Education does little to mitigate bias

In June 2010, Daniel B. Klein wrote an editorial in the Wall Street Journal outlining his research on whether liberals or conservatives better understood basic principles of economics. The editorial's title "Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?" posed a question to which Klein answered, "Not if you are a liberal."

In the editorial, Klein, a self-described libertarian, reviewed responses to a survey that tested knowledge of basic "economic propositions" and found that progressives and liberals were much more likely to answer incorrectly than conservatives and libertarians. Klein concluded the editorial stating, "Governmental power joined with wrongheadedness is something terrible, but all too common. Realizing that many of our leaders and their constituents are economically unenlightened sheds light on the troubles that surround us."

Yet even as he wrote this editorial, Klein was aware that the economic propositions in the survey may have been biased in a manner that favored people with conservative and libertarian views because the propositions implicitly challenged the views of the left and not the right. For example, one proposition was "Mandatory licensing of professional services increases the prices of those services (unenlightened answer: disagree)" and another was "Minimum wage laws raise unemployment (unenlightened answer: disagree)."

To account for the potential bias, Klein and Zeljka Buturovic followed up with a new survey with economic propositions written in a way that implicitly challenged conservatives and libertarians. Examples of the some of the new propositions that challenged the right included, "Making abortion illegal would increase the number of black-market abortions (unenlightened answer: disagree)" and "By participating in the marketplace in the United States, immigrants reduce the economic well-being of American citizens (unenlightened answer: agree)."

As you probably anticipated, just like the left-leaning respondents on the first survey, the right-leaning respondents bombed on the questions that implicitly challenged their beliefs. To Klein's credit, he not only published the new results with the title "Economic Enlightenment Revisited: New Results Again Find Little Relationship Between Education and Economic Enlightenment but Vitiate Prior Evidence of the Left Being Worse," but also described his turnaround in the Atlantic.

It is not clear whether the new results contradict the claims of his Wall Street Journal editorial, but in the Atlantic article, Klein asks about those original conclusions, "Shouldn't a college professor have known better?" He goes on to say, "But adjusting for bias and groupthink is not so easy, as indicated by one of the major conclusions developed by Buturovic and sustained in our joint papers. Education had very little impact on responses, we found; survey respondents who’d gone to college did only slightly less badly than those who hadn’t. Among members of less-educated groups, brighter people tend to respond more frequently to online surveys, so it’s likely that our sample of non-college-educated respondents is more enlightened than the larger group they represent. Still, the fact that a college education showed almost no effect—at least for those inclined to take such a survey—strongly suggests that the classroom is no great corrective for myside bias. At least when it comes to public-policy issues, the corrective value of professional academic experience might be doubted as well."

Counting what counts

A good argument from HEDS representative Mark Salisbury on the Department of Education diversity reporting requirements:

"As a result of the new federal rules, we currently have race/ethnicity data for two groups of students (freshmen/sophomores who entered after the new rules were implemented and juniors/seniors who entered under the old rules) that reflect two different conceptions of race/ethnicity. Although we developed a crosswalk in an attempt to create uniformity in the data, for each additional wrinkle that we resolve another one appears. Thus, we admittedly have more confidence in the "diversity" numbers that we reported this year (2011) than those we reported last year (2010). Moreover, the change in questions has set up a domino effect across many colleges where, depending upon how an institution tried to deal with these changes, an individual institution could come up with vastly different "diversity" numbers, each supported by a reasonable analytic argument. . . .

But we do ourselves substantial harm if we get hung up on a quest for precision. In reality, the problem originates not in the numbers themselves but in the relative value we place on those numbers and the decisions we make or the money we spend as a result. Interestingly, if you ask our current students, they will tell you that they conceive of diversity in very different ways than those of us who came of age several decades ago (or more). Increasingly, for example, socio-economic class is becoming a powerful marker of difference, and a growing body of research has made it even more apparent that the intersection of socio-economic class and race/ethnicity produces vastly different effects across diverse student types."

See full piece at http://www.augustana.edu/x37497.xml.

Salisbury, M. (2011, October 17). Delicious ambiguity. Faculty Newsletter, 9(9). Retrieved November 22, 2011, from Augustana College, Academic Affairs Office website.

Grit, talent, and success

Academically Adrift has raised the question of whether colleges and universities are doing enough to promote critical thinking. The development of critical thinking has been the aim of liberal education for some time. A good "recent" example of this is in the Yale Report of 1828:

The two great points to be gained in intellectual culture, are the discipline and the furniture of the mind; expanding its powers, and storing it with knowledge. The former of these is, perhaps, the more important of the two. A commanding object, therefore, in a collegiate course, should be, to call into daily and vigorous exercise the faculties of the student. Those branches of study should be prescribed, and those modes of instruction adopted, which are best calculated to teach the art of fixing the attention, directing the train of thought, analyzing a subject proposed for investigation; following, with accurate discrimination, the course of argument; balancing nicely the evidence presented to the judgment; awakening, elevating, and controlling the imagination; arranging, with skill, the treasures which memory gathers; rousing and guiding the powers of genius.

Yet I wonder if we focus too much on helping students develop their talent for thinking and too little on developing their will to think, especially for their work outside of the soft confines of our classrooms.

In 2007, Duckworth and her colleagues published a paper on grit. They defined grit as

perseverance and passion for long-term goals. Grit entails working strenuously toward challenges, maintaining effort and interest over years despite failure, adversity, and plateaus in progress. The gritty individual approaches achievement as a marathon; his or her advantage is stamina. Whereas disappointment or boredom signals to others that it is time to change trajectory and cut losses, the gritty individual stays the course. (pp. 1087–1088)

Over a series of six studies, Duckworth and her co-researchers found that grit mattered in predicting an individual's achievement, even after taking IQ into account: "Across six studies, individual differences in grit accounted for significant incremental variance in success outcomes over and beyond that explained by IQ, to which it was not positively related" (p. 1098). The authors conclude by stating,

Evidence gathered by the current investigation and its forerunners, suggest[s] that, in every field, grit may be as essential as talent to high accomplishment. If substantiated, this conclusion has several practical implications: First, children who demonstrate exceptional commitment to a particular goal should be supported with as many resources as those identified as “gifted and talented.” Second, as educators and parents, we should encourage children to work not only with intensity but also with stamina. In particular, we should prepare youth to anticipate failures and misfortunes and point out that excellence in any discipline requires years and years of time on task. (p. 1100)

It is important to remember that grit is likely to be just as important for our own work as it is for our students' education.

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Duckworth, A. L., Peterson, C., Matthews, M. D., & Kelly, D. R. (2007). Grit: Perseverance and passion for long-term goals. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 92, 1087–1101.

Grit scale

Consistency of Interests

1. I often set a goal but later choose to pursue a different one.*
2. New ideas and new projects sometimes distract me from previous ones.*
3. I become interested in new pursuits every few months.*
4. My interests change from year to year.*
5. I have been obsessed with a certain idea or project for a short time but later lost interest.*
6. I have difficulty maintaining my focus on projects that take more than a few months to complete.*

Perseverance of Effort

1. I have achieved a goal that took years of work.
2. I have overcome setbacks to conquer an important challenge.
3. I finish whatever I begin.
4. Setbacks don’t discourage me.
5. I am a hard worker.
6. I am diligent.

Items are rated on a 5-point scale from 1 = not at all like me to 5 = very much like me.
* questions that are reverse scored

The price of public higher education

A tale of three graphs about the price of public higher education, from Postsecondary Education OPPORTUNITY, Issue #230, August 2011.