Keep NLP out of education

The following was adapted from a comment I made on Training Zone, see my previous post:

The UK (and South Africa) has just been through the Brain Gym in education debacle. I believe that the legitimate role of neuroscience in education suffered as a result. Because of its unfortunate and pretentious title, neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) is (falsely) associated with neuroscience. I note that Andy Bradbury recognises this issue on his website, where he declares that "The name is a major pain." Elsewhere he indicates that NLP cannot be a pseudoscience because it never claimed to be a science in the first place. I, however (I think most people do), believe that if something looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it is a duck. Lay people (parents, teachers, managers) can often not distinguish between science and pseudocience (or art if you prefer) to the detriment of the former and the advantage of the latter.

I have read the report quoted by Garry Platt, “Neuro-linguistic programming and learning: teacher case studies on the impact of NLP in education.” This added to my concern. At least two of the authors seem to have a vested interest in NLP (Churches and Tosey). They have links with the University of Surrey group, most of whom according to Dave Snowden in the Wikipedia discussion pages on NLP, have NLP consultancies. Are there conflicts of interest?

The report consists of a literature study, which I do not now have time to peruse. The conclusion from the literature study states: "It was also clear from the literature that contrary to some popular opinion, there have been a number of academic publications on NLP that are supportive of its use in schools and education in general." For the moment I have to take that at face value.

The rest of the research consists of anecdotal "evidence" from teachers who have, or are using NLP in their classrooms. The authors conclude from the teacher anecdotes that " ... the impact of NLP is supported, or at least the perception of its effectiveness is supported." To my mind teacher anecdotes cannot provide scientific support for NLP and teacher perceptions of effectiveness are without value. Teachers who use NLP may themselves have a vested interest (also sunken cost fallacy) and are subject to confirmation bias.

While the authors of the report recognize that their evidence will be questioned, they suggest that NLP be taught to teachers because there should be a balance between evaluation and innovation. I wonder, however, how much nonsense have been introduced into education (and business) in the name of innovation? The one thing, in my opinion, that education does not need is another ill-considered fad.

Nonsense in management theories

This from an interview by Mike Levy with Prof. John Antonakis on the lack of science in some management theories. It's from Training Zone and registration (free) is needed to access. I place some selected quotations, the interviewer's comments in double quotes, Antonakis's in single quotes and italics:

"A man who criticises the basis of Myers Briggs, 'emotional intelligence', NLP and 'good to great' had better be sure of his facts. Professor John Antonakis is sure that he is. Catapulted into the media last year by his paper published in one of the most prestigious scientific journals, 'Science' - where he showed that little children could predict election outcomes merely on looking at the faces of politicians, the author of ‘The Nature of Leadership’ is able to defend his corner as a passionate advocate of evidence-based work on leadership. ... Antonakis, who is professor of organisational behaviour at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, is not afraid to take on what he sees as the vested interests in supplying what techniques with dubious provenance."

According to Prof. Antonakis: 'There are too many snake-oil merchants in the guise of consultants, trainers and management gurus, ... Very little of what they claim is supported by hard evidence; most of which has been totally ignored by those making a lot of money by selling models and techniques that simply don’t work.'

"The absence of evidence (or evidence which proves otherwise) also leads Antonakis to cast grave doubts on cherished models and systems including Myers Briggs and NLP. A recent paper by Antonakis states: 'There are hundreds of methods or approaches like neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), whose proponents claim to be useful for predicting leadership or for developing leadership skills. Alas, NLP continues to persist in the world of practice even though [research] psychologists stopped taking this construct seriously a while back.' He is equally critical of work produced by Goleman and others on 'emotional intelligence' and methods to test it. 'The evidence simply isn’t there.' "

"Antonakis' critical gaze also falls on the whole area of leadership traits – what personality types can be predicted to make effective leaders? He gives two examples of popular models that have little or no validity: the Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument (HBDI), and the DISC personality model. Says Antonakis, 'I could not identify any research on this (DISC) model, though plenty of claims about its validity are on the internet. As with the HBDI, this model does not have the requisite research behind it to be used in industrial settings.' "

The comments (mainly on NLP) are also very illuminating and well worth the read. Prof. Antonakis's views are absolutely in line with many of my views, as expressed in this blog. For what it's worth, he's an ex-South African.

Dilbert on gut based decision making

From Dilbert by Scott Adams.

Unforeseen disasters: salience and availability heuristic

Sonja from Narrative Lab blogged on a disaster that hasn't happened yet and Jonah Lehrer from Frontal Cortex on one that has happened. In both cases salience played a role in lack of action and poorly planned action respectively.

Sonja pointed out the role of salience in:

"A community living next the the "dirtiest dam in the world" seem to care less about getting involved in finding solutions for this issue, but that same community has one of the largest and most active neighbourhood crime watch volunteer groups I've come across."

To give a little perspective, this is what the particular dam's water looks like:


Lehrer pointed out the same process in the BP oil disaster:

"Because those rigs are so far offshore - outta sight outta mind - we haven't prepared for the possibility of this epic disaster. As a result, the unlikely event becomes inconceivable - this is the availability heuristic at work - and the inherent riskiness of a situation is underestimated."

Which brings to the fore the dilemma that the cognitive "blindness" brought about by our cognitive limitations (lack of salience and the availability heuristic) could leave us vulnerable to situations that science, engineering and technology can't solve. Said Adam Frank from NPR Blogs:

"In the old culture failure was impossible because, somehow, we could grab some duct tape and MacGyver our way back into business. The new culture must understand that limits and feedbacks express a kind of planetological wisdom that we are wise to work within rather than try and push aside.

As a technological society we have evolved to the point that we are, literally, playing in much deeper waters. At these scales we must understand that failure is very much an option."

Tips for learning retention

Donald Clark Plan B has one of his useful posts that restates well-known (but often neglected) learning principles. It is worth reading, but I follow his advise and summarize it for my own benefit.

Ebbinghaus Curve.

He starts with a classical Ebbinghaus "forgetting curve" that we all learned about in Psychology 101 and then adds:

"The real solution, to this massive problem of forgetfulness, is spaced practice, little and often, the regular rehearsal and practice of the knowledge/skill over a period of time to elaborate and allow deep processing to fix long-term memories. If we get this right, increases on the productivity of learning can be enormous."

Here are some of his tips for for implementation (get the details from his blog post):

1. Self-rehearsal, rehearse the work yourself on a set schedule.
2. Take notes, and rehearse.
3. Blog about it, and respond to comments
4. Repetition, mindfully.
5. Delayed assessment, by the teacher at different intervals.
6. Record material, and make recordings accessible to learners.
7. Games pedagogy, present and assess in games format.
8. Spaced e-learning (ties in with #6).
9. Mobile technology, use cell phones to drip feed information.
10. Less long holidays (not as applicable in South Africa where we do not have the long summer holiday.

Some of these may be difficult to implement at school level, with limited resources and the high work load of teachers. Collaboration may be helpful.

Neanderthals among us

Some interesting thoughts and ethical dilemmas from Ursula Goodenough at NPR Blogs. She links two interesting developments in genetics, to whit the claims by Craig Venter's company to have artificially synthesized a functional bacterial chromosome and by Svante Pääbo’s laboratory to have produced a first draft of the Neanderthal genome. Goodenough points out that:

"Hence it is now formally feasible, albeit not yet remotely practicable, to synthesize artificial Neanderthal chromosomes, insert copies into enucleated human eggs, and recruit volunteers to give birth to a Homo species that has been extinct for 30,000 years."

There are enough ethical dilemmas here to keep a troop of philosophers busy for years. Imagine a human mother giving birth to a Neanderthal infant and that Neanderthal having to grow up in human society.

Pääbo also estimates that most human genomes contain one to four percent of Neanderthal-derived DNA sequences, meaning there was interbreeding. The next time someone calls you a Neanderthal, they may be closer than you think!

(Quack)busting romance

From Dilbert by Scott Adamns.