I recently took the Implicit Association Test on racial impressions at Harvard.  While I don’t necessarily disagree with my results, I still have strong doubts about the way the test was constructed.  I was shown to have a moderate preference for my own race, white, which doesn’t really surprise me.  After all, I grew up in a predominantly white community, so my early exposure to other races was limited.  I presume it’s probably biologically natural to prefer one’s own race, and there is also a clear historical advantage to being white in America which could quite logically, even as it is unfortunate, strengthen an unconscious desire to associate with white people.  What really bothered me about the test was that it seemed from watching the Dateline interview that the researchers had an agenda.  Every time the test was given, black faces were grouped with negative characteristics in the first part of the test.  Why?  Why don’t the researchers randomize the test so that some participants receive the grouping of black faces with positive characteristics early in the test and then switch the categories in the 2^nd half?  Does this reveal a bias on the part of the researchers?  Rather than testing the preconceptions held by participants, is it possible that the test actually places an association of black with bad in the participants’ minds that then impacts the 2^nd half of the test?  This would correspond well with the observation recorded by Gladwell in Blink that participants who were primed to think about old age in a sentence construction test subsequently behaved in line with that association.  Is the IAT priming participants to form associations between pictures of black people and negative terms?  I would like to know if the results change at all when the order of the test is changed.  William James makes a point of explaining how memory enables us to learn in Talks to Teachers.  Through recalling a series of reactions, we can substitute one behavior for another, “eliminating all the intermediary steps” (p. 21).  For James, one interaction can be instructive, so it is logical to conclude that a test item could potentially teach participants how to behave rather than simply measure that behavior.

Skinner (1984) lamented that behaviorism had not been more quickly accepted by society.  Pryor (2004) acknowledges the long rejection of behaviorism, but demonstrates how it is now being embraced to productive ends in many contexts.  As an interesting example of behaviorism in practice not mentioned by Pryor, Skinner commented on how particularly disparaging linguists were of his methods, but there are many popular language programs now that take students through carefully programmed instruction.  The most famous is Rosetta Stone.  While I’m not personally familiar with the program, one researcher described it as “using pictures to create contexts where meaning is clear, elicit responses, and provide immediate feedback” (Stoltzfus, 1997).  The use of stimuli to elicit responses and then provide immediate feedback sounds like something straight from Skinner’s writing, demonstrating the change that language instruction has undergone.  Pryor (2004) endorses reinforcement because it is effective, interesting to those trained by it, and creates a bond between trainer and trainee.  Kohn (2011) rejects these assertions, claiming that reinforcing children with praise causes them to become dependent on the approval of other people and less sure of their own opinions.  I can see Kohn’s point that some forms of praise can be demeaning.  Sometimes saying “good job” is really more dismissive and condescending than heartfelt and uplifting.  However, I found myself wondering if it’s realistic or beneficial for children to be completely self-reliant.  Humans are social creatures.  Our desire for the approval of other people is an instinct that serves an important function, to drive us toward intimacy because we are more effective as a group than as individuals, and to check our own fallacious tendencies through the feedback of other people.  It is natural for children to want approval.  As a result, while there can be an over-reliance on approval, total deprivation from praise may be just as destructive to a child’s self-esteem.  I agree more with Pryor in advocating behaviorism.  I found his examples of how some animals have tried to use reinforcement to train humans incredibly intriguing.  There may be less that distinguishes people from animals than we realize.

References

Kohn, A. (2011). Five reasons to stop saying “Good job!” Young Children. Retrieved from http://www.alfiekohn.org/parenting/gj.htm

Kohn, A. (2012, Feb 3). Criticizing (common criticisms of) praise. Huffington Post, 75, 783-787. Retrieved from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alfie-kohn/criticizing-common-critic_b_1252344.html

Pryor, K. (2002). Don’t shoot the dog: The new art of teaching and training. Gloucestershire, Scotland: Ringpress Books Ltd.

Skinner, B. F. (1984). The shame of American education. American Psychologist, 42, 947-954.

Stoltzfus, A. (1997). The learning theory behind the Rosetta Stone Language Library from Fairfield Language Technologies. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the National Association for Bilingual Education, Albuquerque, NM. Retrieved from ERIC.

In “The Shame of American Education,” B.F. Skinner criticizes the proposals that have been made for fixing American schools.  Recommendations to make students attend school longer, fire ineffective teachers, disband colleges of education, or study cognitive processes fail to address the root of the problem, a reliance on the wrong theory of learning.  Behaviorism, which proposes that all learning is merely a change in behavior resulting from schedules of reinforcement, can be the basis for a more effective education system.  Through the use of carefully designed instruction, students can learn more in shorter periods of time.  They will be motivated and less disruptive in schools because they will be reinforced by their success through the instructional sequence.  Because the culture has not embraced the theory of behaviorism, colleges of education are not training teachers appropriately, teachers don’t have the tools to perform their job, and students are not learning in the most effective manner.

                Very little has changed in the 29 years since Skinner wrote this article.  Behaviorism is still considered outdated, and our schools are still disintegrating.  Skinner would be disappointed.  There are a few exceptions.  The School of One in New York has adopted some of Skinner’s tenets.  It enables individual students to progress through the curriculum at their own pace and receive reinforcement through daily feedback on their efforts.  As Skinner predicted, students are more motivated and teachers have more time to really teach.  It does not fully incorporate Skinner’s model because the instruction is not carefully designed to elicit the appropriate response and avoid reinforcing wrong answer, but I think Skinner would consider it a major step in the right direction.  By using computer-generated algorithms to respond to the behavior of each student, the School of One emphasizes patterns of behavior rather than the concept of “choice”.  Skinner would agree with this approach.  He considered “free will” an illusion.  All behavior has a cause, and if the causes can be known, then behavior can be controlled.

Behaviorism is an epistemology that proposes that everything we know about living and nonliving things comes from how they act.  All behavior is a reaction to environmental factors.  Animals and humans can be “classically” conditioned to respond to a neutral stimulus by pairing that stimulus through association with another stimulus that naturally produces the desired behavior.  Furthermore, since some behaviors influence or “operate on” the environment, these behaviors can be strengthened or extinguished through positive or negative reinforcers or punishments in a process called “operant conditioning”.

In creating a pie chart on the role of habit vs. free will in my life, I was tempted at first to assign 25% to habit and 75% to conscious choice. This is certainly the way I perceive life as it unfolds. There are some things, I clearly do out of habit. Often when I’m driving a familiar route, I don’t really pay attention to the directions I am taking. I know this because I sometimes find myself taking the wrong familiar route (ex. going to work when I am supposed to be going to a friend’s house) and don’t catch it until I am halfway there. However, I still consciously think about the choices I am making most of the time, hence the 75%. Yet, I decided to reverse these figures because, while the former may be my perception of my day, ultimately my upbringing and culture play a much bigger role than I consciously realize. In the book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell demonstrates how generational heritage can have a major influence on the decisions people make and accounts for a large part of the success of some people. While decisions may feel like “choice”, if they are determined by the values instilled in us by our upbringing, they are really still a form of habit. Now, I need to clarify that I don’t believe this chart is true for all people. Some people have no free will at all. Their actions are completely dictated by habit. We are only enabled to make choices in our lives when we encounter God and are given spiritual life. Even then, while we have the capability to choose, we are still greatly influenced by other factors, so “habit” still remains a predominant force in our lives.

Here is an overview of the Preface and first four chapters of Talks for Teachers on Psychology by William James.

The preface explains that the book was developed from some public lectures given to teachers at Cambridge in 1892 as well as a several “addresses” delivered at women’s colleges.  James has edited the content to focus more on the practical than the theoretical and has eliminated the graphical outline of the text to help the reader focus on the overall impact of these principles on the mental life of the student.

In Chapter 1, James explains that principles developed from psychology won’t give teachers a clear prescription for how to teach, but they can provide some guidance and are useful when combined with an instructional ingenuity.  He also encourages teachers not to feel they must contribute to the study of psychology as part of their job.

I personally found it ironic when James praised the American education system at the time of his writing by saying “avoiding on the one hand the pure lecture-system prevalent in Germany and Scotland, which considers too little the individual student, and yet not involving the sacrifice of the instructor to the individual student, which the English tutorial system would seem too often to entail” (p. 1).  I don’t know much about schools in James’ day, but schools now seem to pendulum swing between these two extremes.  Too many students are lectured at, and in classrooms where this isn’t the case, there is often a heavy emphasis on discovery and student-centered learning, at the expense of teacher as more knowledgeable other.  I agree with James that we need a balance between these extremes.

In chapter 2, James defines “stream of consciousness” as the continual succession of sensory perceptions, feelings, thoughts and wills occurring in the human mind.  While many different kinds of mental impressions (i.e. feelings, senses, intentions, etc) occur simultaneously, there is an indeterminate flow between those which are the center of focus and those which exist on the margins of consciousness.

I experienced a good example of these concepts last Monday when I found myself worrying about an incident I had observed a few weeks ago.  I woke up in the morning thinking about something else entirely, but then the memory came back to me and became the focus of my attention.  Later I got up and went about my day, focusing on other things, but often, an unsettled feeling and vague memory of the incident remained on the margin of my thoughts while I did my work.  At times, my focus returned to the memory and the environment around me shifted into the peripheral.  Then I would get back to what I was doing, but I just couldn’t shake the idea from my mind completely, as these succession of thoughts passed through my mind. 

Chapter 3 describes the historical debate between which end result of one’s stream of consciousness, improved rational thought or impacted behavior, is more important, and makes the case for considering behavior primary since “stream of conscious” developed to help humans survive in the world and since action both makes deeper reflection possible and is also more related to abstract thought than is immediately obvious.

I love the tongue-in-cheek style of James’ writing when he notes that if people “emphasize the practical [over] the theoretical…a concrete victory over this earth’s outward powers of darkness would appear an equivalent for any amount of passive spiritual culture” (p. 11).  James is ironic here because surely we will not merely see them as equivalent, but recognize that “faith without works is dead” (James 2:20 New King James Bible).  It does no good to be a spiritual person if it doesn’t have some kind of impact on one’s life in the world. A humorous example of his distinction between the practical and rational occurred one night while my family was dining at a restaurant.  A napkin on a side table accidentally caught fire from a nearby candle.  While most of us debated the best course of action, noting “somebody ought to get a waiter”, my mother silently rose to her feet, grabbed a class of water, and extinguished the flame.  We were immediately awed by her active ingenuity in contrast with our dumb intellectualism.  We could have been caught in a blazing fire while we reasoned about the situation.  Clearly, thoughts have some value, but actions have more.

Chapter 4 continues the line of argument in Chapter 3 by giving examples of how the German and English school systems are each designed to produce particular kinds of behaviors in students.  William James puts forth a definition of education as “the organization of acquired habits of conduct and tendencies to behavior” (p. 15).

After reading this chapter, I’m reminded of Jerome Bruner’s (1996) discussion about the dialectic tension between the end goals of education.  Should schools prepare students for needed roles in society or should they help students to become self-actualized individuals?  For example, society needs a significant number of garbage collectors, but collecting garbage is probably not the highest aim of most individuals.  At the same time, society cannot function if all of its members are artists, writers, scientists or theoretical mathematicians.  James does not deal with this question, but his emphasis on the importance of behavior in setting instructional aims does raise the issue of which behaviors should be targeted for instruction.

References

Bruner, J. (1996). The culture of education. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

James, W. (1962). Talks to teachers on psychology and to students on some of life’s ideals. Mineola, NY: Dover.

According to Alexander, Schallert, and Reynolds in “What is Learning Anyway? A Topographical Perspective Considered,” learning is both a process of changing and a resulting product of human perception derived from the interactions of a multitude of factors concerning the learner’s characteristics, the situation, the topic, and the timing that indelibly alters the learner and his/her environment.

Alexander et al. list 9 principles that they believe are essential to learning as a construct and common to all learning theorists.  Here are the 5 that I find the most intriguing:

Principle 2:  Learning is inevitable, essential, and ubiquitous

There’s a great story I heard one time about a woman who always cut the ends off her meatloaf and threw them away before cooking it in the pan.  She did so because her mother had always done so.  One day, she started to wonder about it and she called her mom to ask why she should cut the ends off the meatloaf.  Her mother replied, “Well, I don’t know.  That’s just the way my mother always did it.”  They both decided to ask the grandmother.  She told them that when she was younger, she only had a small pan and couldn’t fit the whole meatloaf in, so she simply cut the ends off.  For many years, both the woman and her mother had wasted meatloaf for no good reason simply because they had learned from their mother’s example without understanding why.  This example could easily fit under Principle 4 as well, but I’ve placed it here because it demonstrates how people learn even when they aren’t being “taught.”  The grandmother had not told them they should always follow this practice.  As she went about her daily life, her daughter and then granddaughter picked up on her habits without her even knowing.  We learn from everyday life as well as from formal “lessons”.

Principle 3:  Learning can be resisted

Sometimes we don’t want to accept a new idea because it means we will have to alter some belief or habit we have already developed.  This resistance can be conscious or unconscious.  I’m a very introspective person and I try to be open to new ideas, even ones I don’t like.  Yet, I’ve sometimes noticed a curious thing that my brain does.  When I try to force myself to examine some part of my life that makes me uncomfortable, it is really hard to focus.  My mind will jump away from what I’m thinking about to some unrelated idea.  I’ll be having a “heart to heart” with myself, when suddenly I’m thinking about lunch or my afternoon plans.  I sometimes describe it as feeling like my brain is booby-trapped to avoid certain topics.  I think that on an unconscious level I fear what the consequences may be of altering some of the deep-rooted things I’ve learned, so my brain just simply avoids thinking about them altogether.

Principle 4:  Learning may be disadvantageous

It’s not difficult to imagine many of the terrible things people learn from the wrong interplay of environmental factors.  A great example of this concept is the way that children who are neglected or verbally abused “learn” to expect mistreatment.  They come to believe that they deserve disrespect.  Sometimes they may even confuse abuse for love.  Returning to principle 3, it may take prolonged intervention to counteract this learning once it has become foundational in the person’s life because he/she may be unwilling to accept any other interpretation of the events.  Sadly, I have more than one friend who is drawn to destructive relationships because of what they’ve “learned” about themselves and intimacy from their childhood.

Of course, while this is a really sad example of how this principle works, disadvantageous learning can occur on a smaller, less noticeable scale as well.  Coming to depend on coffee to wake up every morning is a habit that is learned, too.  It’s not as destructive as seeking out abusive relationships, but it’s still not really beneficial for a person either.

Principle 6:  Learning is framed by our humanness

I find this principle fascinating because I’d never truly considered it prior to reading this article.  Now I find myself wondering how my learning would change if I had the advanced sense of hearing or smell that my dog does.  One of the individual differences I’ve experienced in my life is the way I process visual information.  It’s interesting to compare my mother and myself.  She is a very visual person and notices many details about colors and shapes in the world around her.  I have strong verbal skills, but I pay very little attention to visual information.  In school, I was terrible at those exercises where I was asked to stare at a scene for 15 minutes and then after it was removed, describe everything I saw.  My brain just does not take in as much visual information.  As a result, I can’t picture my memories well, although I can describe conversations in dramatic detail.  I learn much better when I read a text with simple illustrations than when I try to learn from detailed diagrams.  They quickly overwhelm and confuse me.

Principle 8: Learning is different at different points in time

Right after I graduated from my undergraduate college, I took a job teaching preschool for a year.  I eventually decided that wasn’t the right fit for me, but I loved designing lessons for the children.  Frequently, I found myself learning new things, even though I was teaching such a young age.  One time, I remember considering new ideas about the interplay of texture and visual representation when I had my students paint with corn.  I’ve heard the idea that we learn more when we teach, but I think it went beyond needing to dig deeper into the material so I could teach.  I think I learned because of the timing in my life.  I’m sure I had completed many of these same activities when I was 4 or 5, but I knew considerably less then.  I had only picked up on some of the information and I had a limited view of what I was doing.  Nearly twenty years later, I was able to make so many more connections than I was at 4, so the experience took on new meaning for me.

References

Alexander, P. A., Schallert, D. L., & Reynolds, R. E. (2009). What is learning anyway? A topographical perspective. Educational Psychologist, 44, 176-192

Learning is like building a home.  While teachers, books, and experiences provide potential construction materials, students must choose to build things out of the information they encounter by connecting ideas.  These connections become joints and walls, and eventually separate what is learned into compartments.  Learners add new ideas to the appropriate part of their houses, although someone else might have arranged his/her home quite differently.

There are some common patterns in students’ structures, just as there are common elements between houses.  These patterns emerge in part from what is inherent in the building materials, in how they are presented, and how the culture at large dictates that they should be connected.  Yet there is also a great deal of freedom in what learners choose to accentuate, in the kinds and number of rooms they create.

Teachers and mentors provide guidance as parts of the home are built, but no learner begins with a blueprint, so the home may sometimes appear haphazard.  Learners become better builders as they work, and sometimes realize there are faults in their construction.  They can either ignore new contradictory information, or they may tear down prior preconceptions to make room for new construction.  If they decide the foundation itself is faulty, the upheaval can be tremendous and messy.  The end result will be an entirely new house, representing a new set of thought patterns and lifestyle.  People live in their homes, and what we “learn” becomes the place from which we view the whole world.

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