on Intuition versus Data - with John Finch

A big thank you goes out to John Finch from Manitoba Education for taking the time  from napping  out of his schedule to speak to us last Tuesday.

@ Brandon University working with pre-service teachers today with @miken_bu
— John Finch (@jfinch) January 29, 2013

A wealth of information, John was able to touch on subjects covering everything from the newly-written copyright laws to professional guidelines to cyber-bullying. For me, one of the big take-aways from this talk was the amount of decisions made by educators and administrators based on intuition rather than actual data. 

While cyber-bullying has become a hot button issue that has dominated media coverage and led to real world repercussions for students across Canada, student surveys suggest that bullying via technology is actually the least frequent form of abuse. Similarly, a look at the data from a Winnipeg school division with an EAL student population approaching 70% revealed that the greatest academic concerns weren't actually literacy, but numeracy. What this highlights to me is a common phenomena across professional services in the public sector: where plans of actions and decisions are demanded to be made, but are so often done based on individual case studies, personal experience and intuition. For example, the court systems have long relied upon psychiatric evaluations and psychological measures to predict the likelihood of (sexual) offender recidivism*. However, longitudinal and meta-studies have repeatedly shown the ability of these professionals to predict whether one person will reoffend after serving their sentence to be close to 50%.

In other words: flip a coin.

As people, we are horrible at making these kind of objective judgements and suffer the continual bias of believing that we are capable of doing so, simply because we consider ourselves professionals. Don't get me wrong - I am not saying we shouldn't be the ones creating policy - educators are after all the ones on the front lines. However, the time of has come where the tools exist to gather data and make informed, objective decisions that simply weren't possible a generation ago. As educators, we are in the most favorable position to know what to do with that information

Remember, it's not what you know - it's what you do with it.

*Edit: I was referencing material from my psych undergrad, but couldn't find the source material when I wrote up this post. A number of psychometric tests have been introduced in the past two decades that have significantly increased the ability to predict non-sexual offender behaviour, however predicting sexual offense recidivism remains shaky. Gendreau et al. out of the University of New Brunswick conducted a massive meta-study that highlights these points: A META-ANALYSIS OF THE PREDICTORS OF ADULT OFFENDER RECIDIVISM: WHAT WORKS