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Society for Quality Education

The gorilla in the picture

January 12, 2013 by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) at 06:49 AM

Today, I'm following up on the video where you were to count how many passes the white team made. Did you notice the gorilla? If you didn't - and about half of people don't - you demonstrate our limited attention budget. People can focus on only one thing at a time.

I came across this example - and many other fascinating examples of "systematic errors in the thinking of normal people...traced...to the design of the machinery of cognition" in Thinking Fast and Slow, a book that explains that humans use two discrete systems that drive the way we think and the way we make choices. We mostly rely on System 1, a kind of automatic pilot that is fast, intuitive, and emotional", but we can choose to engage System 2, a slower, more deliberative, and more logical mode.

When you were counting the passes in the video, you were using System 2. Quoting from page 23:

  • The often-used phrase 'pay attention' is apt: you dispose of a limited budget of attention that you can allocate to activities, and if you try to go beyhond your budget, you will fail. It is the mark of effortful activities that they interfere with each other, which is why it is difficult or impossible to conduct several at once. You could not compute the product of 17 X 24 while making a left turn into dense traffic, and you certainly should not try. You can do several things at once, but only if they are easy and undemanding. You are probably safe carrying on a conversation with a passenger while driving on an empty highway, and many parents have discovered, perhaps with some guilt, that they can read a story to a child while thinking of something else.

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Attention, memory processes, and other cognitive processes are not paid much attention within the teachers’ faculties. One just has to be a parent, educating the teachers from one year to the next, on your children’s attention and memory quirks. As I have observed and experience - they politely listen and ignore the parents.

It doesn’t fit in the constructivism and other learning theories. In schools, they want students to be fully engaged in system 1,  and one of the outcomes that can be deemed as a negative, the students have weaker foundations in the fundamentals, making it almost impossible for some if not all, to connect to system 2, to produce quality work that involves rational, coherent thought using logical analysis thought processes.

Just thoughts, but over at Scientific American - a long paper on the very topic in Malkin’s blog posting.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=kahneman-excerpt-thinking-fast-and-slow

To returned to the implications of Thinking Fast and Slow in the K to 12 education system. what are the educators discussing?  Not much, it appears that Daniel Kahneman is being ignored just like Pinker and other esteem people hailing from the fields other than the public education field. When the educators do, they are ignoring the science.

However, there is a few brave educators wanted to discussed the implications of Thinking Fast and Slow in the public education system.

One example below - of an educator
” And then midway through the book, all kinds of edu-hell breaks loose. For three chapters in Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman argues that professional expertise is largely an illusion:”
http://dropoutnation.net/2012/07/26/voices-of-the-dropout-nation-alex-hernandez-on-abandoning-educations-expertise-myth/

The educator concludes - “As an educator, I’m often haunted by one of my own students who went from failing every core high school class to making the honor roll in a year and a half. I worked in a high expectations school where we all took pride in helping students reach their potential. But this student was dragging every risk factor in the book to school each day. In my deepest, darkest moments, I wasn’t sure this student would graduate from high school. I finally concluded, in the absence of knowing any better, we just have to treat each student like they are going to Harvard. If we are going to be wrong, let’s at least do no harm.
In the next decade, we have a chance to build better schools using new approaches and new models.  Once we let ourselves see beyond our own expertise, I suspect we’ll find that children are capable of more than we ever thought possible.  Let’s see what the evidence says.”

Novel concept inside the public education K to 12 system that prefers the dumb-down curriculum and ignores the science and data stream outcomes of students. Before anyone educator goes off in the tangent, one ought to review the cognitive science and neuro-science in the LD fields, the implications of Thinking Fast and Slow to the professional expertise of the educators comparing to the academic outcomes of LD students.

Doesn’t take too long to conclude that the LD students in the K to 12 education system are getting a raw deal from the educators who are in system 1 mode handing out dumb-down education quality under their professional expertise. No wonder the K to 12 educator are not discussing Thinking Fast and Slow. 

Posted by Nancy on 01/12 at 12:22 PM

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