Bobvis has pointed out a couple times now studies that say that if you tell kids to “do their best” and not insist they can do better in school, they will learn to accept mediocrity. At least, I think that’s the message; the study claims to indicate that children who believe intelligence is a “fixed” quantity for each human are more likely to give up on a task if it’s difficult or challenging.
A secondary bit mentioned in the article he quotes is the phenomenon of “learned helplessness”, which manifests itself all sorts of ways in society.
Working at Southern Tech, I’m constantly amazed by the fact that our older faculty/staff can clearly and easily be separated into two degrees of capability: mediocre and nonexistent.
The Mediocre folks are capable enough of doing basic word processing tasks and working with one or two specialty statistics programs they’ve been using for at least a decade. The nonexistent folks are much worse; they routinely need help figuring out (I am not making this up) that they have accidentally pushed the Caps Lock key when typing.
As near as I can tell, the “Nonexistent”-skilled folks have one thing in common: all are over the age of 45, whether faculty or staff. Watching them attempt to work on their own, I can only conclude that for some portion of the population, the ability to form new mental models and learn new tasks (or even new ways of doing old tasks) has been lost after this age. This is also confirmed by my mother, whose interaction with computers amounts to announcing that the way certain things are programmed to work is “dumb”, and proceeding to attempt to interact with the computer in the way she thinks it should have been programmed to react rather than altering her behavior to work with the system as designed.
Trust me, mom. The computer’s way more inflexible than you are.
The older faculty members at Southern Tech, or some of them at least, surely could manage better if they didn’t have tech support to call upon. As things stand now, however, they have no real incentive to learn.
Comment by Peter — December 23, 2008 @ 6:48 am
Peter,
If we weren’t there, trust me, these people would not muddle through on their own. We’d have a constant stream of “geek squad” type visitors, or else they’d be bothering the hell out of other people, or even hiring grad students solely to do the work we do (one in particular actually did have his own “personal IT guy” grad student for the better part of 4 years).
Plus, their reactions are much the same as my mother’s when you inform them that the procedure they are trying to follow to do something is either (a) missing a step, (b) out of order, or (c) entirely the wrong procedure: exclaim “well that’s stupid, it shouldn’t work that way”, followed by going right back to the problem behavior an hour later.
Imagine if you had someone who was trying to learn to drive a standard-transmission car who insisted that the clutch pedal should be in the center and the brake on the left, rather than clutch on the left and brake in the center. Now imagine that they then proceeded to try to drive the car that way even after multiple times shocking the engine by shoving the brakes on full while the clutch was still engaged. That’s what we’re dealing with here.
Comment by Webmaster — December 23, 2008 @ 12:48 pm
I must be lucky. When my mother learned how to use Quickbooks (or Quicken; I don’t remember which), she called me in to help her every ten minutes for a whole weekend*, but after that she finally figured stuff out.
My father’s always been reasonably competent with computers, though, even back in the DOS days, and we didn’t get one until he was almost 40.
*I didn’t know how to use it either, but this was around 1997 or so, by which time UI designers had figured out how to make things reasonably intuitive.
Comment by Brandon Berg — December 23, 2008 @ 10:01 pm
There are some areas where my father knows more about computers than I do. Particularly the front-end stuff. He’s been working with them for a while though and reads a lot of magazines with a lot of tips. My mother, though, is very much like Web’s. I think she misses Applewriter on the Apple ][e.
Comment by trumwill — December 25, 2008 @ 9:11 am
Yeah…but we older chicks can type up a full page of text in triplicate (with carbon paper!) in 2 minutes flat.
: >
Jan
age 45
Comment by Jan — December 27, 2008 @ 7:06 pm