Appreciating the power of education and knowledge can be tricky. We so quickly acclimate to our own situations. As the weeks go by, it is hard to remember how much we used to know and how far we have come.

The best way to appreciate the power of knowledge is to measure your learning — or your students’ learning — before and after the learning experience. In science terms, this is known as a pre-post design.

We are not talking about drug trials though. And these are not carefully controlled experiments requiring millions of dollars in federal funds. This is the simple power of going to lectures from an expert, reading the relevant texts and participating in classroom exercises.

The results are shocking, and more so when you consider that the methods of learning are available to all of us.

The charts below display student performance data from University level courses. Students were evaluated at the beginning of the semester (red distributions “Baseline Scores”), where any knowledge would have come from independent study or prior experience.

Students’ exam scores were then collected from the relevant exams throughout the semester (green distributions “Exam Scores”). Blocks 1 through 3 refer to blocks of coursework representing about 3 to 4 weeks of full-time study.

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I have shown two different sections of the course side by side. You can appreciate that while every class of students has their own unique characteristics, the power of learning strongly generalizes across learning experiences.

These are traditional multiple choice exams, so we expect that even a naive machine could randomly guess the correct answer about 25% of the time. Scores of 25% correct are essentially what you see for baseline scores — about as good as random chance.

But holy smokes! Look at those green distributions. Those represent exam scores after the course material had been purposely learned. Even the lowest performing students tended to out-perform the uninitiated.

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Every now and then, you find the special student with prior experience or great guessing abilities. But you never find a perfect 100% score without purposeful study.

Most importantly, you can move entire groups of students reliably toward higher knowledge using the principles of learning. Whether you are a great guesser or not, have prior experience or not, have great ability or not, everyone benefits from learning.

Powerful.

Thanks for reading!

Innovation is for everyone.

Our research is focused on how to arrange our minds, our environments and our cultures to generate new, feasible and useful things. The result is innovation.

Our heritage as humans is our culture. From our culture, we learn what is possible. Innovation and culture, I believe, go together. In many ways, culture is the store of past innovations, and an active catalog of innovations being tested against reality.

I believe everyone can innovate. You do not need a lot of money, and you do not need to become famous. If you can improve your condition, or the condition of others by trying something new to you, then you are an innovator.

Share with us, and we will improve the human condition together by growing and sharing culture through innovation.

Research

My research focuses on cross-cultural studies because I think the most effective way to innovate is to first learn what we already know. Many human cultures exist and have existed, and we mostly have not shared with each other. A focus on translation in language and meaning is needed to catch us all up. My particular focus is on the interaction of American and Chinese cultures — two large and growing cultures. One very new, one very old. We have much to learn!

I also study leadership and well-being. These features are core to human culture, across time and across location. One can have a dramatic impact on the other. I think this is a very interesting observation and points to an important clue about what is culture and how best to utilize culture for good.

Making a wish in the beautiful city of Lijiang, Yunnan Province.

In the mountain city of Lijiang, you make a wish at the pavilion. Write your wish on the wooden tablet, and tie it up with red ribbon for the heavens to see.

There is nothing like travelling and seeing how other people live to grow your perspective and stimulate your creativity.

I wish you good luck and good health!