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Wikipedia Mediocre on Education Issues

1/7/2013

 
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I like Wikipedia. I like it enough that I have donated during their fund drives, and not simply under the mistaken impression that doing so would make plaintive face of founder Jimmy Wales disappear from my browser.

Wikipedia is sometimes held up as a great victory for crowdsourcing, although as Jaron Lanier has wryly observed, it would have been strange indeed to have predicted in the 1980's that the digital revolution was coming, and that the crowning achievement would be a copy of something that already existed--the encyclopedia.

That's a bit too cynical in my view, but more important, it leapfrogs an important question: is Wikipedia a good encyclopedia?

For matters related to education, my tentative answer is "no." For some time now I've noticed that articles in Wikipedia got things wrong, even allowing for the fact that some topics in education are controversial.

So in a not-at-all scientific test, I looked up a few topics that came to mind.

Reading education in the United States: The third paragraph reads:

There is some debate as to whether print recognition requires the ability to perceive printed text and translate it into spoken language, or rather to translate printed text directly into meaningful symbolic models and relationships. The existence of speed reading, and its typically high comprehension rate would suggest that the translation into verbal form as an intermediate to understanding is not a prerequisite for effective reading comprehension. This aspect of reading is the crux of much of the reading debate.
There is a large literature using many different methods to assess whether sound plays a role in the decoding of experienced readers, and ample evidence that it does. For example, people are slower to read tongue-twisters than control text (McCutchen & Perfetti, 1982). Whether it is necessary to access meaning or is a byproduct of that process is more controversial. There is also pretty good evidence that speed reading can't really work, due to limitations in the speed of eye movements (Rayner, 2004)

Next I looked at mathematics education. The section of most interest is "research" and it's a grab-bag of assertions, most or all of which seem to be taken from the website of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. As such, the list is incomplete: no mention of the huge literatures on (1) math facts (e.g. Orrantia et al 2010), nor of (2) spatial representations in mathematics: Newcombe, 2010. The conclusions are also, at times, sketchily draw ("the importance of conceptual understanding:" well, sure), and on occasion, controversial ("the usefulness of homework:" a lot depends on the details.)
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Learning styles: You probably could predict the contents of this entry. A long recounting of various learning styles models, followed by a "criticisms" section. Actually, this Wikipedia entry was better than I thought it would be, because I expected the criticism section to be shorter than it is. Still, if you know nothing about the topic, you'd likely conclude "there's controversy" rather than there's no supporting evidence (Riener & Willingham, 2010).

Finally, I looked at the entry on constructivism (learning theory). This was a pretty stringent test, I'll admit, because it's a difficult topic.

The first section lists constructivists and this list includes Herb Simon, which can only be called bizarre, given that he co-authored criticisms of constructivism (Anderson, Reder & Simon, 1997).

The rest of the article is a bit of a mish-mash. It differentiates social constructivism (that learning is inherently social) from cognitive constructivism (that learners make meaning) only late in the article, though most authors consider the distinction basic. It mentions situated learning in passing, and fails to identify it as a influential third strain in constructivist thought. A couple of sections on peripheral topics have been added ("Role Category Questionnaire," "Person-centered messages") it would appear by enthusiasts.

Of the four passages I examined I wouldn't give better than a C- to any of them. They are, to varying degrees, disorganized, incomplete, and inaccurate.

Others have been interested in the reliability of Wikipedia, so much so that there is a Wikipedia entry devoted to the topic. Two positive results are worthy of note. First, site vandalism is usually quickly repaired. (e.g., in the history of the entry for psychologist William K. Estes one finds that someone wrote "William Estes is a martian that goes around the worl eating pizza his best freind is gondi.") The speedy repair of vandalism is testimony to the facts that most people want Wikipedia to succeed, and that the website makes it easy to make small changes.

Second, Wikipedia articles seem to fare well for accuracy compared to traditional edited encyclopedias. Here's where education may differ from other topics. The studies that I have seen compared articles on pretty arcane topics--the sort of thing that no one has an opinion on other than a handful of experts. Who is going to edit the entry on Photorefractice Keratectomy? But lots of people have opinions about the teaching of reading--and there are lots of bogus "sources" they can cite, a fact I emphasized to the point of reader exhaustion in my most recent book.

Now I only looked through four entries. Perhaps others are better. If you think so, let me know. But for the time being I'll be warning students in my Spring Educational Psychology course not to trust Wikipedia as a source.


References

Anderson, J. R., Reder, L. M., & Simon, H. A. (2000). Applications and Misapplications of Cognitive Psychology to Mathematics Instruction. Texas Education Review, 1(2), 29-49.

McCutchen, D., & Perfetti, C. A. (1982). The visual tongue-twister effect: Phonological activation in silent reading. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 21, 672-687.

Newcombe, N. S. (2010). Picture This. American Educator, 1, 29.

Orrantia, J., Rodríguez, L., & Vicente, S. (2010). Automatic activation of addition facts in arithmetic word problems. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 63(2), 310-319.

Radach, R. (2004). Eye movements and information processing during reading (Vol. 16, No. 1-2). Psychology Press.

Riener, C., & Willingham, D. (2010). The myth of learning styles. Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning, 42(5), 32-35.

Turadg Aleahmad
1/7/2013 09:13:53 am

What if you gave your students an assignment to correct the Wikipedia articles using this post as a starting point?

Scott McLeod link
1/7/2013 10:18:23 am

Wikipedia is huge and complex. The solution to incomplete or inaccurate information on Wikipedia is not to shun it as you advocate here, Dan, but rather work (and/or have your students work) to improve it. We have a shared global information commons now. Our collective ability to access it is accompanied by a collective responsibility to make it better. Don't cast stones. Instead, use them to build better foundations that benefit all of us.

Dan Willingham link
1/7/2013 11:19:20 am

@Turadg, @Scott. . .well, I don't doubt that doing the research necessary to try to improve an article would be beneficial to the student. . .it would be a particular type of learning, though, and that may or may not square with the instructor's goals for a course. I would add that for many topics in education, it wouldn't be easy, in my opinion.

Greg S link
1/7/2013 01:04:50 pm

@Dan, Agreed that assignments should match the course goals. However wanted to share that there are several upsides to using wikipedia contributions as an assignment. Of the many, my favorite is that it is not a throw away assignment like most academic papers. FYI: Wikipedia has an Education Program. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:United_States_Education_Program

dan willingham
1/7/2013 11:23:50 am

@scott. . .also, I think I have an obligation to my students (most of whom think of Wikipedia as very reliable) that they ought not to rely on it for education topics. so I don't think of it as throwing stones, but posting a warning sign.

Dan McGuire link
1/7/2013 01:58:41 pm

Wikipedia is what it is. If you want to tell your students about another source, great, go for it.

This post, Dan, would have been improved by offering alternative approaches to finding information and an explaination why the alternative approaches are better. Without doing so, your students are left hanging.

EB
1/8/2013 01:35:46 am

@Dan McGuire: wow! the obvious alternative to Wikipedia (which, like many, I use extensively once I've figured out the level of accuracy I can expect from the topic) is edited works on the same subject. Before Wikipedia, teachers did the same thing as Dan has done here: voiced a warning about specific often-used information sources that have clear shortcomings.

Brett Hardin link
1/8/2013 06:15:15 am

Did you revise the entries?

C.M.
1/9/2013 11:12:53 am

Funny thing: when I was researching these topics (while dealing with fuzzy math issues at my district), I thought to look these things up on Wikipedia to see what an average person would think when they looked up these terms. I was not impressed. In fact, I was a bit alarmed because some of these things, as Dan pointed out, have been proven to be false. Yet our school districts and the Educrats keep regurgitaing the same ineffective clap-trap. At first, I thought it was because they just didn't know any better, but that wasn't the case. They can look at the studies, the brilliant writings (such as found on Dan's website and American Educator) and STILL not believe it. Case in point: the NCTM and their weak, controversial standards and their dogmatic resistance to explicit learning.

I have concluded that some people make decisions by how they feel and others by looking at data. The Feelers won't look at real research and decide something, or if they do, they will check out something like Wikipedia and say, "See, there's a controversy!" and then go about doing what they want or will find the data that fits with what they want to do. The Data People will actually look at all the research and make decisions based on those facts.

Mike Bell
1/10/2013 08:34:44 am

A central problem is that the use of evidence is hardly taught in schools - so almost no adults have developed the mindset.

As I science teacher I know we mostly taught the 'facts', not the method.

When teaching Critical Thinking at A-level I realised that there is a view of evidence shared between scientists, historians, criminologists and critical-thinkers. If the habit of looking at a range of views and evidence and coming to a 'balanced judgement' were to be taught explicitly to all students, the adult population would gradually become able to make sensible choices.

Vedic Mathematics link
1/14/2013 06:18:55 pm

I teaches maths to A-level students and found that teaching maths is an amazing and sound interesting thing than that of other subjects.

Thanks for nice article, like to read more from you.

Suzzane

________

<a href="http://www.mastermindvedicmaths.com">Math For Competitive Exam </a>


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