And then there are thelegions of academic researchers, with a small “r”. Desperate and unimaginative research agendas that extrapolate thin psychological premises into entangled mazes of nonsense. Classic case is a paper I saw that tried to fit students into cognitive style boxes. At least there was an attempt at rational measurement. But that was as far as it went. You see the success of science is put down to the “scientific method” and so to be “modern” it is good form to emulate the trappings of science. It is a form of imitative magic. Give lots of references to increase the sympathetic magic. However the inevitable happened, the poor fit of this crappy theory then led the author to propose that teachers should employ “cognitive style flexing” strategies. Ye Gods. Ah well you have to have a conclusion you know.

I think Edward deBono has done some nice work on thinking, he calls it operacy, by analogy with literacy and numeracy. But he tends to be shunned by academics embroiled in the corrupt publish or perish nonsense of “pedagogy”, even though his programmes have been adopted from time to time in some schools.

I notice the dude writing all the formulas forgot to put a “dx” in his integral. Odd to be sloppy when his apparent reason to write the stuff in the first place is to take a picture to post on the web.