Learning From Mistakes Is Harder Than We Think

“Often mistaken, never in doubt.” That wry phrase describes us all more than we’d like to admit. The psychological study of misconceptions shows that all of us possess many beliefs that are flawed or flat-out wrong — and also that we cling to these fallacies with remarkable tenacity. As a result, just hearing the correct explanation isn’t enough. Most methods of instruction and training assume that if you provide people with the right information, it will replace any mistaken information listeners may already possess. But especially when our previous beliefs (even though faulty) have proved useful to us, and when they appear to be confirmed by everyday experience, we are reluctant to let them go.

Donna Alvermann, a language and literacy researcher at the University of Georgia, notes that in study after study, “students ignored correct textual information when it conflicted with their previously held concepts. On measures of free recall and recognition, the students consistently let their incorrect prior knowledge override incoming correct information.”

It’s what our mothers called “in one ear and out the other.” We have to actively disabuse ourselves or others of erroneous conceptions, and research from cognitive science and psychology points the way. Although much of this research concerns misguided notions of how the physical world works, the techniques it has produced can be used to correct any sort of deficient understanding. Here, three ways to make that new information push out the old:

Highlight the mistaken notion. The simplest way to correct mistaken notions is to point them out as the accurate information is being presented. In a 2010 article in the International Journal of Science and Mathematics Education, researcher Christine Tippett offers an example from a science book for children: “Some people believe that a camel stores water in its hump. They think that the hump gets smaller as the camel uses up water. But this idea is not true. The hump stores fat and grows smaller only if the camel has not eaten for a long time. A camel can also live for days without water because water is produced as the fat in its hump is used up.” Note the three-part structure: the misapprehension is described, declared false and replaced by an accurate version. Although such “refutation text” is very effective in debunking misconceptions, Tippett notes, it’s rarely used in informational books for children or in textbooks for older learners.

Issue an advance alert. For more deeply embedded beliefs that resist simple clarification, teachers, managers and other leaders can ask people to “activate” these prior beliefs, then instruct them to elaborate ways in which the correct explanation differs from their current conviction. For example, Alvermann and a co-author conducted an experiment in which students in an introductory physics class were asked to draw, and then explain, the path a marble would take if shot from a tabletop. The investigators’ instructions contained this advice: “If you thought that the path the marble would take would be straight down, straight out and then straight down, or straight out and then curved down, your ideas may be different from what the laws of physics would suggest. As you read the following text, be sure to pay attention to those ideas presented that may be different from your own.” The students who were “forewarned” with these instructions, the authors note, “showed marked improvement in learning information that conflicted with their existing knowledge.”

Create a confrontation. For the most tenaciously held beliefs, it may be necessary to stage an intervention. In a 2002 article in the American Journal of Physics, researchers from the University of Washington note that “students often finish a standard introductory course or an advanced undergraduate course on relativity with some fundamentally incorrect beliefs.” It’s frequently not enough for instructors to point out the discrepancy between learners’ convictions and the way things actually work, they note; learners have to perceive this discrepancy themselves, at which point they’ll be motivated to resolve it. The Washington researchers designed tutorials in which students were led to confront the fact that they held two mutually exclusive ideas, one mistaken and one correct (in this case, about the concept of time in special relativity). The students then were helped to discard naive beliefs and fully embrace scientific ones. The key is creating an uncomfortable sense of cognitive dissonance; only then are we willing to trade our private versions of reality for something that looks more like the real world.

Genetic Study Identifies Four Main Types of Breast Cancer

With October being BEAST CANCER AWARENESS MONTH... Ladies please be aware and proactive about your health. Arming yourself with as much knowledge as possible about breast cancer is your weapon in the fight against breast cancer!

In recent years, scientists have come to appreciate that breast cancer is a complex disease, triggered by myriad genetic and lifestyle factors. But the latest study of the genetics behind the disease, published in the journal Nature, shows that it may actually be slightly simpler than researchers had thought.

As part of the Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA), a government project that is aiming to sequence tumor genomes from dozens of different cancers to help scientists better understand tumor development and treatment, scientists sequenced 510 tumors from 507 patients with breast cancer. All told, they found 30,626 mutations in these cancer cells, but those aberrations fell into four main groups.

In one subtype, basal-like tumors that account for 10% of all breast cancers, the researchers found that the mutations resembled those found in ovarian cancers, thus explaining the link between the two diseases: women at higher risk of developing breast cancer are also more vulnerable to getting ovarian cancer.

In two related subtypes, luminal A and luminal B, which include breast cancers that contain receptors for estrogen and progesterone, the scientists found that while the mutation rate in these cancers was lower, genetic aberrations occurred in a larger number of genes, suggesting that a more complex interaction of abnormal genes contribute to these types of breast cancer.

Teasing apart such connections will be critical for improving treatment for women with these mutations: those with luminal-A cancers generally have good outcomes, while those with luminal-B tumors have more mixed results. Isolating which mutations distinguish the two subtypes may help doctors treat women with luminal-B cancers in order to make them progress more like luminal-A cases, for example.

In the final subtype, which are those that contain the HER2 receptors, the scientists found two smaller subgroups of HER2 cancers, which could explain why some women respond better to HER2-specific therapies like Herceptin than others. The good responders may have tumors with mutations that make the HER2 receptors more active and therefore enriched, making those cells better targets for the drug than those without the mutations.

“We are really getting at the genetic roots of these different types of breast cancer,” says Charles Perou, professor of genetics and pathology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a co-author of the paper. “The work shows that really these four groups of [breast cancer] require major attention as an important first step down the road to individualized medicine.”

That road is ripe with opportunity, says another co-author, Matthew Ellis, professor of medicine and oncology at Washington University in St. Louis. A better understanding of how breast cancers are triggered, at the genetic level, can lead to more efficient treatments on many levels. First, he says, it’s possible that existing chemotherapy agents currently used in other cancers can be enlisted to treat breast cancer. The connection between breast and ovarian cancers revealed by the TCGA analysis, for example, suggests that chemotherapy used in ovarian cancer, like platinum-based agents, might be effective against basal-type breast cancers, and powerful breast cancer agents likewise might prove useful against some ovarian cancers as well. “We can tweak the recipe of chemotherapy treatment by reaching across to other diseases, and borrowing from that knowledge,” he says.

Continuing on that theme, it might also be possible that some of the newly developed targeted drugs created for other cancers may work on breast cancers too. Because the drugs are made to target specific molecular pathways, it doesn’t really matter where the tumor is, just that it is dependent on that pathway to grow. If that’s the case, then repurposing such existing targeted therapies may also improve breast-cancer outcomes.

“Now we can look at the etiology of the spectrum of disorders that is breast cancer using genomic profiling,” Ellis says. “If you understand something fundamentally, you can develop better treatments. The idea is that suddenly we really understand a lot about these cancers.”

That understanding may soon translate into a sea change in the doctor’s office as well, in the way physicians diagnose and treat cancer. It won’t be long, predict many experts, before every patient diagnosed with cancer will have his or her tumor’s genome analyzed in some way. That analysis — which includes identifying not only the mutations the tumor may harbor, but also other valuable information about how actively its various genes are expressed, or activated, and what proteins those genes produce — could become the foundation for a personalized treatment regimen. That can mean the difference between surviving a cancer and becoming a victim of the disease. “This could become an integral part of cancer care,” says Perou. “We now have the blueprint for breast-cancer genetics. It’s the most complete blueprint ever achieved.” And one that could lead to the most comprehensive and personalized way of treating cancer ever achieved as well.