rational thought itself. Rationality involves instead the maximization of goal achievement via judicious decision making and optimizing the fit of belief to evidence. The thinking dispositions of the reflective mind are a means to these ends. Certainly high levels of such commonly studied dispositions as reflectivity [taking time to think before deciding what to do] and belief flexibility are needed for rational thought and action. But "high levels" does not necessarily mean the maximal level. One does not maximize the reflectivity dimension for example, because such a person might get lost in interminable pondering and never make a decision. Likewise, one does not maximize the thinking disposition of belief flexibility either because such a person might end up with a pathologically unstable personality. Reflectivity and belief flexibility are "good" cognitive styles (in that most people are not high enough on these dimensions, so that "more would be better"), but they are not meant to be maximized. (p. 35)
À propos of the relation between intelligence and rationality, Stanovich says:
Not only is rational thought itself predicted by thinking dispositions after intelligence is controlled, but the outcomes of rational thought are likewise predicted by variations in characteristics of the reflective mind. (p.37)
In sum, rationality requires:
the mental abilities measured by IQ tests
"mindware" — learned rules, procedures, and strategies
thinking dispositions that foster rational thought
Rather than just measuring the first two of these items, all three should be assessed in order to get a full picture of an individual's cognitive functioning. In this regard, Stanovich notes that
Rational thinking errors appear to arise from a number of sources — it is unlikely that anyone will propose a psychometric g of rationality. Irrational thinking does not arise from a single cognitive problem, but the research literature does allow us to classify thinking into smaller sets of similar problems. (p. 173)
Stanovich devotes considerable attention to a taxonomy of cognitive deficiencies that impair rationality. These deficiencies include:
