Today, I just finished a  second review of a paper that I had rejected previously but which the other reviewers had accepted with major revisions. My major concern was that I fundamentally disagreed with the authors approach to interpreting the data. In chemical engineering, it is very common to present some experimental work and develop a mathematical model to ‘explain’ the data. My biologist colleagues sometimes refer to this as using mathematics to tell you what you already know! Maybe they’re right. Inevitably it is concluded that the model fits the data ‘well’!

The problem (for me) with this paper was that the model did fit the data reasonably well but I felt it was fundamentally misguided. Without going into too much detail, the authors were using suspension theory on what I consider to be solutions. While their model seemed to work, I think I can come up with a much simpler and elegant explanation for the data. Yet, without doing further experiments (of a different kind) we do not know, for sure, who is right. In the end, I decided I had no real ‘right’ to reject the paper and let it through – the second draft was much better all round anyway and it might serve as a focal point for future discussion.

This got me thinking about the huge number of publications out in Journal World. The vast majority of them seem to be ‘bitty’ in nature, providing plausible  ‘explanations’ for limited amounts of data. A result of the ‘publish or perish’ culture I suppose.  In the case of the paper I reviewed, the authors really needed to go back to the lab and devise a whole new set of experiments that would provide additional, independent, evidence for their model. The fact that  their mathematical model seemed to fit the data did not mean that it represented ‘truth’.

So what about the really important, fundamental sciences such as particle physics? Does our ability to explain the data in the LHC, for example, mean that we really understand nature? What the hell is an electron anyway?

This is something that I (and colleagues) have noticed before – a bimodal sort of distribution. Now, I’ve taught for over 20 years so I don’t think that I (and the three other colleagues involved) are particularly bad at setting exams. Here’s what I think is going on….

Many students who attend third level simply do not engage and are destined to do badly regardless of the effort we put in. At the same time, the mathematical ability of the population has declined to a level where students who, in the past, could do ok, are now struggling to cope, despite their best efforts. Finally, it has become easier for the intelligent, committed student to get very high marks – a sort of ‘dumbing down’ I suppose. In effect, the 60s of yesterday are the 70+ marks of today. The result of all this is that the ‘middle’ is disappearing.

I wonder if anyone else has noticed this type of distribution?

PS I’ll upload the actual distribution when I return to this topic at the end of the academic year when all results are finalised and there are no issues with confidentiality etc.

In a field like engineering, there are lots and lots of problems that are ideal for an 18 – 24 month project and I can immediately think of half a dozen of good masters projects in my own area of research. (I’d imagine that this is not true of all fields where there might be  a very large learning curve). Personally I found completing a masters a huge learning experience both in terms of learning how to think independently but also in terms of writing a thesis and writing for a journal.  When I started my PhD, I was much more capable and confident than a raw graduate. In fact, I think industry generally would benefit greatly from having people who have done masters by research and I’m not sure whether there is a huge amount to be gained (for industry) by looking for people with PhDs.

A lot of research these days is done in large groups, often in centres of excellence where the students seem to be very closely supervised by a postdoc and it seems to me that this is the perfect environment for doing masters projects. I sometimes wonder if it is always the best environment for doing a PhD where the student should technically take ownership of the project but, at the same time, the group or centre as a whole might have to meet specific targets. I don’t know – I’m not an expert on these things by any means.

Anyway, what sparked these thoughts was the fact that I have been involved in various examining roles in a number of PhD theses recently and I have to say, I have had some concerns. It seemed to me that all the PhDs I examined tried to cover a lot of ground but in an often quite superficial way. It almost seemed that the projects were too ambitious and needed to focus a little better on fewer aspects of the problem in much greater depth. I thought that some chapters were simply left with too many unanswered questions before moving on to the next one. Perhaps it was because of the way the project was funded but there was a sense of ‘where’s the PhD stuff?’. It was almost like the thesis was a few masters-like projects stuck together.

Sadly, I don’t think there’s a solution to this. The rise of the taught masters which can be completed in a calendar year means that the masters by research will continue to disappear.

One thing that I have noticed is that over the years,  the distribution of marks in my modules is becoming increasingly bimodal. There is a peak in the high mark region (>7o) and a much bigger peak in the pass/fail region. The middle seems to be disappearing. I don’t think it’s the fact that my questions are mathematical. The old cliche of a mathematical question being ‘right or wrong’ is way too simplistic. My questions are usually multipart with parts of varying difficulty and anyway there are degrees of ‘rightness’ and ‘wrongness’.  I often see, for example, solutions where the student stumbles on the right answer – this won’t get full marks like a well structured answer would.

So what’s going on? First, I have to admit that all my teaching has been on one degree program with moderate CAO entry requirements (mainly in the range 365-385 over the last decade but around 420 for our current first years) so my perspective is limited.

Anyway, I think that two things have happened. First, I believe we’ve changed our program, both in terms of its content and how we teach it, so that it is easier for good students to get high marks. This is not necessarily ‘dumbing down’ in my opinion, a subject I might return to on another day. Second, I think students are not working hard enough. This ranges from students who are not engaging at all and simply wasting their time to students who  don’t seem to appreciate the level of committment that is required to complete an honours degree. They might think they are studying hard but it is clearly nowhere near hard enough.

Or perhaps their basic skills in mathematics are so poor that they simply can’t penetrate the subject – like trying to make a judgement about certain characters in a novel  writtten  in a language that you don’t really understand.

Anyway, it’s all over for another few months and I can get back to  writing my  textbook  – a tale for another day perhaps.

If one looks at this issue via the lens of the nature versus nurture debate,  the explanation for the science deficit in the population is one based purely on nurture. But what if human beings, on average, are inherently, i.e.  genetically, programmed not to think scientifically? That might seem like a silly thing to say given the technological nature of our world. But, if you think about it, many of the technological advances  that are all around us really are the result of the vision of quite small numbers of people: think of Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, the Google guys.

Consider the notion that religion has an evolutionary origin (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_psychology_of_religion). Now,  many people can split their personality into their religious self and their rational, or scientific, selves. But I suspect that many scientists cannot and I would also suspect that the percentage of agnostics/atheists amongst scientists is much higher than it is in the general population. Maybe, therefore, being inherently ‘scientific’ makes one pre-disposed to agnosticism and thus you lose the evolutionary advantage of being religious. There is also some evidence that religious people are happier than non-religious people. It is also well-known that people with a strong bent towards mathematics are more likely to have personalities on the autistic spectrum. In short, maybe nature has conspired against science!

The continued ‘belief’ in pseudoscience is interesting but I think it ties in with what I’ve said above. If one thinks of religion in the broad sense, believing in pseudoscience is not much different from religion – it’s a belief in the mysterious, the magical. It is why otherwise sensible people can believe in something like homeopathy.

Having taught for 25 years on a degree program containing a mix of biology and engineering, I’m now convinced that the nature side of this discussion is a significant issue. No matter how hard I try, I know that most of my students will never really be interested in my subjects – I’m an engineer. They are all interested in biology, however, and indeed biology is a very popular subject amongst school leavers. Why is this? – it’s science after all. I think it’s because biology is not just a science, it’s ultimately about us  and who we are.  I think a similar thing arises with really fundamental sciences like theoretical physics and astrophysics. Even people who have very little interest in science are interested in issues related to the basic structure and origins of the universe.  Reading about the Higgs and the Big Bang is essentially  a religious quest.

If the politicians are going to do this,  shouldn’t they  just go the full hog and make it a University. The costs will be huge though and would the University be any good? Or worse still, will it be absolutely crap?  Will kids who get high points want to go there instead of  Dublin to do Law or Medicine or, most importantly, Science  and Engineering. I doubt it, except for purely financial reasons of course.

The battle with the staff will be fascinating. Will they just give up their summer holidays. Many IT staff are happy to have the high teaching loads for this very benefit. At the very least they’ll want compensation. Surely that can’t happen given the financial crisis? What about the ‘bar’ on the lecturer scale. I suspect that no staff would have a pay reduction so suddenly there would be a bunch of people in the University system who are being paid far  higher salaries than equivalent people in the existing colleges. Doesn’t seem fair but this country rarely is. Furthermore, despite the scepticism of many, research is a key component of a University.  The Croke Park agreement stipulates explicitly that staff are expected to engage in research. What sort of research will the large numbers of research-inactive staff do? All interesting problems that will, of course, be fudged if this happens.

One thing that interests me is that there is a virtual certainty that changing the status of WIT and ITCarlow will be a boon for the economy in the South East. I wonder is there a precedent for this?

Of course, in time, such a University could become excellent. There are loads of brilliant post docs out there who would love a permanent academic job but the costs……

I think that at a very deep level there is something inherently snobbish about the Irish. (I’m not sure if snobbish is the right word – maybe it’s an inferiority complex or our colonial past or something) No matter how good an institution is, I think there is an instinctive drive to want the status of being a traditional University. (I think that happened to an extent to DCU – I’m not sure what our distinctive features  are these days. We do lots of labs for sure.) It’s a bit like the way kids want to go in to the old professions no matter how poor the job prospects or uninteresting the job.

Interesting times.

* When DCU was NIHE, a colleague of mine once got a letter addressed to the Northern Ireland Housing Executive. NIHE was a silly name to be sure.

Repeatedly and throughout my career, our school has revisited the whole idea of ‘integrating engineering with biology’ – not the other way around you will notice! To be honest, this tends to irritate me considerably. As a classically trained chemical engineer, I have tried to adapt what I teach, and how I assess it,  to make it relevant to bioprocessing. Indeed, most of my research in membrane technology focuses on biological systems. However, while I have no doubt that my biology colleagues are adapting their notes for a biotechnology program, I still don’t see any effort by them to make their material really quantitative. Without trawling through all the past papers, I’m pretty sure that a quantitative question, even a simple analysis of enzyme kinetic data, has never, or very rarely, been asked – except in ‘engineering’ papers.  The lack of a quantitative approach by the biologists creates a split in the students’ mind which tells them  ‘biology=essays’, ‘engineering=maths’.

I wonder is anyone out there teaching a biological subject in a reasonably quantitative way and do you ask ‘sums‘ in your exams?

The Critical Thinking Deficit – A Personal View

It is commonplace these days for industry leaders, academics, bloggers and commentators to bemoan the fact that the current generation of students is unable to think critically. The argument goes that previous generations had this ability but that somewhere along the line our teaching methods, and the material we teach, have become obsolete and inappropriate for the complexities of the modern information age. There is a now a growing clamour for the critical thinking deficit to be addressed. But, how do we instil in our students the ability to think critically? There is a vast literature now on critical thinking and a quick perusal in amazon.com will reveal huge numbers of textbooks and self-help books devoted to thinking and problem solving. Typically these books contain examples of problems solved by the particular strategies being promoted. Many of these problems, however, tend to be puzzles rather than real world problems – the sort of puzzle one encounters in standardised tests such as those used for entry to college in the U.S. But what of real world problems?

I believe an ability to solve challenging, real world problems is very much dependent on having deep knowledge (i.e. knowledge coupled with understanding), including knowledge of methods, relevant to the problem at hand. Of course, each field of study will have particular problem solving strategies that are appropriate to that field. In chemical engineering, we often encourage our students to start each problem by drawing a line diagram of the process. However, without a deep knowledge of mass and energy balances, the student will make no further progress.

I have taught in DCU for many years and in that time I have watched as many of my students advanced to study at PhD level. It is interesting to observe how raw undergraduates develop into successful scientists for whom critical thinking and problem solving is essential and routine. The explanation of most people would be that learning how to think is a key part of PhD training and it is this that produces the competent scientist. To a significant degree, this is true because a student simply must think critically to complete a PhD thesis. However, in the apprenticeship model of PhD education, critical thinking is rarely, if ever, taught formally. So how do these skills develop? I believe it is because the student has been immersed in the thesis topic and acquired a broad and deep knowledge which makes creative thinking and problem solving in this topic instinctive and a natural way of working. They are no longer the raw undergraduate with a superficial knowledge of a lot of different subjects. The novice has become an expert. Of course some of the skills they have acquired will translate to other fields and in time they may become experts in completely different areas but that will take time because they will have to acquire the necessary knowledge. My point, once again, is that critical thinking and deep knowledge are inextricably linked.

Going back to the start of this article, yes, I too believe that the current generation of students lacks critical thinking skills. The reasons for this are twofold. Firstly, Second and Third Level students generally do not have to think critically and are simply unaccustomed to thinking for themselves. This is our fault. Secondly, their knowledge is superficial making critical thinking almost impossible. Their knowledge is superficial partly because of the way we teach but also because students’ work and study habits are inadequate.

So, what should we do? What we should not do, in my opinion, is try to devise generic problem solving or creative thinking modules. Nor should we ‘water down’ content in an effort to make the learning process more attractive. Rather, we need to address the two causes mentioned above.

We can incentivise critically thinking by making examinations less predictable and more imaginative. These changes need to be done at both Second and Third Level. Making the Leaving Certificate examination less predictable and more imaginative will be difficult. Unpredictability is generally seen as being unfair by students, their parents and the whole ‘industry’ surrounding the examination. A change in mindset by many will be required. Furthermore, imaginative examinations will probably require less restrictive marking schemes, something that will naturally worry many people who will have concerns regarding consistency and fairness of marking. Making the appropriate changes at Third Level should not be a problem given that we have such control over what we teach, how we teach it and how we examine it.

So, what about the role of teaching itself? There is no doubt, in my view, that there is a problem in the teaching of fundamentals at both Second and Third Level. For example, students arrive in University with extremely poor writing and mathematical skills. It would appear that poor writing is being accepted at Second Level and students seem to be totally unaware of their weaknesses in this area. The poor standard of very basic mathematics has been discussed ad nauseam in the media and elsewhere. My view is that it is not the teacher’s fault per se but is indicative of a system dominated by predictable exams that make‘teaching to the exam’ inevitable. Regardless of the reasons for these basic deficits, we need, at Third Level, to recognise them as a fact of life and deal with them. At the very least, a radical overhaul of the first year experience is needed.

Finally, what of the students and their work and study habits? This is the proverbial elephant in the room. Over the last decade or so I have been lucky to teach quite a few mature students. They usually studied hard and performed well. In chatting to one particularly successful student, it was clear that he was genuinely shocked by an apparent lack of commitment shown by the current crop of students. Whether the problem is really a lack of hard work or an inability to work smartly is not clear at present. For example, one problem that I continually come across is the lack of attention to detail in students’ written assignments. The students have obviously put a lot of hard graft into their submission but they seem unable to stand back and look at it objectively. Maybe this is a natural consequence of the age we live in but whatever its causes it needs to be confronted.

One of my worries about the future of education in Ireland is that we will fail to recognise the crucial role that deep knowledge plays in developing effective thinkers. I fear that we will be drawn into devising un-validated approaches to teaching that may well be fun to teach and interesting, in a fleeting way, for the students, but will ultimately fail in their objectives. I believe that we need to go back to basics and ensure that all students have deep knowledge in their chosen subjects. Furthermore, we need to incentivise critical thinking. If we can do both of these things, the graduates of the future will be exactly the sort of people this society needs.

One thing that is interesting is that ‘you are expected to promote and engage in the development of research across disciplines as well as your  area of research’. I’m not sure why that is in a contract of employment. In my view the best interdisciplinary research arises organically when people from different disciplines genuinely need each other’s expertise. I don’t think forcing people together leads to good science. It’s the ‘interdisciplinary is good’ philosophy I suppose. Sure, research at the interfaces is important, but so is research smack in the middle of one’s own discipline.

A few years ago, the BBC did an excellent program where a successful businessman (Gerry Robinson was his name I think, an Irish guy) who simply went into hospitals and talked to people at the coal face (not administrators and middle-managers) to see what could be done to eliminate bottlenecks. It led to significant improvements in throughputs without compromising quality. Basically, it was a bottom-up approach.

We need to do a lot more of this in all areas of the Public Sector, especially Health and Education. Too often, strategy groups are set up (containing senior managers in the 50+ age group) when really what we should be doing is talking to the people actually doing the work!