Time to Whine

All of you who don't like to read angry comments about how stuff is unfair, people should do a better job, this makes me so angry, yada yada yada, please skip this blog post. At its core, it's just a bunch of useless bitching. Just a forewarning.

I just read today about something Swedish schools like to call "Kamrateffekten". This refers to the hypothesis that "If we put high-performing students in groups with low-performing students, the low-performing students will get better results." That is to say, the hypothesis basically proposes "Put the quiet over-achieving little girls together with the rowdy guys who spit tobacco everywhere, and Profit happens."

We've all seen this theory in effect, I believe. Now, what I read this morning that was so shocking, is that there's no psychological study that satisfactorily shows that this effect is true! It's apparently basically just conjecture, and there's little to no evidence in favour of it.

There are many studies which claim to give evidence for this hypothetical effect, but most of them just actually prove unrelated things - for instance, it's well-documented that when you divide up a class into a "high-performing group" and a "low-performing group", the low-performing group gets much worse results. This is apparently for some reason used to support the hypothesis that the "weak" students no longer have "strong" students to help them, and not to support the alternative hypothesis, "It's not exactly motivating to study if you're told you suck at it", which to me, seems like a far more sensible conclusion to draw.

It absolutely horrifies me, because apparently this "kamrateffekt" is used as a basis for lots of pedagogical reasoning in Swedish schools today, and it's just, well - conjecture! Worse, it's a case of "This is how people behave, because it fits well with our ideology", which is a dangerous, dangerous way of reasoning.

In this day and age, you'd think at least the people in charge would give some thought towards science, and not just wildly make shit up and then teach their teachers about it.