S-R learning models vs Discovery -
"Educational theorists no longer explain learning with behaviourist theories about stimulus-response connections. More recent studies recognize the role of the student in the feedback process"
I had a class in my masters program on learning and literacy - this was, concisely stated, the point of one of the learning units.
"They study the kind of feedback given and the context in which it is presented. What we now realize is that the message sent is filtered through the students perception as it becomes the message received"
hmmmm - isn't the point of s-r that the response is the result of filtered perception - filtered from the prior knowledge of how a response to given stimulus will be rewarded or punished.. I still stumble on this notion that the s-r folks are ignoring the individual in the model. Making it a black box isn't the same as ignoring it. Indeed, the notion of a block box, in engineering, comes from being able to characterize the function of an item based on what output it gives to input. If all the characteristics of output as a function of interesting inputs can be described then the black box is in fact, for all practical purposes, known. It's not exactly that the box is ignored, it's characterized from the outside.
"The student's job is to make meaning from schoolwork, not to respond to stimuli", well yes ok i would mostly agree. Yet still, I have students that can make meaning out of multiplication but don't respond correctly to stimuli such as what is 7x6. They can make meaning with pictures and groups and yet their lack of fluency causes exploration of deeper problems to get sidetracked by what should be rote knowledge.
The above was all from Brookhart, S (2008) page 3 - How to give effective feedback to your students. ASCD.
Speaking to the above point is this quote from a different source, "Research on expertise in areas such as chess, history, science, and mathematics demonstrate that experts' ability to solve problems depend strongly on a rich body of knowledge about subject matter" (p.9). In other words, experts in their field know stuff and use it make meaning and solve problems. It sometimes seems to me that modern pedagogy attempts to short cut to the meaning and problem solving before there's some stuff to work with.
The above from Bransford, J et. al.(2000), How people learn: brain, mind, experience and school. National Academy Press.
Thinking Thursday: Anatole France
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Writing to Learn Math: What did the author mean? Put the thought in your
own words. Do you agree or disagree? Why? Do you want your children to
develop the...
2 days ago
1 comment:
My mentor responds:
Doug,
Interesting points. I think that the last ten years or so of studies of the brain and the ability to learn have highlighted, despite the obvious advancements, that we still have a long way to go and that the words and terms (as concepts) we have typically used and understood to talk about these issues are patently inadequate and raise more questions than answers. Behaviorism wasn't necessarily wrong in its conception of how we learn (really, there was nothing that behaviorism said that wasn't historically obvious), it was the bogus presumption of science that it pretended. The continuingly seductive promise of neo-behaviorism is that it claims to deliver (if we only do exactly what it says) the goods and shows all the reasons why it should - and then doesn't - which is why it was largely abandoned as the answer to all our learning problems.
What you quote illustrates a problem that exists between those who would study the brains reaction to stimuli and those who actually do the day to day teaching (i.e. providing the stimuli). It's not that there is an irreconcilable gulf between the interactionist view and the brain-as-processor one, it's more that there is still an awful lot of spade-work to be done before the invested parties agree. For example:
Vygotsky rejected an atomized skill building approach as a means to plugging the perceived gaps of the learning disabled he studied and worked with. His point was that even though the evidence suggested that everything could be broken down to the smallest parts and then built up with the assumption that the child under study would make the final inductive leap that stitches the disparate parts together, this rarely happened. He divided cognition into higher function versus lower function. For Vygotsky, only the higher functions make the crucial difference, and what drives them is context and purpose.
For an entirely modern but by no means Vygotskian recapitulation of this notion, read Douglas Hofstadter's "I am a Strange Loop." He's one of the most readable cognitive scientists writing today. The book is primarily a treatise on the great philosophical questions of individual consciousness, now a very hot topic in cognitive science. He provides one of the best descriptions of the gulf between neurology on the one hand - all liquids, squishy bits and stimulus and response - and the upper functions, the metal operations that prevent us from getting caught in the endless loops of the lower stuff (you can tell I'm not very up on the neurological part because of that last noun before the parenthesis). He also offers one of the shortest and best critiques of why Skinner offered so much but in the end failed hopelessly.
Hofstadter's more famous book is "Goedel, Escher, Bach: The Eternal Golden Braid." Perhaps you've read it already? Its treatment of Goedel is marvelous, and as a math moron I found it astonishing at the level of ideas. By the way, he's a marvelous writer too and like all good writers he explains complex ideas in a way that makes you think he's sitting there talking to you. Personally, i insist that all the people i read spend some time in front of me… explaining.
If it's any consolation, by the way, I'm as confused as you are, but I think the archly behaviorist approach epitomized by Seigfried Englemann's (the last of the great behaviorists) lifetime of work through DI has failed ultimately because it's apparent strengths (carefully scripted routines around input-output, stimulus response models - always failed after initial, unqualified success. Why? This is the one i had to think thru: You can only control humans (teachers and students) so far. After a while, being human, they want to do things in a different way, they want to experiment and stretch and be different. When i began to read about the history of DI methods, that's exactly what i found: an initial flush of success after which the rigorously scripted program was abandoned. It's not that it didn't or couldn't work - it most certainly could, whether it was math or reading - it was the fact that it didn't suit the peculiar idiosyncratic differences of human beings that have always seen it abandoned. It's sort of like parenting: "Just do as i say and it'll all be fine." As a parent of five kids, i have only one who could do it that way, but all the rest did it their own way. Really, the biggest impediment to learning is people. If only teaching wasn’t about people!
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