JABET

When I was looking for an online reference to the quote in my last post, I came across another blog post quoting it with interesting relevance.

It discusses a recent article in Time Magazine about the curriculum in at least five US universities changing from pure aquisition of knowledge to emphasising the application of knowledge. I’ll use the same quote from the article below:

. . . the new approach emphasizes the kind of active learning that gets students thinking and applying knowledge. “Just as one doesn’t become a marathon runner by reading about the Boston Marathon,” says the committee report, “so, too, one doesn’t become a good problem solver by listening to lectures or reading about statistics.” Acknowledging how important extracurricular activities have become on campus, the report calls for a stronger link between the endeavors students pursue inside and outside the classroom. Those studying poverty, for example, absorb more if they also volunteer at a homeless shelter, suggests Bok, whose 2005 book, Our Underachieving Colleges, cites a finding that students remember just 20% of the content of class lectures a week later.

Sonds like a very positive step to me. From personal experience, I have found university education so abstracted at times, that I have completed a Biochemistry degree, still enjoying the subject matter, yet with no idea what to expect once it is applied to a real job. In my case, this meant that once I started a significant practical project (Honors year, after three years of theory), I realised that I had no interest in doing this for a career, and thus was back at square one. Whats more, it seemed like about 75% of my classmates felt the same way, and never got a job in the field they had spent so long studying. That doesn’t seem like a very efficient system to me. Sure, we did have weekly lab work during the degree, but that didn’t really give as an idea of what to expect in a career.

Don’t get me wrong – I am not bitter about this experience – I think the scientific and writing skills and diciplines I leant have been very useful in my time since, but I am sure there must be a more efficient way to learn, not just about the knowledge, but also about your relationship to the knowledge and the industry it is related to. Hopefully a more applied curriculum is a positive step in that direction. 

This ‘last post’ thing has become a bit of a habit, but for better or worse, I am about to do it again. Ah well, at least someone comments on my posts

My last post was talking about a feeling of responsibility to learn with a purpose, rather than learn for the sake of learning. Quite a while ago, I came across this relevant quote that has stuck in the back of my mind:

Knowledge is as wings to man’s life, and a ladder for his ascent. Its acquisition is incumbent upon everyone. The knowledge of such sciences, however, should be acquired as can profit the peoples of the earth, and not those which begin with words and end with words.  

This quote is from Bahá’u'lláh, “Epistle to the Son of the Wolf”, pp. 26-27.

In my last post, I mentioned the idea of ‘learning addiction’:

…with the continual increase in knowledge (and technology) production, and such ready access to it (via the internet etc), I am seeing a form of ‘learning addiction’ arise, for example, in people that are subscribed to 600 blogs, or in my case, a ‘healthy’ number of podcasts. 

This reminds me of the ancient Greek concepts of knowledge. They had three different terms to describe different aspects of knowledge:

1. The aquisition of knowledge. Learning, and applying rules.
2. The application of knowledge. Trades and crafts.
3. The ‘being’ of knowledge. Experts that are so familiar with a topic they do not have to think about it.

Understandably, thhis is also a progression from the most basic form of knowledge to the most complex and revered form. (As an aside, this inability to describe knowledge fully in English has been blamed for not being able to fully comprehend and therefore deal with knowledge, and has thus been blamed for failures of large knowledge management systems).

This is all very interesting, but what has it got to do with ‘learning addiction’? It seems to me that ‘learning addiction’ is solely based in the ‘aquisition of knowledge’. I find it helpful to regularly ask myself if my dealings with knowledge are purely aqusition, or if they are moving towards application and being. Sure, some will always be for entertainment and I don’t think that is a bad thing (in moderation), but if you read the morning newspaper etc, how much of that do you think you will be able to apply to your life or your work?

I just listened to a free Audible interview with Ben Bova and Orson Scott Card, in which something interesting bubbled up that seemed relevant to my last post.

A third party had made the comment that Science Fiction is “a fringe genre read only be teens and techo-nerds”, which prompted the question “do you think the (SciFi) art form is becoming acceptable to more mainstream book lovers?”, to which Orson Scott Card replied (amongst other replies):

The demographics have been done on who reads science fiction: our readers are smarter than the readers of any other genre (on average). They are also people who embrace the idea of taking themselves out of the present reality, and going through the process that every two year old can do (but then we stop doing it), which is learning the world through finding, discovering, noticing new things and making rules out of them. And our readers do that routinely – that is what they read for – to have that same excitement of being in a new world, that most human beings only get between the ages of birth and three or four. So we are writing something that duplicates the experience of children, but it is the most intellectually productive time in a human life.

I personally prefer the term (or is it a genre) ’Speculative Fiction’ rather than ‘Science Fiction’. I often feel that making sense of foreign systems, and considering different ways of doing things (both strong components of Spec Fic) have made me more perceptive and creative. However it is a ‘Chicken and Egg’ situation – alternatively I could have already been strong in those skills and appreciated opportunities to exert them. Either way, I can certainly relate to the excitement of such challenges. In fact, with the continual increase in knowledge (and technology) production, and such ready access to it (via the internet etc), I am seeing a form of ‘learning addiction’ arise, for example, in people that are subscribed to 600 blogs, or in my case, a ‘healthy’ number of podcasts.

After going through the archives of podcasts at EdTechTalk, I recently listened to Women Of Web 2.0, Episode 7. 56 minutes in, they have an interesting discussion about intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation related to the concept of Locus of Control.

As this is related to two of my previous posts (here and here) I though it was worthy of mention. Being a podcast, it is hard to give you a simple reference to the discussion point, so I decided to transcribe it below. The other difficulty related to it being from a podcast, is that I can’t be sure exactly who the speaker is, beyond the female members of Cheryl Oakes, Jennifer Wagner, Vicki Davis , Sharon Peters and Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach. Despite their inherent challenges in these situations, I still love podcasts. So the quote is:

I heard a gentleman talking the other day, and one of the things he said I thought were so interesting – he was talking about ‘Locus of Control’… What he was talking about was intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation. Research has shown that students that are intrinsically motivated and really feel that they learn best by what comes from inside of them, that their learning depends on their own initiative about ‘do I get enough sleep’, ‘have I eaten enough’, ‘have I prepared enough for this’, ‘wow, this is interesting, I am going to make it happen’. They [intrinsically motivated] are the most successful at school. But the majority of males that were tested in school were extrinsically motivated, and they beleived that learning somehow occurred from the outside – from whatever the teacher imposed upon them. They were going to be told what to learn and how to learn it, e.g. if the teacher liked them they did better. There wasn’t a whole lot that really came from the inside.

People that are intrinsically motivated, when you start to teach them, and intervene into something (e.g. there is a real wonderment going on and they are exploring and discovering). All of a sudden someone, a teacher comes in from the outside and says ‘ok, we are going to do it structured, we are going to do this, look on page 47, lets reflect on that, what do you guys think’ that the enthusiasm and the wonderment and the excitement just drops from that person who is intrinsically motivated.

And so immediately I questioned, I wonder if all those boys, who are not going to do so well in school because they are extrinsically motivated could be trained to do things the way we [the speaker] do in the average [constructivist] classroom [aka, to be intrinsically motivated].

Quite interesting. From what I can tell, Locus of Control (according to Wikipedia) is more about whether you perceive that you have control over your performance due to skill, of if you beleive it is due to luck. This is closely related to a previous post. The Wikipedia article does not mention intrinsic or extrinsic motivation (in so many words). Although it looks like a relevant Google search does highlight some connections.

It is interesting to relate it to gender differences – I wonder if the stereotypical ‘males are more competitive’ view is connected to this, in that competition may be viewed by them as extrinsic motivation.

Also interesting to see another example of how intrinsic motivation can be decreased by teacher intervention. In retrospect, the ‘imposing structure’ intervention described here is probably a broader category, of which the ‘offering a reward’ intervention of my previous post is simply an example of.

My previous post (on a child’s outlook influencing their intelligence) made me recall a segment in a BBC documentary (I think it was either Human Body or Child of our Time, both hosted by Robert Winston) about how using rewards too much can actually demotivate a child.

It seemed that by promising a reward while assigning a task, the child would focus on how to acheive the reward with the least possible effort, shifting focus away from intrinsic motivation and simply enjoying the task at hand. They illustrated this effect in a classroom, and it only took one or two occurrences to to demotivate the children, and created flow-on problems for quite a while afterwards like boredom, lack of focus and loss of self-sufficiency. This negative effect could be avoided by not promising the reward ahead of time and only providing a reward on a regular basis. With student motivation seeming to be the largest problem facing many teachers and schools today, I wonder if this phenomenon is at least partially to blame. It is very easy to fall into this trap and once started, it can be a slippery slope, as teachers try to counter demotivated students with the promised reward technique again. Even telling students they can leave class or stop work early once they have finished xyz, (or inversely, hold them in after the bell has rung to finish a task) can start them down the slippery slope.

Its facinating and somewhat terrifying how easy it can be to influence a person’s frame of mind. Which brings us back to the previous post – how are the children’s “theories” of intelligence being influenced in the classroom? Related studies have shown that praising a child for acheiving a particular task can be a problem, as (in a similar way to the promised reward technique) it conditions the child to expect (or even attempt to ‘engineer’) praise. This becomes a problem if a task is not done well – if praise is withheld, then the child will feel like they are not able to accomplish that task and be less inclined to try in the future. This fosters ‘helpless’ orientation of learners. However, it is also possible to foster ‘mastery-oriented’ learning using praise. The key is to not praise the task itself, but rather to praise the characteristics used to complete the task. For example, when a child has created a painting, instead of saying “what a beautiful painting”, you could praise their creativity etc.

Recognising the correct characteristics to praise can take some getting used to, however there is help available. The Virtues Project has identified a list of virtues, categorised them and selected a shortlist of the most important ones to bear in mind. They also provide advice and training of how to identify virtues in people’s actions and acknlowledge them. They provide courses for teachers, who in turn teach the students, who interestingly teach their parent as they are intrinsically motivated to be praised on their virtues. They also offer a lot of other advice with many different applications from Violence Prevention to Leadership Development. I actually know someone who is finishing their masters thesis on applying the virtues project in primary schools. The results have shown a significant improvement in sociability and time on task for pretty much all students (less for students that already rated well) in the space of only a few weeks.

So it is good to know that the ease of influencing someone can be both a good and a bad thing.

SlashDotReview mentioned an item on SlashDot (which has a vibrant conversation on the topic) quoting Hugh Pickens, who summarises an article in Scientific American on the secret to raising smart kids. Dang - talk about quoting your sources!

Anyway, Hugh Pickens writes:

Scientific American has an interesting article on the secret to raising smart kids that says that more than 30 years of scientific investigation suggests that an overemphasis on intellect or talent leaves people vulnerable to failure, fearful of challenges and unwilling to remedy their shortcomings. In particular, attributing poor performance to a lack of ability depresses motivation more than does the belief that lack of effort is to blame. One theory of what separates the two general classes of learners, helpless versus mastery-oriented, is that these different types of students not only explain their failures differently, but they also hold different “theories” of intelligence. The helpless ones believe that intelligence is a fixed trait: you have only a certain amount. Mistakes crack their self-confidence because they attribute errors to a lack of ability, which they feel powerless to change. Mastery-oriented children think intelligence is malleable and can be developed through education and hard work. Challenges are energizing rather than intimidating offering opportunities to learn.

The original article Scientific American article is available here.