Train PhD students to be thinkers not just specialists

Gundula Bosch
nature.com
Originally posted February 14, 2018

Under pressure to turn out productive lab members quickly, many PhD programmes in the biomedical sciences have shortened their courses, squeezing out opportunities for putting research into its wider context. Consequently, most PhD curricula are unlikely to nurture the big thinkers and creative problem-solvers that society needs.

That means students are taught every detail of a microbe’s life cycle but little about the life scientific. They need to be taught to recognize how errors can occur. Trainees should evaluate case studies derived from flawed real research, or use interdisciplinary detective games to find logical fallacies in the literature. Above all, students must be shown the scientific process as it is — with its limitations and potential pitfalls as well as its fun side, such as serendipitous discoveries and hilarious blunders.

This is exactly the gap that I am trying to fill at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, where a new graduate science programme is entering its second year. Microbiologist Arturo Casadevall and I began pushing for reform in early 2015, citing the need to put the philosophy back into the doctorate of philosophy: that is, the ‘Ph’ back into the PhD.

The article is here.

Evolution and Human Behavior: A Field Guide for Teaching Evolution in the Social Sciences

Cristine Legare John Opfer Justin Busch Andrew Shtulman
Published January 21, 2018

Abstract

The theory of evolution by natural selection has begun to revolutionize our understanding of perception, cognition, language, social behavior, and cultural practices. Despite the centrality of evolutionary theory to the social sciences, many students, teachers,and even scientists struggle to understand how natural selection works. Our goal is to provide a field guide for social scientists on teaching evolution, based on research in cognitive psychology, developmental psychology, and education. We synthesize what is known about the psychological obstacles to understanding evolution, methods for assessing evolution understanding, and pedagogical strategies for improving evolution understanding. We review what is known about teaching evolution about nonhuman species and then explore implications of these findings for the teaching of evolution about humans. By leveraging our knowledge of how to teach evolution in general, we hope to motivate and equip social scientists to begin teaching evolution in the context of their own field.

The field guide is here.

James Comey isn’t qualified for his new gig teaching ethics, experts explain

Olivia Goldhill
Quartz
Originally published January 27, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

“My entire professional life has been dedicated to ethics education. I’m disheartened by the fact that educational institutions hire people to teach ethics who really don’t have a background in ethics,” says Aine Donovan, director of the ethics institute at Dartmouth University.

Certainly, Comey’s own behavior as FBI director would make the basis of a strong case study, says Donovan. But Comey’s experience navigating a moral quandary is not sufficient qualification. “I’d rather have moral exemplars teaching an ethical leadership class than somebody who has even a whiff of controversy associated with them,” Donovan says. In addition, Donovan adds, it seems Comey did not make the right moral choice at every stage. For example, Comey leaked documents about his conversations with Trump. “I’m highly skeptical that that would ever pass ethical muster,” adds Donovan.

A “puzzling” choice

“There is much to be learned about [ethics from] studying Mr. Comey’s own conduct, but most of it is not positive,” Howard Prince II, who holds the Loyd Hackler Endowed Chair in Ethical Leadership at University of Texas-Austin, writes in an email. Overall, Comey is “a puzzling choice” to teach ethical leadership, he adds.

The article is here.

Should Governments Invest More in Nudging?

Shlomo Benartzi, John Beshears, Katherine L. Milkman, and others
Psychological Science 
Vol 28, Issue 8, pp. 1041 - 1055
First Published June 5, 2017

Abstract

Governments are increasingly adopting behavioral science techniques for changing individual behavior in pursuit of policy objectives. The types of “nudge” interventions that governments are now adopting alter people’s decisions without coercion or significant changes to economic incentives. We calculated ratios of impact to cost for nudge interventions and for traditional policy tools, such as tax incentives and other financial inducements, and we found that nudge interventions often compare favorably with traditional interventions. We conclude that nudging is a valuable approach that should be used more often in conjunction with traditional policies, but more calculations are needed to
determine the relative effectiveness of nudging.

The article is here.

Advocacy group raises concerns about psychological evaluations on hundreds of defendants

Keith L. Alexander
The Washington Post
Originally published December 14, 2017

A District employee who has conducted mental evaluations on hundreds of criminal defendants as a forensic psychologist has been removed from that role after concerns surfaced about her educational qualifications, according to city officials.

Officials with the District’s Department of Health said Reston N. Bell was not qualified to conduct the assessments without the help or review of a supervisor. The city said it had mistakenly granted Bell, who was hired in 2016, a license to practice psychology, but this month the license was downgraded to “psychology associate.”

Although Bell has a master’s degree in psychology and a doctorate in education, she does not have a PhD in psychology, which led to the downgrade.

The article is here.

Baltimore Cops Studying Plato and James Baldwin

David Dagan
The Atlantic
Originally posted November 25, 2017

Here is an excerpt:

Gillespie is trained to teach nuts-and-bolts courses on terrorism response, extremism, and gangs. But since the unrest of 2015, humanities have occupied the bulk of his time. The strategy is unusual in police training. “I’ve been doing this a long time and I’ve never heard of an instructor using this type of approach,” said William Terrill, a criminal-justice professor at Arizona State University who studies police culture.

But he nevertheless understands the general theory behind it. He’s authored studies showing that officers with higher education are less likely to use force than colleagues who have not been to college. The reasons why are unclear, Terrill said, but it’s possible that exposure to unfamiliar ideas and diverse people have an effect on officer behavior. Gillespie’s classes seem to offer a complement to the typical instruction. Most of it “is mechanical in nature,” Terrill said. “It’s kind of this step-by-step, instructional booklet.”

Officers learn how to properly approach a car, say, but they are rarely given tools to imagine the circumstances of the person in the driver’s seat.

The article is here.

New Technology Standards Guide Social Work Practice and Education

Susan A. Knight
Social Work Today
Vol. 17 No. 4 P. 10

Today's technological landscape is vastly different from what it was just 10 to 15 years ago. Smartphones have replaced home landlines. Texting has become an accepted form of communication, both personally and professionally. Across sectors—health and human services, education, government, and business—employees conduct all manner of work on tablets and other portable devices. Along with "liking" posts on Facebook, people are tracking hashtags on Twitter, sending messages via Snapchat, and pinning pictures to Pinterest.

To top it all off, it seems that there's always a fresh controversy emerging because someone shared something questionable on a social media platform for the general public to see and critique.

Like every other field, social work practice is dealing with issues, challenges, and risks that were previously nonexistent. The NASW and Association of Social Work Boards (ASWB) Standards for Technology and Social Work Practice, dating back to 2005, was in desperate need of a rework in order to address all the changes and complexities within the technological environment that social workers are forced to contend with.

The newly released updated standards are the result of a collaborative effort between four major social work organizations: NASW, ASWB, the Clinical Social Work Association (CSWA), and the Council on Social Work Education (CSWE). "The intercollaboration in the development of the technology standards provides one consensus product and resource for social workers to refer to," says Mirean Coleman, MSW, LICSW, CT, clinical manager of NASW.

The article is here.

Social Mission in Health Professions Education: Beyond Flexner

Fitzhugh Mullan
JAMA: Viewpoint
Originally published June 26, 2017

Here is an excerpt:

Today, with a broader recognition of the importance of social determinants of health and a better understanding of the substantial health disparities within the United States, new ideas are circulating and important experiments in curricular redesign are taking place at many schools. Accountable care organizations, primary care medical homes, interprofessional education, cost consciousness, and teaching health centers are all present to some degree in the curricula of health professions schools and teaching hospitals, and all have dimensions of social mission. These developments are encouraging, but the creative focus on social mission that they represent needs to be widely embraced, becoming a core value of all health professions educational institutions, including schools, teaching hospitals, and postgraduate training programs.

Toward that end, the unqualified commitment of these institutions to teaching and modeling social mission is needed, as are the voices of academic professional organizations, accrediting bodies, and student groups who have important roles in defining the values of young professionals. The task is interprofessional and should involve other disciplines including nursing, dentistry, public health, physician assistants, and, perhaps, law and social work. The commitments needed are not the domain of any one profession, and collaborative initiatives at the educational level will reinforce social mission norms in practice. The precision with which health disparities and the morbidity and mortality that they represent can be documented calls on all health professions schools, academic health centers, and teaching hospital to place their commitment to social mission alongside their dedication to education, research, and service in pursuit of a healthier and fairer society.

The article is here.

Israeli education minister's ethics code would bar professors from expressing political opinions

Yarden Skop
Haaretz
Originally posted June 10, 2017

An ethics code devised at Education Minister Naftali Bennett's behest would bar professors from expressing political opinions, it emerged Friday.

The code, put together by Asa Kasher, an ethics and philosophy professor at Tel Aviv University, would also forbid staff from calling for an academic boycott of Israel.

Bennett had asked Kasher a few months ago to write a set of rules for appropriate political conduct at academic institutions. Kasher had written the Israel Defense Forces' ethics code.
The contents of the document, which were first reported by the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper on Friday, will soon be submitted for the approval of the Council for Higher Education.

The article is here.

Should We Outsource Our Moral Beliefs to Others?

Grace Boey
3 Quarks Daily
Originally posted May 29, 2017

Here is an excerpt:

Setting aside the worries above, there is one last matter that many philosophers take to be the most compelling candidate for the oddity of outsourcing our moral beliefs to others. As moral agents, we’re interested in more than just accumulating as many true moral beliefs as possible, such as ‘abortion is permissible’, or ‘killing animals for sport is wrong’. We also value things such as developing moral understanding, cultivating virtuous characters, having appropriate emotional reactions, and the like. Although moral deference might allow us to acquire bare moral knowledge from others, it doesn’t allow us to reflect or cultivate these other moral goods which are central to our moral identity.

Consider the value we place on understanding why we think our moral beliefs are true. Alison Hills notes that pure moral deference can’t get us to such moral understanding. When Bob defers unquestioningly to Sally’s judgment that abortion is morally permissible, he lacks an understanding of why this might be true. Amongst other things, this prevents Bob from being able to articulate, in his own words, the reasons behind this claim. This seems strange enough in itself, and Hills argues for at least two reasons why Bob’s situation is a bad one. For one, Bob’s lack of moral understanding prevents him from acting in a morally worthy way. Bob wouldn’t deserve any moral praise for, say, shutting down someone who harasses women who undergo the procedure.

Moreover, Bob’s lack of moral understanding seems to reflect a lack of good moral character, or virtue. Bob’s belief that ‘late-term abortion is permissible’ isn’t integrated with the rest of his thoughts, motivations, emotions, and decisions. Moral understanding, of course, isn’t all that matters for virtue and character. But philosophers who disagree with Hills on this point, like Robert Howell and Errol Lord, also note that moral deference reflects a lack of virtue and character in other ways, and can prevent the cultivation of these traits.

The article is here.

The candy diet

Seth Godin
Seth's Blog
Originally posted January 4, 2017

The bestselling novel of 1961 was Allen Drury's Advise and Consent. Millions of people read this 690-page political novel. In 2016, the big sellers were coloring books.

Fifteen years ago, cable channels like TLC (the "L" stood for Learning), Bravo and the History Channel (the "History" stood for History) promised to add texture and information to the blighted TV landscape. Now these networks run shows about marrying people based on how well they kiss.

And of course, newspapers won Pulitzer prizes for telling us things we didn't want to hear. We've responded by not buying newspapers any more.

The decline of thoughtful media has been discussed for a century. This is not new. What is new: A fundamental shift not just in the profit-seeking gatekeepers, but in the culture as a whole.

"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler."*

[*Ironically, this isn't what Einstein actually said. It was this, "It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience." Alas, I've been seduced into believing that the shorter one now works better.]

Is it possible we've made things simpler than they ought to be, and established non-curiosity as the new standard?

The blog post is here.

7 Ways We Know Systemic Racism Is Real

benjerry.com

Here is an excerpt:

Racism at Every Level of Society

Systemic racism is about the way racism is built right into every level of our society. Many people point to what they see as less in-your-face prejudice and bias these days, compared to decades past, but as Archbishop Desmond Tutu said, “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.”

While fewer people may consider themselves racist, racism itself persists in our schools, offices, court system, police departments, and elsewhere. Think about it: when white people occupy most positions of decision-making power, people of color have a difficult time getting a fair shake, let alone getting ahead. Bottom line: we have a lot of work to do.

The blog post is here.

The Difference Between Rationality and Intelligence

By David Hambrick and Alexander Burgoyne
The New York Times
Originally published September 16, 2016

Here is an excerpt:

Professor Morewedge and colleagues found that the computer training led to statistically large and enduring decreases in decision-making bias. In other words, the subjects were considerably less biased after training, even after two months. The decreases were larger for the subjects who received the computer training than for those who received the video training (though decreases were also sizable for the latter group). While there is scant evidence that any sort of “brain training” has any real-world impact on intelligence, it may well be possible to train people to be more rational in their decision making.

The article is here.

Can Morality Be Taught?

Ashley Lamb-Sinclair
The Atlantic
Originally published September 14, 2016

Here is an excerpt:

I am especially disheartened, as are many Americans, when I consider the events of this past summer alone—bombings, riots, shootings—every bit of which derive from a need to identify and destroy the other, or, at the very least, a refusal to understand each other’s perspective. Then there is the presidential campaign with Donald Trump proclaiming “the other” as the source of many societal ills.

Arguments abound regarding laws to pass and policies to implement as solutions to these issues. And while passing bills might feel like a solution—and in some ways it would be—policy can only go so far in changing habits and perception. The only surefire solution to developing tolerance and openness to the perspectives of others is through educating young people.

I believe that the problem is not what is taught in schools, but how it is taught. It is not enough to simply offer curriculum about the ills of racism, homophobia, or bullying, and then expect lasting results from students who are entrenched in cultural beliefs that are reinforced by society.

The article is here.

Medical students track former patients' electronic health records

By Stephen Feller
United Press International
Originally published July 26, 2016

Although it is suspected to be largely for educational purposes, researchers in a recent study say the following of patient electronic health records as part of training poses ethical questions for the handling of those records.

A majority of medical students reported they find it beneficial to follow patient medical histories by accessing electronic health records, but some are checking cases they are not involved with out of curiosity -- which may not pose an actual problem, but poses an ethical one, say researchers at Northwestern University.

Some doctors have complained that electronic records, considered essential for better coordination of patient care and improvement of precision medicine, is too significant a burden on their time.

At the same time, most hospitals and doctors have invested heavily in moving to electronic records, with some groups of medical professionals saying the shift from paper to digital has made their jobs easier.

The article is here.

Evolution makes scientific sense. So why do many people reject it?

Nathalia Gjersoe

The Guardian

Originally published March 31, 2016

Evolution is poorly understood by students and, disturbingly, by many of their science teachers. Although it is part of the compulsory science curriculum in most schools in the UK and the USA, more than a third of people in both countries reject the theory of evolution outright or believe that it is guided by a supreme being.

It is critical that the voting public have a clear understanding of evolution. Adaptation by natural selection, the primary mechanism of evolution, underpins a raft of current social concerns such as antibiotic resistance, the impact of climate change and the relationship between genes and environment. So why, despite formal scientific education, does intelligent design remain so intuitively plausible and evolution so intuitively opaque? And what can we do about it?

Developmental psychologists have identified two cognitive biases in very young children that help to explain the popularity of intelligent design. The first is a belief that species are defined by an internal quality that cannot be changed (psychological essentialism). The second is that all things are designed for a purpose (promiscuous teleology). These biases interact with cultural beliefs such as religion but are just as prevalent in children raised in secular societies. Importantly, these beliefs become increasingly entrenched, making formal scientific instruction more and more difficult as children get older.

The article is here.

Doctors Often Fail To Treat Depression Like A Chronic Illness

Shfali Luthra
NPR.org
Originally published March 7, 2016

Depression prompts people to make about 8 million doctors' appointments a year, and more than half are with primary care physicians. A study suggests those doctors often fall short in treating depression because of insurance issues, time constraints and other factors.

More often than not, primary care doctors fail to teach patients how to manage their care and don't follow up to see how they're doing, according to the study, which was published Monday in Health Affairs. Those are considered effective tactics for treating chronic illnesses.

"The approach to depression should be like that of other chronic diseases," said Dr. Harold Pincus, vice chair of psychiatry at Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons and one of the study's co-authors. But "by and large, primary care practices don't have the infrastructure or haven't chosen to implement those practices for depression."

Most people with depression seek help from their primary care doctors, the study notes. That can be because patients often face shortages and limitations of access to specialty mental health care, including lack of insurance coverage, the authors write. Plus there's stigma: Patients sometimes feel nervous or ashamed to see a mental health specialist, according to the authors.

The article is here.

The Efficacy of Empathy Training: A Meta-Analysis of Randomized Controlled Trials

By Emily van Berkhout and John M. Malouff
Journal of Counseling Psychology, Jul 20 , 2015

Abstract

High levels of empathy are associated with healthy relationships and prosocial behavior; in health professionals, high levels of empathy are associated with better therapeutic outcomes. To determine whether empathy can be taught, researchers have evaluated empathy training programs. After excluding 1 outlier study that showed a very large effect with few participants, the meta-analysis included 18 randomized controlled trials of empathy training with a total of 1,018 participants. The findings suggest that empathy training programs are effective overall, with a medium effect (g = 0.63), adjusted to 0.51 after trim-and-fill evaluation for estimated publication bias. Moderator analyses indicated that 4 factors were statistically significantly associated with higher effect sizes: (a) training health professionals and university students rather than other types of individuals, (b) compensating trainees for their participation, (c) using empathy measures that focus exclusively on assessing understanding the emotions of others, feeling those emotions, or commenting accurately on the emotions, and (d) using objective measures rather than self-report measures. Number of hours of training and time between preintervention assessment and postintervention assessment were not statistically significantly associated with effect size, with 6 months the longest time period for assessment. The findings indicate that (a) empathy training tends to be effective and (b) experimental research is warranted on the impact of different types of trainees, training conditions, and types of assessment.

The entire article is here.

Doctors Behaving Badly

By Roni Caryn Rabin
The New York Times - Well
Originally published

Here is an excerpt:

Nancy Berlinger, a scholar at The Hastings Center who writes about ethical challenges in health care as well as issues of power between junior and senior clinicians, disagrees. “Doctors must be respectful even if a patient is sedated,” she said. And in these cases, she said, the supervising physicians also did harm to the medical students they were responsible for training and mentoring.

“This is the worst thing a role model can do: to suggest that wrong behavior is acceptable, to nudge junior people to be callous and to misuse power,” Dr. Berlinger said. In both cases, the senior doctors made a trainee student complicit in their abuse and “made them feel dirty at an early stage of their careers.”

The entire article is here.

Schools told to end religious instruction and teach morality instead

By Richard Garner
The Independent
Originally published June 15, 2015

Religious instruction should be banned from schools and be the preserve of Sunday schools, madrassas or the home, according to proposals by the former Education Secretary Charles Clarke for a radical overhaul of religious education and the way faith schools operate.

Legislation compelling schools to hold a daily act of “predominantly Christian” worship in assemblies should also be scrapped, the Labour former frontbencher argues in a report jointly compiled with the religious education expert Professor Linda Woodhead, from Lancaster University.

In recommendations that will be studied keenly by faith and schooling experts, they argue that the emphasis should shift away from merely religious education, with pupils being taught religious and moral education instead.

The entire article is here.