Curios of the week #77

Clippings, endnotes and other ephemera

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Nassim Nicholas Taleb coined the term ‘Black Swan Event’ to refer to (usually financial) events that are severe in their impact, outside the usual span of expected possibilities and are therefore inherently unpredictable. The 2008 financial crisis, precipitated as it was by the use of novel forms of debt, is often cited as an example. The name derives from the fact that black swans were not considered to exist by Europeans until they first sighted them in Australia.

To residents of Ballarat, a black swan event accompanies every trip to Lake Wendouree where the swans preside over a cygnocracy. Cars stop for them to cross the road and overly friendly dogs soon find out that the swans do not share their amity. They forage in vacant blocks and generally lounge around as they please. If you visit Ballarat, you need to take a walk to pay tribute to them.

It’s big boss week on Curios. Enjoy.

Ratchet of the week

Big boss, E D Hirsch Jr, recently wrote a piece for Education Next about ‘the ratchet effect.’ I am a fan of ratchet metaphors. At Clarendon, we talk about our curriculum being a ratchet and not a wheel. Instead of constantly spinning, throwing out what we did and writing something completely new, our curriculum should build over time, refined according to the evidence we have on its impact. This is the essence of continual improvement.

Hirsch is talking about the ratchet effect in human cultural evolution — our ability to build on, and improve, what came before. This is a key mission of education. Unfortunately, education has been confounded by a Romantic philosophy that views the development of academic skills as equivalent to the growth and unfurling of a flower. In this philosophy, each child has it within themselves to identify their needs and learning therefore must be individualised:

“Current evolutionary and cognitive science, then, is more classic than Romantic. It regards human culture and education as human-made accommodations to local exigencies rather than as an inherent natural unfolding. Local conditions are varied; hence, human cultures are varied. Our social inventiveness, supported by our ratcheted social knowledge, enables human schools to help foster human flourishing across the globe—not through natural development but through highly varied cultural inventiveness.”

Hirsch goes on to make the case for a knowledge-rich curriculum as a ratcheted form of education. Contrary to Romantic or progressivist ideas, teaching children knowledge of the world is an equalising force. Where it has been tried, Hirsch argues it has a positive impact and provides evidence to support this.

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Bibliometric analysis of the week

Bibliometric analysis is a form of research that uses statistical techniques to analyse published academic papers. It therefore sits at one step removed from the usual process of writing and publishing articles. I first came across the concept when Christian Bokhove and Casper Hulshof promised to use the technique to somehow disprove cognitive load theory* in a paper that, to my knowledge, has not yet been published.

We await that with great interest.

In the meantime, it is worth examining a new bibliometric analysis of publications in the field of educational psychology. Waseem Hassan and colleagues identified the top 12 educational psychology journals. They examined articles published from 1988 to 2023 and counted the number of times each article was cited, both in total and on average per year since publication. Citations are a measure of influence — if an article influences other researchers, they are likely to cite it in their own work.

From this list, Hassan et al. identified the top papers, authors, connections between authors, and themes. Big Boss John Sweller topped the list of authors, with 27,087 citations, followed by Richard Mayer with 24,455. This is interesting because both authors focus on cognitive load — Sweller developed cognitive load theory and Mayer developed the closely related cognitive theory of multimedia learning.

However, cognitive load was not the top topic, perhaps due to splitting across these two fields. Instead, it was motivation which, in turn, tells us something about the motivations of those who produce and consume research. Getting kids to pay attention to learning is clearly a perennial concern.

“The combined set of 42 unique most-cited articles in educational psychology journals showcases the most impactful topics in the field that is consistent with the keyword analysis: motivation, cognitive load theory, and learning were the most popular topics”

If disproved by Bokhove and Hulshof, cognitive load theory is going to leave a big hole behind it.

Slow burning scandal of the week

In Australia, students sit the NAPLAN suite of assessments in literacy and numeracy in Years three, five, seven and nine. As noted previously, they are far from perfect but they still have value.