̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Bill Nicholl

Teaching pupils empathy measurably improves their creative abilities, study finds

tdk25 — Wed, 03 Feb 2021 00:50:16 +0000

̽��ֱ��findings are from a year-long ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge study with Design and Technology (D&T) year 9 pupils (ages 13 to 14) at two inner-London schools. Pupils at one school spent the year following curriculum-prescribed lessons, while the other group’s D&T lessons used a set of engineering design thinking tools which aim to foster students’ ability to think creatively and to engender empathy, while solving real-world problems.

Both sets of pupils were assessed for creativity at both the start and end of the school year using the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking: a well-established psychometric test.

̽��ֱ��results showed a statistically significant increase in creativity among pupils at the intervention school, where the thinking tools were used. At the start of the year, the creativity scores of pupils in the control school, which followed the standard curriculum, were 11% higher than those at the intervention school. By the end, however, the situation had completely changed: creativity scores among the intervention group were 78% higher than the control group.

̽��ֱ��researchers also examined specific categories within the Torrance Test that are indicative of emotional or cognitive empathy: such as ‘emotional expressiveness’ and ‘open-mindedness’. Pupils from the intervention school again scored much higher in these categories, indicating that a marked improvement in empathy was driving the overall creativity scores.

̽��ֱ��study’s authors suggest that encouraging empathy not only improves creativity, but can deepen pupils’ general engagement with learning. Notably, they found evidence that boys and girls in the intervention school responded to the D&T course in ways that defied traditional gender stereotypes. Boys showed a marked improvement in emotional expression, scoring 64% higher in that category at the end of the year than at the start, while girls improved more in terms of cognitive empathy, showing 62% more perspective-taking.

̽��ֱ��research is part of a long-term collaboration between the Faculty of Education and the Department of Engineering at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge called ‘Designing Our Tomorrow’ (DOT), led by Bill Nicholl and Ian Hosking. It challenges pupils to solve real-world problems by thinking about the perspectives and feelings of others.

̽��ֱ��particular challenge used in the study asked pupils at the intervention school to design an asthma-treatment ‘pack’ for children aged six and under. Pupils were given various creative and empathetic ‘tools’ in order to do so: for example, they were shown data about the number of childhood asthma fatalities in the UK, and a video which depicts a young child having an attack. They also explored the problem and tested their design ideas by role-playing various stakeholders, for example, patients, family-members, and medical staff.

Nicholl, Senior Lecturer in Design and Technology Education, who trains teachers studying on the ̽��ֱ��’s D&T PGCE course, said: “Teaching for empathy has been problematic despite being part of the D&T National Curriculum for over two decades. This evidence suggests that it is a missing link in the creative process, and vital if we want education to encourage the designers and engineers of tomorrow.”

Dr Helen Demetriou, an affiliated lecturer in psychology and education at the Faculty of Education with a particular interest in empathy, and the other researcher involved in the study, said: “We clearly awakened something in these pupils by encouraging them to think about the thoughts and feelings of others. ̽��ֱ��research shows not only that it is possible to teach empathy, but that by doing so we support the development of children’s creativity, and their wider learning.”

̽��ֱ��gender differences charted in the study indicate that the intervention enabled students to overcome some of the barriers to learning that assumed gender roles often create. For example, boys often feel discouraged from expressing emotion at school, yet this was one of the main areas where they made significant creative gains according to the tests.

In addition to the Torrance Tests, the researchers conducted in-depth interviews with pupils at both the intervention school and a third (girls-only) school who also undertook the asthma challenge. This feedback again suggested that pupils had empathised deeply with the challenges faced by young asthma-sufferers, and that this had influenced their creative decisions in the classroom.

Many, for example, used phrases such as ‘stepping into their shoes’ or ‘seeing things from another point of view’ when discussing patients and their families. One boy told the researchers: “I think by the end of the project I could feel for the people with asthma… if I was a child taking inhalers, I would be scared too.”

Another responded: “Let’s say you had a sister or brother in that position. I would like to do something like this so we can help them.”

Overall, the authors suggest that these findings point to a need to nurture ‘emotionally intelligent learners’ not only in D&T classes, but across subjects, particularly in the context of emerging, wider scientific evidence that our capacity for empathy declines as we get older.

“This is something that we must think about as curricula in general become increasingly exam-based,” Demetriou said. “Good grades matter, but for society to thrive, creative, communicative and empathic individuals matter too.”

Nicholl added: “When I taught Design and Technology, I didn’t see children as potential engineers who would one day contribute to the economy; they were people who needed to be ready to go into the world at 18. Teaching children to empathise is about building a society where we appreciate each other’s perspectives. Surely that is something we want education to do.”

̽��ֱ��study is published in the journal, Improving Schools.

Teaching children in a way that encourages them to empathise with others measurably improves their creativity, and could potentially lead to several other beneficial learning outcomes, new research suggests.

We clearly awakened something in these pupils by encouraging them to think about the thoughts and feelings of others

Helen Demetriou

Designing Our Tomorrow project

Child-friendly asthma treatment kits designed by pupils who took part in the study, which gave them various empathetic ‘tools’ to inform their D&T lessons

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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Breathing new life into asthma treatment

Anonymous — Thu, 05 Oct 2017 17:57:59 +0000

I don’t think I will ever forget the moment I sat at the bedside of a six-year-old patient and watched the consultant hand over a 13-year-old student’s design to help with the patient’s asthma treatment. It has been the culmination of a long journey that started eight years ago with the belief that children can solve real world problems as part of the mainstream Design and Technology curriculum.

Designing Our Tomorrow (DOT) is an initiative that puts authentic challenges like this at the heart of the learning experience. Asthma treatment is the epitome of such a challenge. With 5.4 million people in the UK with the condition, the NHS spends about £1 Billion on treatment, and yet 1,468 people died from asthma in 2015. Tragically, it is believed that 90% of these deaths involve preventable factors and similarly 75% of A&E admission are thought to be avoidable.

We set the challenge in schools for students to design a packaging solution that will help co-ordinate the initial treatment for young asthma patients, to put the patient and their carers on the right path to controlling what is typically a long-term condition. A recent survey highlighted that over 80% of people, of all ages, feel that their asthma is not under control. Crucially we wanted students to address the anxiety that a child feels the first time a spacer mask is placed on their face. Students watched a video of a real instance of this, where the child recoils backwards each time the mask is placed over their mouth.

This is a complex, messy problem requiring solutions that are not only effective but cheap, simple to use and scalable. When I first saw the monkey mask design, where the child becomes a monkey and the inhaler and spacer becomes a banana to feed to it, I knew we had something special. It is so simple, so elegant as a design solution, and gets to the very heart of the child’s initial anxiety. Changing that moment from fear to fun for the patient as well as other family members makes it a better experience for all.

Alongside this we have worked with students to develop posters that remind patients to always use their spacer. In addition, we have developed a simple traffic light system explaining the narrowing of airways in the lungs and why and how it can be controlled. ̽��ֱ��credit card-sized printout can be easily clipped to a healthcare professional’s ID badge so it is always to hand.

This is a significant moment in our journey as engineers and educators, and we are so grateful for all the people that have partnered with us on this journey. ̽��ֱ��list of names would be too long, but I do want to mention the organisations that have walked the journey with us. ̽��ֱ��Healthy London Partnership, Children and Young People’s programme (a collaboration of the health and social care system across London), whose passion and skill around asthma has been an inspiration. On the packaging side the British Printing Industry Federation (BPiF) and ̽��ֱ��Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining (IOM3) who have guided us in the realities of packaging design and production; DS Smith who turned around amazing designs in such short timescales; Peter Brett Associates who believed in the project when it was just an idea; and last, but by no means least, the teachers and students who brought it to life in the classroom.

This was perfectly timed to fit with the Healthy London Partnership #AskAbout Asthma campaign and our pledge is to run the ‘Unpacking Asthma’ challenge in schools again in this academic year. We are confident that students will come up with more ideas that can help with this vital work.

It’s hard not to sound corny, but Churchill’s words come to mind for the vision we had for DOT eight years ago, “now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning”. We hope that this work will go on to play a part in transforming asthma care and help us towards our goal of equipping future generations to be creative problem solvers. In other words, for young people to design a better tomorrow.

Ian Hosking from Cambridge’s Engineering Design Centre is co-founder and co-leader of Designing Our Tomorrow, a collaboration between the Department of Engineering and the Faculty of Education which brings real-world problems into classroom design and technology sessions. Here, he describes the culmination of a year-long project in which secondary school students designed packaging solutions for the treatment of childhood asthma.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

Student-led designs could help prevent childhood asthma deaths

sc604 — Mon, 10 Jul 2017 07:31:51 +0000

̽��ֱ��programme, called Designing Our Tomorrow, was founded by researchers at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, and brings real-world problems into classroom design and technology sessions in secondary schools, and encouraging the next generation of UK designers and engineers.

As part of their classroom curriculum, students from different secondary schools have been learning about what makes an effective and useful design. Their goal was to design a type of packaging which would contain everything a young child with asthma would need, whether they’re at home, at school or elsewhere; and one which would help reduce anxiety of children with asthma by using child-friendly design themes. “In other words, we want to make it fun,” said Ian Hosking of Cambridge’s Department of Engineering, who co-leads the Designing Our Tomorrow (DOT) programme, in collaboration with the Faculty of Education. “We want to re-frame what education can be – projects like these start to form a broader evidence base of what’s possible.”

Five of the best designs were presented by students from Wimbledon High School GDST at the British Paediatric Respiratory Society conference last Friday (30 June) in Cambridge.

Students were not merely designing packaging but an experience. Themes included a monkey character where the inhaler and spacer become a banana that the child can ‘feed’ the monkey with and then copy themselves. Other themes include a pack shaped like a cat where the inhalers become mice that are stored in a smaller box shaped like a wedge of cheese; and a folding pack that can hang on a door for easy access at home but can be quickly zipped up and put in a bag to take out.

“Seeing how people were scared of asthma…this affects and could benefit a lot of people. ̽��ֱ��child wanted it to be fun, the gran wanted emergency instructions, the parents wanted it to be compact and small and the nurse wanted it to be organised – so we took all of that and designed our packs,” said Charlotte, aged 11 from Wimbledon High.

Several of the designs have been made into initial corrugated cardboard prototypes by UK packaging company DS Smith, with the aim of piloting them in partnership with the NHS in London through the Healthy London Partnership.

“It has been great doing something which is able to change and improve children’s lives and help them get better,” said Sascha, aged 12 from Wimbledon High, one of the students who presented her design at the conference. “I am so happy and glad that they have decided to take mine to the next stage and it could appear in people’s homes.”

Asthma affects one in 11 children in the UK. On average, there are three children with asthma in every classroom in the UK, and a child is admitted to hospital every 20 minutes due to an asthma attack.

This DOT project has focused specifically on asthma in children under six years of age. It addresses the anxiety that a child feels in the early stages of treatment and the co-ordination of the equipment and their instructions to help ensure compliance with their treatment plan.

“DOT is a fascinating project which aims to bring real-world problems into classroom design and technology sessions in secondary schools,” said Sara Nelson from the Healthy London Partnership. “It’s one of the more rewarding pieces of work that I have had the pleasure of being involved in during the last year, the one I have learned the most from, and it involved collaborating with an unusual partner for the NHS.”

Each of the students was given all of the tools which a child with asthma or their carer would need to manage their condition, including inhalers, spacers, and emergency instructions. Through a set of classroom lessons, the students’ way of thinking was developed in order to help them understand how to be creative by breaking fixation through the use of stimulus.

Fixation is a common problem in design – for example, if you’re trying to design a new type of chair and all you’re shown are other chairs, you’ll just end up designing a variant of what already exists. “If I want to design a new chair, the last thing I should look at is a chair,” said Bill Nicholl from Cambridge’s Faculty of Education, who co-leads the DOT programme.

“Children and young people are terribly creative, and the NHS should involve them more in co-designing what we do,” said Nelson. “We should not be afraid to put our heads above the parapet and should look outside the NHS to what partnerships might be out there to help us solve some of our tricky problems – I know that we can learn an awful lot from engineers.”

̽��ֱ��students from Wimbledon High also gained valuable industry experience working with DS Smith, who will help refine the students’ concepts into something that can be manufactured in large volumes. “By working with industry, it takes the project beyond a competition to something that can make a difference to patients and help prevent avoidable asthma deaths in children,” said Hosking.

“This project has shown yet again the potential of young people and their ability to engage with, and ultimately solve, complex design problems. We underestimate their creativity at our peril. Solving real problems like this should be at the heart of all young people’s educational experiences,” said Nicholl.

Wimbledon High Head of Design & Technology Marcia Phillip has been deeply involved in the project: “It puts authentic challenges and engineering practice at the heart of the learning experience and this appealed to me, particularly working in a girls’ school. We know there is a shortage of engineers in the UK – particularly women – and I thought we should get our girls inspired from an early age. ̽��ֱ��girls have been highly engaged and excited – after all, they are playing a part in the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge’s research and their ideas will potentially be implemented within the NHS.”

“I feel like I am doing something for a purpose and it makes me feel happy that I am helping people,” said Charlotte. “I feel accomplished and proud of what I have done because it was a long process but it was all worth it.”

DOT is funded in part by engineering design consultants Peter Brett Associates and ARM Ltd.

Solutions designed by secondary school students as part of an innovative classroom design and technology programme could help reduce the number of unnecessary deaths from childhood asthma.

I feel like I am doing something for a purpose and it makes me feel happy that I am helping people.

Charlotte, aged 11

Lloyd Mann

Students from Wimbledon High School at the British Paediatric Respiratory Society conference

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

Winners announced in the inaugural Vice-Chancellor’s Impact Awards and Public Engagement with Research Awards

jeh98 — Tue, 21 Jun 2016 09:58:54 +0000

On Monday 20 June, the Vice-Chancellor and Pro Vice-Chancellor for Research presented two sets of inaugural awards; the Impact Awards run by the Research Strategy Office, and the Public Engagement with Research Awards run by the Public Engagement team in the Office of External Affairs and Communications.

Research at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge has had profound effects on society – it is a formal part of the ̽��ֱ��’s mission.

̽��ֱ��Vice-Chancellor’s Impact Awards have been established to recognise and reward those whose research has led to excellent impact beyond academia, whether on the economy, society, culture, public policy or services, health, the environment or quality of life.

In this, its inaugural year, there were 71 nominations across all Schools. Nominations were initially judged by School, with one overall best entry selected by external advisor Schlumberger. A prize of £1,000 was awarded to the best impact in each School, with the prize for the overall winner increased to £2,000.

̽��ֱ��winners were announced at an award ceremony on 20 June 2016, hosted by Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz. These winners, although very diverse, illustrate only a small part of the wide range of impact that Cambridge's research has had.

This year’s winners were:

Dr Mari Jones (Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages)

Norman French has been spoken in Jersey for over 1,000 years. Today, however, this language (Jèrriais to its speakers) is obsolescent: spoken by some 1% of the population. ̽��ֱ��research of Mari Jones has sought to preserve Jèrriais and has helped raise the profile of the language within Jersey and beyond, with impacts on local and national media, language policy and education, and cultural identity and development.

Dr Gilly Carr (Department of Archaeology and Anthropology)

̽��ֱ��Channel Islands have long had great difficulty in coming to terms with the darker side of the German occupation. ̽��ֱ��aim of Gilly Carr’s research is to increase awareness of Channel Islander victims of Nazi persecution through creation of a plural ‘heritage landscape’ and via education. ̽��ֱ��creation of this heritage is a major achievement and will be of significant impact for the Channel Islands.

Professor Steve Jackson (Wellcome Trust/CRUK Gurdon Institute)

Olaparib is an innovative targeted therapy for cancer developed by Steve Jackson. In 2014 Olaparib was licensed for the treatment of advanced ovarian cancer by the US Food and Drug Administration and the European Medicines Agency. ̽��ֱ��following year, NICE made the drug available on the NHS in England for specific ovarian cancer patients. 2015 saw promising findings from a clinical trial in prostate cancer and Olaparib received Breakthrough Therapy Designation earlier this year. Olaparib is currently in clinical trials for a wide range of other cancer types.

Professor John Clarkson and Dr Nathan Crilly (Department of Engineering)

It is normal to be different. ̽��ֱ��demographics of the world are changing, with longer life expectancies and a reduced birth rate resulting in an increased proportion of older people. Yet with increasing age comes a general decline in capability, challenging the way people are able to interact with the ‘designed’ world around them. ̽��ֱ��Cambridge Engineering Design Centre has worked with the Royal College of Art to address this ‘design challenge’. They developed a design toolkit and realised what was by now obvious, that inclusive design was simply better design.

Dr Nita Forouhi and Dr Fumiaki Imamura (MRC Epidemiology Unit)

Identifying modifiable risk factors is an important step in helping reduce the health burden of poor diet. Forouhi and Imamura have advanced our understanding of the health impacts of sugars, fats and foods, through both scale and depth of investigation of self-reported information and nutritional biomarkers. They have engaged at an international level with policy and guidance bodies, and have used the media to improve public understanding with the potential for a direct impact on people’s health.

In 2015, the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge received a one-year £65k Catalyst Seed Fund grant from Research Councils UK to embed high quality public engagement with research and bring about culture change at an institutional level.

̽��ֱ��Public Engagement with Research Awards were set up to recognise and reward those who undertake quality engagement with research. 69 nominations were received from across all Schools.

This year’s winners were:

Dr Becky Inkster (Department of Psychiatry)

Dr Inkster’s work work explores the intersection of art and science through the prism of mental health research. Dr Inkster has successfully collaborated with ̽��ֱ��Scarabeus Theatre in a performance called Depths of My Mind and founded the website HipHopPsych, showcasing the latest psychiatry research through hip hop lyrics. Her approach has allowed her to engage with hard-to-reach teenage audiences, encouraging them to reflect on their own mental health. Beyond this work she has explored the use of social media to diagnose mental illness, and has gathered patient perspectives on ethics, privacy and data sharing in preparation for research publication.

Dr Paolo Bombelli (Department of Biochemistry)

Dr Bombelli’s research looks to utilise the photosynthetic chemistry of plants to create biophotovoltaic devices, a sustainable source of solar power. For over five years, he has been taking his research out of the lab to science festivals, schools and design fairs; tailoring his approach to a wider variety of audiences. Through his engagement, he has reached thousands of people, in multiple countries, and is currently developing an educational toolkit to further engage school students with advances in biophotovoltaic technology. Dr Bombelli’s public engagement work has also advanced his research, namely through a transition from using algae to moss in live demonstrations.

Dr Ruth Armstrong and Dr Amy Ludlow (Institute of Criminology and Faculty of Law)

Dr Armstrong and Dr Ludlow have collaborated on a research project addressing the delivery of education in the prison sector. Their project, Learning Together, pioneered a new approach to prison education where the end-users, the prisoners, are directly engaged with the design, delivery and evaluation of the research intervention. Adopting this shared dialogue approach has yielded positive results in terms of prisoners’ learning outcomes and has gathered praise from prison staff and government policy makers. Through continued engagement and partnership working, Armstrong and Ludlow have managed to expand their initiative across a broad range of sites and institutional contexts.

Dr Hazel Wilkinson (Department of English)

Dr Wilkinson is investigating the history of reading and writing habits in the eighteenth century. In collaboration with Dr Will Bowers at the ̽��ֱ�� of Oxford, she has developed an online public platform, journallists.org, which allows readers to engage with installments of periodicals, diaries, letters, and novels, on the anniversaries of the day on which they were originally published, written, or set. Her approach has allowed members of the public to actively participate in research. She has also inspired thousands of readers to engage with under-read eighteenth and nineteenth century texts, often for the very first time.

Dr Paul Coxon (Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy)

Over the last ten years Dr Coxon has endeavored to engage with audiences often overlooked by traditional public engagement channels. He has given talks in venues as varied as bingo halls, working men’s social clubs and steam fairs to showcase his passion for solar research, steering clear of the “flashes and bangs” approach often associated with Chemistry. He has also designed a Fruit Solar Cell Starter Kit, used in fifty low-income catchment schools across the UK.

Mr Ian Hosking and Mr Bill Nicholl (Department of Engineering and Faculty of Education)

Ian Hosking and Bill Nicholl are cofounders of Designing Our Tomorrow, a platform for transforming D&T education in schools. Their public engagement initiative began in 2009 and brought together research around inclusive design and creativity in education. Through production of their DOT box, Hosking and Nicholl have taken active research questions into the classroom and given students control of designing technological solutions. Engagement with teachers, students and policymakers is integral to the success of their initiative and has resulted in engineering design being included in the national curriculum and GCSE qualifications.

Researchers from across the ̽��ֱ�� have been recognised for the impact of their work on society, and engagement with research in the inaugural Vice-Chancellor’s Impact Awards and Public Engagement with Research Awards.

̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge

Dr Ruth Armstrong and Dr Amy Ludlow receive their award from the Vice-Chancellor, Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes