The Rise of Credentialism

It seems ironic to pair the Death of Expertise with the Rise of Credentialism. But interestingly as the public’s trust in experts is falling, the search for credentials – that perhaps signal expertise – is ballooning. There is plenty of punditry as to why this is happening. (Yes, everyone is an “expert” when it comes to airing one’s opinions!) The internet is of course blamed on the one hand, while at the same time entrepreneurial folks are moving in to colonize the space of digital credentialism. The prophets of Disruption warn us that old-school credentials will give way to new credentials in the new economy. Which new credentials will triumph is unclear.

In the meantime old-school credentials seem to count for less. Where previously a high school diploma might suffice, the college diploma is touted (by universities, of course) as the gateway to jobs and upward mobility. Today’s job market “system” has certainly made it much more difficult for those without some college education. Even an Associate’s Degree is counting for less as Bachelor’s Degree holders proliferate. The piece of paper that is your diploma gets your foot in the door. But why? What does the diploma signify? Does it say something about your ability to be employed in a particular area? Or is it a proxy for some less defined “skill” set employers value? Or perhaps a proxy for socialized standing in society?

My B.A. in Chemistry is from a small selective liberal arts college. While it’s not one of the more famous names, it is well-known in academic circles – and likely helped me significantly when I applied to graduate school. The degree signifies, hopefully, that I have some knowledge of chemistry – or at least I had to take a bunch of chemistry classes to successfully complete a major. My transcript of mostly A’s and B’s might signal that I was at least good-to-excellent at the subject matter (or that I was successful at taking exams testing my knowledge). My degree is certified by the American Chemical Society, which signifies that I completed the requirements of an accrediting body in my discipline.

My Ph.D. in Chemistry indicates, somewhat nebulously, that I was successful at completing original research in my field – at least in a narrow sub-discipline of chemistry. Outside of academia, I’m not sure who cares about what exactly I did, given that my graduate studies were at an “elite” institution. This, perhaps more than anything else, gets my foot in the door in many ways. But it’s a proxy of sorts. I might have been mediocre in my studies, but hardly anyone would bother to check. No one (outside of academia) bothers about my Bachelor’s degree either. And there may come a time when the job market is so saturated with Bachelor’s degree-holding applicants that a graduate degree becomes the new entry-level credential. The proliferation of new Masters (and some doctoral) programs in the last ten years is astounding – many of which can be completed online. A Masters in CyberSecurity is the new hot diploma. And yes, my institution offers one too.

Chemistry and CyberSecurity conjure in one’s mind the idea of a tangible skill set that applies to particular areas – the chemical and information-technology industries. Degrees attached to a commonly-known profession – medicine, engineering, law, accounting – have more obvious entryways into the job market, and by presumption upward mobility. But what about other “liberal arts” subjects? Proponents of a liberal arts education (and I would be one of them) can rehearse the spiel about critical thinking, writing and communicative skills, and adaptability to jobs of the future. I’m not going to do so in this blog post. Instead, I want to ponder a darker topic: Is the “industry” of higher education one of the main “drivers” for the Rise of Credentialism?

As I was recently thinking about Arms Races in higher education, I decided to re-read an older article (i.e. from 15 years ago) titled “Credential Inflation and the Rise of Universities”. The author, Randall Collins, a sociologist and professor tackles this topic head-on. (The article can be found in The Future of the City of Intellect: The Changing American University.) Here’s the abstract:

“Most problems of the contemporary university are ultimately connected to the process of credential inflation. The inflation of educational credentials that drove university expansion throughout the 20th century shaped the internal structure of universities as well, and thus the conditions of academic work. We will need this broader viewpoint in order to capture the main dynamics which have driven the proliferation of academic disciplines, as well as their internal differentiation into specialties and their compulsion to continuous research. If the fundamental versus applied character of the disciplines are at issue in today’s university, as well as the growing distance between a highly paid elite of noted researchers and a professorial underclass of temporary lecturers, the causes are in the economic strains of a system whose mass production of educational credentials for employment has become extremely expensive.”

Collins emphasizes the main point that credential inflation feeds on itself. The main dynamic is that “a given level of education at one time gave access to elite jobs. As educational attainment has expanded, the social distinctiveness of that degree and its value on the occupational marketplace has declined; this in turn has expanded demand for still higher levels of education.” Collins traces the history of this expansion through its various cycles. He also argues that the evidence points to credential inflation being mainly driven by the supply side. Essentially the U.S. educational system grows to flood the market for whatever level of labor is needed. This is certainly true in my profession as a college professor, as we see the adjuntification of faculty continuing apace. Even in the high-tech world, much that is cutting-edge is learned on the job. While the employer “demand” side of the equation makes the news, Collins argues that its contribution is small compared to the supply side.

Fifteen years ago, Collins predicted that “with future computerization and automation… routine middle class jobs will disappear (just as skilled and semi-skilled manual jobs have greatly diminished) leaving an even bigger gap between a small technical/managerial/financial elite and everyone else.” This is certainly the case today, and will likely accelerate as we are trapped in a technological system. To deal with the displaced labor force, higher education and credentials step in, serving as a “hidden welfare system” in the form of work-study arrangements, student loans, etc. “But the warehousing also keeps up the supply of education credentials, reinforcing the first process”, Collins argues.

What’s worse is that as folks with higher credentials enter the workforce, especially in the high-tech economy, they tend “to redefine their jobs and to eliminate non-[similarly]-credentialed jobs around them.” Thus, the vicious cycle continues. Reinforcing the ideology of education isn’t just politically favorable, with its overtones of democratic equal opportunity, it helps a cadre of professors to attain the “sponsorship that allows those of us who are interested in so doing to concern ourselves with the production of knowledge and the enjoyment of high culture. Credential inflation is the dirty secret of modern education; if everyone admitted it publically… it would force us to face head on the issue of class inequality and indeed growing class inequality.” The last several years have certainly brought such discussions to the forefront – although it is muddled, and full of opined punditry. Collins goes into detail in his area of expertise as a sociologist. (If you’re interested, I recommend reading the article in full.)

It’s a sobering thought that tenure-line professors like myself are partly to blame for the present situation. Collins makes a case that research-driven sub-specialization is a contributing factor. (I’ve previously blogged about how sub-specialization affects curricular choices, thereby shaping the classes students take in college.) Honestly, I’m not sure what to do about it. The ecosystem of education, jobs, and dreams of a better life, is a gargantuan interlocked beast. Sometimes I feel like a cog in the machine, stuck in the system.

The culture of Assessment has led to the slicing up of acquired knowledge and skills. Not surprisingly, this has led to a push for micro-credentials and digital badges to signal some acquired skill. Even the Boy Scouts, the organization of old-school badging, have digital badges. Here’s the “digital citizen staged activity badge” and its requirements.

I am not a fan of digital badging and micro-credentials. My pessimistic view is that one of the reasons for their proliferation is to make the job easier for Human Resource bots to weed out job applicants. This will lead to humans attempting to “game” the system, thus proliferating next-generation credentialism, and the vicious cycle continues. The proponents of digital micro-credentials will tout its democratic equal opportunity values, but I’m inclined to agree with Collins that the larger effect will be to further increase the gap between the haves and have-nots. Yes, there will be a handful of anecdotal rags-to-riches stories that illustrate the possibility of upward mobility with the new world of digital access and opportunity. Fanning the flames of hope is a time-worn tactic of profiteers. That’s why we still have pyramid schemes in various guises.

I’m reminded that it is crucially important for academics not to be ensconced in their ivory towers. In The Death of Expertise, Tom Nichols exemplifies one route in playing his role as a public intellectual. My professorial life has mainly been about teaching and training students to have a love of chemistry and hopefully a love of lifetime learning. But perhaps should I be doing more beyond the handfuls of students that I personally encounter.

The Death of Expertise

In The Death of Expertise, Tom Nichols, an expert in the areas of policy and international affairs, plays his role as a public intellectual. His goal is to inform his readers about “the campaign against established knowledge and why it matters” – the subtitle of his book. He discusses various factors that have led to distrust between the average non-expert public citizen and experts (pejoratively now called elitist”). With his book, Nichols hopes to bridge the gap and avert the death spiral into a future featuring chaotic demagoguery or manipulative technocracy. One of the solutions he calls for in his book is for experts to step up to the role of public intellectual.

The reasons for the widening gulf between experts and non-experts are myriad. I recommend reading the book in full to understand Nichols’ arguments for each contributing factor. While the Internet plays its role in a chapter titled “Let me Google that for you: How unlimited information is making us dumber”, higher education, journalism, experts themselves, the entertainment industry, all play their part. The Dunning-Kruger effect features prominently: The less knowledgeable tend to overestimate their competence and cognitive ability. My experience as a teacher is that the weakest students have the least sense of where they’re at in terms of understanding chemistry. On the other hand, a little knowledge can also be a dangerous thing that leads to over-confidence in one’s abilities. (I previously discussed a study gauging the Easiness Effect.) I recall a conversation a while back with a colleague in the social sciences. I had opined that teaching students who didn’t know anything about chemistry was a challenge in introductory courses. My colleague said it was even more challenging in the social sciences because the students think they know something and have strong opinions about it.

Nichols’ expertise is in political affairs, thus, many of his examples are drawn from that realm. One vignette that stands out: Nichols describes the Q&A following a public lecture where an undergraduate challenged the speaker, both holding to their views in what seems like professional discourse. But what happens at the end is more interesting. The student shrugs and says, “Well, your guess is as good as mine.” At that point, the speaker disagrees and says “No, no, no. My guesses are much, much better than yours.” Nichols thinks that the speaker might have been trying to teach the student something, i.e., “that respecting a person’s opinion does not mean granting equal respect to that person’s knowledge.” Experts aren’t always right, but they’re much more likely (probability comes into play here) to be right than the non-expert. We will return to this point momentarily.

This is, in fact, how Nichols defines expertise. “Experts are the people who know considerably more on a subject than the rest of us… this does not mean that experts know all there is to know… Rather, it means that experts in [their] given subject are, by their nature, a minority whose views are more likely to be… correct or accurate – than anyone else’s.” Distinguishing expertise can be trickier than it looks, and Nichols spends quite a bit of time in Chapter 1 discussing the signs and pitfalls. He lists “education, training, practice, experience, and acknowledgement by others, [as] a rough guide” to discerning expertise. The romanticized Good Will Hunting type savant is remarkably rare.

As a chemistry professor, I have expertise in two main areas: Chemistry and Teaching Chemistry. I have credentials that indicate I am knowledgeable and experience in Chemistry, although my real area of expertise as a practicing research is necessarily narrow. You don’t become an expert in a field without going in deep and narrow. Through experience and sheer practice, I have become an expert in teaching chemistry at the undergraduate level. (The Ph.D. as a credential does not indicate any expertise in teaching.) But one of the important things about continuing to be an expert is that you have to keep practicing your expertise. I keep learning more chemistry in my reading and research, and I continue to find ways to improve my teaching. I think one of the key goals of higher education is to learn how to continue learning, and I hope my students get a glimpse of this while they are in college.

But experts can be wrong. And when they are wrong, the consequences can be significant. As Dumbledore says in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, “I make mistakes like the next man. In fact, being – forgive me – rather cleverer than most men, my mistakes tend to be correspondingly huger.” The general public loves to gobble up such stories, and the media responds in kind. Nichols traces the denigration of expertise from talk radio to cable news to the world wide web where punditry of every stripe can be found. The Dunning-Kruger effect combined with the ability to tune out everything but one’s own echo chamber exacerbates the problem exponentially. (Nichols also explains why crowdsourcing approaches have limited applicability to a range of problems, in case you were wondering.)

Linus Pauling, chemist-physicist par excellence, gets a mention in Nichols’ book as a cautionary tale. Nobel prize winner in chemistry becomes Vitamin C quack. I’m particularly sensitive to this example because Chemical Bonding is my expertise and Pauling is one of the giants in the field. Interestingly, part of why Valency forms a significant part in introductory chemistry textbooks at the high school and college level, is because Pauling was a master at communicating his ideas clearly and practically. Mulliken, on the other hand... well that’s another story. (If you’re interested in such details I recommend the book Neither Physics nor Chemistry.)

Why do such things happen? Nichols writes: “Cross-expertise violations happen for a number of reasons, from innocent error to intellectual vanity. Sometimes, however, the motivation is as simple as the opportunity provided by fame. Entertainers are the worst offenders here. Their celebrity affords them easy access to issues and controversies, and to actual experts or policymakers who will work with them because of the natural proclivity to answer the phone when someone famous calls.” (Nichols also discusses whether an expert is a fox or a hedgehog and the dangers of making predictions, with or without expertise.)

It’s hard for anyone to say “I don’t know”, but this might be harder for experts because of “previous successes and achievements [as] evidence of their superior knowledge”. I’ve had to train myself to say “I don’t know” when I get the occasional student question that I don’t actually know the answer to, even though I feel tempted to “wing it” in front of the class. Worse, I catch myself making authoritative-sounding pronouncements in areas that I have no expertise in. Colleagues observing my classroom say that I have an authoritative teaching-style. (They mean it in a good way, having to do with clarity and directness in my approach and how I project my voice when making certain points.) The most common comment on my course evaluations from students is that I am “knowledgeable”, partly as a result of this. I mentioned this to my spouse a number of years ago and we now have a tacit agreement that when she notices me doing this, she says: “You said that very confidently.” It’s a good check for me, and I’ve learned to humbly backtrack and clarify my speculative statements.

Nichols closes his book with a discussion of the meaning of democracy and how it plays out in a republic, the political “system” of the United States. “[Disturbingly] citizens of the Western democracies, and Americans in particular, no longer understand the concept of democracy itself. This, perhaps more than anything, has corroded the relationship between experts and citizens… Citizens no longer understand democracy to mean a condition of political equality, in which one person gets one vote, and every individual is no more and no less equal in the eyes of the law. Rather [they] now think of democracy as a state of actual equality [in talent and intelligence], in which every opinion is as good as any other on almost any subject under the sun.”

Now everyone’s an expert or nobody’s an expert. What’s the difference?

I close with a vignette mentioned by Nichols from that fount of wisdom, National Lampoon’s Animal House. The antics of the Delta fraternity brothers have earned the wrath of Dean Wormer who has organized a hearing to revoke their charter. Some of the Deltas are worried and the following exchange takes place at a house meeting. (Text quoted from Rotten Tomatoes.)

Robert Hoover: Don’t screw around, they’re serious this time!

Eric "Otter" Stratton: Take it easy, I'm pre-law.

Donald "Boon" Schoenstein: I thought you were pre-med.

Eric "Otter" Stratton: What's the difference?

Self-Efficacy and Student Engagement

A current trend in education is to “engage students in interesting real-world issues”. Project-Based Learning, Problem-Based Learning, Learning Communities (structured around a theme), Integrated Learning are enjoying their moment on the stage. The simple idea, at least in the world of educational punditry, is that if you get Motivation right, Learning will follow. Real life is of course more complex and rarely just due to a single issue.

I don’t think there is anything wrong with engaging students by providing a thematic approach that might be of personal interest to students. (I’ve done a Potions theme and a New Elements theme recently.) A student who is interested in something is likely to desire learning more, and willing to work at it. The problem is when this approach takes center stage, and leads to poorer learning outcomes. “Hmmm, that didn’t work as well as we anticipated. Let’s try a different theme or approach the theme in a different way.” I’ve heard this before. If it’s an instructor talking about a particular course, maybe there is something unique about that particular situation. When it is an administrator discussing this in a college-wide or school-wide initiative, it potentially siphons off resources, energy and goodwill among teachers. Worse, it may not benefit learning.

A better approach is to design activities in your courses aimed at building Self-Efficacy rather than Motivation. This is discussed in a thoughtful paper by Linnenbrink and Pintrich. The citation and abstract are provided in the figure below.

Let’s start with a definition of self-efficacy. The authors refer to this as “people’s judgments of their capabilities to organize and execute courses of action required to attain designated types of performance.” Let’s break it down. First, it is not the same as self-esteem. Judging whether you can perform an activity is different from you feeling good or bad about your performance. Second, it is specific and situational. It’s not “I’m good at math” but more akin to “I’m still confident I can solve these quadratic equations today, even though [algebra was a while back]”. Third, it is situational. For example, “a student’s self-efficacy for learning and doing well in a math class may be lower than usual because the teacher uses a grading  curve and the student thinks that all the other students are very competitive and better in math.” The student’s perception may change in a different classroom with a different teacher.

How is self-efficacy related to student engagement, and hence to learning? The authors classify three types of engagement. (1) Behavioral engagement can be observed by the teacher who can see if students “work hard at the task or are distracted or are putting forth only minimal effort”. (2) Cognitive engagement is more difficult to observe because we can’t see what’s going on in the students’ minds. One can get some measure of engagement by listening to what students are saying or asking. Another is to find out the extent that students use metacognitive strategies. (3) Motivational engagement is related to the affective experiences of the student while learning. These may be due to personal interest, perceived utility, or value beliefs related to life goals.

According to the authors, all three categories are inter-related. There is also no doubt that emotions affect learning, but is giving Motivation primacy the best approach for engaged learning? I’m not so sure. Trying to grab student interest is fleeting unless you have a very small class and you know how to hook all the students. The authors write: “This interest-first perspective is a strong belief in our culture, and teachers often worry over how to interest their students in the content, as they see interest as a prerequisite to all learning and future motivation. The interest-first pathway may be one path to motivation and learning, but current research on self-efficacy and motivation suggests that there may be other pathways…” They highlight research that connects self-efficacy to the three types of engagement mentioned above. I won’t go into the details here, but I encourage reading their article in full. I will summarize the results by saying that there seems to be a stable correlation between building self-efficacy and the motivation-learning virtuous cycle. Becoming competent (and building competency) is a strong motivating factor for generating interest and further learning; it may even be the most salient contributing factor in general. (The authors are careful to note the nature of generalizable results through statistical studies in educational psychology and related areas.)

How does one build self-efficacy? (1) By teaching the students how to have an accurate sense of their current abilities (using metacognitive strategies!). (2) By giving the students task in their zone of proximal development, i.e., not too easy, not too hard, providing a challenge that is within one’s grasp. (3) By reminding the students to reflect on how their abilities have changed (improved!) as they work at learning more and more. The authors suggest that “generally, self-efficacy beliefs should be a little higher than actual skill level, but not so high as to reflect a gross overestimation of actual expertise.” (4) By providing feedback aimed at self-efficacy in the specific domain rather than generalized self-esteem boosts.

Okay then. More food-for-thought as I work on my classes next semester.

Bottom-Up Chemical Bonding

In my last post, I discussed how the octet rule is often used by students as an explanative rule for everything in chemical bonding, rather than as a rule-of-thumb. Today I will discuss an approach proposed by Nahum and co-workers proposing an alternative approach to teaching chemical bonding (Nahum, T. L.; Mamlok-Naaman, R.; Hofstein, A.; Kronik, L. Journal of Chemical Education 2008, 85, 1680-1685). The title of their article: A New “Bottom-Up” Framework for Teaching Chemical Bonding.

The authors contend that the difficulty with the traditional approach is to divide up different materials according to some common set of physical properties (e.g., low or high boiling points, ability to dissolve in water, ability to conduct electricity). These materials are classified as different “structures” of matter associated with different “types” of chemical bonds or forces. This seemingly clean classification into categories is illustrated in Figure 1 from their paper

Students like to have these clean classification schemes. It helps them study using a divide-and-conquer strategy, which makes sense from a cognitive load point-of-view. With this scheme in mind, the student will be able to trot out the following answers to “explain” the physical properties of different substances – as shown below from the authors’ contribution to Concepts of Matter in Science Education(mentioned in my previous post).

The problem here is that our seemingly “good” students might not actually understand at a fundamental level what they are saying. The authors refer to this as a pseudo-conception, i.e., “students use the right terms in the right context with no conceptual thinking or scientific understanding”. If pushed a little further to explain their answers, the (Un)Happy Atom story, starring the octet rule, is likely to make an appearance. As a teacher who encounters a relatively wide range of student interests and abilities, there’s a part of me that thinks this is okay if the student is not majoring in chemistry, biochemistry or some flavor of physics. However, for majors in my department, my lofty goal is that they learn how to reason chemically at a fundamental level – and not pseudo-chemically.

And those were the good students. The ones who seem to turn in nonsensical answers on our exams, are those who mix up their concepts. They think there is a black-and-white difference between ionic and covalent bonding and run into trouble when this is not the case. The concept of electronegativity gets misapplied all over the place as they grasp-at-straws for explanation. Hydrogen bonds are simply confusing, as are dipole-dipole interactions be they permanent, temporary, induced or whatever else was written down somewhere in their notes.

Nahum and colleagues propose an alternative approach to Chemical Bonding. Start with the Atom and build your way up. Here’s Figure 2 from their article.

Most modern chemistry textbooks already start with Atoms (i.e., Stage 1). “Atoms First” approach has been heavily touted by textbook publishers (this century) as new-and-improved. After that, however, the classifications of Figure 1 are used to organize the material in your typical textbook. Ionic compounds and ionic bonds lead off, followed by a morass of topics related to covalent bonds (Lewis dot structures, the octet rule, molecular orbitals, hybridization, molecular shape, etc). Metallic bonding gets short shrift with a simple delocalized electron cloud model that is not properly explained. Then it’s on to Intermolecular Forces with each category having its own imposed typology (dispersion forces, dipole-dipole interactions, hydrogen bonds, etc).

Instead of all this, Nahum and colleagues propose that Stage 2 should start with a generic energy curve illustrating what happens when two atoms approach each other, as shown in Figure 3 below. Note that no mention is made yet about what “types” of bonds these are or how strong they are. The point to hit home here is that stability is correlated with minimizing the energy.

The authors suggest emphasizing Coulomb’s Law to discuss the balance between attractive and repulsive energies. I’m less sure how to implement this. While standard textbooks use some variation of Coulomb’s Law to explain pretty much all the various bonds and forces in Figure 1, things are actually more complicated if you’re a quantum mechanic. Since chemical bonding and quantum mechanics is my area of expertise, I struggle with how to simplify things without leading students down the path to pseudo-conception, misconception or confusion. However, I agree with the authors that the generality of Figure 3 makes it particularly useful. It works for H₂, He₂, Li₂, F₂ and LiF. The equilibrium bond distances and the bond energies are different in each case, but the curve still works.

Stage 3 is where we dive into chemical bonds. The authors suggest starting with ionic bonds before moving on to covalent bonds, and then “once [these concepts] are internalized, we recommend stressing right away that the nature of most bonds is infact partly covalent and partly ionic, that is, polar…” They describe these two categories in terms of “charge sharing” and “charge transfer” although they don’t define either term. Partly, the idea is to illustrate that heteroatomic bonds are stronger than homoatomic bonds in general, although the authors point out that other factors also contribute to the bond energy. This is also where Electronegativity gets introduced. From there, the authors recommend discussing hydrogen bonds, followed by the Van der Waals force in the helium dimer before bringing up the interaction between diatomic molecules. The main point is to emphasize the “continuum” of interactions rather than the clean category approach of Figure 1.

In Stage 4, the main concept is Valency. Start with defining the valence shell, and then discuss periodic properties, before moving on to Lewis dot structures and the octet rule. Hopefully at this point, the students are immersed in ideas of energy stabilization that they indeed recognize the rule-of-thumb nature in guidelines for drawing good Lewis structures. Valence shell electron pair repulsion (VSEPR) theory can be introduced at this stage. After understanding the structures of small molecules, one can move on to “giant” structures and lattices be they ionic, covalent or metallic. Metallic bonds get introduced at this stage as related to covalent bonds with a swath of delocalized electrons.

Stage 5 is where Properties are discussed – the main idea is to connect the microscopic world with macroscopic observations. This is in contrast to standard approaches that start with classification of substance-type by different properties and then a proceeding atomistic-molecular “explanation” for each type.

What do I think about this? I partially do some of this in my class already, but not systematically. Honestly, I feel constrained by the textbook. The fact that we have small class sizes and therefore have to offer multiple sections of General Chemistry and agree on a list and order of topics (to mesh with the lab) imposes further constraints. As it is, I already jump around somewhat in the textbook. This leads to student confusion in their reading, and may provide a stronger impetus for me to move towards Open Educational Resources (OERs). While there are good resources out there, they don’t quite do things with the depth and approach that I’m looking for. Perhaps I need to write my open OER textbook. But it’s unclear how helpful it will be to others. If teaching is a relationship, then it’s not surprising that each instructor has an idiosyncratic approach that’s unique – playing to the instructor’s strengths and taking into account the background (and numbers) of students in the class. Context matters. At least I think so. Other voices would argue that General Chemistry can be standardized through an online delivery system that could even provide data-driven personalized approaches.

Will I overhaul my class and follow this approach? I don’t know yet. I spent the previous two afternoons writing out a sample syllabus with some re-ordering of topics. I’m not happy with it yet, and it only partially makes use of the approach favored by Nahum and colleagues. I need to chew on this a bit more. Classes don’t start until early September so it’s still early days in the summer. I have some time for further reflection.

(Un)Happy Atoms

Question: Are the noble gases happy?

Answer #1: No because they exist as lonely atoms. Aren’t they also known as the inert gases? It sounds as if they have no passion. How could they be happy?

Answer #2: Yes. That is why they are one of the few substances that exist as atoms. They do not need to combine with other atoms. The atoms that are not noble gases are unhappy and want to combine with other atoms so they can be happy like the noble gases.

Answer #3: What does happiness have to do with atoms? You’re projecting irrelevant anthropomorphic ideas on to atoms.

Let’s rephrase the Question to something a classroom teacher might actually ask: Why are the noble gases the only elements in the periodic table that exist as stable individual atoms at room temperature and pressure?

Common student Answer: Because they follow the octet rule. They have a full shell of electrons and they are happy, um, I mean stable. They don’t want to react any further.

If you are a chemistry teacher, would this answer satisfy you on an exam? Perhaps, at an introductory level – maybe in a high school chemistry class or an introductory college course not aimed at chemistry majors. Let me point out three features of the response. (1) A rule is quoted. (2) A “full shell” of electrons is associated with “stability” but the latter is not explained. (3) Chemical reactivity is referred to as some sort of “motive”. Whether out of desire or necessity, some atoms want to react while others don’t want or need to.

The octet rule forms a bedrock in introductory chemistry textbooks. At a superficial level, it seems to magically provide an “answer” to those inscrutable rules of chemistry. If chemical transformation is about the combining and recombining of atoms, it can be used to “explain” how different elements in the periodic table “behave” differently: why some substances are solids, others are gases; why some substances conduct electricity while others are insulators. Why some are malleable, some are dense, and some are water-soluble.

We teach students to draw (Bohr-like) models of the atom to illustrate the octet rule. Here’s happy Neon

With eight electrons in its outermost shell, it is “full” and therefore unreactive. At the college level, an instructor or a textbook might try to connect the un-reactivity thus: “Noble gases have high ionization energies and zero electron affinities. Therefore, it is energetically very costly to remove an electron, and there is no energetic advantage to gaining an electron. The atoms are therefore energetically stable.”

Noble gases are less interesting because they are (for the most part) chemically inert. In a chemistry class, you want to get to the good stuff! All the other elements are not “stable” as atoms. They want to “combine” with other atoms. Here’s my tongue-in-cheek version.

If the noble gas electron configuration is the “happy” state, perhaps everything else wants to be like a noble gas to be “stable”. Notice how I’ve sneaked in a term of desire with a hint of anthropomorphism. Don’t we all want stability? Shouldn’t the noble gases also want to be stable (energetically)?

At this point, most textbooks introduce Ionic Bonding as a great way for metals and non-metals to achieve stability. And wow! Isn’t it amazing, ionic compounds (commonly known as salts) have all these unique physical properties that mesh sooooo well with our “lattice picture” of ionic compounds? If you’re paying attention I’ve just introduced two broad categories: metals and non-metals. (I’ve explained neither.) It’s a trick that chemistry instructors use by “appealing to the obvious” wherein we’ve now associated bulk macroscopic properties of different elemental substances in the periodic table to their atomic-level properties without much explanation.

Here’s how the story goes with cheeky pictures to illustrate the degree-of-happy. (Yes, I spent hours creating all the pictures in this blog post for the pure love of it!)

Alone, Sodium (Na) and Fluorine (F) are unhappy. But look! If Na transferred its valence electron to F, both of them would “achieve noble gas configuration”. See how they look like happy Neon. The ionic bond is formed by the attraction of the plus and minus ions! This works oh so well because metals want to give up electrons and non-metals want to receive electrons to be like the noble gas. Happiness all around!

But what if you have two non-metals? Both want to receive, neither wants to give. So what do they do? They share! Notice in my picture below how the two Fluorines look like happy Neons if you draw them sharing in just the right way. Now you have covalent bonds, which lead to covalent compounds and blah, blah, blah.

But what if you have two metals? Both want to give, neither wants to receive. Um, do they share? I don’t know. Let’s try this with two Sodiums. That doesn’t look like a happy noble gas. Is it stable? Dunno.

But what if they just gave up their electrons anyway into this mobile “sea” of electrons? It’s a “metallic” bond. Not only will they look like happy Neon, this will be excellent in explaining why metals conduct electricity. Bonus!

At this point we haven’t explained the nagging issue as to why the noble gases don’t bond even though the picture would look somewhat similar to the ionic bond you saw a moment ago, although one could easily hand-wave it away by referring to a later topic called “intermolecular forces”.

We’ve now explained how the three types of chemical bonding occur where we’ve blithely made use of the octet rule as a “driving force” for all these chemical reactions that involve combining atoms.

The problem is that the octet rule doesn’t “drive” anything. Energetics does. But it’s unclear what the energetic sources are, at least to the students. Hence, even if you as an instructor know that you are making a simplification, and even if you tell the students so explicitly, the happy anthropomorphic story outlined above sticks with the students like superglue. It seems to “work” so well (except when it doesn’t), and students being introduced to the complexity of chemistry latch on to a good heuristic. The octet rule is such a good heuristic, that even we instructors unwittingly use it to reinforce student misconceptions about the nature of chemical bonding. As a teacher, you might consider it a rule-of-thumb, but your students are likely using it as a rule. The thumb is lost somewhere along the way.

Below I’ve modified Figure 5 from Keith Taber’s article “A Common Core to Chemical Conceptions: Learners’ Conceptions of Chemical Change, Stability and Bonding” from Concepts of Matter in Science Education. This excellent article was also the motivation for this blog post and all my (un)happy pictures. The figure below illustrates some of the common misconceptions that stick with students as they consume the happy-atom story.

Honestly, I use something close to the happy story when teaching chemistry for non-science majors. It meshes well with textbooks and readings, and the heuristic “works” well for answering typical (or even standardized) exam questions. When I teach the class for science majors, I’m much more careful to stress energetics and what we mean by “stable”. This is done in detail for ionic compounds because it’s relatively “easy” to explain and supported by standard chemistry textbooks. Things are less straightforward for covalent compounds and metals. I do teach the octet rule and emphasize that it is a heuristic. But I strongly suspect, after reading the many studies in Concepts of Matter in Science Education, that my students interpret the octet rule differently. Actually, I know this to be the case because I can now clearly see the misconceptions that students make when they implicitly attempt to use the happy-atom story where it does not work. (It doesn’t matter whether you also teach orbital overlap, which is rather obtuse to the students.)

Is there an alternative way to approach chemical bonding instead of the happy-atom story? In the next post, I’ll outline an alternative idea (not mine) that I might try out in my General Chemistry class next semester.

Singapore Student: Sample of One

Six months ago, almost to the day, the PISA 2015 results were released. The assessment taken by 15-year old students around the world covers three areas: Science, Math and Reading. Singapore topped all three categories. I’ve been perusing the results slowly over the last several months because there was a special in-depth study on science education around the world, including the use of inquiry-based pedagogies. The next round of PISA assessments is 2018. I have a niece studying in Singapore at a public secondary school who will be 15 next year, so she might be part of the next PISA cohort.

One of my sisters was visiting Singapore last week and kindly agreed to facilitate an interview, so that readers could get a glimpse into one student’s experience in the Singapore system. My 14-year old niece is in Secondary 2 in an International Baccalaureate program. I generated the list of questions. My sister conducted the interview and transcribed the responses, and I made some minor edits. I did a subsequent accuracy check was done with my niece via e-mail and asked one follow-up question. Below is the transcript. Editorial remarks are in italics.

What does a typical school-day look like for you?

I get up around 6:30 am, and I leave the house about 7-ish. School normally starts at 7:30am, with assembly. After that we have lessons for 1-1.5 hours (each period). There are many subjects altogether, 13 or more. We take Language Arts. This term we have Chemistry and STEM, but next term we have Physics and Bio. We also take Chinese and Math. We also have history. School ends at 2:30pm. There are two breaks in between – one recess break for about half an hour, and one half-hour lunch break).

Not all class periods are examinable subjects (i.e., there are no final graded national or international exams). Others include Philosophy, Thinking and Knowledge (inquiry, debate), Global Studies - current affairs (the teacher talks about Trump and all that stuff), Independent Studies - you can apply for different courses (i.e., electives), which take you throughout the year. For example, I'm taking Future Problem Solving with a Scenario Writing competition - we write stories based on a futuristic topic. My story is on 3-D printing of humans in the future. Other non-examinable subjects are Art, Music, and Home Economics.

What do you like best about school?

Probably the friends I make in school. Friends make school life more enjoyable, because you're slaving away, but people are slaving along with you. We can talk about books and it helps to lighten up the school atmosphere. It's probably the enjoyable people in class.

The schoolteachers are also really funny. Our history teacher, during the lesson, entertains us with Power Points with animations and music. He said, "If at any time you want to start a haunted house, I have the music". Or when we were learning about the War, he had one with Hitler and a gun coming up. He entertains us with jokes, e.g. claiming to be German and having a Japanese wife (i.e, presumably illustrating the relationship between the Axis powers). Once someone photoshopped his face on a t-shirt and gave it to him. He's that sort of teacher. He got nominated for a Dunking booth.

What is one thing you don’t like about school?

Probably the heavy workload. But even then it can be kind of mitigated, because you still have fun, and at the end of the year, you see how much you learned and you feel a sense of accomplishment. Better than having a light workload (and not learning much).

The day before the geography exam, I stayed in my room 5 hours straight, from 3 pm till 8 pm. Then I had a break for dinner. I didn't have time to drink water so I drank water in the shower (laughter). It's fine 'cause you put in all that effort and feel so accomplished. You come up with a good score.

Which is your favourite class and why?

Normally my favourite class depends on the teacher who is teaching it. This year it's history because it's fun and entertaining, although the teacher does get some of his facts wrong. The other subjects, the teachers more or less drone on. Home Economics was also fun because I enjoy cooking. For the exam, you had 1 hour and you could cook three dishes. That's good because you don't have to stick to this rigid, instruction-based thing.

This year, you’re taking Chemistry. How would you describe what the study of chemistry is about?

We learned about the fundamental basics of chemistry before we moved on to harder chemistry. We learned about atomic structure and protons, electrons and the atomic number of elements in the periodic table, acids and alkalis, about physical and chemical changes, how to identify certain substances based on their colour, etc. For example, MgO is a white solid. We did a lot of experiments with acids and bases, for example, sulfuric acid is a common acid found in the lab and potassium hydroxide is a common alkali found in the lab. We learned about the various pH levels of certain substances.

But I think the most interesting thing is  - we have chemistry coursework - a major project, 8% of our grade. This year's was making our own toothpaste, evaluated based on effectiveness. We searched for ingredients to remove plaque acid. We used coconut oil, cacao nibs, and a bunch of weird ingredients that you wouldn't normally find in toothpaste, as well as normal ingredients. But it looked terrible because it was black. We put in charcoal - it looked like mud. But it smelled good and we ate it and it tasted good!

We tested with factors such as abrasiveness, pH level, whether the toothpaste would be dissolved in vinegar. We coated an egg half with our toothpaste, and half with Colgate, and brushed it off to see if the red of the egg would come off. We had painted it red.

What is one concept you found difficult in chemistry class? What helped you to finally learn it?

I was doing well in chemistry until the exam. I kind of understood all the concepts, but it needed time. You needed to practice, with assessment books, etc. The terms proton, electron, atomic number, mass number - it took a while to differentiate all the terms. I worked at it by bringing all my Chem stuff on vacation and revising it with my dad.

Sometimes I find it hard to apply [chemistry concepts], because you do it with rote learning, so during the exams when they come up with application questions I don't know how to answer.

Do you enjoy chemistry lab? Why or why not?

Hmm... it depends what we're going to do in the lab. It is rather interesting to see how acids and bases react with each other. For example, the other day we mixed alkalis with some sort of solution and there was a residue formed, that spiraled down. That was quite cool. The only thing I would like the lab to have is air-con[ditioning]. Everything else is fine.

What advice would you give someone who is studying chemistry for the first time?

I would tell them to have fun because that's the only way they're going to learn anything. People struggle to understand concepts if they think of it as work. But if you had fun doing the experiment, you will remember it during your later work. I quite enjoyed chemistry.

Anything else you would like to add?

Chemistry is the subject with the potential to make the most puns. My friends and I always make puns using the names of elements in chemistry. For example, I made up this pun for the prefectorial board (although I'm not in it, but I was thinking about it at the time) - lead is Plumbum, which is Pb. The prefectorial board is also referred to as PB. So I came up with "PB leads. Please join us in our equation. We would like to have chemistry with you. Please provide a reaction."

After receiving a transcript of the interview from my sister, I sent a follow-up question to my niece via e-mail to ask what her STEM class was about. Here’s her response.

STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. We learnt STEM for two semesters (4 months) over the course of 2 years. Last year, we learnt about water filtration techniques, and built our very own water filter out of organic items we could find  - E,g, Moringa seeds, activated charcoal, etc. - And conducted experiments to test how effective our filter was at filtering muddy water (which we obtained from a pond). This year, we made dishes based on Molecular Gastronomy, which is Science with food. The school took us to the Singapore Science Centre, and we made two dishes - chocolate spaghetti and chrysanthemum tea caviar - in the lab. We then returned another day to create a spaghetti and caviar dish of our own choice. Furthermore, there was another lesson where we made slime, and yet another where we experimented with Smart materials, which are materials that react to their surroundings. We experimented, inter alia, with nithol wire, hydrophobic sand and thinking putty. I also remembered the time when we made our own pGLO bacteria! STEM is definitely a subject which exposes you to new things you have never learnt before.

So there you have it. The life of a Singapore Student: Sample size of one.

(Island-Flag image from Wikipedia Commons)

Attention Arms Race: Ad Version

Are you finding ads on your Internet browser more and more annoying? There’s a reason for that. Compared to the more passive nature of watching television, we interact more actively and purposefully with the Internet. To get your attention, advertisers need to work harder by hammering you with annoying, pop-up, highly animated, distractions.

How do we function in an information-overloaded age? And how do advertisers engage in an arms race for your attention? Insight into this and much more can be found in Sold on Language by Julie Sedivy and Greg Carlson, both experts in linguistics and cognitive science. Their book is subtitled “How Advertisers Talk to You & What This Says About You”. The book cover looks commercial, and you have to work a little harder to see that the publisher is Wiley-Blackwell. This is an academic book, chock full of information, but very well written – to keep your attention focused. (I recommend it!) In today’s post I will just focus on Chapter 3 – The Attentional Arms Race

With information being hammered at you from the moment you wake up, why aren’t you completely exhausted? I like the way the authors frame their response: “The answer is one that junior high teachers have known all along: that people ignore most of the information that surrounds them. Or rather, they shunt most of it off to the periphery of their attention, allowing only a small, select portion of it a full audience with the attentive part of their minds. Selective hearing and seeing is not just a fact about adolescent contrariness; it’s a systematic human trait.”

I learned that mental attention and vision work similarly. When you survey a scene, you think you are carefully taking in all that you see. But actually, your detailed vision only covers a very small spatial area (“about the size of your thumbnail held at arm’s length in front of you”). What happens is that your brain interprets the scene as your “your eyes jump around from one spot to another every fraction of a second to take visual snapshots”. These snapshots are assembled by your neurons giving you the impression of “a coherent scene by means of a perceptual miracle.” (The authors provide excellent examples and references to support their argument.)

So if you can only carefully attend to a tiny slice of what you see and hear, how do advertisers try to grab you? By providing something unexpected. Our brains are evolutionarily wired to react to unexpectedness perceptually. Advertisers exploit this approach. The TV strategy is to “make sure the first seconds of commercials are extra loud, extra flashy and with lots of extra movement compared to the TV program they’re nested in, or novel and unexpected enough [to] nab your attention.” Internet ads have to fight even harder to do this because part of your attention is already devoted to your browsing activity. That’s why we “experience these as annoying precisely because we have to wrestle with them to regain control over our attentional resources… [The ads] act as dead weights on our cognitive processes… making us feel as if we’re expending more mental effort, which we are.”

Sold on Language focuses mainly on advertising, but there are several examples of how deliberate linguistic choices (accompanied by appropriate visuals) can be effective in political messaging. Sedivy and Carlson uncover the many tricks that are used, and analyze why they are effective – at least for a period of time, until the dynamic arms race results in a blasé response to the old tricks, thereby requiring newer tricks. Not all these are loud and brash. Many are subtle, and perhaps all the more effective because of their covertness. There’s a reason why branding is a multi-billion dollar industry. This includes political branding. Much more can be said on this topic, but instead of commercial advertising and politics, I would like to turn my attention to education for the remainder of this post.

You’ve heard the old-fogey complaints about kids these days being more easily distracted and having shorter attention spans. Technology and the Internet are chiefly blamed. TV was blamed in an earlier generation. Books were blamed many generations ago. But perhaps the main problem is not so much the medium per se, but the arms race for attention. The Internet simply provides a much larger audience at lightning speeds. What happens when more blinking lights and rowdy animations fight for your attention?

First, let’s discuss two types of thinking. Both have developed in humans evolutionarily for different purposes. They complement each other in many cases, but sometimes come to conflicting conclusions. Deep thinking (System 2) is the slower, analytical approach, which one needs for, say, learning chemistry in school. It requires huge resources for our brain, but the concentration can be well rewarded if focused appropriately. Peripheral thinking (System 1), on the other hand, is quick and intuitive. It allows us to quickly filter out the numbing deluge of sensory information, so we can attend to something that might be life-saving at a moment’s notice. Serious analysis is not part of its repertoire.

Here’s where the attention arms race makes things harder for educators. The authors write: “Today, the thick information soup we swim around almost guarantees that we’ll do proportionally more peripheral thinking… [It] rewards persuasive messages that use superficial cues, many of which we’re not even consciously aware of. Messages that focus on building a decent argument and presenting solid evidence are at a competitive disadvantage in this environment.” Truthiness tends to be more convincing than truth when your attention is being bombarded because you’re inclined to process more peripherally.

There are two approaches an educator can use that are not mutually exclusive. One, reduce the distractions. I don’t have a no cellphone or laptop rule, simply because this has generally not been a problem in my smaller-sized classes. (At my institution, the large introductory courses cap at 40 students – so we have to run multiple sections for a core class.) Two, provide something that grabs the student’s attention and motivates them towards deep thinking. This is not easy, because the deep thinking required in learning chemistry is quite difficult and non-intuitive, and (excuse my pun) the activation energy barrier is rather high. But there is a potential reward: a cognitive “learner’s high” akin to the “runner’s high”. Tailoring in these experiences at appropriate time intervals can provide a sufficiently motivating factor. One thing we’re seeing in the advertising world is that people enjoy puzzles – not too hard, not too easy. That’s the challenge of the educator, and a topic I hope to explore more as I think about revamping my introductory chemistry class in the fall semester.