[Physltest] [Phys-L] Re: "Effective" teaching methods

[John Denker <jsd@AV8N.COM>]

Frohne, Vickie wrote:

> > A colleague of mine is a former industrial physicist.  He told me of =
> > a study in which a firm was trying to influence employee's productivi=
> > ty.  For example, they found that playing music  improved productivit=
> > y. Turning off the music a month later also improved productivity.

sampere wrote:

> Look up the Hawthorne Effect.  I think the original study was done at
> Western Electric.

Quite so.  It's named after the huge Hawthorne Works, outside Chicago.

In simplest terms, the Hawthorne Experiments taught us that
  a) The placebo effect is strong.  Just making a fuss over
   somebody has a big effect.
  b) It's easy to get fooled.  It's hard to get the right answer.

It's quite a tale.  Check out Sidebar #2 in
   http://www.bellsystemmemorial.com/westernelectric_history.html
also
   http://www.mgmtguru.com/mgt301/301_Lecture1Page9.htm
or more generally
   http://www.google.com/search?q=hawthorne-experiments+lighting

IMHO if you haven't thought carefully about these experiments,
you don't know very much about
  a) psychology, or
  b) the design of experiments on human subjects.

Education involves a lot of (a) and education research involves
a lot of (b).

The Hawthorne Experiments were _initially_ briefly one of the
all-too-common cases where the investigators were fooled by
the placebo effect.  But _eventually_ it became one of the
all-too-rare cases where they stayed with it long enough to
realize they'd been fooled, and then to figure out what was
actually going on.

Another lesson that can be drawn is that a thousand little,
quick, cheap, sloppy experiments are not nearly as valuable
as a few large, extensive, expensive, well-run experiments.

One of the most appalling things is when people pay lip
service to the Hawthorne Experiments and then make the
same old mistakes.  The same old nonsense has been going
on for years.  RPF said some pointed things about this
at the 1974 commencement (the "Cargo Cult Science" address).
Check out
   http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/cargocul.htm
You can search for "rats", about 2/3rds of the way down ...
although the whole thing is well worth re-reading.
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