Strategic Targeting (and Un-Targeting)
How to teach skills to those who need instruction without wasting the time of those who don't?
I’m going to do that thing academics are prone to where I seize on some small side bit of a story about one thing and use it to talk about a different issue that’s mor interesting to me, personally. Which is not to say that the original source isn’t interesting— it’s this transcribed podcast interview from The Atlantic featuring Jerusalem Desmas and Dr. Lucy Foulkes, with the slightly clickbait-y title “Not Everyone Needs to Go to Therapy”. I can’t speak for the podcast per se, having only read the transcript, but it’s a worthwhile read.
The particular relevant-to-my-interests bit comes in a discussion about some recent research showing minimal benefits (or even mild negative effects) from trial programs where large cohorts of teens were taught mental health concepts and therapy-based techniques in school. Because it’s a podcast transcript, there are no links with the piece I’m quoting from below, but this earlier story from The Atlantic covers the same general subject.
The specific bit that caught my interest was this, where Foulkes is talking about one reason why the trial may not have had the hoped-for benefits:
I think what’s important about all of them is that they’re universal interventions. So that means that they were taught to all young people in a class, regardless of need, with the very reasonable idea: Why not try and help everyone? Why not try and give everyone the tools and knowledge that they might need, either because they’re struggling now or because, at some point in the future, they might benefit from this information? But the trouble is what that does is you’re taking principles that were originally designed to be taught one-to-one, and then you’re teaching them to a group of 25 or 30 teenagers or young people, all in one class.
So if you learn these techniques in one-to-one therapy, you can adapt them to your specific issues. You can troubleshoot with your therapist when you’re having difficulty. You can ask for explanations and clarifications when you don’t understand. That mindfulness is a difficult skill to learn. So part of the issue for why these interventions don’t work well, or sometimes have negative effects, is because you have diluted the practices too much.
And then, in addition to that, you are, by definition, teaching it to a whole class with a variety of needs. But that means within that class, you will have a lot of young people who are actually fine. It’s become a bit unfashionable to talk about this, but there are a lot of teenagers who don’t have mental-health problems. So potentially you’re asking them to learn skills that aren’t relevant to them. And a lot of young people, if you ask them, they say they find these lessons boring and not relevant to their lives.
This jumps out at me because it’s describing these as a specific example of a more general problem of information delivery that comes up again and again in the course of my day job: How do you teach specific skills to the individuals within a large population who need them without annoying (let alone harming) the ones who don’t?
This comes up in a wide variety of contexts. In formal classroom instruction (in physics, anyway), it mostly shows up with topics like writing or programming: skills that are somewhat secondary to the core activities of the class (learning various concepts and techniques for solving specific types of problems), that are also…, let’s say “not uniformly distributed across the student population.” It can be enormously helpful and illuminating to use numerical calculations when discussing some topics in physics, but it requires a kind of comfort with computers that some students will have and others very much will not. Spending class time on formal instruction to attempt to bring the least-comfortable up to speed will reduce the time available for the core content of the class, and also bore/annoy the most-comfortable students. In a lot of courses, the easiest thing to do is to just say “Screw it,” and punt the whole set of topics, but that’s also doing students a disservice. Finding the right balance between those is difficult and frustrating.
On the professional staff level, this shows up through the proliferation of lengthy “trainings” for this and that. We’re deep in the process of transitioning our financial systems to Workday, which has led to a steady barrage of emails encouraging faculty and staff to sign up for hour-long classes on the new system. Happily, these are not mandatory, because everyone on the faculty I’ve talked to who did one described it as a huge waste of time. (My position on this has been “I have a Ph.D. in a technical subject, if you give me some print documentation, I can figure out how to do whatever I need to do with this consumer-facing system,” and I feel 100% vindicated in that to this point…) And, of course, there’s the mandatory annual “training” in how not to be an enormous dickhead, which is inevitably dull to the point of being mildly insulting.
The same general issue shows up in a lot of in-between, semi-formal contexts, as well. I’ve been at least on the fringes of a lot of discussions of how to impart various “Life Skills” to students— everything from time management to financial literacy to navigating interpersonal relationships (that last one thankfully rarely). Given the nature of the people who tend to be in charge of these discussions on a college campus, this inevitably leads to a lot of calls for formal educational programming about whatever particular topic is being discussed.
And that’s the context that most clearly highlights the fundamental problem, which is also touched on in Foulkes’s comments above, namely that when you make this kind of thing a universal formal requirement, you end up wasting the time of a lot of people who don’t actually need the “training” in question, while not necessarily reaching the ones who actually need it. Any student who has their shit together to a sufficient degree to actually show up for the Life Skills program on time management isn’t likely to derive much benefit from the program contents. And the students who don’t show up probably need even more help than can be provided by any at-scale program.
This is closely related to the “Why didn’t they teach ____ in school?” problem, which comes around regularly in the grumpier corners of social media. The answer to the question is almost always “They did teach it in school, you just weren’t paying attention.” There are a lot of skills that aren’t particularly relevant at the time that it’s convenient to force people to take classes on them, but that will be essential later. My 12th grade social-studies class had a whole section on the pros and cons of different kinds of life insurance. The details of which I remembered just long enough to pass the test, then promptly forgot, because it would be close to a decade before that was anything I really needed to think about. (I still couldn’t really tell you what the various options are…) And I was a good student who paid attention— it’s hard to overstate the degree to which some of my classmates were checked out of that whole scene.
Some of the Life Skills stuff people earnestly discuss how to impart to our students— financial literacy, etc.— will be enormously relevant to them down the road. But it’s almost certainly not relevant right now, when we can push them into formal instruction. Which means even the good students who dutifully attend are going to see it as a big waste of time and promptly forget most of it. And that, in turn, means squandering some institutional goodwill (“Why are they making me sit through this bullshit?”) for dubious long-term benefit.
(This is even before factoring in the ability of students to narrowly compartmentalize skills that ought to transfer between courses. I once threatened to fail a student for turning in grossly deficient lab reports in a Winter term class, which got his attention enough that his re-written report was acceptable. I had the same student for the Spring term section of the next course in the sequence— separated by a one-week break between terms— and his first lab for the second course was exactly as bad as the first lab from the earlier course, in exactly the ways that I had forced him to correct mere weeks before. It still boggles my mind…)
In the Life Skills area and the campus context, the backstop for this is the academic/disciplinary process. Students who don’t have their shit together enough to attend time management classes usually end up flunking something else, bringing them to the attention of administrators who can try to direct them to the more intensive and individualized help that they really need. But that’s not really an ideal path, which is why we have all these discussions about requiring universal programs— everyone’s hoping for a way to head these issues off before it gets to the point of a formal sanction from the Dean.
I wish I had a good solution to this problem— how to target people who will need instruction in advance, or at least to un-target the ones who won’t need it. Not least because if I had such a solution, I’d be wealthy beyond dreams of avarice from the consulting fees I’d rake in. Sadly, I think we’re pretty much stuck with the current muddle of trying to patch together just enough universal training to do some good.
That’s a bit of inconclusive wibbling, I know, but at least it’s not about politics? If you want more of this kind of thing, here’s a button:
If you have a foolproof system for (un)targeting people for formal instruction in a way that addresses this, send me a message and we’ll work out a fair split of the consulting fees. Or if you’re feeling unusually altruistic, you can throw it out to the world by leaving a comment:
Well, I don't have a foolproof program (you know what they say about ingenious fools...), but what I've seen work in a more informal context is a group class for the main parts of a subject, and optional, short "appendage" classes run in parallel with the main class, for little bits and pieces that may be harder for particular students.
Mind you, this was for a group of very motivated & generally competent adults, so the people who needed additional help tended to self-identify and show up at the side mini-classes as they needed. It was also an environment where the same main class was being taught in parallel to hundreds of students, so having side mini-classes that might only be attended by 5-10% of the students still made sense.
Some of the kids do remember just enough to be useful later.
We didn't have a module on life insurance, but I picked up at about the same age "anything but term insurance is probably a scam" (though doubtless perfectly legal). Later I added "before buying life insurance, think about what would actually be needed if the death occurred". What else do I need, other than a good financial calculator and at least some providers willing to give actual financial details, rather than imprecise or misleading brochures?
Likewise, one of my math teachers, when I was somewhere around 12 years old, brought in a heap of income tax forms, and had us all fill them out for three hypothetical tax payers. My take away: "this is <i>easy</i>; all you need is basic arithmetic skills." I didn't become better able to file taxes, or even learn about some of the ways in which filing income tax can be made anything other than simple. But more than a decade later I faced my first tax forms with happy confidence. (And yes, they were as easy as I remembered.)