Pop Science Loses Again

In nearly 40 years of teaching, I have been assaulted many times with the newest fad. It has been especially painful to see math teachers and supervisors who have not a clue about how real science works. They seem to follow one basic premise when evaluating new tools and techniques: "Well, that sounds good - I'm sure it works." And off we would go on another wild goose chase to improve schools. Somehow, we never caught on to the fact that there is only one way to improve schools: better teaching. And becoming a better teacher is a time-intensive individual process that takes years. 

New Yorker Magazine has an article this month entitled "GroupThink" that debunks one of the biggest fads of the late twentieth century: brainstorming. Brainstorming was a technique propounded by Alex Osborne, an advertising executive at BBDO, a long-time New York agency (they did commercials for Lucky Strike cigarettes on the Jack Benny Radio Show in the 1940's) that has been cited numerous times for its creative work in advertising. Osborne's book Your Creative Power included a chapter on organizing for creativity which introduced the idea of brainstorming. From the New Yorker:   

The most important of these, Osborn said—the thing that distinguishes brainstorming from other types of group activity—was the absence of criticism and negative feedback. If people were worried that their ideas might be ridiculed by the group, the process would fail. “Creativity is so delicate a flower that praise tends to make it bloom while discouragement often nips it in the bud,” he wrote. “Forget quality; aim now to get a quantity of answers. When you’re through, your sheet of paper may be so full of ridiculous nonsense that you’ll be disgusted. Never mind. You’re loosening up your unfettered imagination—making your mind deliver.”   

That makes a lot of sense, doesn't it. Everybody likes to get lots of positive feedback. Unfortunately it doesn't work. In 1958, a team at Yale University had 48 students broken up into groups and given a set of creative puzzles. The control group of 48 students were given the same puzzles, but told to work independently. The results?  

The solo students came up with roughly twice as many solutions as the brainstorming groups, and a panel of judges deemed their solutions more “feasible” and “effective.” Brainstorming didn’t unleash the potential of the group, but rather made each individual less creative.   

In fact according to a Wikipedia:

Research from Michael Diehl and Wolfgang Stroebe (in 1987) demonstrated that groups brainstorming together produce fewer ideas than individuals working separately. Their conclusions were based on a review of 22 other studies, 18 of which corroborated their findings.  

A 2003 research study in San Francisco working with 265 female undergraduates came up with similar results, but specifically showed that the best way to get creativity going in work groups is to remove the rule against negative feedback. As the study's author Charlan Nemeth puts it, “While the instruction ‘Do not criticize’ is often cited as the important instruction in brainstorming, this appears to be a counterproductive strategy. Our findings show that debate and criticism do not inhibit ideas but, rather, stimulate them relative to every other condition.”  

So another "right answer" falls by the wayside, the victim of research and the scientific method. All too often we want to jump on the latest bandwagon when we would be best served by waiting to see what really works. My friend and education colleague John said it best, "We're ahead by being behind."