| Chronology | Current Month | Current Thread | Current Date |
| [Year List] [Month List (current year)] | [Date Index] [Thread Index] | [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] | [Date Prev] [Date Next] |
When you say that the intuition of any given classroom teacher are
better than PER results I just don't know what to do with that. Are
you just saying that the field is so young that it hasn't made any
breakthroughs yet? I can't imagine you making a similar statement
about any other scientific endeavor...
... there have been many experiments running rats through all kinds of
mazes, and so on—with little clear result. But in 1937 a man named
Young did a very interesting one. He had a long corridor with doors
all along one side where the rats came in, and doors along the other
side where the food was. He wanted to see if he could train the rats
to go in at the third door down from wherever he started them off.
No. The rats went immediately to the door where the food had been the
time before.
The question was, how did the rats know, because the corridor was so
beautifully built and so uniform, that this was the same door as
before? Obviously there was something about the door that was
different from the other doors. So he painted the doors very
carefully, arranging the textures on the faces of the doors exactly
the same. Still the rats could tell. Then he thought maybe the rats
were smelling the food, so he used chemicals to change the smell
after each run. Still the rats could tell. Then he realized the rats
might be able to tell by seeing the lights and the arrangement in the
laboratory like any commonsense person. So he covered the corridor,
and still the rats could tell.
He finally found that they could tell by the way the floor sounded
when they ran over it. And he could only fix that by putting his
corridor in sand. So he covered one after another of all possible
clues and finally was able to fool the rats so that they had to learn
to go in the third door. If he relaxed any of his conditions, the
rats could tell.
Now, from a scientific standpoint, that is an A-number-one
experiment. That is the experiment that makes rat-running experiments
sensible, because it uncovers the clues that the rat is really
using — not what you think it’s using. And that is the experiment that
tells exactly what conditions you have to use in order to be careful
and control everything in an experiment with rat-running.
I looked into the subsequent history of this research. The next
experiment, and the one after that, never referred to Mr. Young. They
never used any of his criteria of putting the corridor on sand, or
being very careful. They just went right on running rats in the same
old way, and paid no attention to the great discoveries of Mr. Young,
and his papers are not referred to, because he didn’t discover
anything about the rats. In fact, he discovered all the things you
have to do to discover something about rats. But not paying attention
to experiments like that is a characteristic of cargo cult science.