An Innovative Student-Led Teaching

Proposal for Statistics812-204

Dr Bijou M. Smith

Faculty of Hospitality & Tourism

Prince of Songkla University,
Phuket, Thailand

October 13, 2016

Abstract
This is a note for Faculty prior to TQF-3 review. The teaching innovation is radical
enough that I thought it should require some extensive preliminary research into questions of viability, both for effectiveness of learning and viability of implementation.
It will likely be difficult to accept the proposal without understanding much of the
background motivation and lengthy thought processes over many semesters which
have led up to this proposal. So first I will explain some of my motivations.
The essential idea is to obtain clearer learning outcomes for students by assessing
their work directly in class. Students will choose questions or problems and then spend
a week researching them, and then provide a lesson in class. In short: the students
will do the majority of the lecture-based teaching. The lecturer will provide feedback
and correct any potential misunderstandings, as well as the usually general course
management.
Normally a teacher might give some theory, then examples and demonstrations and
expect students to show evidence of learning in tests and exams and assignments. I
have tried many variations of such methods to date, such as lecture, lecture-discussion,
participative quizzes, project work, self-learning via Forums and Homework quizzes,
formative assessment via peer-graded unit tests, and journal portfolios (an extreme
form of active learning because they require students to document all their work for
the whole semester). For many reasons I have not been satisfied with the results of
any of these methods. I will try to succinctly explain why. Then I will explain how the
student-led teaching is potentially a good remedy for the issues facing the particular
challenges of the freshman Statistics course in the FHT programme.

Caveats
One thing to be clear about is that although I will be raising many issues here, all of the
problems could be merely due to under-performance and lack of ingenuity in my role as
a teacher. I do not believe they are all attributable to teacher incompetency, but I will
freely admit that many issues could be due to my personal flaws as an educator. But to
be fair I do not think they can all be attributed to teacher inadequacies, nevertheless,
this is something to consider, least one get alarmed at some of the student behaviours
I will be noting.
I am not completely apprised of the effectiveness of learning in statistics courses
at PSU in the past. My guess is that in some years learning was better, and sometimes
it was worse. All I can note here is my own experience over five semesters, and then
how to improve going forward.

The Proposal: Student Led Teaching (SLT)

The motivation is that people of all ages and all cultures learn best when they try to
teach. If you do not truly understand something it is exceedingly difficult to teach it to
anyone else. The teacher invariably ends up understanding more about the topic (and
this is only patently logical when you think about it, unless the students somehow
had prior expert knowledge but in that case teaching would be pointless except for
the benefit of the teacher, which is exactly my point). So instead of trying to coerce
students to learn with the usual incentives (which often fail) I propose to run a course
where students do the bulk of the teaching.
There are two linked parts to the course, (1) teaching and (2) assessment.

The Teaching Component

Each week students will be assigned to one of five teams.
Topics will be suggested, but each team can also choose a topic freely if it
meets certain minimal course guidelines they can teach their chosen topic.
The next week each group presents a lesson, teaching the topic to the other
students in the course.
Only three students from the team will present the lesson, they will be selected randomly without replacement (to maximise the number of students
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who will lead a teaching effort).

They will have 20 minutes to conduct their lesson.
All other students can act as normal, but will be allowed to interrupt the
lesson if they have pertinent questions. (There will not be much time for
questions after each lesson, about 5 minutes will be all.)
For this course to be manageable I estimate five teams of 12 students per three
hour lecture class time is just manageable, so this limits the course to 60 students per
section. So five 20 minute lessons with a 10 minute buffer time in between equates
to around 140 minutes, leaving 40 minutes for announcements and short quizzes or
discussions. Each section will

The Assessment Component

Assessment can be quite flexible, and I will present four alternative schemes. So that
I do not bias reviewer opinion I will explain my own preference after giving the four
options.
Option A. Assessment by Exam Percentage Results of Others
Students will be assessed as groups according to how well all the other students do on
exam questions based on what their group taught. So in effect, I am assessing their
group ability to effectively tach the content they chose.
The team can write exam questions if they choose to, otherwise the lecturer will
use their lesson plan to construct suitable assessment questions.
A Midterm exam and a Final exam will include all these questions.
The group will be graded according to the pass rate of all other students on the
specific questions derived form their groups lesson.
Attendance in class will be monitored so that students not present for the lessons
will not count against the groups results.
The groups are free to also teach and help tutor other students outside of class
if they can muster the self-organization. They might, for example, distribute their
exam questions, along with answer guides, to all students, hoping these will be the
exam questions chosen by the lecturer. I would consider this beautiful cooperation
not cheating!
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Option B. Assessment by Exam PASS/FAIL of Others

This is just a variation of Option A, but where instead of having a percentage score,
the Teaching Groups will simply Pass or Fail depending on whether a majority of other
students Pass or Fail the exam questions related to the topic the Group taught in class.
Although this options seems drastic, it could be considered quite fair. The teacher
is not always solely to blame for students not learning. Learning is a collective process,
even when some teachers think it is not! So it is unfair to link a teachers performance
directly to the performance of students.
Later, under the heading of Motivation, I will try to explain some of the modern research, which suggests that people cannot truly motivate other people. Great
motivators are really only drawing upon the intrinsic interests of people. Teachers
assigned to teach topics that students intrinsically do not want to learn cannot be held
responsible for lack of student motivation and consequent allow student performance
in exams.
The PASS/FAIL criteria can be reasonably lenient. I would recommend using 50%
as a criteria, because in my past exams for the Statistics812-204 course a 50% to 60%
pass rate was fairly consistent. So with this criteria I doubt too many students will be
unfairly affected.
The rest of their course grade will be determined by individual Homework Quiz
and Moodle Forum assessments.

Option C. Assessment by Peers (using feedback criteria)

After each lesson students will fill in a form noting how much value they got out of
the lesson. This will serve as a useful subjective assessment of the lesson.
But more important than assessing the studentteachers is the feedback. So students in class will be given time to give feedback to the Teaching Group.
Based on several criteria in the feedback, such as,
Technical content learning value Do you think you can use the content of
this lesson so solve similar problems to the ones demonstrated?
Utility learning value Do you think you can adapt the content of this lesson
to solve problems in real life?
Motivational learning value Was this lesson interesting or fun?
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(I normally would not like to confound factors, but here we are not doing research, we just want an overall peer assessment, so confounding interest with
fun is I think fine.)
The Teaching Group will be assigned a percentage score.
The rest of their course grade will be determined by individual Homework Quiz
and Moodle Forum assessments.

Option D. Assessment by Peers (informal feedback)

After each lesson students will fill in a form noting how much value they got out of
the lesson. This will serve as a useful subjective assessment of the lesson.
But more important than assessing the studentteachers is the feedback. So students in class will be given time to give feedback to the Teaching Group.
Based on the quality of the feedback the lecturer can give the Teaching Group a
PASS/FAIL grade.

Recommended Assessment Preference

Percentage grades are not as neat and tidy a most people think, they are susceptible to
tremendous variation and vagary. I think exam grades are just plain unfair, but many
assessment experts still recommend test and exams. One thing I do believe is that test
scores provide very useful information for informing teachers. So the exams used in
this course should still be used, but not for assessing students. I actually believe exams
do not fairly assess teaching efforts either. The test sand exams assess the course as a
whole system.
The fact many educational institutions still use exams almost solely as an assessment of students is unethical and maybe even criminal. I would challenge anyone to
defend the idea that exam and test score variation is due only to the amount of effort
put in by students. I am prepared to research these claims, but elsewhere I have written at length about similar issues with organizational performance appraisals. There
is almost no difference between the arguments against performance appraisals and
the arguments against using exam grades. So I will refer reviewers to those writings.
The Exam PASS/FAIL Option B is only weakly less judgemental and susceptible to
random variations as the percentage score system.

So I would recommend using Option D Peer Assessment via Informal Feedback.

It serves the purpose of getting students thinking and reflecting on their learning, and
it is probably the most fair and least judgemental assessment scheme I can devise.
I certainly do not think many exam or subjective assessment systems can accurately
assign percentage scores. This is actually still an open question in educational assessment research. Reliability measures are easy to confirm, and most comprehensive
exams and tests can achieve satisfactory reliability. But student grades are hardly ever
used as measures of exam reliability, in fact the consistent practice across almost all
educational systems throughout the known world is to assume exam scores and endof-year grades are a rank scoring of student performance. This is completely false.
Or, if used as rankings the grades should at least come associated with correctly estimated uncertainties, but they never are. The scores and GPA points are only a test of
the reliability of exams.
In my opinion, most egregious, is the use of exam scores to limit future student
options. No one truly knows how honest student effort and creativity can be linked to
exam scores, and even if absolute student intelligence is correlated with higher exam
cores, this ignores the human potential for growth. A low graded student might be
making fantastically goo relative progress, but exams never assess this effort, which is
criminally negligent in my opinion.
In fact, exam rankings demotivate low academic achievers and severely limit their
human growth in obvious ways. So instead of using grades to feed the ego of already
academically gifted students and demotivate and depress low academic achievers, I
would favour not using grades at all, but still using exams and tests to assess the course
the vaguely defined value of the course as a whole.
But abolishing grades is a long politically fraught battle I fear. So for the interim,
an assessment scheme that gives good quality feedback to students and allows students to pass the course provided they have shown effort and industry. Although it is
not a perfect assessment scheme, I think Option D achieves a reasonable balance between fairness to students and accountability within the current university assessment
system.

A Few Obvious Advantages of SLT

.

Some Clearly Obvious Pitfalls of SLT and How to Counter Them

Large class size. The main problem is large class size, which may prevent some
students from having the opportunity to actively teach. However, all students will
need to at least be prepared to teach, which is the bulk of the learning. The actual
delivery of the lesson is only 20 minutes, and while much insight can be gained in this
time, provided the whole team is in attendance and motivated to maybe help their
team-mates deliver and effective lesson, all the troubles and concerns of a teacher will
likely be shared by the whole team. (Unless the team is dysfunctional, but that is a
different issue.)

Grade differentiation. Grading teams means everyone in the group receives the
same grade. Requiring grade differentiation is actually only a problem if you require
it! Most enlightened educational philosophers would agree that the ideal learning
environment is not a course, but is free learning, but if a course is required the ideal is
then to have all students earn an A grade. Anything less is sub-optimal. It is a great
prejudice of traditional education systems that somehow students cannot all get a top
grade. Forced distributions in particular are unethical and fairly heinous practices. (It
was almost unthinkable to me when I first came across this practice. Imagine Ussain
Bolt being denied a world record because his sprinting was too far outside the Normal
distribution tail.)
Grades will however not be solely determined by the teaching results. There will
still be Homework and Moodle Forum topic discussions, and the occasional classroom
quiz, which students can use to gain extra grade points. Students will be encouraged
to use my Live Poll Quiz system.

Dysfunctional teams. Group activities are not proven to be effective for learning,
but in a large class I have no other option than to use groups. However, by working
in groups the students learn the additional lessons of problems with working cooperatively in a team. The course is not officially designed to teach team-work, but we
might consider it an additional benefit of the course.
Teams will have an opportunity to report anonymous feedback on how they functioned, so issues with disruptive team members can be dealt with as they arise.

Motivation for Trialling Learning by Teaching

There are perhaps too many problems in the teaching of compulsory statistics for Hospitality & Tourism majors to list them all, but I will highlight a few which I think are
critical. One which I will hardly dwell on at all is low English language proficiency.
Lecturers like to complain about poor language skills, but I do not think English language ability is a terribly critical factor. Most students are capable of looking up dictionaries, and can, with some effort, read through basic material needed for the course.
The challenge is in course management, where resources need to be perhaps better
organized and carefully selected to be readable at the general proficiency level of the
average student. Given this can be done I do not think language comprehension is
the real problematic issue. The far more critical issue is do students want to make the
effort to read and understand the resources? If they are prepared to make the effort,
and admittedly it is hard for many of them, then they should learn perfectly well.

Issue 1. Compulsory courses. Most educators know compulsory education is a

terrible idea. But there is a paternalistic attitude that we know best for students.
I will not argue this is wrong, albeit in some cases it could very well be foolish and
counter-productive. However, given some investigations by Professor Chayanon, who
(I am indebted to) surveyed FHT graduates, and found a major component of their
first jobs after university involved a need for statistical analysis of data, one can, in our
case, completely understand and indeed sympathise with the need to make statistics
a compulsory subject. It is paternalistic, but it is not a bad form of paternalism.
Nevertheless, this poses tremendous pedagogical challenges, because the ideal
form of learning is learning by intrinsically motivated interest [Ryan and Powelson,
1991, Ryan and Deci, 2000]. Compulsory courses completely defeat this very important element of effective learning.

Issue 2. Lecture and Lecture-discussion format is ineffective. In education literature I have read about comparisons of different pedagogies, and (maybe surprisingly)
it turns out that students enjoy lecture formats. They can be passive, not do too much
work, avoid exposing their ignorance, and let the loquacious students do all the discussion. It looks good from the outside, but is rotten in the core, because it fails to
engage all students, and the lecturer is still largely dictating content. Unmotivated
students get no value.
But these negatives are mainly a result of the fact the course is compulsory. At
other universities, where I have taught physics and engineering courses, students are
well-motivated and get a lot from the courses. It does not particularly matter what
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learning format one uses when students are keen and motivated, under such endogenous circumstances they will learn despite the lecturers best or worst effort. This is
a universal fact about learning, especially at a tertiary level (it is slightly different at
high school, where standards regimes impose restrictions of curriculum and student
choice which means a good teacher plays an unduly influential role in helping guide
students through the curriculum).

Issue 3. Alternatives that can lead to free-wheeling. Relevant to my TQF-3 proposal (a Student-Led Teaching pedagogy, or SLT) is that the Jigsaw method1 was found
to be the most effective for learning in one study of methods for large class sizes [Carpenter, 2006], but the least valued by 31% of students (but most favourably valued by
19% of students). Some students do not know what is good for them! (Few humans
do in general.) The Case Study pedagogy was found to be the next most effective (but
only most highly valued by 13% of students). The Team Project pedagogy was found
to be the least effective for learning.
Compared to the five methods (Lecture, Lecture-discussion, Case-studies, Jigsaw,
Team Projects) the Student-led teaching method is probably most closely related to
Case-Study, Team Project and Jigsaw methods. So I see this as a good preliminary
confirmation that Student-led teaching should have good learning outcomes. The
only problem is the team aspect (who would have guessed!)
I suspect the reason Team Projects are not as effective as the other pedagogies is
because of free-riding. Academically high achieving students find it terribly hard not
to do all the work! They just cannot help it. So this promotes excessive free-wheeling.
I think I can counter this effect by using randomization to select student representatives from each group to present the lessons. The whole group will then need to
cooperate to ensure everyone in the group understand how to teach the chosen topic,
otherwise their collective group grade will suffer. It is not a perfect solution, but I
think it will eliminate too much unthinking free-wheeling, and that is really all I aim
for I want students to at least think about their learning and to reflect upon their
lessons.
It is good for students to have both opportunities to learn and opportunities to
cheat themselves, to rob themselves of the chance to learn, because this is all part of
the greater goal of learning how to learn. If we structure education in a way the forces
students to learn then we deprive them of the much more important lesson of how to
learn independently, how to educate themselves.
1
In a jigsaw pedagogy the teacher splits classes into groups and breaks down assignments into pieces
that the group assembles to complete the lesson.

The next issue of copying and plagiarism is a big factor in my proposal, so I will
dwell on it at some length.

Issue 4. Copying without learning. Plagiarism is fairly rampant from what I can
tell. This negatively effected the usefulness of journal portfolios, which in other contexts might have led to highly effective and even enjoyable learning experiences (the
IT for Hospitality & Tourism course, by contrast, has seen reasonably good use of journal portfolios). I will note more about journals later. For statistics I had to recommend
so many assignment resubmissions that it became odious. The resubmitted work was
not greatly improved, but I could see efforts had been made to hide the plagiarism
effectively.
There is much more to note about this culture of copying, and the section later
will provide a lot more detail and hopefully useful speculation.
For the time being I have managed to gathered some data on the prevalence of
copying through a natural experiment. The results pose some challenges for ensuring
or assessing authentic student learning. With bi-weekly unit tests I was unable to
separate students (the lecture theatres had barely enough seats). Invigilating the tests
I would repeatedly warn against the temptation to copy answers from classmates. But
from day one I could see a lot of copying. It was so clear and over-whelming that
initially I was just very depressed. But then I thought this is a great opportunity. Here
are some things I gleaned:
A lot of the copied test responses were wrong, so students gained little by this
form of cheating.
The students were clearly under stress and were fearful of getting low grades.
When I added a bonus point question asking students to honestly tell me if they
copied answers from a classmate, or not, I had an unexpectedly large response.
Many students were honest about copying answers. I gave them their bonus
points (as well as students who claimed they did not copy). They were not
required to answer this question, but most did.
Students did not seem to learn anything from copying.
The unit tests were successful however for an entirely other reason: I would
gather the papers and the redistribute them so everyone had to grade the paper
of another student.
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During grading students would ask a lot of questions. They wanted to be fair
and give correct grades to their classmates. This was great. I got to actually
answer lots of questions, far more than in lecture-discussion classes.

My Learning: students at PSU ask more questions when faced with a task requiring considerations of justice for their classmates.

Influence or Lack of Influence of Buddhism and Thai Tradition

Here I wish to return to the issue of rampant plagiarism. Given a slight chance, many
students still take the easy option of copying answers from friends or class mates. I
can ask two contrary questions about this. Firstly why? Do they not realise they
are cheating themselves? Secondly, why not? If there is no perceived advantage to
the learning, then clearly it is a waste of time for students to put effort into learning
the course topics. When virtually the only perceived benefit is grade points, then
copying and cheating become the risky but smart thing. I am almost tempted to devise
clever ways to assess the intelligence of the method of cheating and reward it for pure
display of high intelligence. (I refrain from this only because, for now, I regard it as an
abnegation of responsibility for the future welfare of my students, and perhaps also
because I am not clever enough to devise an elegant enough subversive system for
doing this.)
My diagnosis is that this issue is not an indictment of student ethics2 . It is largely,
I believe, a systemic failure of the course to help these students, students who are so
worried about grade points that they are prepared to by-pass almost all learning to
just obtain a moderate passing grade. The students have been conditioned by prior
education (or more to the point, lack of a good education) to focus on grades, and not
on true learning. This is not, in my opinion, a problem of laziness or cultural attitudes.
I think it is a reasonably widespread international problem with exam-based education
systems.
It is perhaps exacerbated in Thailand, or at PSU, because teaching is conducted in
English, and also exacerbated by the way Western cultural practices in education, from
2

There is plenty of evidence that students want to be ethical. They ask lots of questions when trying
to fairly grade the tests of other students. They complain a lot about perceived unfair grading. They
avert their eyes and look down when admitting copying work. They want to be good but our system
has too much pressure that focuses their minds on grades instead of good moral behaviour.

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even early childhood learning in kindergarten and primary school, have adversely
influenced natural cultural practices in both Thai and more generally in most Buddhist
societies. The competition for grades is destructive I believe. It has bred out of students
a natural joy for learning.
Although I am not an expert in cultural anthropology, my suspicions would be that
Thai culture would benefit tremendously from simply wholesale abandonment of the
WesternEuropeanAmerican model of education. (I believe most countries would
also benefit this way, but that is another story and a difficult political battle to fight.)
Grades and test scores are, at least in the Thai context, a kind of unnatural perversion. In the wider Buddhist context I suspect school exams and tests are similarly
devoid of dharma or righteousness. An entire thesis could be written about this, but
I will just mention one minor aspect: grades score individuals. Whereas Buddhism
teaches that we are all connected and inter-related, we are One with our community
(Sangha). So there is no special intrinsic value in individual grade points.
When a student receives a failing grade the teacher should think of the course
as failing the student, not the other way around. The teacher has also failed. The
school has failed. But this is not the way Anglo-European-American culture views
educational assessments. It is all about individual responsibility in these western
cultures. I think the middle ground is the correct view, both individual and system
share in responsibility for the outcomes of any learning.
Nevertheless, I would like to attempt to situate learning more in terms of the
BuddhistHinduIslamic context for the purposes of this proposal. And so I want
to examine in more depth some of the cultural and spiritual issue which I think are
crucial for trying to help students gain more from their time at university.
My limited understanding is that Buddhists would typically be trained using meditations and denial of material comforts. I am not sure how to translate this into modern
education, there might be serious human rights dilemmas involved, but I think I can
extract some of the essence of Buddhism and apply it to education. But I think there
is more of an essence to Buddhist teachings that goes beyond superficial practices of
trained clergy.
The essence is not really simply meditation and materialistic abstinence, but rather
attunement to the world of the spirit (the mind, intellectual life, in other words). This
is the way of Jh
ana, and the Middle Way taught by Gautama Buddha meditation
with neither extreme material indulgence nor extreme asceticism and cultivation
of jh
ana and mindfulness is not a preserve of monks and elite, it is accessible to every
human being, as the traditions record Buddha eventually agreed dharmma could be
taught to all were ready to receive.

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This has huge relevance for education. You can take Buddhist spiritual training and
almost directly form parallels to ideas about the importance of intrinsic motivation for
learning. The meditative goal of becoming One with the World (esho funi in Japanese
Buddhism) has a direct bearing on inner motivation. The idea is that because we
are really one with our environment (or two but not two) it is anti-dharmato even
contemplate the idea of extrinsic motivation.
We, or powerful others, place ourselves in situations where a separation of motive from our true self is created. This is always then a spiritual (or psychological)
tension, because we are really connected to our world and the construct of extrinsic
motivation separates us from a part of our selves. If given time, I could easily make a
very convincing case that the way education is run in most universities is a violation
of Buddhist ethics. A deep violation. In fact, I could argue that school education is a
violent rejection of many profound Buddhist principles.
There is however, one principle which serves to retroactively justify modern schooling imported into a Buddhist culture, and this is the principle of harmony. The school
system is a part of what has been adopted. It must be accepted as such. It is (I believe)
a severe test and trial of traditional values. But, if we have faith, then ultimately the
spiritual principles will triumph over the external obstacles. This is very deeply what
living within the material world is all about, it is a test of the spirit.
This is such an important point that I do not want to gloss over it too quickly.
There is a tendency towards lazy thinking about BuddhistHindu culture which is
quite destructive for education. It is that the idea of karma means that what happens is accepted as the way of the world, and little can be done about it. But this
is not really true to the original teachings of the prophets of these great traditions.
The idea of karma is not that one can do what one pleases provided the future consequences are accepted. The essential idea is that progress of the soul can be made
by doing righteous deeds. One does not have to accept as punishment the condition
one is born into, and one can actively strive to make spiritual progress and then release from samsara. It is far more a future focused and progressive philosophy than
it is cyclical. To simplistically characterize BuddhistHindu philosophy as cyclical is a
gross miss-characterisation and very harmful to the concerns of education and human
advancement.
This would all be purely academic if children in Thailand have basically lost all the
fruits of their Buddhist heritage. To be more optimistic it is useful to think about some
of the causes for the loss of potency of Buddhist teachings in Thai society. I think in
high schools the adoption of western educational models actively works to magnify the
influence of mass media and entertainment, which erodes traditional spiritual beliefs.
With the technical impossibility of restricting Internet access censorship is not a viable
answer. Education is the answer. The great irony is that currently education is also
12

a magnifier for Anglo-American culture. It seems like a hopeless trap. But I am not
overly pessimistic.
I should not need to remind students of their cultural heritage, but the following
points seem to suggest that if I neglect Buddhism in my teaching then my students
will fail to connect to their spiritual traditions, and my belief is that they will, as a
consequence, fail to live up to expectations their elders might demand. This is of
course a travesty, because (a) in Buddhist philosophy the student is not apart from
their Sangha, their community, their peers, and their environment, all is connected,
so the so-called education failure is not a failure of the student, it is a systematic
imbalance in the world dharmma. It is a failure of the whole system. Furthermore
(b) the very fact elders expect something of their children is a materialistic desire, and
therefore also a dharmmic imbalance.
The points I refer to are the following:
Many students routinely cheat to gain points.
Many students routinely copy text from the Internet and present it as their own
work.
When given freedom to choose topics and study independently, many students
do not know where to begin, and many will choose topics they are obviously not
at all enthusiastic about learning.
I will leave the quantity many students open to speculation. In some classes it means
more than half, in other classes it might mean less than 25%. The exact numbers are
not really something I worry about, it is the mere existence of any such behaviour that
concerns me.
The central paradox of Buddhism is that if All is One, how can there truly be disharmony and disequilibrium? The resolution is precisely that which is found in all major
religions: human souls are not perfect, but rather have a scared duty to seek perfection.
Thus, isolated human activity tends to form localised imbalances in cosmic dharmma,
and our collective duty is to constantly strive to restore the balance of harmony. This
gives meaning to life. Within a perfectly balanced united world system there can be
no renewal, no test of the soul, no growth, no progress. So within the material matrix
of our universe All is One but All is Not Perfect. The transcending goal of human existence is to strive to the best of ones ability to seek greater awareness of the unity of
self and the world, to find inner harmony, and to be mindful of outer disunity and to
work to bring people and the world together into spiritual balance.
Given such views it is natural that I should not worry too much about students who
cannot easily understand theory and practice of statistics. But I should care greatly
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about how students are studying, I should care greatly about removing the causes of
their suffering, and I should be giving them opportunities to thrive and connect to the
world of the spirit.
This is because, I suspect, when the spiritual virtues of students are aligned with
the good in their cultural and philosophical traditions, then their learning will become
righteous. And by this I truly mean a lot more than simply right and correct answers
to test questions!
*

We can see how abstract cosmic-level Buddhist principles can be found in educational microcosms.
One of the central Five Precepts of Buddhism is to refrain from taking that which
is not given. This seems to me to be a very simple principle to exercise in education
and learning. It translates into a principle of learning by ones own efforts, and not
through the knowledge of others. More specifically, if prosaically applied to the taking
of tests it would translate into no cheating.
Yet it seems students here have lost these principles, or may have heard about them
but completely fail to see how they should be used in ordinary life. But unlike some
who think there is a crisis in religion, a loss of dharmma, and a general corruption
and decline in morals, I am not so pessimistic. This is because I believe all the good
is still within the potential of each child. The challenge to society, to the Sangha, is to
restore the imbalances in modern society that breed out all of the spiritual potential
in children and turn them into clones of materialistically driven and intellectually lazy
westernized American students.
Everyone in society can play a part in this effort. And so I question what we can
do as educators to play our role in this effort to restore harmony and balance?
There are some extremely simple first steps. But, although simple, they will take
plenty of courage, because there is powerful institutional inertia opposing restoration
of harmony. Yet even these forces are not hard to understand and probably do not arise
from bad intent. People (of whatever culture) are psychologically resistant to change.
In Thailand people must have been resistant to importing Western education methods
back some time in history, but with Anglo-American dominance in economics these
powerful capitalist systems gained incredible influence over international education
systems. Not for the betterment of many cultures.
But over time these forces won sway, so much so that now there is massive organizational inertia opposing changes to these initially resisted reforms! The history
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has been forgotten. If we are kind and generous then we cannot find too much fault
with people who hold to the status quo. Change is disruptive, and it leads to an outer
impression of disharmony at times. Ironically no one can see that the current systems
are often the true cause of the disharmony. So, sadly, it is always the agents of change
who get blamed for the disruption.
The true story is that all are to blame and none are to blame. We are all part of the
system, and we all behave imperfectly like disconnected individuals at times.
A better way to envisage change is as a cyclic process of renewal and improvement.
People are not perfect souls. We corrupt and distort the balances in nature, this builds
up tension which is often hidden behind a veil of business as usual, and harmony of
the status quo, but inevitably periodically the imbalance becomes so great that harmony must be restored, even when the process of restoration is perceived as disruptive
and full of conflict.
This is the Way of things. People and system that are out of balance with spiritual
forces will always form within perceive agents of change as the causes of conflict.
This type of process of change is itself almost of the status of a universal law, although
perhaps not quite: because there is a human attribute called wisdom which allows
people to manage change and restoration of harmony without too much conflict. This
is no easy however, it is another test and trial of the human spirit.

Motivation and Learning

Another unarguable fact about human beings (as opposed to say jackasses and mules)
is that in order to learn most effectively people need inner motivation (intrinsic motivation). Outer, external or extrinsic motivation is also important (without deadlines
people tend to get a bit lazy, but not if they are super intrinsically motivated and want
to burst out of bed every morning to get back to solving the problem they are working
on).
But the story of motivation is very subtle in many ways, and yet almost totally
understandable and easy to comprehend [Pink, 2009]. The type of extrinsic motive
is what is important. A bad extrinsic motive sucks the life out of the much more
important intrinsic motivation behind wanting to learn and this confounds a lot of
statistical studies of what counts as good motivation (performance enhancing).
Test scores and exam grades are the worst kind of extrinsic motivation, because
they distract the mind of the student. If they are not academically gifted they become
grade scarce in mindset, and in the behavioural psychology research of Mullainathan

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and Shafir [Mullainathan and Shafir, 2013]. THis causes all actual content learning
and cognition to shut down in their brains even if they are actually very bright and
intelligent people. What happesn is that they becoem focused with almost myopic zeal
on finding short cuts and any achievable ways to increase their grades and scores.
Often, if we are honest, there are much more efficient ways to get hihg academic
cscores than by actually learning the content and mastering the subject topics. But the
alternative methods involve a lot of risk, such methods as exam cheating, plagiarism,
copying, and any manner of faking learning the students are intelligent enough to
think of and devise.
This sort of behaviour has even been considered fairly intelligent, even children
with fairly high IQ will by-pass true learning if they are (a) not intrinsically motivated,
and (b) extrinsically driven by incentives like grades and test scores. Anyone who does
not know of personal experience of such drives is probably fooling themselves. Some
educators even grudgingly will let such students pass, on occasions, out of respect for
their excellent cheating skills. If they show sufficient ingenuity, then the attitude is
sometimes, why not reward them for their ingenuity, but then next time keep them
honest.
One of my favourite (true) stories is the engineering professor who gave a student
and A+ for solving a problem of measuring the height of a large building on campus
using only a watch, a piece of metre long string and a ruler. The student bribed the
building maintenance officer with the watch to show him the building blue-prints. The
student obtained the most accurate result. (Sadly, the name of the professor is a little
lost in the archives of Internet lore, but I think with a bit of search could be retrieved.)
Another (true) story is the professor (Russell Ackoff) who asked students to type
their term papers in the old days before personal computer word processors were
around. The papers had to be 10 to 15 pages, doubled spaced, with one inch margins.
One student wrote in 72 point font in landscape format. Their paper was a few dozen
words in length. The professor gave them an A (but only this time.).

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Bibliography
[Carpenter, 2006] Carpenter, J. M. (2006). Effective Teaching Methods for Large
Class Sizes. Journal of Family and Consumer Sciences Education, 24(2):1323.
[Mullainathan and Shafir, 2013] Mullainathan, S. and Shafir, E., editors (2013).
Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much. Time Books, Henry Holt & Company, New York.
[Pink, 2009] Pink, D. (2009). Drive: The surprising science of motivation. In Online
video http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html. TED Talks.
[Ryan and Deci, 2000] Ryan, R. M. and Deci, E. L. (2000). Intrinsic and Extrinsic
Motivations: Classic Definitions and New Directions. Contemporary Educational
Psychology, 25(1):5467.
[Ryan and Powelson, 1991] Ryan, R. M. and Powelson, C. L. (1991). Autonomy and
Relatedness as Fundamental to Motivation and Education. The Journal of Experimental Education, 60(1):4966.

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