Attachments to the October 7, 2005 issue of Swift:

 

Psychics in the Science Class?

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&

A Scientific Investigation:
“Crossing Over with John Edward”
How well does he do?

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Psychics in the Science Class?

Students in the 7th grade are using a popular television psychic to test the Scientific Method.

“Memorizing the steps of scientific study isn’t particularly useful for most people,” Mr. Michalski says. “But give the kids a chance to apply the techniques to something that genuinely intrigues them, and you’ve got something. Psychics are fun because many of us, deep inside, sort-of hope that psychics really have some special ability. Students regularly ask me what I think about phenomena like palm-reading, fortune-telling, and astrology. This exercise gives them a chance to find the answers for themselves.”

Watching an episode or two of the popular television program Crossing Over With John Edward gives the 7th graders a practical, ground-level workout with the Scientific Method. “First, we watch a show or two without comment. This fellow is fairly impressive, the way he presents himself.” Or is he? Over the next few days, students watch the same episode, only this time they record every statement made by the psychic to his audience, and dutifully record whether or not the audience confirmed his statements or refuted them.

“It’s a grueling exercise,” Mr. Michalski says. “To really analyze something like this, it takes hours to comb through just a few minutes of the TV show. If John Edward says an audience member has lost his father, and the person agrees with him, we record that as a ‘yes’, but if they say it’s their uncle, not their father, we record that as a ‘no.’ If the psychic says their mother was named Anna but they say it was Agnes, John Edward is likely to claim it as a success because they both start with the letter ‘A’, but we record it as a failure, but his guess was Anna, not ‘something that starts with A.’ When you record everything in detail like this, the host rarely does better than 25 percent correct. The worst I’ve seen him do is 8 percent right. That’s a failure rate of 92 percent, and it’s on his own show—this is the way he chose to present himself on television.”

This is just the start of the exercise, which forms the basis for the students’ first lab report. All the information is collected and put into a table. The results are analyzed and graphed. And the students answer questions that force them to make analytical conclusions about what they have found.

“We don’t use this exercise to prove that psychics are phony, and that’s a very import distinction,” Mr. Michalski emphasizes. “It’s really none of my business whether one of my students—or their parents, for that matter—places their faith in celebrities like Edward. But I think we can demonstrate that his reliability is much lower than we would allow ourselves in other, more practical areas of life, like highway safety or studying for a test. Would you choose a study partner who was right only 8 percent of the time?”

“I can’t prove that John Edward is a fraud, because Science is not designed to work that way. But this lab does demonstrate, very effectively, that he is not very good at what he claims to do, which is receive information from the dead. Our kids need better ways to think through things and make the important decisions in their lives. Just like Jack and the Beanstalk, we are constantly surrounded by people who are willing to sell us a handful of magic beans.”