Red for detail & blue for creativity – do colours matter?

Many people like to mark up their study notes with different colours and in some cases use a consistent ‘system’ – one colour for names, one for concepts etc. That’s just a personal choice, like choosing which colour clothes to wear.

However, it has been suggested that particular colours can consistently affect academic performance, and I saw this paper recently reported in Scientific American “Color (sic!) scheme: Red focuses attention, blue sets your mind free.” Which suggested that students should use different coloured pens for different types of study. I was intrigued, so I dug out the original paper which is freely available online.

In this study, psychologists in a Canadian business school were interested in the responses of people to red and blue computer screen backgrounds whilst people performed a series of tasks. The researchers mentioned that there are consistent associations with colours (within our society at least), but proposed that the conscious effects of red and blue in particular were contrary to expectations. Bottom line was that they found results consistent with the hypothesis that red encouraged an avoidance response and blue an approach response, so red should encourage detailed work where avoidance of error is important and blue should encourage creative work by imbuing an approach response.

Now I’m not going to go into a critique of the methodological or statistical holes in this paper (I’ll just say “Overlapping confidence intervals” and leave it at that!), but lets get down to brass tacks. Should you take studies like this seriously, along with ones that tell you to play baroque music, or have vanilla in the air while you study?

At the moment, the honest answer is that no one probably knows, but if there is an effect it’s probably small, and overwhelmed by other more mainstream factors like motivation, organisation and hard work. So if you want to use red and blue pens or change your computer screen colour, go ahead. And if you believe it will work, then as a trained hypnotist I can tell you that suggestion is a powerful tool. Just don’t expect miracles, eh?

Snow – a few flakes and everything stops!

For anyone in the UK it will be no news that we’ve had the heaviest snow fall for 18 years. For anyone outside the UK – guess what…?

That’s not the interesting bit though. The interesting bit is the reaction which has been reported in the media to the snow and its consequent effects, particularly on the social infrastructure – transport, schools, hospitals etc. To be brief, for at least a day or two, everything stopped – no buses, few trains, schools closed, hospital clinics cancelled. In the red top (tabloid) newspapers, this was a scandal – Britain Grinds to a halt…what can’t we be like the Canadians or Russians who have weather much worse than this every year…etc?

This is not just about snow; it’s about how people and societies prepare for uncommon events. It’s just not practical or economic to have Moscow-style snow-clearing kit tucked away in warehouses all over the UK for use once every 20 years. Of course there will always be the ‘Something must be done’ brigade who argue that any inconvenience to their lives must be a sign of the downfall of British society, but more reasonable people will recognise that economy of preparation is a sensible course of action.

What does this have to do with exams? Well I think it illustrates the point about focussing your efforts on likelihoods. Yes, you can try to prepare for every possible, but unlikely, question. And if you are a highly able candidate (on the distinction/merit boundary) then it may well be worthwhile for you to have your mental snowploughs all oiled up and ready to roll. But if your abilities and goals are more modest (you’re on the pass/fail boundary), it makes more sense to prepare for the likely questions and if you’re unlucky enough to get a rare ‘snowstorm’ of a question, just accept that you’re going to have to rely on some hard shovelling to get you out!

NLP – real or hoax?

NLP or neurolinguistic programming is a body of psychological techniques and theories that, depending on who you listen to or read is either a bunch of self-deluded hooey or the greatest breakthrough in psychology since Freud (assuming you think Freud had something worthwhile to contribute). In educational terms, its potential is vast, but can it live up to its potential?

The first challenge is discussing NLP lies in defining it. It was originally an attempt by Bandler and Grinder to understand and copy exceptional human performance. They studied what remarkable therapists from very different ‘school’ did with their clients and tried to find recurring patterns of behaviour. Note they didn’t ask what these great people thought they were doing to succeed, they observed what they actually did.

Based on these observations, they created a collection of techniques which great therapists seemed to use which worked (see The Structure of Magic 1975). And when they taught these techniques to other people, they reported great success with them too. Since the early days, the originators have split up and spent much of the 1990’s in an acrimonious law-suit over, amongst other things, the right to use of the term ‘NLP’. They finally settled their differences in 2000, but have not returned to co-working, and have both since developed ‘new technologies’ with new names. So effectively, now no one can now call a spade a spade for rear of legal ramifications, this makes the problems of definition even thornier.

There have been many studies trying to test claims of NLP, and there is little hard evidence to support many of the claims. The originators, particularly Bandler, claimed to have a mainly pragmatic interest, taking the view that it was not his job to prove his techniques or theories. Negative studies into NLP have often been criticised by practitioners as either misunderstanding NLP or misapplying it. Given the commercial interests involved, it seems likely that there is poor motivation on the part of some in the field to have clear hypotheses, capable of being disproven.

So can we glean anything from this tangle? Well having used a number of NLP techniques myself with clients and with myself, I know that some of the methods appear to produce quick, lasting result. How much of this is placebo or therapeutic effect, I don’t know. How much of the (convoluted) theory is a reflection of neurological reality and how much marketing hype, I can’t tell. 

All I can tell you is that, for all the hype, there do appear to be some useful methods contained in NLP, and it provides an alternative way to view human interactions, which can be interesting if nothing else.

The Hawthorne effect - confounder or tool?

There was a big splash in the medical press this week about the WHO new surgical checklist, which has apparently ‘been shown to significantly reduce post-surgical morbidity and mortality’, leading to the National Patient Safety Agency (NPSA) planning to roll out the checklist across the UK, and a patient advocate complaining that doing this in all 500-odd of the NHS’s hospitals over 12 months is too slow!

My critical eye was caught by the phrase ‘pilot studies have shown…” and I immediately wondered about a well-known confounder of social research called the Hawthorne effect.

This can be a particular problem in evaluating educational interventions, but may be less familiar to people used to medical interventions, which tend to favour the double-blind randomised controlled trial, ideally with physically defined outcomes.

The Hawthorne effect occurs when the objects of a study are themselves capable of understanding that they are part of a study, and that therefore something is expected of them.

In the classic experiments in the Hawthorne Works (a huge electrical factory outside Chicago) in the late 1920’s, Landsberger was looking at the effects of work conditions on manufacturing output. He tried first improving the lighting on the shop floor, and found that productivity improved. However, when he lowered the light levels back to their original settings, he found that productivity improved again! The intervention which he thought was effective (the lighting levels) was in fact NOT responsible for the change in performance. What had the major effect seemed to be the knowledge that the workers were being observed, and that something was expected of them!

Now the authors of the surgical checklist pilot study, do acknowledge the possibility of a Hawthorne effect in the results they obtained. (Full text) If this is an explanation for much of the observed improvement in patient safety, then we would expect it to wear off as the novelty of the checklist wears off (perhaps as the checklist is finally rolled out across the NHS).

Just like the placebo effect can confound medical research, in the world of educational research the Hawthorne effect can be a bug bear. 

However, it is also an effect which you can use to positive effect as a study tool. If you make a change in your study patterns and set up an observer (which could be yourself) to measure the outcome, it’s likely that the very fact of making a change and studying its effects will produce an improvement in performance (albeit temporary). 

New Years resolutions

Happy New Year to all my blog readers! I wonder if you’ve made any New Years resolutions this year, and if you have, are they broken yet?

I don’t think that anyone takes New Years resolutions seriously any more, and to be honest neither do I. 

I mean, if it takes a point in the calendar to force you to make a decision, then how motivated were you in making the decision in the first place? I’m not against self-imposed deadlines, they can be very useful, but the problem with New Years resolutions is precisely that they aren’t self-imposed – they are set by an external source.

So, if you’ve set yourself some challenges for the New Year, then good for you, and I hope that it works out for you. But if you have difficulty keeping up to a decision, why not re-set it at a date of significance to you? And there is one date which I think is best for a personal decision. There is just one date that says ‘commitment’ to your own subconscious as well as to other people. 

The date to make a change that matters to you is TODAY.