solving mysteries

Brayden

Malcolm Gladwell has an interesting piece in the New Yorker where he rehashes the Enron scandal. Gladwell wonders whether the Enron case was an example of a puzzle – solved by finding missing information – or an example of a mystery. Solving a mystery is a much more complex task, as it involves putting together lots of different pieces of information and making judgements under conditions of uncertainty.

In the end, Gladwell concludes that it was a mystery. Enron’s failure wasn’t in hiding information, but in obscuring that information in a way that complicated figuring out what the true value of the company was. Any vigilant analyst though could have pieced the mystery together and figured out early on that Enron wasn’t worth what it was trading (in fact, in 1998 some Cornell business school students did just this).

Gladwell makes some good points (although I’m not sure his analysis of the analysis of Enron vindicates Skilling). I like his contrast of figuring out puzzles versus mysteries. As educators, many of us try to teach our students how to do both of these things. Teaching students to find the right information is hard enough, but I’m finding lately that teaching students how to solve mysteries is the real challenge. However, in my estimation it is the most important skill that any student can learn. Students need to learn how to put together all of the right information to make the right inferences. A recent Time article discussed this in an article about the changing nature of education:

In an age of overflowing information and proliferating media, kids need to rapidly process what’s coming at them and distinguish between what’s reliable and what isn’t. “It’s important that students know how to manage it, interpret it, validate it, and how to act on it,” says Dell executive Karen Bruett, who serves on the board of the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, a group of corporate and education leaders focused on upgrading American education.

I’ve really tried to help my students improve in this area, but after another semester of grading, I feel disappointed in my efforts. On the average, my students are barely figuring out how to solve puzzles, let alone learning how to solve mysteries. I wonder if the vast availability of information (on the net and elsewhere) has actually made students less able to process information and make good inferences. Because they are inundated with information, students experience paralysis and tend to believe whatever they’re told (no matter what the source). Wikipedia has become the only source of information they think they need, which makes them think they can avoid the hard task of sorting through that information.

But if Gladwell and the Time article are correct (which I think they are), mystery solvers will be those individuals who benefit the most in our information age. We just have to figure out how to help students realize the importance of it and come up with better ways to apply it in the classroom.