Bigfoot and Sugar Pills

Be very wary of people who go to college to "get an education". I mean, what are you doing the rest of the time? Un-getting an education? - Unknown

Sugar pills. You can buy 500 doses here for $49. For the more discriminating shopper, you can go here and get roughly the same thing for $24. Both will work fine for treating depression.

Apparently, the fact that an increasing number of medications are unable to beat sugar pills in controlled, scientific studies has thrown the industry into crisis. But really, we have known for quite a while that there is lots of evidence that placebos work in medicine and that people get well simply because they think they're supposed to.

Allegedly, the mere proximity an ultrasound machine to someone's face is effective for post-operative dental pain, regardless of whether the machine is even switched on.

During the 1950s, doctors were somewhat taken with the notion of “ligating the internal mammary artery” to treat angina. Unfortunately, when someone did a placebo-controlled trial, complete with a mock-operating room and an incision, but only pretended to “ligate the internal mammary”, the theatrical procedure was just as effective as the real one. Ouch.

So we did the intelligent thing. We just stopped doing the procedure because it was useless, not to mention the consternation it likely caused for the billing/complaint department.

We know that red sugar pills are more effective stimulants than blue sugar pills.

We know, of course, that two sugar pills have a bigger effect than one, and that an intramuscular sugar pill injection is far more effective than sugar tablet form.

We know that brand-name aspirin, with brand-name packaging and the wealth of advertising and cultural background material that supports it, is more effective at managing our aches and pains that that no-name generic, knock-off stuff, no matter that they've both got the same active ingredient. Four hyphens appear in that sentence. That makes it better.

We’ve known for quite a while that placebos can affect lots of things, but especially the stuff that has some level of subjectivity attached and that a big part of effectiveness comes from the ceremony and the cultural context of the treatment. But, I have only recently learned that there are some that believe higher education isn’t much more than a sugar pill, albeit a highly invasive one.

I read (part of) a book by Tyler Cowen called “Create Your Own Economy: The Path to Prosperity in a Disordered World”.  In it, he makes the statement that, “…placebo effects can be very powerful and many supposedly effective medicines do not in fact outperform the placebo. The sorry truth is that no one has compared modern education to a placebo. What if we just gave people lots of face-to-face contact and told them they were being educated?”

Is that what we do? Is that all “education” is? Is it the social function of bringing people together, and letting positive peer pressure do its magic? Is it that educators and administrators stage a kind of "theater" to convince students that they now belong to an elite group called the learned? Is it that only once students finish 2 or 4 years of higher education they will have drunk a sufficient amount of (k)cool-aid (but the kind made with real sugar) to believe? 
Maybe a little. I should explain:

School in general works to some degree because it makes people feel they've been transformed. College graduates earn a lot more than non-graduates. The College Board reports that, “…the data showed that median annual earnings for workers 25 and over also increased with more education. In 2008, high school graduates earned an average of $33,800; people with some college education but no degree earned $39,700; people with an associate degree earned $42,000; bachelor's degree holders earned $55,700; master's degree holders earned $67,300; doctoral degree holders earned $91,900; and those with a professional degree earned $100,000.”

Our own results confirm. But why?

Saying that you studied modern American literature by itself rarely gets people a job. But by saying that you are adept at critical-thinking (and producing the skills to back it up) just might.

The problem is that critical thinking is not a definable skill set, in and of itself.  Unless something was published recently that I missed, all the known world's collected wisdom of several thousand years has failed to accurately describe an effective and replicable way of teaching critical thinking.

It is sort of like Bigfoot. We can describe generally what it looks like, but very few people have seen it, and there is some doubt about whether it actually exists.

Critical thinking deals with some sort of problem solving, say the application of the principles of mechanics to living organisms. It has to do with how good a decision is or how well a problem has been solved. It focuses on specific outcomes.

For example, you can give a student an assignment to consider reasonable alternative explanations for an historical event, but they can't do it unless they know what's reasonable in that context. Similarly, you can tell a student to look at an issue from multiple perspectives, but if they don't know much about the issue they can't think about it from multiple perspectives.

Our academic assessment woes aside, universities (and to some degree, colleges) are very concerned with prestige, status, and pretense. This translates into thick syllabi, famous professors, research dollars, and impressive graduation ceremonies. It sounds like a speech (my own included) that you may have heard. You know, the one admonishing students to persist, to invest in their education both financially and in time and effort?

One of the reasons we spend so much on college is to convince ourselves of our own commitment; similarly, in medicine, experiments show that aspirin relieves more of our pain if we know that we spent more money on the pills.

When I went through basic training in the Army, the culminating event was a week-long hazing called “The Crucible”. I learned quickly that it had absolutely nothing to do with Arthur Miller.

To sum it up, it involved very little sleep, lots of yelling and screaming, marching long distances, and practical examination of routine skills we learned the prior eight weeks. The “crucible” exists so that the soldiers feel they suffered/invested to get there and it remains an extraordinarily effective technique. It has to do with perceived value -- our opinion of a product's value. It may have little or nothing to do with a product's market price, and everything to do with the product's ability to satisfy our needs or requirements.

Correspondingly, effective higher education probably won't ever be cheap or easy. What you get in college is the opportunity to demonstrate that you can manage your own schedule, complete projects and papers on schedule without someone standing over you every minute, autonomy, and resources. In reality, the students are jumping through lots of hoops and acquiring a new self-identity. It really does cost a lot to bundle together a bit of learning, some good theater, and some missionary zeal, replete with the socially required props. And to some degree, it is about the ability to deal with a bureaucracy, and that’s, my friends, is a valuable life skill. It also demonstrates the ability to come up to speed on some topic, and be able to engage in some logical discourse. In total, I think this is why employers value a college degree.

To keep on with the medical analogy, a college or university is a delivery system (think the syringe) that imparts the "medicine" of knowledge. The “knowledge” is an independent entity; it isn't the "cure" itself. A delivery system is incredibly important to a medical outcome, but it's not the drug, so (at least in my understanding) it can't be a placebo.

The drug, on our case, is the information, knowledge, skills, and techniques, sequenced and presented in a way that engages the student.

And here it comes, the big reveal…the critical element that separates higher education from medicine is the professor.

In medicine (or at least pharmaceuticals), the treatment is independent of the doctor. The effect of swallowing two little pills has nothing to do with the skills and talents of the person handing them over. It’s all about the "treatment" regardless of who administers it. But in education, the professor is supposed to be a major cause of learning. And it is true.

In nearly all “teacher effects” studies where one of the variables was the faculty, the effect of different teachers was always bigger than the effect of different treatments (what was meant to be studied). Read that again. I’ll wait.

In my last posting, Nanothoughts, I talked about a study that showed that 10 seconds of video (without sound) of a teacher allows students to predict the ratings they teacher will receive. Similarly, hearing the sound without the visual (rhythm and tone of voice only) were enough as well. This is powerful evidence that teachers differ in ways that cannot easily or normally controlled, but which are very quickly perceptible. Somehow and with lightning speed, students' minds are able to determine value of a teacher.

Basically, teachers have a huge effect but one that we don't understand at all from a social science standpoint.

The most fundamental lesson that comes to my mind is that our scientific ignorance of the human condition remains profound. Despite confidently asserted empirical analysis, persuasive rhetoric, and claims to expertise, very few social-program interventions can be shown, in controlled experiments, to create real improvement.

We continue to consider socio-economic factors influencing learning and cognition, learning styles, multiple intelligences, student preferences, faculty teaching style, active-learning techniques, constructivism v. behaviorism, air temperature, room size, time of day, and daily caloric intake. Every one of these variables has been studied to some extent and when assessed individually, some generalizations can be made, but always with exception and never with absolute certainty. 

There is as much difference between two teachers doing, purportedly, the same thing in conventional classes as there is between two teachers doing different things.

As long as we keep on thinking that it works, it probably does.

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