The 90-9-1 Rule

I’ve always been a great believer in the Pareto Principle, sometimes more commonly referred to as the 80/20 rule. This principle basically suggests that in any group or organisation there will usually be 20% of the people who produce 80% of the results. This observation generally holds quite true, be it a club, a group, a classroom or even a family… there is always a minority of the people who produce a majority of the results. It may not always be exactly an 80/20 split, but you can pretty much guarantee that the work done by any group will almost never be spread evenly among the workers.

Once you understand and accept this fact, a lot of the frustration and annoyance of life starts to go away as you stop worrying about how you’re going to get the majority of the people to do more than the minimal amount that the Pareto Principle says they will do. The fact is, they never will. Those people will never do more than the miminum, no matter how we cajole, threaten, or incentivise them. Like gravity and taxes, some things are the way they are because they just are… Live with it.

So I was interested to see this report from Jakob Nielsen, one of the world’s most respected human interface analysts. Nielsen studies human interaction with computer systems and tries to get designers to make systems that work with people, not against them. He tries to identify what you might call “human nature” and encourages designers to create systems that adapt to people rather than the other way around as is usually the case.

From one of his recent studies, he observes that in most online systems, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action.

From my own experience with online systems (discussion forums, blogs, email lists, etc) as well as real organisations (committees, clubs, etc) I would have to agree with Nielsen. There is always a bulk of the work/traffic/discussion/effort/ideas that is actively done by a relatively small percentage of the users/participants/workers. I wish it weren’t that way, but I’ve always found that it is.

So, how do you interpret this principle in your classroom? What implications does it have?

Teachers, are you paying attention?

If you are a teacher in a school, this video should be required viewing.

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It may just change your view of what you do, and if it doesn’t, you should get out of teaching now. If you can’t become part of the solution then you are almost certainly part of the problem.

Btw, this comes via mscofina’s blog, which is most definitely worth a look.

Just like the "Real World"

I’m sneaking in this quick blog post as I sit in class supervising some of my kids doing a test. Sorry, a quiz. I have to be careful of what I call it… if I call it a quiz they are ok about it, but if I call it a test, or heaven forbid an ‘exam’, they go into a little panic.

I use Quia as a tool for giving class quizzes, partly to make my job of marking a bit simpler, but mostly because the kids seem to prefer doing a test online rather than on paper. I’ve been using online methods for testing for quite a few years now, using various methods or creating them including Quia, Hot Potatoes, and even crafting them myself from raw html code hooked up to a sendmail.pl script back in the ‘old days’ . I’m of the overwhelming opinion that today’s students relate to the idea of answering their test questions in an online format.

Anyway, I let them do the quiz in an open-book mode. They are free to use the textbook, use Google, use whatever, to answer the questions. I figure that I can’t think of too many jobs in the “real world” that don’t allow people to go find the answers when they don’t have them. I still don’t reckon that school should be about just “remembering stuff”, but more about applying the knowledge they have to a particular situation. To my mind, the important thing is not whether they know the answer, but rather, could they find an answer if they had to.

If a mechanic turns up to the garage and needs to order a part for a car, he gets the chance to lo.ok it up, make phone calls, talk to the spare parts people, and so on… he isn’t expected to remember all the part numbers.

A doctor ought to have a good working knowledge of illnesses, and sure, that means remembering a lot of things – body parts, disease symptoms, drugs, etc. I guess that’s why they expect people who want to be doctors to be reasonably intelligent. But all those books on the shelf of most doctors’ surgeries are there for a reason. Sometimes a doctor will need to look something up, find an appropriate drug, or check a symptom against a reference. She isn’t expected to be the sole source of all knowledge.

I’m not sure why we in education have such a thing about our kids needing to “remember stuff”. Facts, dates, names, places … we put questions on our tests that really just test a kid’s ability to remember these things, rather than apply them in any meaningful way. As teachers, we need to be cleverer about the way we test whether our students have learned anything by asking better questions, questions that get them to think and not just remember, and if that means they need to look up a fact or two along the way then I don’t have a problem with that.