Category Archives: Science and Society

Alcohol really is no excuse for bad behaviour – research reveals you’re still the same person after a drink

Many of us know that feeling of waking up, headache in tow, struggling to remember what we said and did after that extra drink the night before. And then suddenly, the memories vividly resurface.

Alcohol disinhibits us, making us say and do things that we’d otherwise keep under wraps. People will often drink to gain “Dutch courage” in a demanding situation. Many of us can understand the appeal of having a drink before a blind date or a social event – it can help to calm our nerves and cultivate confidence. That’s because alcohol has a depressant effect which makes us feel more relaxed.

Of course, alcohol’s effects aren’t all positive. We’ve all adopted nicknames for the characters that we become after a few drinks. Maybe you’re the “happy drunk”, or perhaps you’ve built a reputation for being the “aggressive drunk” who takes everything the wrong way after a pint.

The relationship between alcohol and antisocial behaviour is well documented – both anecdotally and in research. Plenty of arguments and fights stem from someone having had one too many. Scientists believe we behave like this when drunk because we misinterpret social situations and lose our sense of empathy. In essence, once we start slurring words and stumbling, our ability to understand or share the emotions of others goes out the door, too.

Own your drunken decisions

If someone has done something wrong while under the influence of alcohol, we tend to give them a “get out of jail free card”, rather than hold them accountable for their actions. We also extend these excuses to ourselves.

But in our research, we’ve attempted to paint a clearer picture of how drinking alcohol, empathy, and moral behaviour are related. In turns out that while consuming alcohol might affect our empathy, making us respond inappropriately to other people’s emotions and reactions, this doesn’t necessarily change our moral standards, or the principles we use to distinguish between what is right and what is wrong.

In a recent experiment, we gave participants shots of vodka and then measured their empathy and their moral decisions. We presented images showing various people expressing emotions to our participants. After having a higher dose of vodka, people began to respond inappropriately to these emotional displays, reporting that they felt positively about sad faces and negatively about happy faces. The more intoxicated people were, the more impaired their empathy became – having a few drinks weakened people’s abilities to understand and share the emotions of others.

But did this then have an effect on their morality?

We had people tell us what they thought they would do in moral dilemmas and then also looked at what they actually did in a simulation of a moral dilemma in Virtual Reality. Consider what you might do in one of these situations:

A runaway trolley is heading down some rail tracks towards five construction workers who can’t hear it approaching. You’re standing on a footbridge in between the approaching trolley and the workers. In front of you, is standing a very large stranger. If you push this stranger onto the tracks below, their large bulk will stop the trolley. This one person will be killed but the five construction workers will be saved. Would you do it?

While alcohol might have impaired the empathy of our participants, it didn’t have an effect on how they judged these moral situations or how they acted in them. If someone chose to push the person off the footbridge in order to save more lives while sober, they did the same thing when drunk. If people refused to sacrifice the person’s life in the same situation because they believed that killing was wrong regardless of the consequences, they also did the same when drunk.

It turns out that while we might believe that alcohol changes our personalities, it doesn’t. You’re still the same person after a drink – your existing sense of morality left intact. So while alcohol might affect how we interpret and understand the emotions of other people, we can’t blame our immoral behaviours on alcohol.

Drunken you has the same moral compass. And so you are responsible for your moral and immoral actions, whether you’ve had a few drinks or not.

Kathryn Francis does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Source: The Conversation: Technology http://theconversation.com/alcohol-really-is-no-excuse-for-bad-behaviour-research-reveals-youre-still-the-same-person-after-a-drink-122298

Ghost particles: how galaxies helped us weigh the lightest neutrino – and why it matters

Even when you close your eyes at night, 100 billion neutrinos produced in the sun will pass through them – travelling close to the speed of light, but never hitting anything. Neutrinos are extremely elusive and only weakly interact with matter around them: nature’s true ghosts. Until very recently, these tiny particles were believed to be massless.

In the late 1990s, researchers demonstrated that neutrinos constantly change between three different types (flavours), which affects how they interact with matter. This is something they can only do if they have mass – a discovery that was granted the Nobel Prize in 2015. From these particle physics experiments, we know that at least two of the three neutrino species have mass.

Yet little has been known about the mass of the lightest species – until now. Our new study, published in Physical Review Letters, shows that the lightest neutrino is at least 6m times lighter than the mass of an electron, at 0.86 electron volts (a unit of energy). Our technique may give exact masses for each neutrino in the future.

Neutrinos are peculiar. Thanks to the strange rules of quantum mechanics, the relationships between the flavours and their masses are complicated. In any beam of neutrinos, the three masses are always present but in different ratios. Each flavour of neutrino has a combination of the three masses and each neutrino mass has a combination of the three flavours.

Massive significance

Neutrinos matter to understanding space. Back to the 1940s, a letter to Physical Review by physicists George Gamow and Mario Schoenberg (a personal hero of mine) suggested that neutrinos played a major role in stellar evolution and supernovas (exploding stars). This was confirmed when scientists detected the first neutrinos from a supernova in 1987, providing a better understanding of supernovas and neutrinos alike.

On a cosmological scale, however, because these ghostly particles have mass, they tend to drag a little bit of matter with them thanks to gravity. And so the more massive the neutrinos are, the “fuzzier” the distribution of galaxies around us will be. This means that by observing galaxies around us, we can infer the mass of neutrinos. It is amazing to think that the largest structures of galaxies in the universe are sensitive to the tiniest particles known by physics.

The reason scientists are so keen to find out their mass, is that it matters to our ultimate understanding of reality. The Standard Model of Particle Physics is one of the most precise theories of fundamental particles that we have so far. However, this theory predicts that neutrinos should be massless.

Understanding neutrino masses is a key point to move ahead towards a new and improved theory of particle physics. It is quite possible that by doing so, other mysteries in physics, which also cannot be explained by the standard model, such as the nature of dark energy and dark matter, would also be solved.

Two camps

The way we made our discovery matters, too. Our international team of researchers from the UK and Brazil combined cosmological data and particle physics experiments.

Each approach has its limitations. When cosmologists determine neutrino masses from observations of galaxy distributions, they can only determine a maximum mass for the sum of the three neutrinos.

Particle physics experiments can directly study neutrinos, for example by creating a beam of them in the lab or detecting neutrinos from space underground. But most of them are based on detecting how neutrino flavours mix. This doesn’t tell you the absolute mass for each particle, but only the difference in mass for two out of three neutrino species. It also doesn’t tell us which of the two is the heaviest neutrino.

Sadly, many cosmologists often ignore results from particle physics. And some particle physicists are sceptical of cosmologists’ statistical techniques, claiming their way of using prior knowledge, such as estimating that the mass cannot be negative, influences their results.

We combined the two by creating a mathematical model to calculate the sum of the neutrino masses by studying the large scale structure of more than a million galaxies from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS). We also had to include many other parameters that affect galaxy distribution such as dark matter and dark energy. We then fed in what we know from particle physics experiments, which told us in very exact terms what the relationships between the masses of the neutrinos should be. This allowed us to calculate an upper limit of the mass of the lightest particle.

In order to achieve these results, we had to push the boundaries of big data analysis in cosmology to their limits, using more than half a million computing hours to process the data. Luckily, we had a super computer to help us.

Although current available data is not powerful enough to detect a lower-bound for the mass of the lightest neutrino – it could still be massless– this work demonstrates that applying a combined methodology is the way forward.

The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), which will analyse ten times more galaxies than we had access to, will give a much more reliable estimate of the total mass for all the neutrinos – and that may make it possible to work out a minimum mass. Excitingly, this might just launch a new era in neutrino physics.

Arthur Loureiro received funding from the National Council for Science and Technology (CNPq), Brazil.

Source: The Conversation: Technology http://theconversation.com/ghost-particles-how-galaxies-helped-us-weigh-the-lightest-neutrino-and-why-it-matters-122230

Why we laugh when we know it’s wrong

For the Batek people of the Malaysian peninsula rainforest, laughter can be dangerous. Within the system of taboos of these egalitarian hunter-gatherers, laughing in certain situations can cause storms, illness or even death. And yet sometimes, Batek people – like anyone else – laugh when they know they shouldn’t. In fact, laughter can be especially pleasurable when it’s forbidden.

What does this paradox tell us about ideas of right and wrong? My recent research with the Batek suggests that examining contagious, uncontrollable laughter can help explain why we do things we say we shouldn’t. Rather than always being “wrong”, laughing when we shouldn’t can be a way of shaping our ethical beliefs by interacting with others, testing out the limits of right and wrong. To understand this, we must look not only at what is funny, but at how people laugh.

In the Batek’s forest, to laugh at anything you might be about to eat would risk diarrhoea and even death in extreme circumstances. Laughing around fruits, flowers, bees, honey, certain insects or in fact anything that has to do with the ecology of the fruit season carries enormous risks. These include caterpillars coming out of your eyes, a gigantic swelling head, or being unable to speak.

This kind of laughter might also affect the fruit season itself, causing some fruits or flowers not to appear. Laughing too much, too loudly or at certain creatures – in particular leeches and other invertebrates – might risk angering the thunder-being, causing terrifying storms.

Adhering to these taboos is seen as ethical behaviour, a way that people demonstrate respect for the non-human persons of the forest that provide the Batek with sustenance. But sometimes people can’t control their laughter. So they cannot do the “right” thing every time.

During my fieldwork with the Batek, one night I was staying up late with Naʔ Srimjam, a Batek friend, when a frog began to croak. This frog’s croak sounded a lot like someone breaking wind, causing her to crack up. Naʔ Srimjam tried desperately to get her laughter under control, gasping through her giggles that her laughter was taboo. As soon as she had stopped laughing, the frog let out another croak. This cycle happened repeatedly until she was weeping with laughter.

Naʔ Srimjam was fully aware that she was being dangerously taboo, but was revelling in the subversive laughter anyway. She just couldn’t help herself. In this instance, her laughter was uncontrollable, erupting even though it was wrong. And yet no one judged her as wrong or bad for having laughed when she recounted the story the next day.

Society or individual?

Scholars have long debated whether our ethics are shaped by society or whether we control them as individuals. But moments of forbidden laughter among the Batek show that both can be true at once.

On the one hand, our ideas about what is funny are shaped by our social contexts. This moment was so funny to Naʔ Srimjam because she knew that, as a Batek person, it was taboo for her to laugh at this frog. This was demonstrated by how she kept pointing out that we were being taboo, even while she was doing the taboo thing.

On the other hand, people will always have their own reactions to things that happen. Social contexts help shape these reactions but aren’t the only thing that determines our behaviour. Laughter can erupt whether or not it is culturally or socially appropriate.

When it comes to the ethics of laughter, people may recognise the rules of what’s appropriate but also take the rules into their own hands. How much freedom people have to choose what is ethical reflects their broader understandings of their relationships with others.

In the Batek’s egalitarian society, where no one person has systematic authority over another, individual autonomy is paramount. This focus on autonomy is why the Batek do not punish one another for inappropriate laughter, even when it is considered wrong and risks dangerous consequences for the group such as the anger of the thunder-being. Instead, people say, it’s up to “them on their own”.

Because of this, laughter is a unique tool for socialisation. There is a constant interplay between doing the right thing, and doing (just the right amount of) the wrong thing. And understanding how this works through laughter helps people establish their personal ethical values in relation to the rest of the group. When it comes to what we find funny, we may either follow the rules or just laugh them off. But either way we are learning about right and wrong.

Alice Rudge receives funding from the Leverhulme Trust, The Evans Fund at the University of Cambridge.

Source: The Conversation: Technology http://theconversation.com/why-we-laugh-when-we-know-its-wrong-122218

Keeping monkeys as pets is extraordinarily cruel – a ban is long overdue

Most people will have seen at least one headline over the last couple of years describing animal attacks on humans. This needn’t include the elephant from a Zimbabwe National Park that trampled a tourist or the Sumatran tiger that killed a keeper who entered his zoo enclosure in Birmingham. There are numerous examples of attacks by wild pets on their owners, often whom they have known for years.

The pet, bottle fed from birth, having grown up in someone’s home like a child, suddenly “snaps” and causes major harm to a human family member, to the shock of both the public and the press. More often than not, these incidents involve pet primates – monkeys and apes – that have been purchased as one would any dog or cat. The problem is that dogs and cats are domesticated animals but primates are not.

Primates are a diverse group of over 250 species that live across five continents but are most commonly found in the tropics, from Uruguay to Uganda and Venezuela to Vietnam. They are wild, and attempts to domesticate them result in a mentally disturbed animal that no amount of training, beating or adoring will ever reverse.

There are an estimated 5,000 primate pets currently in UK households and a growing illicit trade in wild-caught animals. In response to this growing problem, the Labour Party has recently announced it would make training or keeping primates in homes illegal.

It’s a wonder that a political party even has to take this stance, although the debate is not a new one. The evidence that keeping pet primates is unsafe for the animals and their owners is overwhelming.

A long way from home

Matching the living conditions of a wild primate is impossible in the UK. Primates need nutrition, light, temperature and humidity that are consistent with the tropics not British households. A mismatch in any of these conditions in a captive primate’s environment can cause health issues, including vitamin and mineral deficiencies, respiratory infections and skin diseases.

Some primates, like the chimpanzee, are used to roaming across areas of up to 100 square kilometres in the wild. Even the very smallest species, like the common marmoset, have evolved to range across thousands of square metres. Confining large animals to small spaces impairs their development.

Like humans, primates are social creatures. But most people only want a single monkey for a pet, not an entire troop. So not only do primate pets suffer physically, they’re also socially deprived. We know from early experimental work that isolating these animals from their group causes profound social problems. In most cases, normal social behaviour can’t be recovered in pets that are later released. Human owners of especially young pet monkeys cripple the animals for life by removing them from their natural surroundings.

The health and safety of the human owner is also at risk in these situations. Most new infectious diseases that scientists discover are zoonotic, which means they’re transmitted from wildlife to humans. More often than not, we don’t know where the disease originates.

The most common of these is Ebola, the haemorrhagic fever that periodically rears its hideous head and spreads rapidly throughout central Africa and beyond, even recently reaching the UK. You only have to read up on the current Ebola outbreak and especially the early symptoms to want to keep your distance from any wildlife that might harbour it. Rhesus monkeys also carry a strain of herpes B virus that can be fatal in humans.

Then there are the unprovoked attacks. It’s tempting to think that loyalty trumps instinct and any primate raised with the love and devotion of a caretaker would reciprocate those sentiments in later life. This may be the case with domestic animals but not wild ones.

Pet owners underestimate the influence of millions of years of evolution. Adolescence, male aggression and female competition are natural and ingrained tendencies of wild animals that no amount of living with humans can erase. Failure to acknowledge or anticipate them is what often leads to these attacks, but such events are really just the animals exhibiting natural behaviour.

Read more: Stop portraying wild animals as cuddly companions (and potential pets)

Despite the good intentions of many pet owners, it’s nothing short of cruel to imprison primates in homes that are simply unfit for their living in nearly every regard. The Labour Party should be applauded for taking such a resolute stance.

Some will argue that outlawing the ownership of pet primates will only drive the industry underground, immunising it from the rules that currently govern acceptable conditions. But this logic could apply to any illegal behaviour, from kidnapping to owning guns. Surely, just because these things persist, it doesn’t mean we should legalise and attempt to regulate them.

The world’s remaining wild primates face extinction wherever they live naturally. Those who love primates enough to want to own them can support them by any number of more ethical and safe options, from supporting conservation work in the wild to volunteering at zoos and sanctuaries.

Educating people is what will protect these animals and also the humans that care about them. We still have an enormous amount to learn about our closest relatives. But Labour’s policy of outlawing pet primates is an important step towards reducing an otherwise harmful, if well-intended human threat to wild primates.

Alexander Piel is the director of GMERC, LTD, a Tanzania-based research and conservation group that studies wild primates.

Fiona Stewart is a co-director of GMERC, a Tanzania-based research and conservation group that studies wild primates

Source: The Conversation: Technology http://theconversation.com/keeping-monkeys-as-pets-is-extraordinarily-cruel-a-ban-is-long-overdue-122278

Singularity: how governments can halt the rise of unfriendly, unstoppable super-AI

The invention of an artificial super-intelligence has been a central theme in science fiction since at least the 19th century. From E.M. Forster’s short story The Machine Stops (1909) to the recent HBO television series Westworld, writers have tended to portray this possibility as an unmitigated disaster. But this issue is no longer one of fiction. Prominent contemporary scientists and engineers are now also worried that super-AI could one day surpass human intelligence (an event known as the “singularity”) and become humanity’s “worst mistake”.

Current trends suggest we are set to enter an international arms race for such a technology. Whichever high-tech firm or government lab succeeds in inventing the first super-AI will obtain a potentially world-dominating technology. It is a winner-takes-all prize. So for those who want to stop such an event, the question is how to discourage this kind of arms race, or at least incentivise competing teams not to cut corners with AI safety.

A super-AI raises two fundamental challenges for its inventors, as philosopher Nick Bostrom and others have pointed out. One is a control problem, which is how to make sure the super-AI has the same objectives as humanity. Without this, the intelligence could deliberately, accidently or by neglect destroy humanity – an “AI disaster”.

The second is a political problem, which is how to ensure that the benefits of a super-intelligence do not go only to a small elite, causing massive social and wealth inequalities. If a super-AI arms race occurs, it could lead competing groups to ignore these problems in order to develop their technology more quickly. This could lead to a poor-quality or unfriendly super-AI.

One suggested solution is to use public policy to make it harder to enter the race in order to reduce the number of competing groups and improve the capabilities of those who do enter. The fewer who compete, the less pressure there will be to cut corners in order to win. But how can governments lessen the competition in this way?

My colleague Nicola Dimitri and I recently published a paper that tried to answer this question. We first showed that in a typical winner-takes all race, such as the one to build the first super-AI, only the most competitive teams will participate. This is because the probability of actually inventing the super-AI is very small, and entering the race is very expensive because of the large investment in research and development needed.

Indeed, this seems to be the current situation with the development of simpler “narrow” AI. Patent applications for this kind of AI are are dominated by a few firms, and the vast bulk of AI research is done in just three regions (the US, China and Europe). There also seem to be very few, if any, groups presently investing in building a super-AI.

This suggests reducing the number of competing groups isn’t the most important priority at the moment. But even with smaller numbers of competitors in the race, the intensity of competition could still lead to the problems mentioned above. So to reduce the intensity of competition between groups striving to build a super-AI and raise their capabilities, governments could turn to public procurement and taxes.

Public procurement refers to all the things governments pay private companies to provide, from software for use in government agencies to contracts to run services. Governments could impose constraints on any super-AI supplier that required them to address the potential problems, and support complementary technologies to enhance human intelligence and integrate it with AI.

But governments could also offer to buy a less-than-best version of super-AI, effectively creating a “second prize” in the arms race and stopping it from being a winner-takes-all competition. With an intermediate prize, which could be for inventing something close to (but not exactly) a super-AI, competing groups will have an incentive to invest and co-operate more, reducing the intensity of competition. A second prize would also reduce the risk of failure and justify more investment, helping to increase the capabilities of the competing teams.

As for taxes, governments could set the tax rate on the group that invents super-AI according to how friendly or unfriendly the AI is. A high enough tax rate would essentially mean the nationalisation of the super-AI. This would strongly discourage private firms from cutting corners for fear of losing their product to the state.

Public good not private monopoly

This idea may require better global co-ordination of taxation and regulation of super-AI. But it wouldn’t need all governments to be involved. In theory, a single country or region (such as the EU) could carry the costs and effort involved in tackling the problems and ethics of super-AI. But all countries would benefit and super-AI would become a public good rather than an unstoppable private monopoly.

Of course all this depends on super-AI actually being a threat to humanity. And some scientists don’t think it will be. We might naturally engineer away the risks of super-AI over time. Some think humans might even merge with AI.

Whatever the case, our planet and its inhabitants will benefit enormously from making sure we get the best from AI, a technology that is still in its infancy. For this, we need a better understanding of what role government can play.

Wim Naudé does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Source: The Conversation: Technology http://theconversation.com/singularity-how-governments-can-halt-the-rise-of-unfriendly-unstoppable-super-ai-121999

What’s the best way to teach children a second language? New research produces surprising results

People often assume that children learn new languages easily and without effort, regardless of the situation they find themselves in. But is it really true that children soak up language like sponges?

Research has shown that children are highly successful learners if they have a lot of exposure to a new language over a long time, such as in the case of child immigrants who are surrounded by the new language all day, every day. In such a scenario, children become much more proficient in the new language over the long term than adults.

But if the amount of language children are exposed to is limited, as in classroom language learning, children are slow learners and overall less successful than teenagers or adults. How can we explain this apparent contrast?

Researchers have argued that children learn implicitly, that is, without conscious thought, reflection or effort. And implicit learning requires a large amount of language input over a long period of time.

As we get older, we develop the ability to learn explicitly – that is, analytically and with deliberate effort. Put differently, adults approach the learning task like scientists. This explains why more mature classroom learners have greater success: they can draw on more highly developed, efficient, explicit learning processes which also require more effort.

Which is best?

When it comes to learning a language, however, it is not a question of either implicit or explicit learning. They can coexist, so it is more often a question of how much of each approach is used.

In our new study, we asked whether younger children who are generally thought to learn implicitly had already developed some ability to learn explicitly as well. What’s more, we looked at whether the ability to analyse language can predict foreign language learning success in the classroom.

We worked with over 100 Year 4 children, aged eight to nine, in five primary schools in England. The children took a number of tests, including a measure of their language learning aptitude, which assessed their ability to analyse language (language-analytic ability), to memorise language material (memory ability) and to handle language sounds (phonological awareness).

Over one school year, the children participated in language classes for 75 minutes per week. For this purpose, they were divided into four groups.

In the first half of the school year, each group was taught, respectively, German, Italian, Esperanto or Esperanto with a “focus-on-form method”. This method involved the teacher drawing the children’s attention to regular patterns in the language, asked them to think about what particular parts of words might mean or how sentences are put together in the language, for example. In other words, the children were encouraged to use their language-analytic ability, taking an explicit approach.

In the other groups, language was taught in a way that is typically used at primary school, that is, entirely playfully with games, songs and worksheets. This method is more likely to result in implicit learning.

In the second half of the school year, all groups experienced the same type of language class: they all learned French, taught with a focus-on-form method. For our study, we assessed the children’s progress in French over the second half of the school year and then looked at whether any components of their aptitude – language-analytic ability, memory ability, phonological awareness – would predict their success in learning French.

If children learn implicitly, we would expect that memory ability would be most important. In other words, the ability to pick up language material as you hear and see it is most relevant. If children learn above all explicitly, we would expect that language-analytic ability would be most important.

The results

Differently to what people might expect, we found that the children’s language-analytic ability was most important, followed by phonological awareness. These two abilities contributed to predicting the children’s achievement in French, while memory ability was only marginally relevant. This suggests that children as young as eight or nine years can indeed learn explicitly to some extent, if the teaching method they experience encourages them to engage in analysis of the language to be learned.

Our results are in line with a previous study which directly compared children and adults experiencing different teaching methods. Here the researcher also found that learners’ use of an explicit approach in the foreign language classroom did not exclusively depend on age, but on how learners were taught. This means that even younger children can approach a learning task like scientists.

Of course, it is important to note that children of primary school age are still developing their ability to learn explicitly. Therefore, we cannot expect to teach them languages in exactly the same way as we would teach teenagers or adults. But some activities that encourage children to consciously reflect on and analyse the language material to be learned can be introduced to make best use of the limited class time that is available for foreign language teaching.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Source: The Conversation: Technology http://theconversation.com/whats-the-best-way-to-teach-children-a-second-language-new-research-produces-surprising-results-122059

STEM: efforts to inspire more children could be entrenching educational inequalities

Science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education is a priority for governments around the world. For example, the UK’s current commitment to increasing investment in research and development to 2.4% of GDP by 2027 means that we need to train 260,000 more researchers to carry out this work.

There has long been a perceived shortage in such skills and knowledge. And this drives policy measures in education, skills and immigration to address the situation.

In their STEM strategies, governments are increasingly focused on addressing the large disparities in participation between different social groups. For example, in the UK only 15% of scientists come from working-class households, just 7% of patents are filed by women, and among start-up founders men outnumber women four to one. The problem is often discussed in terms of a “leaky pipeline”, the idea that potential STEM professionals are lost at particular points along defined pathways.

Plugging the leak

This spurs governments around the world to target activities at young people, aiming to foster STEM engagement from an early stage. “STEM inspiration” is one way to do this, by offering STEM-related activities to school-age children beyond usual subject teaching. This could take place within schools, or informally through visits to museums or in the home or community.

Read more: AI is in danger of becoming too male – new research

The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) funds STEM inspiration in the UK, spending £103m annually on programmes delivered through bodies such as STEM Learning Ltd, the Wellcome Trust, and the British Science Association.

But is all this activity having the desired effect or could it even be doing more harm than good?

First, we know that there is just not enough provision. For example, our mapping of invention programmes found that they reach just 1.5% of the UK school population annually. Overall, participation in STEM careers activities is low, with less than 30% of 11- to 14-year-olds reporting having taken part in 2017. In light of evidence that it takes around four role model encounters for effects to be seen on students’ aspirations, it is likely a very small and select group that receives effective provision.

Also, provision continues to exclude students and communities who need it most – those who are traditionally less likely to take part in STEM. UCL’s ASPIRES team has found that while significant proportions of the school population report never having had access to STEM inspiration, this is particularly the case among disadvantaged groups.

Competition equals inspiration?

Our own research looked in more detail at one particular type of STEM inspiration activity: competitions. STEM competitions are an increasingly popular model in the UK and internationally, challenging students individually or in teams to apply STEM skills and knowledge to hands-on projects.

There are around 50 STEM and innovation competitions in the UK. Government departments run their own – for example, the Youth Industrial Strategy Competition by BEIS, and CyberFirst by the National Cyber Security Centre. The model is also very popular in the US and China, and reflects a strategic focus on STEM for economic growth. However, in some countries, such as Finland, competitions are treated more as opportunities to collaborate and share knowledge than promote individual success; and in Singapore, there is a noticeable emphasis on creativity in STEM.

We looked at participation in STEM competitions in England and compiled a dataset of 179 schools that had teams shortlisted, from 13 competitions in total. While two competitions, the Leaders Award and IET Faraday, provided complete lists of all participating schools, only shortlisted schools were available for other programmes.

Classifying schools by type, we found that 21% were independent schools, a large over-representation (independent schools make up just 10% of all schools in England). This is probably because, while over 80% of independent schools offer STEM competitions as an extracurricular activity, only half of all state schools do.

After excluding independent schools, we added data on state schools’ deprivation levels using eligibility for the pupil premium (extra funding allocated to schools to support students from disadvantaged backgrounds) as an indicator. We found that almost half (45%) were in the least deprived fifth of all state schools. In other words, there is a strong skew towards schools serving richer populations.

Other studies show that this pattern holds in different fields, too. For example, independent schools are also over-represented in enterprise competitions, and theoretical work suggests that such competitions reproduce inequalities between participants, schools and communities. Academics question the educational value of competitions, observing that such exercises emphasise the extrinsic reward of achievement, so that participants engage in tasks to win rather than to learn.

However, competitions can be designed with a commitment to equity, meaningful learning, and long-term outcomes for communities, by organisations that draw on research evidence and lessons learned through their own practice. For example, the Leaders Award run by Primary Engineer asks children, “If you were an engineer, what would you do?”, challenging them to apply engineering principles to a problem of their choice. The programme runs 16 distinct regional competitions, reaches 60,000 students annually, and emphasises local community and industry links.

As ever, Finland provides an inspiring example. StarT is an international programme run by the LUMA Centre, a network of Finnish universities dedicated to ensuring high-quality science, technology and mathematics teaching.

Students develop projects based on their own interests, with the requirement that projects are related to science, maths and/or technology (interdisciplinary projects, and those which incorporate other subjects such as arts, are encouraged), and that they address one of the StarT themes. These projects can then be shared at events, where children peer-assess each others’ work.

A key feature of the programme is the learning community: schools, kindergartens, extracurricular clubs and even families register as learning communities to support projects and are invited to share best practices within this network.

What’s good practice?

From our review of STEM competitions and the research behind them, we’ve identified four principles of good practice.

First, equity. Competitions should be designed with those who are most excluded in mind, so that provision is practically and conceptually inclusive.

Second, congruence. The offer should relate to students’ own experiences, and facilitate the move to further study.

Third, intensity. One-off experiences are rarely effective. Sustained and joined-up support is needed for long-term outcomes.

Finally, reflection. For both participants and providers, it’s important to build in opportunities for reflecting on and integrating learning into further study or further iterations of programmes.

If these four foundations are put in place, STEM inspiration can better serve students, and through them, society in general.

Juliet Ollard does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Source: The Conversation: Technology http://theconversation.com/stem-efforts-to-inspire-more-children-could-be-entrenching-educational-inequalities-119948