Cognitive Dissonance

This week are two articles that might lead to cognitive dissonance (See number 9 below). 

See if you agree with the conclusion in the first article and see how many of the famous experiments in the second article you were familiar with. (And let me know if you can figure out why experiment 8 is even on the list.)

Enjoy the weekend!

Joe

Are Private Schools Worth It?

•   Researchers at the U of Illinois found that Private schools—long assumed to be educationally superior—are in fact underperforming public school

•   Studying the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, they found that, when controlling for demographic factors, public schools are doing a better job academically than private schools.

•   Private school students have higher scores because they come from more affluent families.

•   Other research at Educational Testing Service, Notre Dame, and Stanford has also found this to be true.

•   Our typical and best public schools are doing a pretty good job—it’s just that the national averages are often dragged down by the fact that we have a lot of schools with poor-performing students who happen to be poor. We have such a large socioeconomic polarization in this country and the students at the bottom are skewing the overall sense of how we are doing.

•   NAEP data over the past couple of decades have shown remarkable improvement in U.S. students’ scores.

•   There is a danger in the autonomy that private schools have. The teachers aren’t required to be certified, there is less professional development happening, they’re not held accountable to the same kinds of stare curriculum standards and tests.

•   Why would somebody pay money for a service that is apparently inferior to one they could get for free? There are, however, reasons for choosing a private school—it’s things like reputations, convenience, safety, the value systems that are represented by schools, but parents are also making choices based on the peer group they are selecting for their students, which does have an impact on student’s performance. If you send a child to a school with more affluent peers, he/she is going to do better regardless of whether or not it’s a private or public

•   This is also happening in a context of the constant chorus of public schools are failing. Parents are told this by the media and by a lot of reform organizations, and so that message gets internalized. People just assume that private is better.

10 Psychological Studies That Will Change What You Think You Know About Yourself

Interesting article from Huffington Post that discusses a number of famous psychological studies—and the findings of some of them, i.e., how people behave, certainty have implications for us as teachers. I knew about some of the studies but others were new to me. Here's the link to the full article.

•   1971 Stanford Prison Study—which measured how human behavior is affected by social situations. (Shows dark side of humans)

•   1998 Kent State Study about “change blindness”—where we can miss significant details in any visual scene

•   Famous late 1960’s Stanford Marshmallow Experiment that shows the importance of self-control and delayed gratification and future success

•   1961 Yale Study about how far people would go to obey authority figures when asked to harm others. Human moral nature includes a propensity to be empathetic, kind, and good to our fellow kin and group members, but we also have an inclination to be xenophobic, cruel, and evil to tribal others.

•   Study that shows illustrates that those is positions of power often act towards others with a sense of entitlement and disrespect.

•   1950s experiment in a boys summer camp that showed how quickly we can form into competitive, even hostile, tribal groups.

•   Late 1930s Harvard study that followed male undergraduates throughout their life and found that the main pillars of happiness in life is love.

•   The one pretty strange study that shows Oscar winners live longer than Oscar nominees who lost (I haven’t figures out why this “study” was in the article.)

•   1959 study that shows human have a natural propensity to avoid cognitive dissonance, i.e., our brains seek to make the world orderly and harmonious and we are more apt to accept new information that supports our orderly view of the view than the accept new information that changes our current world view.

•   NYU study that shows that we all have a tendency—unconsciously--to stereotype groups of people, which then causes us to judge people based on unconscious stereotypes.