On a scale of 1 to 10, how much do you think Pearson publishing cares about the efficacy of their products?

Now now, I asked for a numerical rating, not invective or expletives.

My own rating might be a three or a four. I'm guessing that the folks at Pearson care about effectiveness to some extent because it affects how much things sell.

But the bottom line is that what matters is the bottom line. The success and failure of particular marketing strategies are followed closely, I'm guessing, as are sales of particular products. Learning outcomes from the product? Well, the customer can track them if they are interested.

So what are we to make of it when Pearson says "We are putting the pursuit of efficacy and learning outcomes at the centre of our new global education strategy."

Wut?

Educators have every right to be cynical. It's not just that Pearson has shown little inclination in this direction in the past, but also that it's a publicly traded company that shareholders ought to expect will put profits first.

Ironically, the path Pearson plans to effect this change is mostly about inputs: hiring people who care about efficacy, developing a global research network to gather evidence, that sort of thing.

But crucially they also promise to track outcomes, namely "to report audited learning outcomes, measures, and targets alongside its financial accounts, covering its whole business by 2018."

That's an enormous commitment and if they really follow through, it gives me some confidence that this is not merely a marketing ploy. Or if it is, the marketing team has concluded that to make this ploy appear not to be a ploy, they need to put some teeth in the plan.

A significant aspect of the success of this step turns on that small adjective "audited." It's not that hard to cook the learning outcome books. For this new effort to be persuasive, Pearson will need to have disinterested parties weigh in on the efficacy measures used, and their interpretation.


A person knowledgeable about testing, yet wholly disinterested? Does Pearson have Diogenes on staff?

There's another aspect of this plan that I find even more interesting, and potentially useful. Pearson has published a do-it-yourself efficacy review tool. It's a series of questions you are to consider to help you think about the effectiveness of a product you are currently using, or are contemplating using. There's an online version as well as a downloadable pdf.

The tool encourages you to consider four factors (listed here in my own phrasing):

1. What am I trying to achieve?
2. What evidence is there that this product will help with my goal?
3. What's my plan to use this tool?
   
4. Do I have what I need to make my plan work?

These simple, sensible questions are elaborated in the framework, but working through the details should still take less than an hour. The tool includes sample ratings to help the user think through the rating scheme.

I think this tool is great, and not just because it aligns well with a similar tool I offered in When Can You Trust the Experts?

I think it offers Pearson a way to gain credibility as the company that cares about efficacy. If I were to hear that Pearson's sales force made a habit of encouraging district decision-makers to apply this efficacy framework to the educational products of Pearson (and others) that would be a huge step forward.

I would be even more impressed if Pearson warned users about the difficulty of overcoming the confirmation bias, and making these judgments objectively.

Still, this is a start. There might be some satisfaction in greeting this move with cynicism, but I think it's better to start with skepticism--skepticism that will prompt action and help to encourage educators to think effectively about efficacy. 

Is there a critical period of brain plasticity for literacy? We know that brain development progresses with age. If a child does not learn to read at the right age, has the brain lost its plasticity such that learning to read will be more difficult?  

For at least one aspect of brain plasticity, we now have data indicating that the answer is “no.”

That aspect of plasticity that bears on reading is the loss of mirror invariance in visual perception.

Mirror invariance means recognizing a mirror image as the same object. It makes good sense for visual recognition to be set up this way. If I recognize a dog facing to my left, I ought to recognize the same dog facing to my right as the same object.

But mirror invariance is a problem when children are learning to read, because for that task one must NOT treat mirror-reversed objects as identical: b and d must be treated differently. Anyone who has observed children learning to read and write cannot help but notice that they initially make a lot of mirror reversal errors. The errors disappear with practice.

In a recent study Felipe Pegado and colleagues (2013) set out to investigate whether literacy changes mirror invariance not just for letters of the alphabet, but for other visual stimuli as well. Does the process of learning to read actually change this aspect of vision?

The researchers simply showed subjects pairs of stimuli, to which they were to respond “same” or “different” via button press. Mirror images were to be judged “same.”

The experimenters used three different types of stimuli: pictures, letter strings, and false fonts (that is, letter-like stimuli that were not actually letters.

Of most interest, they tested three groups of subjects: illiterate adults (“il” in the graph below), ex-illiterates (i.e, those who learned to read as adults; “ex” in the graph below) and literate adults (that is, those who learned to read at a typical age; “li” in the graph below). 

The solid line shows reaction times to mirror reversed images, and the dashed line is reaction time to the non-reversed images. Look first at the data for the illiterate subjects for the pictures, strings, and false fonts: they respond equally quickly for mirror reversed and same stimuli.  

But the ex-illiterate (ex) and the literate (li) subjects have trouble with the mirror reversed images. They have BIG trouble with the letter strings, but they are slower even with the pictures.

What does this result mean?

A straightforward interpretation is that lots of practice with visual stimuli that are not mirror-reversible—that is, learning to read—changes the visual system. The natural state of the visual system is that mirror-reversed objects are treated as equivalent. Literate people can treat them as equivalent, but it takes a little extra time.

I find two aspects of these findings interesting: that that visual system changes in this way and that the “ex-illiterate” subjects show the same phenomenon. Thus (at least for this process) it’s not that case that, once brain development is finished the visual system is no longer open to change.

This visual process is not the only one that is changed by learning to read, but this one at least is not subject to a critical period of development.

Reference:
Pegado, F., Nakamura, K., Braga, L. W., Ventura, P., Filho, G. N., Pallier, C., Jobert, A., Morais, J., Cohen, L., Kolinsky, R., & Dehaene, S. (2013, June 17). Literacy Breaks Mirror Invariance for Visual Stimuli: A Behavioral Study With Adult Illiterates. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. doi: 10.1037/a0033198

"Stereotype threat" refers to a phenomenon in which people perform worse on tasks (especially mental tasks) in line with stereotypes, if they are are reminded of this stereotype.

Hence, the stereotype for women (in American culture) is that they are not as good at math as men; for older people, that they are more forgetful than the young; and for African-Americans, that they are less proficient at academic tasks. Members of each group do indeed perform worse at that type of task if the stereotype is made salient just before they undertake it (e.g. Appel & Kronberger, 2012).

Why does it happen? Most researchers have thought that the mechanism is via working memory. When the stereotype becomes active, people are concerned that they will verify the stereotype. These fears occupy working memory, thereby reducing task performance (e.g., Hutchison, Smith & Ferris, 2013).

But a new experiment offers an alternative account. Sarah Barber & Mara Mather (2013) suggests that stereotype threat might operate through a mechanism called regulatory fit. That's a theory of how people pursue goals. If the way you conceive of task goals matches the goal structure of the task, you're more likely to do well than if it's a poor fit.

Stereotype threat makes you focus on prevention; you don't want to make mistakes (and thus confirm the stereotype). But, Barber & Mather argue, most experiments emphasize doing well, not avoiding mistakes. Thus, you'd be better off with a promotion focus, not a prevention one.

To test this idea, Barber & Mather tested fifty-six older (around age 70) subjects on a combined memory/working memory task. Subjects read sentences, some of which made sense, others which were nonsensical either syntactically or semantically.

Subjects indicated with a button press whether the sentence made sense or not. In addition, they were told to remember the last word of the sentence for as many of the sentences as they could. Task performance was measured by a combined score: how many sentences were correctly identified (sensible/nonsensical) and how many final words were remembered.

Next, subjects read one of two fictitious news articles. The one meant to invoke stereotype threat described the loss of memory due to aging. The control article described preservation of memory with aging.

Then, subjects performed the sentence task again. We would expect that stereotype threat would lead to worse performance.

BUT the experimenters also varied the reward structure of the task. Some subjects were told they would get a monetary reward for good performance. Others were told they were starting with a set amount of money, and that each memory error would incur a penalty. 

The instructions made a big difference in the outcome. As shown in the graph, framing in terms of costs for errors didn't just remove stereotype threat; it actually lead to an improvement.

This outcome makes sense, according to the regulatory fit hypothesis. Subjects were worried about errors, and the task rewarded them for avoiding errors.

These data are the first to test this new hypothesis as to the mechanism of stereotype threat, and should not be seen as definitive.

But if this new explanation holds up (and if it applies to other groups) it should have significant implications for how threat can be avoided.

References:
Appel, M., & Kronberger, N. (2012). Stereotypes and the achievement gap: Stereotype threat prior to test taking. Educational Psychology Review, 24(4), 609-635.

Barber, S. J., & Mather, M. (2013). Stereotype Threat Can Both Enhance and Impair Older Adults’ Memory. Psychological science, published online Oct. 22, 2013. DOI: 10.1177/0956797613497023.
Hutchison, K. A., Smith, J. L., & Ferris, A. (2013). Goals Can Be Threatened to Extinction Using the Stroop Task to Clarify Working Memory Depletion Under Stereotype Threat. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 4(1), 74-81.