National Standards and Neanderthals – “They will know what is required …” – Part III

In Part I of this post I outlined the historical context of our modern education system and argued that  National Standards were a continuation of the controlling and directive imperatives of that system.

In Part II I described the nature of National Standards, their justification and how they would be implemented.

In this final part, I address the most important question – What is wrong with National Standards?

Or,

Are National Standards up to standard?

It’s pretty clear from the documentation that National Standards ‘double down’ on the directing and controlling aspects of education that have been at the heart of modern schooling since its inception.

But there’s a subtler point to be made about what this rhetoric indicates about the actual – as opposed to claimed – role of National Standards.

The role is not, in fact, to enhance learning – or the capacity to learn (‘learning how to learn’). It is about directing learning to achieve a progression within a subject area.

This may come as a surprise to many people – including, perhaps, some people in the Ministry of Education – but the two processes are not the same.

Indeed, it is claimed in the pamphlet that explains National Standards to parents that the National Standards have been developed by the Ministry of Education and “subject experts” rather than ‘learning experts’. So it might not be that surprising that the learning process hardly rates a mention – all that matters are the ‘required next steps’ in subject progression.

There’s a further, related, point that serves as the essential justification for National Standards in reading, writing and mathematics for children at such young ages.

In the same pamphlet for parents, a claim is made that is deemed so important that it has a stand-out graphic to itself:

For many parents too, the apparent realities of this world make it self-evident that children must be educated right from the start in the ‘Three Rs’ for their own good. To many – far too many – people, these are the ‘building blocks’ of learning. Therefore, only through a (gently?) coercive approach will children ultimately gain what it takes to succeed in our world, so popular opinion has it.

And, in this view, National Standards are simply one way that parents can be assured that just this process is occurring – Michael Laws, for one, seems to see it this way.

But is it true that this process is a necessity? Is it the only way to ensure that children have a good chance in life? Peter Gray (2013, p. 42), again:

When we see that children today are required by law to go to school, that almost all schools are structured in the same way, and that our society goes to a great deal of trouble and expense to provide such schools, we naturally assume that there must be some good, logical reason for all of this. Perhaps if we didn’t force children to go to school, or if schools operated differently, children would grow up to be incompetent in our modern world. Perhaps educational experts have figured all this out, or perhaps alternative methods of allowing children to develop have been tested and have failed.

The reality, as I will show later, is that alternative ways have been tested and have succeeded. Children’s instincts for self-directed learning can work today as well as they ever did. When provided with freedom and opportunity, children can and do educate themselves marvellously for our modern world. The schools that we see around us are not products of science and logic; they are products of history.

And this leads to the second error with the claim of the educational priority of the ‘Three Rs’: The fundamental skills for all learning are not reading, writing and maths. The most fundamental are autonomy and motivation (the latter in the form of curiosity or fascination).

Learning is, in essence, a motivational rather than a cognitive process. Autonomy – allied with motivation – allows the expression of motivated exploration and the consequent acquisition of (deep) learning.

A lack of autonomy and control over behaviour reduces motivation (or increases avoidant or resistant behaviours). It’s a wonder such basic principles of behaviour and learning need to be reiterated. But they do.

Ever since our social and economic system moved away from the knowledge- and skill-intensive life of the hunter-gatherer it has had to do battle with children and their natural ways of learning.

The enemies of our education system, unsurprisingly, are therefore just those core aspects of human nature identified by Gray (2013) as being the essential and natural means of self-education – curiosity; playfulness; and, sociability. For modern education to work, all of these must be either minimised or managed lest they interfere with children learning what is required.

Here’s how the supposed efficacy of National Standards will side-step questions of autonomy and motivation.

According to the official explanation, National Standards will allow children – as well as teachers and parents – to know what next steps are required in their learning. That is, children will possess a cognition or belief about what is needed to progress. By tracking and monitoring “achievement” and “progress“, so the idea goes, children will understand (i.e., have cognitive clarity over) what they need to learn next and, hence, will continue to progress. As the Fact Sheet puts it,

Reporting against a standard will enable teachers, parents, and students themselves to see if a student is achieving at a level that enables them to engage in learning right now, as well as make the progress they need for success throughout schooling.

It’s a simple idea – feedback enables improvement. It’s simple and it’s rational (and, usefully, you don’t even have to mention motivation). But is it correct?

Well, there’s a lot of psychological research on this topic and the answer to the question is not straightforward – or, better, the result of monitoring and ‘feedback’ depends on the starting point of participants.

Peter Gray (2013, p. 132) describes a famous study by Michaels et al. (1982) (Full reference = Michaels, J.W., Blommel, J.M., Brocato, R.M., Linkous, R.A. and Rowe, J.S. (1982) Social facilitation and inhibition in a natural setting, Replications in Social Psychology, 2, 21-24). The researchers,

hung around a pool hall in a university student center and watched friendly games of eight ball. At first they observed unobtrusively and counted the percentage of successful shots that each player made, in order to categorize players as experts or novices. They then moved closer and began watching in a way that made it obvious to the players that they were evaluating their performances.

…

Here’s what they found: close observation caused the experts to perform better than they did without observation, but it had the opposite effect on the novices. All in all, the average success rate of the experts rose from 71 percent up to 80 percent under observation, while that for novices fell from 36 percent to 25 percent.

The findings have been replicated and generalised to a wide variety of other tasks. In particular,

When research subjects believe their performance is being observed and evaluated, those who are already skilled become better and those who are not so skilled become worse. The debilitating effects of being observed and evaluated have been found to be even greater for mental tasks, such as solving difficult math problems or generating good rebuttals to the views of classical philosophers.

[It’s not part of this post, proper, but there’s even an interesting confound between test motivation and IQ test scores.

As the linked study demonstrates, those of below-average baseline IQ – i.e., those who prior to the study scored low on IQ tests – under incentive conditions showed an improvement of 0.96 SD (standard deviations). That’s remarkable. Those of above average baseline IQ also showed improvement under incentive conditions but only of 0.26 SD. Prior to the study, performance on IQ scores were being disproportionately constrained by low test motivation for those who gained lower IQ scores than for those who gained higher IQ scores.

IQ score, as the article also makes clear, is not the same as the latent variable ‘intelligence’ – in case you were wondering. Here’s a short extract from the discussion:

And, from the conclusion:

I’ll let you consider what these results might mean for performance against National Standards.]

We might not expect young children to be”generating good rebuttals to the views of classical philosophers“, but National Standards certainly involve them being observed and evaluated when solving mathematics problems (and reading and writing).

And this monitoring process is not envisaged as a covert form of observation. Quite the reverse – as already discussed, the children are to be made well aware of their “progress” so that it can be made clear to them “what they need to learn next“.

Given that a good part of the justification for introducing National Standards is to do with the so-called ‘long tail’ of underachieving students, it is remarkable that those standards explicitly embody a monitoring and assessment strategy well known – from psychological research – to exacerbate initial inequalities in ‘expertise’, or ‘achievement’. ‘Novices’ will not do well under observation.

Once again, Gray (2013, p. 133) says it so much better:

with their incessant monitoring and evaluation of students’ performance, schools seem to be ideally designed to boost the performances of those who are already good and to interfere with learning. Those who have somehow already learned the school tasks, maybe at home, generally perform well in this setting, but those who haven’t tend to flounder. Evaluation drives a wedge between those who already know how and those who don’t, pushing the former up and the latter down.

It gets worse.

We are, today, almost incessantly told that creativity and innovation are the keys to success in the modern economy – whether as individuals or as nations. An interesting study of rates of creativity in succeeding generations of American children was recently reported  by Kyung Hee Kim (2011) – (see her own outline of the research here). Briefly, on all sub-measures of creativity, the evidence is that it is declining in the United States – supposedly the Western home of creativity and innovation.

There’s an interesting comment from James T. Weiner, a research colleague of Kim’s, in the comments section of that link:

I think we as Americans are lucky though.. we started in a much better place .. relatively high creativity .. so they [Asian and European societies] have a ways to go to catch up. I like the quote attributable one prominant [sic] creativity researcher: “All schools and organizations tend to crush creativity, here in the US we just tend to crush it less“. Of course that comment was made many years ago before KHK’s discovery of the declines in creativity in the US over the last 20 years.

That same point was pursued by Peter Gray in a blogpost on the website ‘Psychology Today‘:

According to Kim’s research, all aspects of creativity have declined, but the biggest decline is in the measure called Creative Elaboration, which assesses the ability to take a particular idea and expand on it in an interesting and novel way. Between 1984 and 2008, the average Elaboration score on the TTCT [Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking], for every age group from kindergarten through 12^th grade, fell by more than 1 standard deviation. Stated differently, this means that more than 85% of children in 2008 scored lower on this measure than did the average child in 1984.  Yikes.

What about the TTCT? How important is it?

The best evidence that the Torrance Tests really do measure creative potential come from longitudinal research showing strong, statistically significant correlations between childhood scores on the TTCT and subsequent real-world achievements.[4]  As the authors of one article commenting on these results put it, high scorers “tallied more books, dances, radio shows, art exhibits, software programs, advertising campaigns, hardware innovations, music compositions, public policies (written or implemented), leadership positions, invited lectures, and buildings designed” than did those who scored lower.[5]

Gray’s explanation of the creativity decline? It’s a bit predictable:

Well, surprise, surprise.  For several decades we as a society have been suppressing children’s freedom to ever-greater extents, and now we find that their creativity is declining.

Creativity is nurtured by freedom and stifled by the continuous monitoring, evaluation, adult-direction, and pressure to conform that restrict children’s lives today.

Is it really true that “[c]reativity is nurtured by freedom“? Sadly, yes.

Theresa Amabile (along with often-times co-worker Beth Hennessy) is probably one of the most known names in creativity research. In 2010, for example, Hennessy and Amabile provided a review of creativity research for the pre-eminent psychological journal Annual Review of Psychology.

In a long career researching creativity, Amabile and her colleagues have demonstrated an unusual but vital fact: Any pressure to be creative, including provision of ‘incentives’, undermines creativity. As Gray (2013, p. 134), correctly, summarises her results:

In experiment after experiment, the most creative products were made by those who were in the non-incentive condition – the ones who worked under the impression that their products would not be evaluated or entered into contests and who were not offered any prizes.

As Hennessy and Amabile (2010, p. 599) concluded (as point 6 of their summary) in their review of creativity research,

6. People are most creative when they are motivated primarily by the interest, enjoyment, satisfaction, and challenge of the work itself—i.e., by intrinsic motivation.

More fully – on page 581,

In short, people are more creative when they are simply ‘playing’. Being monitored and evaluated doesn’t cut the mustard when it comes to creativity – and creativity predicts life success better than IQ.

(Perhaps that’s why this column recently appeared in Forbes magazine – In defense of skipping college and enrolling in the real world.)

I said ‘unusual’ because we are used to thinking that external ‘incentives’, in particular, improve performance (In fact, if you read the ‘aside’ above about intelligence testing, external incentives were just what improved IQ test performance – though performance on an IQ test is not necessarily ‘creative’.)

To be honest, there was a very heated debate in the literature over this point as to whether or not external incentives (rewards) reduced creativity. It’s a bit complicated, but revealing in relation to discussion of National Standards.

Eisenberger and Cameron (1996 in the journal American Psychologist) – two psychologists from the behaviourist tradition – claimed that rewards only undermine intrinsic motivation and creativity under very limited conditions – principally, when non-specific instructions as to ‘what is understood as creative’ by those asking for creativity are provided (i.e., ‘merely’ instructions to be creative or to ‘try your best’ without specifying just what you wanted).

This was then refuted by Hennessy and Amabile (1998) and, inevitably, Eisenberger and Cameron (1998) responded to that refutation – and those of others.

But, so far as understanding National Standards and their likely effect on creativity is concerned, here’s the ‘take-away’ from Eisenberger and Cameron (1998):

In our article (Eisenberger & Cameron, 1996), we suggested that the decremental effects of reward on creativity were due to cues indicating that conventional performance was desirable; moreover, we reported that an explicit contingency between reward and creative performance increased creativity.

Participants in studies reporting a decremental effect of reward on creativity are not typically given explicit information that conventional performance is desirable, leading Hennessey and Amabile (1998, this issue) to question how conventional performance is cued. According to learned industriousness theory (Eisenberger, 1992), individuals learn the type of performance for which they are rewarded (e.g., speed, accuracy, or novelty) and generalize such learning to new tasks. Because daily experience more frequently rewards various types of conventional performance than novel responding, people who are promised a reward for nonspecific performance may fail to respond creatively. Amabile (1982), for instance, asked children to construct a collage and told them that the best collages would receive a monetary award but did not specify what aspect of collage performance would be assessed. These children constructed collages judged less creative, though better planned and organized, and more representational than the collages produced by a control group that received no promise of reward. Importantly, in the past, the children may have been rewarded more frequently at school for the organization and graphic realism of their artwork than for originality. As a result, the promise of reward for unspecified performance in Amabile’s study may have elicited conventional performance rather than creativity.

If you followed that discussion, you’ll realise that Eisenberger and Cameron (1998) were basically saying that without telling people (e.g., ‘children’) that you want something novel they’ll default to what they’ve learnt people want (e.g., from school) – conventional performance. 

Further, their point is that there’s no such thing as spontaneous creativity. If you want it, you have to explicitly request it and ‘incentivise’ it. And you have to specify what it involves (e.g., ‘novelty’). Creativity on demand.

Well, maybe in our society, with our educational system, that’s true. But that pretty much means that creativity is generally squashed by the way we educate people and treat them generally – as Kyung Hee Kim found in the US.

If you want the – pretty much – final word on this then read pages 581-582 in Hennessy and Amabile (2010). It lays it all out neatly.

External incentives only work for relatively repetitive or clear, straightforward tasks (including the request to ‘be novel’) – when they work at all. Otherwise, they interfere with spontaneous, creative solutions.

As Hennessy and Amabile (1998) Reality, intrinsic motivation and creativity argued, just following instructions – ‘be novel’ – is not what we mean by creativity, in ‘Reality’.

Creativity can never be a requirement.

By contrast, creating conditions which induce a positive mood – largely by reducing the seriousness of a task setting – generally seems to improve creativity and insightful problem solving.

This was first established in a famous study by Alice Isen. The simple manipulation of showing one group of students a five minute humorous film, a second group a serious film about mathematics and a third group no film prior to presenting them with a classic problems in creative problem solving (including the famous ‘candle test’ by Duncker) produced stunning results: Seventy five percent of the first group successfully completed the task while only 23 and 17 percent in the second and third groups, respectively, were successful.

Overall, according to Hennessy and Amabile (2010, p. 574):

Despite the good press for creativity and widespread belief that it is a ‘good thing’ in business and society as a whole, creativity in the classroom has hardly been studied, according to Hennessy and Amabile (2010):