Davidson used her book, "Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work and Learn" as a starting point to explore how education must adapt to a digital age.
In four instances throughout history, communication technology has changed so drastically that it has fundamentally altered the way humans interact and transmit information, Davidson said. The first such instance was the invention of writing around 4,000 B.C., followed by the invention of movable type in 10th-century China, the advent of industrial steam-powered presses in the 18th century and the recent development and expansion of the Internet. As time goes on, the gaps between major changes in technology have gotten smaller, according to Davidson.
"One never keeps up, especially in a world of rapid change," Davidson said in an email to The Dartmouth. "The best we can do, as teachers, students and co-learners, is learn how to learn, how to change, how to adapt, how to transform."
Davidson began her lecture by asking audience members to use provided postcards and pencils to write down three things they considered essential for a typical Dartmouth graduate to have in order to "thrive in the 20th century." The list of responses included "friends," "adaptability" and "effective communication."
Compulsory education evolved during the Industrial Age, leading to a set of teaching philosophies that Davidson referred to as the "industrial-educational complex." Education became quantifiable, as "attention to task" and "standardization" became key components of teaching methods.
Davidson argued that this philosophy of asking students to focus on one thing stunts their ability to see the bigger picture.
She presented a 1999 study on selective attention in which subjects were shown a video of students wearing white and black shirts passing basketballs to each other. Viewers were asked to count how many times the students wearing white shirts passed the ball to each other. During the video, an undergraduate dressed in a gorilla suit walked through the group for nine seconds. The study found that over 60 percent of students were so focused on counting passes that they did not see the gorilla.
"If you focus on one specific task, the very definition of focus is that you shut out everything else," she said. "In a crisis, you can easily miss another crisis."
Davidson compared education to the process of a child learning to walk. In education, the measurement of how much one has learned has been "divorced" from the process of learning, she said.
"No one says, My kid got a 98 percent in walking.'" she said.
Quantifying achievement through grades is a shortcoming of today's education system, Davidson said. Mount Holyoke College was the first institution to adopt letter grades in 1897 to evaluate its students. The second organization was the American Meat Packer's Association, a fact that elicited laughter from the audience.
"There were lots of people who thought sirloin and chuck were far too complex to reduce to an A, B, C, D grade, and in fact there is an alternative system within the Meat Packer's Association," she said. "Meanwhile, virtually every institution in the United States thinks it's a great idea for measuring achievement and starts adopting A, B, C, D grades."
Multiple-choice tests, another standard component of an American education, are also problematic, Davidson said. In the Kansas Silent Reading Test, the first multiple choice test in the United States, children were asked to choose whether a dog, a cow, a dinosaur or a crocodile were farm animals. Children who lived on farms were equally likely to choose between "cow" and "dog," according to Davidson.
"You're not just teaching content," she said. "You're teaching a kind of content with a certain way of knowing the world."
As opposed to the "industrial" model of education, which stresses task-oriented thinking and adherence to procedures, the digital age requires "multitasking attention," "blended skills" and "collaboration," according to Davidson.
In the process of speaking to both educational institutions and corporations, Davidson said she often hears from corporations that it takes a "minimum of one, most people say two years, to un-train students to think about success as something measured externally on a test."
In academia, students who do not know the correct answers often feel that they must hide their weak areas, Davidson said. However, a workplace rewards those who are open about their shortcomings and are willing to ask for help.
"We don't have metrics for that," she said.
Differences in thinking processes often discouraged in industrial education should be valued and encouraged more, according to Davidson. She described a time in which she presented the gorilla experiment to a room of recently tenured professors.
"It is so strange to see a room full of your smartest colleagues and see the gorilla and people are counting as if nothing is happening," she said. "In every room there is going to be a freaky girl who saw the gorilla while you were all counting basketballs."
It is essential to incorporate the opinions and experiences of those who think unconventionally in order to avert major crises that the majority of people do not anticipate, such as the 2008 recession, Davidson said.
Audience members said they found the lecture interesting.
Norm Berman, a Dartmouth Medical School professor and a member of the Digital Dartmouth strategic planning committee, said the material discussed in Davidson's lecture and book is very "pertinent to the College."
"I don't think schools have prepared students for the world," Berman said. "I think they're preparing themselves."
Rick Hoffman, a former employee of the College, said his son-in-law, who is part of the strategic planning initiative, told him about the lecture.
"Dartmouth is so traditional," Hoffman said. "But we have so many creative minds, we need a way to release all that creative energy."
