Progress-focused

Recent research ( Woznicki et al., 2023 ) examines the formation of classroom microclimates within STEM courses. This study looked at how course goal structures and instructor mindsets contribute to these microclimates and their impact on student perceptions and experiences.

Adam Rutherford, British geneticist and writer, has a new book, How to Argue with a Racist . I have read it and think it is an educational, interesting and well written book. It comes at a good time because there is now a lot of talk about racism and what to do about it. We often have conversations about race and racism based on our personal experiences, intuitions, norms and values, and common sense. This book adds something valuable in that it explains what the science of genetics and the science of evolution show about races and supposed differences between races. That makes the book very interesting. But I also have two critical thoughts about the book.

All of us experience reality in a distorted way and we are mostly unaware of that this happens and how this happens. Here is a list of well-known human biases. On this list is a bias called naive realism. This bias plays a special role. It can be seen as the mother of all biases. Naive realism, a term coined by Lee Ross, is the wrong belief that reality is just like we experience it. In other words, it is the cognitive mechanism which blinds us to the many biases we fall prey to.

Kathryn Schulz has written a book called Being Wrong, adventures in the margin of error . The book covers many interesting views on wrongness but I'd like to focus here on one. There is a difference between the scientific method and the approach to knowing we as individuals tend to have. Schulz: "The scientific method is essentially a monument to the utility or error. Most of us gravitate toward trying to verify our beliefs ... But scientists gravitate toward falsification.... Not only can any give theory be proven wrong, sooner or later, it probably will be. And when it is, the occasion will mark the success of science, not its failure."