Harvard academic Todd Rose on the fallacy of averages – Macleans.ca

Although I like manipulating and understanding large groups of people, using averages, medians and the like, useful note of caution on some of the limits.

However, analysis of overall trends and groups provides an overall understanding of how different groups are doing, and a frame to understand and address individual variances:

Q: It’s apparent in The End of Average that, while you applaud personalized medicine, what really interests you is education.

A: Education and the workforce: I think these two things go together in terms of human potential. Historically, education has been about batch processing: standardize everything against the average, rank kids, sort them to see who gets more and who really doesn’t deserve to be there. The problem, even if you’re just being selfish from an economic standpoint, is we’re not producing the talent we need: companies tell me that even in their best attempts to hire people, it’s a 50/50 proposition whether that person pans out a year later. We need to develop people rather than process them. But if you accept that, there are huge implications, including a whole different organizing set of principles. Right now, for instance, we resist giving people extra time on exams or for assignments, as though it’s unfair to the faster students. Well, is the purpose of the assessment to understand what they know or to rank them against the average? The whole idea of timing tests is a century old, from a scientist who thought speed and ability were tightly correlated, which they are not. We don’t have that obsession with, say, a driver’s licence: take the test as often as you need; when you pass we’ll allow you to operate a multi-tonne machine.

Q: Are you still working on ways to personalize education?

A: Our role so far has been to clarify for the public a way of seeing this. We use the Air Force analogy: there were expensive things they had to do to get a cockpit suitable for a lot of pilots, like wraparound windshields, but their initial solutions, when they realized average didn’t work, were adjustable seats. How in the world did they not already have adjustable seats in their planes? We’re looking for adjustable seats for education, for basic things that we can do. Solutions are out there in piecemeal that need to be brought to the centre of the system. Abandon fixed-time, grade-based classes; if something is valuable, have mastery focus, where we give a flexibility in time and it’s all about getting you to competency.

Q: If your children were in high school and grading, for lack of a better term, the way you did in high school, do you have solid options that were not available to your parents?

A: Yes, but right now they’re decidedly skewed to people with money. That rubs me wrong. I care deeply about opportunity and fairness, because I grew up really poor. What motivates me is that, for the first time, we can have the knowledge to scale these kind of solutions and make them available to all. But that requires making good choices right now about the way we’ll use our technology, and the purpose we have for education. That’s not going to happen magically. We can make really bad choices and double-down on the system we have, so we have to work at it.

Source: Harvard academic Todd Rose on the fallacy of averages – Macleans.ca