As we discussed last night, there are both modern and ancient schools of thought that suggest the fullest expression of learning may be the mind's ability to control what and how it thinks. In these frameworks, the mind doesn't merely have the capacity to comprehend a static reality; the mind in fact may actually have the capacity to influence reality. Your homework was to conduct an informal experiment in which you set an intention and observed your day.
Please report your results as comments to this post.
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
Thursday, December 11, 2008
Week 8 Resources
Please publish your resources for week 8 (December 16) as comments to this post. Thanks!
Article on Teasing
December 7, 2008
In Defense of Teasing
By DACHER KELTNER
A FEW YEARS AGO my daughters and I were searching for sand crabs on a white-sand beach near Monterey. A group of sixth graders descended on us, clad in the blue trousers and pressed white shirts of their parochial school. Once lost in the sounds of the surf, away from their teacher’s gaze, they called one another by nicknames and mocked the way one laughed, another walked. Noogies and rib pokes, headlocks and bear hugs caught the unsuspecting off guard. Two boys dangled a girl over the waves. Three girls tugged a boy’s sagging pants down. Dog piles broke out. In a surprise attack, one girl nearly dropped a dead crab down a boy’s pants.
As they departed in sex-segregated lines, my daughters stood transfixed. Serafina asked me, “Why did that girl try to put the crab in the boy’s pants?” “Because she likes him,” I responded. This was an explanation Serafina and her older sister, Natalie, only partly understood. What I witnessed might be called “the teasing gap.”
Today teasing has been all but banished from the lives of many children. In recent years, high-profile school shootings and teenage suicides have inspired a wave of “zero tolerance” movements in our schools. Accused teasers are now made to utter their teases in front of the class, under the stern eye of teachers. Children are given detention for sarcastic comments on the playground. Schools are decreed “teasing free.”
And we are phasing out teasing in many other corners of social life as well. Sexual-harassment courses advise work colleagues not to tease or joke. Marriage counselors encourage direct criticism over playful provocation. No-taunting rules have even arisen in the N.B.A. and the N.F.L. to discourage “trash talking.”
The reason teasing is viewed as inherently damaging is that it is too often confused with bullying. But bullying is something different; it’s aggression, pure and simple. Bullies steal, punch, kick, harass and humiliate. Sexual harassers grope, leer and make crude, often threatening passes. They’re pretty ineffectual flirts. By contrast, teasing is a mode of play, no doubt with a sharp edge, in which we provoke to negotiate life’s ambiguities and conflicts. And it is essential to making us fully human.
The centrality of teasing in our social evolution is suggested by just how pervasive teasing is in the animal world. Younger monkeys pull the tails of older monkeys. African hunting dogs jump all over one another, much like pad-slapping, joking football players moments before kickoff. In every corner of the world, human adults play peekaboo games to stir a sulking child, children (as early as age 1) mimic nearby adults and teenagers prod one another to gauge romantic interest. In rejecting teasing, we may be losing something vital and necessary to our identity as the most playful of species.
THE LANGUAGE OF TEASING
A few hundred years ago, teasing was anything but taboo. Jesters and fools enjoyed high status. With their sharp-tongued mockery, outlandish garb and entertaining pranks, they highlighted the absurdities of all that was held sacred, from newborns and newlyweds to kings, queens and leaders of the church. In the tradition of the jester or the fool lies the essence of what a tease is — a playfully provocative mode of commentary.
But attempts to define the nature of that commentary can be difficult, not least because language itself gets in the way. We may use “teasing” to refer to the affectionate banter of middle-school friends, to the offensive passes of impulsive bosses and to the language of heart-palpitating flirtation, to humiliation that scars psyches (harsh teasing about obesity can damage a child’s sense of self for years) and to the repartee that creates a peaceful space between siblings. It is necessary to look at how we use language — especially at how we deliver our spoken words — to get at what teasing actually is.
The answer can be found, paradoxically, in a classic study of politeness by Penelope Brown, a linguistics anthropologist, and Stephen Levinson, a cognitive anthropologist, which differentiates between “on-record” communication” and “off-record” communication. On-record communication is to be taken literally and follows the rules of what the philosopher Paul Grice described as “cooperative, direct speech”: what is said should be truthful, appropriately informative, on topic and clear. When doctors deliver prognoses about terminal illnesses or financial advisers announce the loss of family fortunes, they adhere to these rules like priests following Scripture.
Very often, though, we do not want our words to be taken too literally. When we speak in ways that risk offense, for example when we criticize a friend, we may add intentional vagueness or unnecessary circumlocutions. Say a friend proves to be too confrontational at a dinner party. To encourage greater civility, we might resort to indirect hints (“Say, did you read the latest by the Dalai Lama?”) or metaphor (“I guess sometimes you just need to blow off some steam”). These linguistic acts establish a new channel of communication — off-record communication — signaling that what is being said has an alternate meaning.
Teasing is just such an act of off-record communication: provocative commentary is shrouded in linguistic acts called “off-record markers” that suggest the commentary should not be taken literally. At the same time, teasing isn’t just goofing around. We tease to test bonds, and also to create them. To make it clear when we’re teasing, we use fleeting linguistic acts like alliteration, repetition, rhyming and, above all, exaggeration to signal that we don’t mean precisely what we’re saying. (“Playing the dozens,” a kind of ritualized teasing common in the inner city that is considered a precursor to rap, involves just this sort of rhyming: “Don’t talk about my mother ’cause you’ll make me mad/Don’t forget how many your mother had.”) We also often indicate we are teasing by going off-record with nonverbal gestures: elongated vowels and exaggerated pitch, mock expressions and the iconic wink, well-timed laughs and expressive caricatures. A whiny friend might be teased with a high-pitched imitation or a daughter might mock her obtuse father by mimicking his low-pitched voice. Preteens, sharp-tongued jesters that they are, tease their parents with exaggerated facial expressions of anger, disgust or fear, to satirize their guardians’ outdated moral indignation. Similarly, deadpan deliveries and asymmetrically raised eyebrows (Stephen Colbert), satirical smiles and edgy laughs (Jon Stewart) all signal that we don’t entirely mean what we say.
THE BENEFITS OF TEASING
The language of teasing is intimately linked to the language of social behavior. Because teasing allows us to send messages in indirect, masked ways, it is an essential means of navigating our often-fraught social environments. In teasing, we become actors, taking on playful identities to manage the inevitable conflicts of living in social groups.
Placed into groups, children as young as 2 will soon form a hierarchy — it will be clear even among toddlers who is in charge and who is not. Hierarchies have many benefits — the smooth division of labor and resources, protecting weaker members of the group — but they can be deadly to negotiate. Male fig wasps chop their rivals in half with their large mandibles. Narwhal males loll about with tusk tips embedded in their jaws — vestiges of their status contests. Coyotes engage in heavily coded bouts of play; those who don’t live shorter, ostracized lives.
Given the perils of negotiating rank, many species have evolved dramatized status contests, relying on symbolic displays of physical size and force to peacefully sort out who’s on top. Stags roar. Frogs croak. Chimps throw branches around. Hippos open their jaws as wide as possible to impress competitors.
And humans tease. Teasing can be thought of as a status contest with a twist. As humans evolved the ability to form complex alliances, the power of a single individual came increasingly to depend on the ability to build strong bonds. Power became a matter of social intelligence (the good of the group) rather than of survival of the fittest (raw strength). As a status contest, teasing must walk a fine line, designating status while enhancing social connection.
Take nicknames. One of the most common forms of teasing, they also serve to assign status and enhance or create social bonds. They commonly emerge in marriages, between friends, among co-workers and between the public and its leaders. Artful nicknames involve such off-record markers as exaggeration, alliteration and metaphor, which comment upon the individual’s excesses. Muhammad Ali was the Louisville Lip; Richard Nixon, Tricky Dick; and George W. Bush, Uncurious George. During my fifth-grade trip to the Mendocino tide pools, I became Dacher Kelp Crab to all, a fitting riff on my name, our coastal locale and my sullen temperament. Nicknames are relationship-specific placeholders. They allow us to escape to the world of play, where we mock in affectionate fashion and critique the powerful in safety.
To examine the role nicknames play in helping a community to function, Erin Heerey, now a professor at Bangor University in Wales, and I invited members of a University of Wisconsin fraternityto the laboratory one October, just after what is known as rush week, when pledges angle to gain acceptance at the frat of their choice. We divided the fraternity brothers into groups of four — two high-status “actives,” or established members of the group, and two new low-status “pledges.” We gave each participant two randomly generated initials — “A. D.” or “T. J.” or “H. F.” or “L. I.” — and asked them to generate a nickname and story for each of the other three.
Our participants came up with nicknames like “human fly,” “another drunk,” “turkey jerk,” “little impotent,” “anal duck” and “heffer fetcher.” Each tease turned out to be a 30-second morality play. One low-status pledge was known as Taco John. The story behind the nickname was this: The pledge had gotten drunk on 18 shots of Bacardi during a late-night feast at Taco John’s; he then disappeared and was found passed out on the toilet, with his pants around his ankles, holding his genitals. Among other things, the fraternity members were notifying one another about moral boundaries: don’t get too drunk, and keep your private parts to yourself.
In the content and tones of the teases, we uncovered a familiar status dynamic. High-status “actives” teased the “pledges” in sharper, more provocative fashion, putting them in their place. Each “pledge” went after the other low-status pledges with edgy provocations, no doubt jousting for an edge. But when it came to their new high-status brothers, the pledges used teasing to praise. The most popular “pledges” proved to be the more playful teasers and were themselves teased in more flattering fashion: within a couple of weeks of the group’s formation, 30-second teases were demarcating rank.
For all the put-downs, the teasing among frat brothers and pledges did not appear to do any lasting damage. In studying transcripts of these teasing contests, you might expect to find a thrown punch or two. Instead, the fraternity members became better friends after their playful humiliations. Frame-by-frame analyses of the videos of these status contests revealed how this happened. At the punch line of a particular tease, the four brothers would actually burst into laughter (the target, not surprisingly, more quietly). Thanks to the scientific study of laughter, we know that when friends laugh, they laugh in unison, their fight-flight response (e.g., increased blood pressure) is calmed and mirror neurons fire; shared laughter becomes a collective experience, one of coordinated action, cooperative physiology and the establishing of common ground.
Perhaps surprisingly, the momentary pain of being teased can lead to pleasure. During their 15 seconds of humiliation, the targets of teasing displayed common signs of embarrassment — gaze aversion; a coy, nervous smile; a hand touching the face; a head bowed submissively so as to expose the neck; and blushing. These gestures are ancient signs of appeasement that trigger a reconciliation response in most mammals, as they did in our study. The more targets showed these evanescent signs of embarrassment, the more the teasers liked them.
Still, it’s hard not to remember why teasing has a bad name when it results in what sounds an awful lot like humiliation. In situations where power asymmetries exist, as they do in a frat house, how do we separate a productive tease from a damaging one? In part it’s the nature of the provocation. Productive teasing is rarely physically hurtful and doesn’t expose deep vulnerabilities — like a romantic failure or a physical handicap. Off-record markers — funny facial expressions, exaggeration and repetition — also help mark the tease as playful rather than hostile. And social context means a lot. Where teasing provides an arena to safely explore conflict, it can join people in a common cause. Especially when they’re allowed to tease back.
THE ROMANCE OF TEASING
I still remember that day, as clear as a bell. Off to the side of the seventh-grade four-square game, Lynn, future high-school mascot, valedictorian, and my first love, approached me with hands coyly behind her back. She stopped unusually close, and with a mischievous smile framed by her cascading hair, asked, “Hey Dacher, wanna screw?” As I was in the midst of mumbling an earnest and affirmative reply, she held her hand open in front of me, a screw lying flat on her palm. “Just teasing” I heard amid the screeching laughter of the cabal of finger-pointing girls.
Had I trained my ear to discern the off-record markers of teasing, I would have detected subtle deviations from sincere speech in the artfully elongated vowels of Lynn’s enunciation (“Hey Daaaacher, wanna screeeuuw?”). Had I read my Shakespeare I would have known to counter with my own provocation, and my chances for requited love would have risen. Here is a first expression of love between two of literature’s great lovers, Beatrice and Benedick, from Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing”:
BEATRICE: For which of my good parts did you first suffer love for me?
BENEDICK: Suffer love! A good epithet! I do suffer love indeed, for I love thee against my will.
BEATRICE: In spite of your heart, I think. Alas, poor heart, if you spite it for my sake, I will spite it for yours, for I will never love that which my friend hates.
BENEDICK: Thou and I are too wise to woo peaceably.
To tease is to woo wisely.
Monica Moore, a psychologist at Webster University, surreptitiously observed teenage girls at a mall and found their packlike meanderings to be punctuated by bursts of teasing. These young Beatrices would veer into the orbits of young Benedicks (and vice versa) to tickle, poke, nudge and squeeze, creating opportunities for physical contact. Touch is registered in specialized receptors under the surface of the skin, our largest sensory organ. Touch calms stress-related physiology; it helps to activate reward regions of the brain and the release of oxytocin, a chemical that promotes feelings of devotion. Snails shoot dartlike appendages into potential sexual partners, to stimulate their paramour’s sexual organs. We tease. And when we do, we look for traces of the telltale signs of desire — the lip pucker, the lip lick, the mutual gaze that lasts beyond the 0.20-second eye contact that defines more formal exchange. Teasing is the stage for the drama of flirtation, where suitors provoke in order to look for the sure signs of enduring commitment.
Long-term partners develop their own teasing idiom that weaves its way into their quotidian rhythms. This teasing typically focuses on sexual proclivities, bodily functions, sleep habits, eating habits and anachronistic fashion choices (my wife, Mollie, calls me “bison” when my hair begins to flip upward in nostalgic 1970s style). Such teasing marks partners’ quirks as deviant but endearing foibles, uniquely appreciated by the partner. Studies find that married couples with a rich vocabulary of teasing nicknames and formulaic insults are happier and more satisfied.
Romantic teasing provides a way of negotiating the conflicts that send many couples to the therapist’s couch. To explore how playful teasing shores up marital bonds, I asked couples to tease each other using the same nickname paradigm used in the fraternity study. The nicknames they invented drew on the metaphors of love documented by the Berkeley linguistics professor George Lakoff: they made references to each other as food objects (“apple dumpling”) or small animals (“adorable duckling”). The more satisfied the couple, the more the teasing was filled with off-record markers. And in a separate study, partners who managed to tease each other during a conflict — for example, over money or an infidelity — felt more connected after the conflict than those couples who resorted to the earnest criticism many therapists recommend. Teasing actually serves as an antidote to toxic criticism that might otherwise dissolve an intimate bond. Teasing is a battle plan for what Shakespeare called “the merry war.”
THE GOOD TEASE
Our rush to banish teasing from social life has its origins in legitimate concerns about bullies on the playground and at work. We must remember, though, that teasing, like so many things, gets better with age. Starting at around 11 or 12, children become much more sophisticated in their ability to hold contradictory propositions about the world — they move from Manichaean either-or, black-or-white reasoning to a more ironic, complex understanding. As a result, as any chagrined parent will tell you, they add irony and sarcasm to their social repertory. And it is at this age that you begin to see a precipitous drop in the reported incidences of bullying. As children learn the subtleties of teasing, their teasing is less often experienced as damaging.
In seeking to protect our children from bullying and aggression, we risk depriving them of a most remarkable form of social exchange. In teasing, we learn to use our voices, bodies and faces, and to read those of others — the raw materials of emotional intelligence and the moral imagination. We learn the wisdom of laughing at ourselves, and not taking the self too seriously. We learn boundaries between danger and safety, right and wrong, friend and foe, male and female, what is serious and what is not. We transform the many conflicts of social living into entertaining dramas. No kidding.
Dacher Keltner is a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and an editor of the magazine Greater Good. His latest book, “Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life,” from which this essay is adapted, will be published next month by Norton.
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
In Defense of Teasing
By DACHER KELTNER
A FEW YEARS AGO my daughters and I were searching for sand crabs on a white-sand beach near Monterey. A group of sixth graders descended on us, clad in the blue trousers and pressed white shirts of their parochial school. Once lost in the sounds of the surf, away from their teacher’s gaze, they called one another by nicknames and mocked the way one laughed, another walked. Noogies and rib pokes, headlocks and bear hugs caught the unsuspecting off guard. Two boys dangled a girl over the waves. Three girls tugged a boy’s sagging pants down. Dog piles broke out. In a surprise attack, one girl nearly dropped a dead crab down a boy’s pants.
As they departed in sex-segregated lines, my daughters stood transfixed. Serafina asked me, “Why did that girl try to put the crab in the boy’s pants?” “Because she likes him,” I responded. This was an explanation Serafina and her older sister, Natalie, only partly understood. What I witnessed might be called “the teasing gap.”
Today teasing has been all but banished from the lives of many children. In recent years, high-profile school shootings and teenage suicides have inspired a wave of “zero tolerance” movements in our schools. Accused teasers are now made to utter their teases in front of the class, under the stern eye of teachers. Children are given detention for sarcastic comments on the playground. Schools are decreed “teasing free.”
And we are phasing out teasing in many other corners of social life as well. Sexual-harassment courses advise work colleagues not to tease or joke. Marriage counselors encourage direct criticism over playful provocation. No-taunting rules have even arisen in the N.B.A. and the N.F.L. to discourage “trash talking.”
The reason teasing is viewed as inherently damaging is that it is too often confused with bullying. But bullying is something different; it’s aggression, pure and simple. Bullies steal, punch, kick, harass and humiliate. Sexual harassers grope, leer and make crude, often threatening passes. They’re pretty ineffectual flirts. By contrast, teasing is a mode of play, no doubt with a sharp edge, in which we provoke to negotiate life’s ambiguities and conflicts. And it is essential to making us fully human.
The centrality of teasing in our social evolution is suggested by just how pervasive teasing is in the animal world. Younger monkeys pull the tails of older monkeys. African hunting dogs jump all over one another, much like pad-slapping, joking football players moments before kickoff. In every corner of the world, human adults play peekaboo games to stir a sulking child, children (as early as age 1) mimic nearby adults and teenagers prod one another to gauge romantic interest. In rejecting teasing, we may be losing something vital and necessary to our identity as the most playful of species.
THE LANGUAGE OF TEASING
A few hundred years ago, teasing was anything but taboo. Jesters and fools enjoyed high status. With their sharp-tongued mockery, outlandish garb and entertaining pranks, they highlighted the absurdities of all that was held sacred, from newborns and newlyweds to kings, queens and leaders of the church. In the tradition of the jester or the fool lies the essence of what a tease is — a playfully provocative mode of commentary.
But attempts to define the nature of that commentary can be difficult, not least because language itself gets in the way. We may use “teasing” to refer to the affectionate banter of middle-school friends, to the offensive passes of impulsive bosses and to the language of heart-palpitating flirtation, to humiliation that scars psyches (harsh teasing about obesity can damage a child’s sense of self for years) and to the repartee that creates a peaceful space between siblings. It is necessary to look at how we use language — especially at how we deliver our spoken words — to get at what teasing actually is.
The answer can be found, paradoxically, in a classic study of politeness by Penelope Brown, a linguistics anthropologist, and Stephen Levinson, a cognitive anthropologist, which differentiates between “on-record” communication” and “off-record” communication. On-record communication is to be taken literally and follows the rules of what the philosopher Paul Grice described as “cooperative, direct speech”: what is said should be truthful, appropriately informative, on topic and clear. When doctors deliver prognoses about terminal illnesses or financial advisers announce the loss of family fortunes, they adhere to these rules like priests following Scripture.
Very often, though, we do not want our words to be taken too literally. When we speak in ways that risk offense, for example when we criticize a friend, we may add intentional vagueness or unnecessary circumlocutions. Say a friend proves to be too confrontational at a dinner party. To encourage greater civility, we might resort to indirect hints (“Say, did you read the latest by the Dalai Lama?”) or metaphor (“I guess sometimes you just need to blow off some steam”). These linguistic acts establish a new channel of communication — off-record communication — signaling that what is being said has an alternate meaning.
Teasing is just such an act of off-record communication: provocative commentary is shrouded in linguistic acts called “off-record markers” that suggest the commentary should not be taken literally. At the same time, teasing isn’t just goofing around. We tease to test bonds, and also to create them. To make it clear when we’re teasing, we use fleeting linguistic acts like alliteration, repetition, rhyming and, above all, exaggeration to signal that we don’t mean precisely what we’re saying. (“Playing the dozens,” a kind of ritualized teasing common in the inner city that is considered a precursor to rap, involves just this sort of rhyming: “Don’t talk about my mother ’cause you’ll make me mad/Don’t forget how many your mother had.”) We also often indicate we are teasing by going off-record with nonverbal gestures: elongated vowels and exaggerated pitch, mock expressions and the iconic wink, well-timed laughs and expressive caricatures. A whiny friend might be teased with a high-pitched imitation or a daughter might mock her obtuse father by mimicking his low-pitched voice. Preteens, sharp-tongued jesters that they are, tease their parents with exaggerated facial expressions of anger, disgust or fear, to satirize their guardians’ outdated moral indignation. Similarly, deadpan deliveries and asymmetrically raised eyebrows (Stephen Colbert), satirical smiles and edgy laughs (Jon Stewart) all signal that we don’t entirely mean what we say.
THE BENEFITS OF TEASING
The language of teasing is intimately linked to the language of social behavior. Because teasing allows us to send messages in indirect, masked ways, it is an essential means of navigating our often-fraught social environments. In teasing, we become actors, taking on playful identities to manage the inevitable conflicts of living in social groups.
Placed into groups, children as young as 2 will soon form a hierarchy — it will be clear even among toddlers who is in charge and who is not. Hierarchies have many benefits — the smooth division of labor and resources, protecting weaker members of the group — but they can be deadly to negotiate. Male fig wasps chop their rivals in half with their large mandibles. Narwhal males loll about with tusk tips embedded in their jaws — vestiges of their status contests. Coyotes engage in heavily coded bouts of play; those who don’t live shorter, ostracized lives.
Given the perils of negotiating rank, many species have evolved dramatized status contests, relying on symbolic displays of physical size and force to peacefully sort out who’s on top. Stags roar. Frogs croak. Chimps throw branches around. Hippos open their jaws as wide as possible to impress competitors.
And humans tease. Teasing can be thought of as a status contest with a twist. As humans evolved the ability to form complex alliances, the power of a single individual came increasingly to depend on the ability to build strong bonds. Power became a matter of social intelligence (the good of the group) rather than of survival of the fittest (raw strength). As a status contest, teasing must walk a fine line, designating status while enhancing social connection.
Take nicknames. One of the most common forms of teasing, they also serve to assign status and enhance or create social bonds. They commonly emerge in marriages, between friends, among co-workers and between the public and its leaders. Artful nicknames involve such off-record markers as exaggeration, alliteration and metaphor, which comment upon the individual’s excesses. Muhammad Ali was the Louisville Lip; Richard Nixon, Tricky Dick; and George W. Bush, Uncurious George. During my fifth-grade trip to the Mendocino tide pools, I became Dacher Kelp Crab to all, a fitting riff on my name, our coastal locale and my sullen temperament. Nicknames are relationship-specific placeholders. They allow us to escape to the world of play, where we mock in affectionate fashion and critique the powerful in safety.
To examine the role nicknames play in helping a community to function, Erin Heerey, now a professor at Bangor University in Wales, and I invited members of a University of Wisconsin fraternityto the laboratory one October, just after what is known as rush week, when pledges angle to gain acceptance at the frat of their choice. We divided the fraternity brothers into groups of four — two high-status “actives,” or established members of the group, and two new low-status “pledges.” We gave each participant two randomly generated initials — “A. D.” or “T. J.” or “H. F.” or “L. I.” — and asked them to generate a nickname and story for each of the other three.
Our participants came up with nicknames like “human fly,” “another drunk,” “turkey jerk,” “little impotent,” “anal duck” and “heffer fetcher.” Each tease turned out to be a 30-second morality play. One low-status pledge was known as Taco John. The story behind the nickname was this: The pledge had gotten drunk on 18 shots of Bacardi during a late-night feast at Taco John’s; he then disappeared and was found passed out on the toilet, with his pants around his ankles, holding his genitals. Among other things, the fraternity members were notifying one another about moral boundaries: don’t get too drunk, and keep your private parts to yourself.
In the content and tones of the teases, we uncovered a familiar status dynamic. High-status “actives” teased the “pledges” in sharper, more provocative fashion, putting them in their place. Each “pledge” went after the other low-status pledges with edgy provocations, no doubt jousting for an edge. But when it came to their new high-status brothers, the pledges used teasing to praise. The most popular “pledges” proved to be the more playful teasers and were themselves teased in more flattering fashion: within a couple of weeks of the group’s formation, 30-second teases were demarcating rank.
For all the put-downs, the teasing among frat brothers and pledges did not appear to do any lasting damage. In studying transcripts of these teasing contests, you might expect to find a thrown punch or two. Instead, the fraternity members became better friends after their playful humiliations. Frame-by-frame analyses of the videos of these status contests revealed how this happened. At the punch line of a particular tease, the four brothers would actually burst into laughter (the target, not surprisingly, more quietly). Thanks to the scientific study of laughter, we know that when friends laugh, they laugh in unison, their fight-flight response (e.g., increased blood pressure) is calmed and mirror neurons fire; shared laughter becomes a collective experience, one of coordinated action, cooperative physiology and the establishing of common ground.
Perhaps surprisingly, the momentary pain of being teased can lead to pleasure. During their 15 seconds of humiliation, the targets of teasing displayed common signs of embarrassment — gaze aversion; a coy, nervous smile; a hand touching the face; a head bowed submissively so as to expose the neck; and blushing. These gestures are ancient signs of appeasement that trigger a reconciliation response in most mammals, as they did in our study. The more targets showed these evanescent signs of embarrassment, the more the teasers liked them.
Still, it’s hard not to remember why teasing has a bad name when it results in what sounds an awful lot like humiliation. In situations where power asymmetries exist, as they do in a frat house, how do we separate a productive tease from a damaging one? In part it’s the nature of the provocation. Productive teasing is rarely physically hurtful and doesn’t expose deep vulnerabilities — like a romantic failure or a physical handicap. Off-record markers — funny facial expressions, exaggeration and repetition — also help mark the tease as playful rather than hostile. And social context means a lot. Where teasing provides an arena to safely explore conflict, it can join people in a common cause. Especially when they’re allowed to tease back.
THE ROMANCE OF TEASING
I still remember that day, as clear as a bell. Off to the side of the seventh-grade four-square game, Lynn, future high-school mascot, valedictorian, and my first love, approached me with hands coyly behind her back. She stopped unusually close, and with a mischievous smile framed by her cascading hair, asked, “Hey Dacher, wanna screw?” As I was in the midst of mumbling an earnest and affirmative reply, she held her hand open in front of me, a screw lying flat on her palm. “Just teasing” I heard amid the screeching laughter of the cabal of finger-pointing girls.
Had I trained my ear to discern the off-record markers of teasing, I would have detected subtle deviations from sincere speech in the artfully elongated vowels of Lynn’s enunciation (“Hey Daaaacher, wanna screeeuuw?”). Had I read my Shakespeare I would have known to counter with my own provocation, and my chances for requited love would have risen. Here is a first expression of love between two of literature’s great lovers, Beatrice and Benedick, from Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing”:
BEATRICE: For which of my good parts did you first suffer love for me?
BENEDICK: Suffer love! A good epithet! I do suffer love indeed, for I love thee against my will.
BEATRICE: In spite of your heart, I think. Alas, poor heart, if you spite it for my sake, I will spite it for yours, for I will never love that which my friend hates.
BENEDICK: Thou and I are too wise to woo peaceably.
To tease is to woo wisely.
Monica Moore, a psychologist at Webster University, surreptitiously observed teenage girls at a mall and found their packlike meanderings to be punctuated by bursts of teasing. These young Beatrices would veer into the orbits of young Benedicks (and vice versa) to tickle, poke, nudge and squeeze, creating opportunities for physical contact. Touch is registered in specialized receptors under the surface of the skin, our largest sensory organ. Touch calms stress-related physiology; it helps to activate reward regions of the brain and the release of oxytocin, a chemical that promotes feelings of devotion. Snails shoot dartlike appendages into potential sexual partners, to stimulate their paramour’s sexual organs. We tease. And when we do, we look for traces of the telltale signs of desire — the lip pucker, the lip lick, the mutual gaze that lasts beyond the 0.20-second eye contact that defines more formal exchange. Teasing is the stage for the drama of flirtation, where suitors provoke in order to look for the sure signs of enduring commitment.
Long-term partners develop their own teasing idiom that weaves its way into their quotidian rhythms. This teasing typically focuses on sexual proclivities, bodily functions, sleep habits, eating habits and anachronistic fashion choices (my wife, Mollie, calls me “bison” when my hair begins to flip upward in nostalgic 1970s style). Such teasing marks partners’ quirks as deviant but endearing foibles, uniquely appreciated by the partner. Studies find that married couples with a rich vocabulary of teasing nicknames and formulaic insults are happier and more satisfied.
Romantic teasing provides a way of negotiating the conflicts that send many couples to the therapist’s couch. To explore how playful teasing shores up marital bonds, I asked couples to tease each other using the same nickname paradigm used in the fraternity study. The nicknames they invented drew on the metaphors of love documented by the Berkeley linguistics professor George Lakoff: they made references to each other as food objects (“apple dumpling”) or small animals (“adorable duckling”). The more satisfied the couple, the more the teasing was filled with off-record markers. And in a separate study, partners who managed to tease each other during a conflict — for example, over money or an infidelity — felt more connected after the conflict than those couples who resorted to the earnest criticism many therapists recommend. Teasing actually serves as an antidote to toxic criticism that might otherwise dissolve an intimate bond. Teasing is a battle plan for what Shakespeare called “the merry war.”
THE GOOD TEASE
Our rush to banish teasing from social life has its origins in legitimate concerns about bullies on the playground and at work. We must remember, though, that teasing, like so many things, gets better with age. Starting at around 11 or 12, children become much more sophisticated in their ability to hold contradictory propositions about the world — they move from Manichaean either-or, black-or-white reasoning to a more ironic, complex understanding. As a result, as any chagrined parent will tell you, they add irony and sarcasm to their social repertory. And it is at this age that you begin to see a precipitous drop in the reported incidences of bullying. As children learn the subtleties of teasing, their teasing is less often experienced as damaging.
In seeking to protect our children from bullying and aggression, we risk depriving them of a most remarkable form of social exchange. In teasing, we learn to use our voices, bodies and faces, and to read those of others — the raw materials of emotional intelligence and the moral imagination. We learn the wisdom of laughing at ourselves, and not taking the self too seriously. We learn boundaries between danger and safety, right and wrong, friend and foe, male and female, what is serious and what is not. We transform the many conflicts of social living into entertaining dramas. No kidding.
Dacher Keltner is a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and an editor of the magazine Greater Good. His latest book, “Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life,” from which this essay is adapted, will be published next month by Norton.
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
Tuesday, December 9, 2008
Week 7 Resources
Please publish your resources for week 7 (December 9) as comments to this post. Thanks!
Monday, December 1, 2008
Applying Social Learning Theory to Technology
Hi All,
The following article appeared in Sunday's New York Times. Please take a moment to read and respond if you like-- I look forward to discussing in class.
David
The New York Times
November 30, 2008
You’re Leaving a Digital Trail. What About Privacy?
By JOHN MARKOFF
Cambridge, Mass.
HARRISON BROWN, an 18-year-old freshman majoring in mathematics at M.I.T., didn’t need to do complex calculations to figure out he liked this deal: in exchange for letting researchers track his every move, he receives a free smartphone.
Now, when he dials another student, researchers know. When he sends an e-mail or text message, they also know. When he listens to music, they know the song. Every moment he has his Windows Mobile smartphone with him, they know where he is, and who’s nearby.
Mr. Brown and about 100 other students living in Random Hall at M.I.T. have agreed to swap their privacy for smartphones that generate digital trails to be beamed to a central computer. Beyond individual actions, the devices capture a moving picture of the dorm’s social network.
The students’ data is but a bubble in a vast sea of digital information being recorded by an ever thicker web of sensors, from phones to GPS units to the tags in office ID badges, that capture our movements and interactions. Coupled with information already gathered from sources like Web surfing and credit cards, the data is the basis for an emerging field called collective intelligence.
Propelled by new technologies and the Internet’s steady incursion into every nook and cranny of life, collective intelligence offers powerful capabilities, from improving the efficiency of advertising to giving community groups new ways to organize.
But even its practitioners acknowledge that, if misused, collective intelligence tools could create an Orwellian future on a level Big Brother could only dream of.
Collective intelligence could make it possible for insurance companies, for example, to use behavioral data to covertly identify people suffering from a particular disease and deny them insurance coverage. Similarly, the government or law enforcement agencies could identify members of a protest group by tracking social networks revealed by the new technology. “There are so many uses for this technology — from marketing to war fighting — that I can’t imagine it not pervading our lives in just the next few years,” says Steve Steinberg, a computer scientist who works for an investment firm in New York.
In a widely read Web posting, he argued that there were significant chances that it would be misused, “This is one of the most significant technology trends I have seen in years; it may also be one of the most pernicious.”
For the last 50 years, Americans have worried about the privacy of the individual in the computer age. But new technologies have become so powerful that protecting individual privacy may no longer be the only issue. Now, with the Internet, wireless sensors, and the capability to analyze an avalanche of data, a person’s profile can be drawn without monitoring him or her directly.
“Some have argued that with new technology there is a diminished expectation of privacy,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a privacy rights group in Washington. “But the opposite may also be true. New techniques may require us to expand our understanding of privacy and to address the impact that data collection has on groups of individuals and not simply a single person.”
Mr. Brown, for one, isn’t concerned about losing his privacy. The M.I.T researchers have convinced him that they have gone to great lengths to protect any information generated by the experiment that would reveal his identity.
Besides, he says, “the way I see it, we all have Facebook pages, we all have e-mail and Web sites and blogs.”
“This is a drop in the bucket in terms of privacy,” he adds.
GOOGLE and its vast farm of more than a million search engine servers spread around the globe remain the best example of the power and wealth-building potential of collective intelligence. Google’s fabled PageRank algorithm, which was originally responsible for the quality of Google’s search results, drew its precision from the inherent wisdom in the billions of individual Web links that people create.
The company introduced a speech-recognition service in early November, initially for the Apple iPhone, that gains its accuracy in large part from a statistical model built from several trillion search terms that its users have entered in the last decade. In the future, Google will take advantage of spoken queries to predict even more accurately the questions its users will ask.
And, a few weeks ago, Google deployed an early-warning service for spotting flu trends, based on search queries for flu-related symptoms.
The success of Google, along with the rapid spread of the wireless Internet and sensors — like location trackers in cellphones and GPS units in cars — has touched off a race to cash in on collective intelligence technologies.
In 2006, Sense Networks, based in New York, proved that there was a wealth of useful information hidden in a digital archive of GPS data generated by tens of thousands of taxi rides in San Francisco. It could see, for example, that people who worked in the city’s financial district would tend to go to work early when the market was booming, but later when it was down.
It also noticed that middle-income people — as determined by ZIP code data — tended to order cabs more often just before market downturns.
Sense has developed two applications, one for consumers to use on smartphones like the BlackBerry and the iPhone, and the other for companies interested in forecasting social trends and financial behavior. The consumer application, Citysense, identifies entertainment hot spots in a city. It connects information from Yelp and Google about nightclubs and music clubs with data generated by tracking locations of anonymous cellphone users.
The second application, Macrosense, is intended to give businesses insight into human activities. It uses a vast database that merges GPS, Wi-Fi positioning, cell-tower triangulation, radio frequency identification chips and other sensors.
“There is a whole new set of metrics that no one has ever measured,” said Greg Skibiski, chief executive of Sense. “We were able to look at people moving around stores” and other locations. Such travel patterns, coupled with data on incomes, can give retailers early insights into sales levels and who is shopping at competitors’ stores.
Alex Pentland, a professor at the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who is leading the dormitory research project, was a co-founder of Sense Networks. He is part of a new generation of researchers who have relatively effortless access to data that in the past was either painstakingly assembled by hand or acquired from questionnaires or interviews that relied on the memories and honesty of the subjects.
The Media Lab researchers have worked with Hitachi Data Systems, the Japanese technology company, to use some of the lab’s technologies to improve businesses’ efficiency. For example, by equipping employees with sensor badges that generate the same kinds of data provided by the students’ smartphones, the researchers determined that face-to-face communication was far more important to an organization’s work than was generally believed.
Productivity improved 30 percent with an incremental increase in face-to-face communication, Dr. Pentland said. The results were so promising that Hitachi has established a consulting business that overhauls organizations via the researchers’ techniques.
Dr. Pentland calls his research “reality mining” to differentiate it from an earlier generation of data mining conducted through more traditional methods.
Dr. Pentland “is the emperor of networked sensor research,” said Michael Macy, a sociologist at Cornell who studies communications networks and their role as social networks. People and organizations, he said, are increasingly choosing to interact with one another through digital means that record traces of those interactions. “This allows scientists to study those interactions in ways that five years ago we never would have thought we could do,” he said.
ONCE based on networked personal computers, collective intelligence systems are increasingly being created to leverage wireless networks of digital sensors and smartphones. In one application, groups of scientists and political and environmental activists are developing “participatory sensing” networks.
At the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing at the University of California, Los Angeles, for example, researchers are developing a Web service they call a Personal Environmental Impact Report to build a community map of air quality in Los Angeles. It is intended to let people assess how their activities affect the environment and to make decisions about their health. Users may decide to change their jogging route, or run at a different time of day, depending on air quality at the time.
“Our mantra is to make it possible to observe what was previously unobservable,” said Deborah Estrin, director of the center and a computer scientist at U.C.L.A.
But Dr. Estrin said the project still faced a host of challenges, both with the accuracy of tiny sensors and with the researchers’ ability to be certain that personal information remains private. She is skeptical about technical efforts to obscure the identity of individual contributors to databases of information collected by network sensors.
Attempts to blur the identity of individuals have only a limited capability, she said. The researchers encrypt the data to protect against identifying particular people, but that has limits.
“Even though we are protecting the information, it is still subject to subpoena and subject to bullying bosses or spouses,” she said.
She says that there may still be ways to protect privacy. “I can imagine a system where the data will disappear,” she said.
Already, activist groups have seized on the technology to improve the effectiveness of their organizing. A service called MobileActive helps nonprofit organizations around the world use mobile phones to harness the expertise and the energy of their participants, by sending out action alerts, for instance.
Pachube (pronounced “PATCH-bay”) is a Web service that lets people share real-time sensor data from anywhere in the world. With Pachube, one can combine and display sensor data, from the cost of energy in one location, to temperature and pollution monitoring, to data flowing from a buoy off the coast of Charleston, S.C., all creating an information-laden snapshot of the world.
Such a complete and constantly updated picture will undoubtedly redefine traditional notions of privacy.
DR. PENTLAND says there are ways to avoid surveillance-society pitfalls that lurk in the technology. For the commercial use of such information, he has proposed a set of principles derived from English common law to guarantee that people have ownership rights to data about their behavior. The idea revolves around three principles: that you have a right to possess your own data, that you control the data that is collected about you, and that you can destroy, remove or redeploy your data as you wish.
At the same time, he argued that individual privacy rights must also be weighed against the public good.
Citing the epidemic involving severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, in recent years, he said technology would have helped health officials watch the movement of infected people as it happened, providing an opportunity to limit the spread of the disease.
“If I could have looked at the cellphone records, it could have been stopped that morning rather than a couple of weeks later,” he said. “I’m sorry, that trumps minute concerns about privacy.”
Indeed, some collective-intelligence researchers argue that strong concerns about privacy rights are a relatively recent phenomenon in human history.
“The new information tools symbolized by the Internet are radically changing the possibility of how we can organize large-scale human efforts,” said Thomas W. Malone, director of the M.I.T. Center for Collective Intelligence.
“For most of human history, people have lived in small tribes where everything they did was known by everyone they knew,” Dr. Malone said. “In some sense we’re becoming a global village. Privacy may turn out to have become an anomaly.”
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
The following article appeared in Sunday's New York Times. Please take a moment to read and respond if you like-- I look forward to discussing in class.
David
The New York Times
November 30, 2008
You’re Leaving a Digital Trail. What About Privacy?
By JOHN MARKOFF
Cambridge, Mass.
HARRISON BROWN, an 18-year-old freshman majoring in mathematics at M.I.T., didn’t need to do complex calculations to figure out he liked this deal: in exchange for letting researchers track his every move, he receives a free smartphone.
Now, when he dials another student, researchers know. When he sends an e-mail or text message, they also know. When he listens to music, they know the song. Every moment he has his Windows Mobile smartphone with him, they know where he is, and who’s nearby.
Mr. Brown and about 100 other students living in Random Hall at M.I.T. have agreed to swap their privacy for smartphones that generate digital trails to be beamed to a central computer. Beyond individual actions, the devices capture a moving picture of the dorm’s social network.
The students’ data is but a bubble in a vast sea of digital information being recorded by an ever thicker web of sensors, from phones to GPS units to the tags in office ID badges, that capture our movements and interactions. Coupled with information already gathered from sources like Web surfing and credit cards, the data is the basis for an emerging field called collective intelligence.
Propelled by new technologies and the Internet’s steady incursion into every nook and cranny of life, collective intelligence offers powerful capabilities, from improving the efficiency of advertising to giving community groups new ways to organize.
But even its practitioners acknowledge that, if misused, collective intelligence tools could create an Orwellian future on a level Big Brother could only dream of.
Collective intelligence could make it possible for insurance companies, for example, to use behavioral data to covertly identify people suffering from a particular disease and deny them insurance coverage. Similarly, the government or law enforcement agencies could identify members of a protest group by tracking social networks revealed by the new technology. “There are so many uses for this technology — from marketing to war fighting — that I can’t imagine it not pervading our lives in just the next few years,” says Steve Steinberg, a computer scientist who works for an investment firm in New York.
In a widely read Web posting, he argued that there were significant chances that it would be misused, “This is one of the most significant technology trends I have seen in years; it may also be one of the most pernicious.”
For the last 50 years, Americans have worried about the privacy of the individual in the computer age. But new technologies have become so powerful that protecting individual privacy may no longer be the only issue. Now, with the Internet, wireless sensors, and the capability to analyze an avalanche of data, a person’s profile can be drawn without monitoring him or her directly.
“Some have argued that with new technology there is a diminished expectation of privacy,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a privacy rights group in Washington. “But the opposite may also be true. New techniques may require us to expand our understanding of privacy and to address the impact that data collection has on groups of individuals and not simply a single person.”
Mr. Brown, for one, isn’t concerned about losing his privacy. The M.I.T researchers have convinced him that they have gone to great lengths to protect any information generated by the experiment that would reveal his identity.
Besides, he says, “the way I see it, we all have Facebook pages, we all have e-mail and Web sites and blogs.”
“This is a drop in the bucket in terms of privacy,” he adds.
GOOGLE and its vast farm of more than a million search engine servers spread around the globe remain the best example of the power and wealth-building potential of collective intelligence. Google’s fabled PageRank algorithm, which was originally responsible for the quality of Google’s search results, drew its precision from the inherent wisdom in the billions of individual Web links that people create.
The company introduced a speech-recognition service in early November, initially for the Apple iPhone, that gains its accuracy in large part from a statistical model built from several trillion search terms that its users have entered in the last decade. In the future, Google will take advantage of spoken queries to predict even more accurately the questions its users will ask.
And, a few weeks ago, Google deployed an early-warning service for spotting flu trends, based on search queries for flu-related symptoms.
The success of Google, along with the rapid spread of the wireless Internet and sensors — like location trackers in cellphones and GPS units in cars — has touched off a race to cash in on collective intelligence technologies.
In 2006, Sense Networks, based in New York, proved that there was a wealth of useful information hidden in a digital archive of GPS data generated by tens of thousands of taxi rides in San Francisco. It could see, for example, that people who worked in the city’s financial district would tend to go to work early when the market was booming, but later when it was down.
It also noticed that middle-income people — as determined by ZIP code data — tended to order cabs more often just before market downturns.
Sense has developed two applications, one for consumers to use on smartphones like the BlackBerry and the iPhone, and the other for companies interested in forecasting social trends and financial behavior. The consumer application, Citysense, identifies entertainment hot spots in a city. It connects information from Yelp and Google about nightclubs and music clubs with data generated by tracking locations of anonymous cellphone users.
The second application, Macrosense, is intended to give businesses insight into human activities. It uses a vast database that merges GPS, Wi-Fi positioning, cell-tower triangulation, radio frequency identification chips and other sensors.
“There is a whole new set of metrics that no one has ever measured,” said Greg Skibiski, chief executive of Sense. “We were able to look at people moving around stores” and other locations. Such travel patterns, coupled with data on incomes, can give retailers early insights into sales levels and who is shopping at competitors’ stores.
Alex Pentland, a professor at the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who is leading the dormitory research project, was a co-founder of Sense Networks. He is part of a new generation of researchers who have relatively effortless access to data that in the past was either painstakingly assembled by hand or acquired from questionnaires or interviews that relied on the memories and honesty of the subjects.
The Media Lab researchers have worked with Hitachi Data Systems, the Japanese technology company, to use some of the lab’s technologies to improve businesses’ efficiency. For example, by equipping employees with sensor badges that generate the same kinds of data provided by the students’ smartphones, the researchers determined that face-to-face communication was far more important to an organization’s work than was generally believed.
Productivity improved 30 percent with an incremental increase in face-to-face communication, Dr. Pentland said. The results were so promising that Hitachi has established a consulting business that overhauls organizations via the researchers’ techniques.
Dr. Pentland calls his research “reality mining” to differentiate it from an earlier generation of data mining conducted through more traditional methods.
Dr. Pentland “is the emperor of networked sensor research,” said Michael Macy, a sociologist at Cornell who studies communications networks and their role as social networks. People and organizations, he said, are increasingly choosing to interact with one another through digital means that record traces of those interactions. “This allows scientists to study those interactions in ways that five years ago we never would have thought we could do,” he said.
ONCE based on networked personal computers, collective intelligence systems are increasingly being created to leverage wireless networks of digital sensors and smartphones. In one application, groups of scientists and political and environmental activists are developing “participatory sensing” networks.
At the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing at the University of California, Los Angeles, for example, researchers are developing a Web service they call a Personal Environmental Impact Report to build a community map of air quality in Los Angeles. It is intended to let people assess how their activities affect the environment and to make decisions about their health. Users may decide to change their jogging route, or run at a different time of day, depending on air quality at the time.
“Our mantra is to make it possible to observe what was previously unobservable,” said Deborah Estrin, director of the center and a computer scientist at U.C.L.A.
But Dr. Estrin said the project still faced a host of challenges, both with the accuracy of tiny sensors and with the researchers’ ability to be certain that personal information remains private. She is skeptical about technical efforts to obscure the identity of individual contributors to databases of information collected by network sensors.
Attempts to blur the identity of individuals have only a limited capability, she said. The researchers encrypt the data to protect against identifying particular people, but that has limits.
“Even though we are protecting the information, it is still subject to subpoena and subject to bullying bosses or spouses,” she said.
She says that there may still be ways to protect privacy. “I can imagine a system where the data will disappear,” she said.
Already, activist groups have seized on the technology to improve the effectiveness of their organizing. A service called MobileActive helps nonprofit organizations around the world use mobile phones to harness the expertise and the energy of their participants, by sending out action alerts, for instance.
Pachube (pronounced “PATCH-bay”) is a Web service that lets people share real-time sensor data from anywhere in the world. With Pachube, one can combine and display sensor data, from the cost of energy in one location, to temperature and pollution monitoring, to data flowing from a buoy off the coast of Charleston, S.C., all creating an information-laden snapshot of the world.
Such a complete and constantly updated picture will undoubtedly redefine traditional notions of privacy.
DR. PENTLAND says there are ways to avoid surveillance-society pitfalls that lurk in the technology. For the commercial use of such information, he has proposed a set of principles derived from English common law to guarantee that people have ownership rights to data about their behavior. The idea revolves around three principles: that you have a right to possess your own data, that you control the data that is collected about you, and that you can destroy, remove or redeploy your data as you wish.
At the same time, he argued that individual privacy rights must also be weighed against the public good.
Citing the epidemic involving severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, in recent years, he said technology would have helped health officials watch the movement of infected people as it happened, providing an opportunity to limit the spread of the disease.
“If I could have looked at the cellphone records, it could have been stopped that morning rather than a couple of weeks later,” he said. “I’m sorry, that trumps minute concerns about privacy.”
Indeed, some collective-intelligence researchers argue that strong concerns about privacy rights are a relatively recent phenomenon in human history.
“The new information tools symbolized by the Internet are radically changing the possibility of how we can organize large-scale human efforts,” said Thomas W. Malone, director of the M.I.T. Center for Collective Intelligence.
“For most of human history, people have lived in small tribes where everything they did was known by everyone they knew,” Dr. Malone said. “In some sense we’re becoming a global village. Privacy may turn out to have become an anomaly.”
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
Week 6 Resources
Please publish your resources for week 6 (December 2) as comments to this post. Thanks!
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
Week 5 Resources
Please publish your resources for week 5 (November 25) as comments to this post. Thanks!
Final Project
EDUU 606
FINAL PROJECT
Working with a group of no more than four people, design a charter school around one or more of the concepts we have examined. You may include elements of neuroscience, cognitive/behavioral theory, social development theory, humanism, attribution theory, multiple intelligences/learning modalities, and any other theoretical construct you believe to be relevant.
Your charter project must explicitly address the following questions:
➢ How do students learn?
➢ How do the school’s curricula and instructional delivery models support student learning?
➢ How does the school’s assessment methodology support and demonstrate student learning?
➢ In the context of your “best practices” approach, what are the appropriate roles and expectations for students, parents, teachers, and other constituents? How will you communicate and evaluate performance criteria?
➢ What factors distinguish your school from other formal or informal educational experiences available to students?
Your group is responsible for submitting your “charter” in class on January 6, 2009. In addition to a written version of no less than five pages with appropriate citations and recommendations, you may choose from the following presentation options (or petition Dr. Preston with a creative alternative of your own):
➢ Poster/2-D visual
➢ PowerPoint
➢ Video
Please make sure your presentation is 2-10 minutes in length (not counting Q&A), and use all of your abilities and newfound information to “WOW” your audience!
FINAL PROJECT
Working with a group of no more than four people, design a charter school around one or more of the concepts we have examined. You may include elements of neuroscience, cognitive/behavioral theory, social development theory, humanism, attribution theory, multiple intelligences/learning modalities, and any other theoretical construct you believe to be relevant.
Your charter project must explicitly address the following questions:
➢ How do students learn?
➢ How do the school’s curricula and instructional delivery models support student learning?
➢ How does the school’s assessment methodology support and demonstrate student learning?
➢ In the context of your “best practices” approach, what are the appropriate roles and expectations for students, parents, teachers, and other constituents? How will you communicate and evaluate performance criteria?
➢ What factors distinguish your school from other formal or informal educational experiences available to students?
Your group is responsible for submitting your “charter” in class on January 6, 2009. In addition to a written version of no less than five pages with appropriate citations and recommendations, you may choose from the following presentation options (or petition Dr. Preston with a creative alternative of your own):
➢ Poster/2-D visual
➢ PowerPoint
➢ Video
Please make sure your presentation is 2-10 minutes in length (not counting Q&A), and use all of your abilities and newfound information to “WOW” your audience!
Monday, November 17, 2008
Vygotsky online
In order to share another perspective with you, I have borrowed from a website that caters to professional educators by providing background on pedagogy and theory.
The following text may be found online at: http://www.newfoundations.com/GALLERY/Vygotsky.html
©2007 NewFoundations Gary K. Clabaugh, EdD, & Edward G. Rozycki, EdD, Editors
The Educational Theory of Lev Vygotsky: an analysis
Researched and Written by:
M. Dahms, K. Geonnotti, D. Passalacqua. J. N. Schilk, A. Wetzel,
and M. Zulkowsky
vygotsky
RETURN
edited 11/8/08
Introduction
Born in Czarist Russia in 1896, Lev Vygotsky lived a relatively short life, dying of tuberculosis in 1934. Because he was Jewish, the law limited his higher education options. He was, however, one of the 5% maximum of Jews permitted admission to a university. He was, however, not permitted to fulfill his ambition to pursue training as a teacher. In consequence, between the years of 1913 and 1917, Vygotsky studied medicine, philosophy, history, and law.[1]
Vygotsky began teaching in his home city almost immediately after the 1917 Communist Revolution. However, he was disappointed if he anticipated that this upheaval would result in greater overall freedom. The ascension of Joseph Stalin to power in 1922 meant that all of Vygotsky's scholarly work was to be accomplished in an ever more repressive police state.
Vygotsky's investigations of child development and educational psychology were influenced by his own Marxism – a philosophy that emphasizes the importance of one's social origins and place in the scheme of production.[2] Vygotsky's works, consisting of more than one hundred books and articles, were not published until after his death in 1934. Just two years later they were suppressed. This suppression endured for two decades during which time his works were held in a secret library that could only be accessed by permission of the Peoples Commissariat for Internal Affairs — commonly known as the NKVD.[3] Despite this prolonged attempt to suppress his ideas, Vygotsky's work survived and, particularly after the Cold War, came to wield considerable influence in the field of educational psychology.[4]
I. Theory of Value: What knowledge and skills are worthwhile learning? What are the goals of education?
Vygotsky's stresses the importance of looking at each child as an individual who learns distinctively. Consequently, the knowledge and skills that are worthwhile learning varies with the individual.
The overall goal of education according to Vygotsky is to "generate and lead development which is the result of social learning through internalization of culture and social relationships."[5] He repeatedly stressed the importance of past experiences and prior knowledge in making sense of new situations or present experiences.[6] Therefore, all new knowledge and newly introduced skills are greatly influenced by each student's culture, especially their family environment.
Language skills are particularly critical for creating meaning and linking new ideas to past experiences and prior knowledge. According to Vygotsky, internalized skills or psychological tools "are used to gain mastery over one's own behavior and cognition."[7] Primary among these tools is the "development of speech and its relation to thought."[8]
Vygotsky maintained that language plays a central role in cognitive development. He argued that language was the tool for determining the ways a child learns "how" to think. That is because complex concepts are conveyed to the child through words. "Learning, according to Vygotsky, always involves some type of external experience being transformed into internal processes through the use of language."[9] It follows that speech and language are the primary tools used to communicate with others, promoting learning.
Vygotsky promoted the development of higher level thinking and problem solving in education. If situations are designed to have students utilize critical thinking skills, their thought processes are being challenged and new knowledge gained.[10] The knowledge achieved through experience also serves as a foundation for the behaviors of every individual.[11]
II. Theory of Knowledge: What is knowledge? How is it different from belief? What is a mistake? A lie?
According to Davydov and Kerr, it was a momentous occasion in the history of psychology when Vygotsky asserted "...specific functions are not given to a person at birth but are only provided as cultural and social patterns."[12] Vygotsky saw "intellectual abilities as being much more specific to the culture in which the child was reared."[13] Through observation and study Vygotsky came to understand that people adapted to their surrounding environment based on their interpretations and individual perceptions of it.[14] Thus, humans are not born with knowledge nor is knowledge independent of social context. Rather, one gains knowledge as one develops by way of social interactions with peers and adults.
Vygotsky does not make as drastic a distinction between knowledge and belief as some other theorists do. For him, knowledge is obtained through past experiences, social situations, as well as ones general environment. In similar manner, beliefs are instilled into an individual via culture and parental upbringing.
"Mistakes are crucial in Vygotsky's theory of learning. In the course of development, mistakes are made during the process of "concept formation." They are important in that they impact future learning.[15] From Vygotsky's perspective, "A concept emerges and takes shape in the course of a complex interaction aimed at the solution of a problem...[A] concept is ...an active part of the intellectual process."[16]
We see, then that, for Vygotsky, concept formation is a dynamic, ever-changing activity during which "... the child relies on their own perception to make sense of objects that appear to them to be unrelated ... the child creates his or her own subjective relationships between objects and then mistakes his or her egocentric perspective for reality."[17] This stage of development is known, paradoxically, as "incoherent coherence."[18] During this stage, the making of mistakes is an integral part of a child's development.
Also at this time, the child's organization schema becomes less egocentric and begin to incorporate additional information gained from experience into his or her thought processes.[19] In this way, mistakes can be corrected and new knowledge gained. Therefore mistakes are developmentally necessary, resulting from the "...role of social interaction in transformation of prior knowledge.[20]
Tentatively one might infer that Vygotsky would view a lie as something that occurs as a result of the desire to conform to social norms. For example one might feel one way but report a more socially acceptable reality.
III. Theory of Human Nature: What is a human being? How does it differ from other species? What are the limits of human potential?
According to Marxist theory, "The essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations."[21] Vygotsky would agree that we develop as humans through the ways we interact with those around us. His view of human nature fits with his Marxist ideology. Human beings can only be understood within the context the time period and the part of the world in which they live. Human nature cannot be understood as never-changing and universal, but as always depending on its specific social and historical formation. This principle does not leave out biological factors.[22] To be human, however, means that you have surpassed a level of functioning that your biological traits would otherwise dictate.
[23]
Although some animals have the ability to create and use material tools, humans have the ability to utilize psychological tools. In other words, human beings are differentiated by their ability to develop psychological tools that are "used to gain mastery over one's own behavior and cognition"[24] that other forms of life are not capable of developing. Some psychological tools include: "language, different forms of numeration and counting, mnemotechniques, algebraic symbolism, works of art, writing, schemes, diagrams, maps, blueprints, etc."[25]
In his theories, Vygotsky placed great emphasis on the importance of spoken language, arguably the most critical tool that sets us apart from other species. He asserts that "speech is a very powerful psychological tool that lays the foundation for basic structures of thinking later in one's development."[26] Vygotsky further explains that speech is the first psychological tool used by children to communicate with others who share the environment. Naturally, this is continued through adulthood, as speech is a primary tool used for learning. Vygotsky insists that "humans learn best in cooperation with other humans."[27]
"Vygotsky contended that, unlike animals - who react only to the environment, humans have the capacity to alter the environment for their own purposes. It is this adaptive capacity that distinguishes humans from lower forms of life. ...The animal can only be trained. It can only acquire new habits. It can through exercises and combinations perfect its intellect, but is not capable of mental development through instruction in the real sense of the word."[28]
Vygotsky's concept of the zone of proximal development (ZPD) posits that human potential is theoretically limitless; but the practical limits of human potential depend upon quality social interactions and residential environment. This zone of proximal development is "the distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers."[29] In theory, then, so long as a person has access to a more capable peer, any problem can be solved.
IV. Theory of Learning: What is learning? How are skills and knowledge acquired?
According to Piaget, learning is what results from both mental and physical maturation plus experience.[30] That is, development preceded learning. In contrast Vygotsky observed that learning processes lead development.[31] Vygotsky maintained that "learning is a necessary and universal aspect of the process of developing culturally organized, specifically human, psychological functions."[32] In other words, learning is what leads to the development of higher order thinking.
According to Vygotsky the two primary means of learning occur through social interaction and language. Language greatly enhances humans' ability to engage in social interactions and share their experiences. "The most important fact uncovered through the ... study of thought and speech is that their relationship undergoes many changes."[33] Initially, a child's new knowledge is interpsychological, meaning it is learned through interaction with others, on the social level.[34] Later, this same knowledge becomes intrapsychological, meaning inside the child, and the new knowledge or skill is mastered on an individual level.[35]
The previously mentioned idea of the zone of proximal development (ZPD) is central to Vygotsky's view on how learning takes place. He described this zone as, "the distance between the actual development level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers."[36] Vygotsky maintained that learning occurs just above the student's current level of competence.[37] It follows then, that the copying student will have a higher performance when working with a more capable student.
The zone of proximal development works in conjunction with the use of scaffolding. "Scaffolding is a six-step approach to assisting learning and development of individuals within their zone of proximal development."[38] Knowledge, skills and prior experiences, which come from an individual's general knowledge, create the foundation of scaffolding for potential development. At this stage, students interact with adults and/or peers to accomplish a task which could possibly not be completed independently. The use of language and shared experience is essential to successfully implementing scaffolding as a learning tool. [39]
V. Theory of Transmission: Who is to teach? By what methods? What will the curriculum be?
Vygotsky defined those who are to teach as the "More Knowledgeable Other." The MKO is anyone who has a better understanding or a higher ability level than the learner, particularly in regards to a specific task, concept or process.[40] Traditionally the MKO is thought of as a teacher or an older adult. However, this is not always the case. Other possibilities for the MKO could be a peer, sibling, a younger person, or even a computer. The key to MKO is that they must have more knowledge about the topic being learned than the learner does.[41] Teachers or more capable peers can raise the student's competence through the zone of proximal development (ZPD).
Vygotsky's findings suggest methodological procedures for the classroom. "In Vygotskian perspective, the ideal role of the teacher is that of providing scaffolding (collaborative dialogue) to assist students on tasks within their zones of proximal development."[42] During scaffolding the first step is to build interest and engage the learner. Once the learner is actively participating, the given task should be simplified by breaking it into smaller subtasks. During this task, the teacher needs to keep the learner focused, while concentrating on the most important ideas of the assignment. One of the most integral steps in scaffolding consists of keeping the learner from becoming frustrated. The final task associated with scaffolding involves the teacher modeling possible ways of completing tasks, which the learner can then imitate and eventually internalize. [43]
Vygotsky recommended a social context wherein a more competent learner would be paired with a less competent one, so that the former can elevate the latter's competence. This social context promotes sustained achievement and cognitive growth for less competent students."[44] Accordingly, students need to work together to construct their learning, teach each other so to speak, in a socio-cultural environment. In-class opportunities for collaboration on difficult problem-solving tasks will offer support to students who are struggling with the material. By interacting with more capable students who continue to mediate transactions between the struggling students and the content, all students will benefit.[45]
The implications of Vygotsky's theories and observations for educators are several and significant. In Vygotsky's view, the teacher has the collaborative "task of guiding and directing the child's activity."[46] Children can then solve novel problems "on the basis of a model he [sic] has been shown in class."[47] In other words, children learn by solving problems with the help of the teacher, who models processes for them and his or her peers, in a classroom environment that is directed by the teacher. In essence, "the child imitates the teacher through a process of re-creating previous classroom collaboration."[48] It is important to note that the teacher does not control the class with rule and structure; rather, the teacher collaborates with the students and provides support and direction.[49]
Assignments and activities that can be accurately completed by a student without assistance, indicate that the student has previously mastered the necessary prior knowledge. In the majority of classrooms this would be the conclusion of a unit; however, this is Vygotsky's entry point. However, as previously mentioned, the teacher must carefully group the student that "can potentially develop in collaboration with a more capable person."[50]
In our research, we found limited references to Vygotsky's specific views on curriculum content. One exception involves the teaching of writing to preschoolers. According to Garton and Pratt, Vygotsky argued for shifting the teaching of writing to preschool. They explain that Vygotsky differentiated between two forms of speech: spoken and written. Vygotsky, as cited by Garton and Pratt, asserts that a child develops an understanding that spoken speech can be symbolized in writing by progressing from "drawing things to drawing speech."[51] Vygotsky suggested then that the preschool curriculum should be designed so that it was organized to "ease child's transition from drawing things to drawing speech."[52]
Learning to master tools and technologies should also be included in the curriculum. "Students should be taught how to use tools such as the computer, resource books, and graphs in order to better utilize these tools in the future.[53] In this way, students will benefit as these tools and technologies influence the individual's thinking (along with the development of language).[54]
In sum, Vygotsky's findings suggest that the curriculum should generally challenge and stretch learner's competence.[55] The curriculum should provide many opportunities to apply previous skills, knowledge and experiences, with "authentic activities connected to real-life environment."[56] "Since children learn much through interaction, curricula should be designed to emphasize interaction between learners and learning tasks."[57]
VI. Theory of Society: What is society? What institutions are involved in the educational process?
According to Vygotsky, "society is the bearer of the cultural heritage without which the development of mind is impossible."[58] This 'society' allows the learner to develop cognitively through social interactions. As a result, the use of language makes it possible for a child to communicate and share the environment from within their society. "Every function in the child's cultural development appears twice: first, on the social level, and later, on the individual level; first, between people (interpsychological) and then inside the child (intrapsychological)."[59]
Perhaps Vygotsky was comfortable generalizing about 'society' in this way because he was living in post-revolutionary times. The revolution had been accomplished in Russia, and the "New Soviet Man", was emerging in the Soviet Union, and the dictatorship of the proletariat" was at hand.
So far as the institutions involved in the educational process are concerned, Moll reports that Vygotsky "considered school the best laboratory of human psychology."[60] He noted: "At first glace, it may be easily seen that no special educational environment is needed, that education may be accomplished in any environment whatsoever. ... It is not very hard to conclude that no sort of artificial educational environment has to be created, that life educates better than any school. ... This view is wrong, however."[61]
For Vygotsky, society (and therefore social interaction) happens in schools. "Schools are incorporated into the larger society and have that as their context, so that some of their activity settings are determined by this larger contextuality."[62] "For Vygotsky the classroom is also a social organization that is representative of the larger social community ... it is the social organization ... that is the agent for change in the individual."[63]
Fhis statement was not meant to "imply that informal education was not important."[64] Rather, as we stated before, for Vygotsky informal education is used by children through speech and language to develop higher mental functions. He stressed that "children's learning begins long before they attend school. ... Any learning a child encounters in school always has a previous history."[65]
VII. Theory of Opportunity: Who is to be educated? Who is to be schooled?
Vygotsky repeatedly asserts that it is within the "social environment" that learning takes place. Since no individual is able to escape their social surroundings, all within a society are inadvertently being educated.
Vygotsky writes:
"...In this sense, education in every country and in every epoch has always been social in nature. Indeed, by its very essence it could hardly exist as anti-social in anyway. Both in the seminary and in the old high school, in the military schools and in the schools for the daughters of the nobility ... it was never the teacher or the tutor who did the teaching, but the particular social environment in the school which was created for each individual instance."[66]
Every person is socialized in the society in which they are enveloped. Socialization is the process of cultural transmission, both unintentional and deliberate.[67] According to Vygotsky, this process is central to education.
We have already established that Vygotsky was a Marxist and, so far as we know, a supporter of the revolution; and further that socialization, education, and schooling are in a symbiotic relationship. So it seems likely that he would have favored reform of the entire socialization and educational process up to and including schooling, in order to create "The New Soviet Man."
Schooling, while similar to education, involves formalized teaching by a specialist in a specific place designated for instruction, such as a traditional school.[68] Vygotsky's Russia of the late 1920's and early 1930's was populated by millions of illiterate peasants and workers, and it is difficult to imagine that he would have regarded them as unworthy of the opportunities that schooling affords. Indeed, Vygotsky probably understood his theories to be, in part, a response to the need to solve the urgent and practical problems of schooling the new socialist state.
When referring to the education of children with disabilities, Vygotsky pointed out that "changes in the context of education may have profound consequences for the developmental processes."[69] He went on to say that children with disabilities should be included in the general education classroom, and not be separated into self-contained classrooms, because he felt that those children who were educated separately from "normal" children "would proceed in a totally different, and not beneficial, manner".[70] If he were alive today, Vygotsky would call this the model of full inclusion.[71]
Vygotsky also "considered the capacity to teach and to benefit from instruction a fundamental attribute of human beings".[72] He noted that "a child whose development is impeded by a disability is not simply a child less developed than his peers; rather, he has developed differently." [73] Given this, one can see that Vygotsky thought all children should be schooled side-by-side in a regular education classroom.
VIII. Theory of Consensus: Why do people disagree? How is consensus achieved? Whose opinion takes precedence?
To contemplate Vygotsky's theory of consensus, one must consider his Marxist perspective. Though Marxism is a very broad and diverse theory with many variations, certain commonalities exist.[74] The Encarta Reference Library defines Marxism as "a theory in which class struggle is a central element in the analysis of social change in Western societies."[75]
Depending on one's views, society can be seen in its natural or normal state as either a society of conflict or a society of consensus. Being a Marxist, Vygotsky would have looked at the world through the same lens as Karl Marx, who "...described all advanced....societies in conflictual terms." [76] However, it should be remembered that Vygotsky was living in the post-revolutionary Soviet Union. Consequently, at least some of the conflict mentioned above would be ameliorated by revolutionary attempts to build a classless and conflict-free society.
Anyway, the primary conflict that Marx saw was based on the "...conflict between the material forces of production and social relations of production."[77] Material forces of production "... can be considered society's capacity to produce ..." and has been somewhat continuous throughout time.[78] Social relations, on the other hand, can be seen as the "...distribution of income generated by the material forces of production" and tend to change only abruptly and violently.[79] As written in Marx's Communist Manifesto, "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles." [80] Marx added, however, that conflict was normal due to social structures and not due to human nature.[81]
Keeping his Marxism in mind, Vygotsky would probably have said that, at least prior to the revolution, people disagree ultimately because they are engaged in class struggle for dominance among competing social groups - classes, genders, races, religions, etc. When conflict theorists such as Marx look at society, they see the social domination of subordinate groups through the power, authority, and coercion of dominant groups. In the conflict view, the most powerful members of dominant groups create the rules for success and opportunity in society, often denying subordinate groups such success and opportunities; this ensures that the powerful continue to monopolize power, privilege, and authority.[82]
Since Vygotsky was involved in mutual consultation with other theorists and was clearly aware of the social context in which learning takes place, one can safely assume he appreciated that the evolution of consensus among experts was central to learning about learning, as well as to learning in general. His theories all were influenced by the other learning theorists of his time.
Consider Vygotsky's evaluation of Piaget's theories and findings. After detailed examination, Vygotsky concluded that Piaget had developed a clinical method that revolutionized the study of children's language and thought. Vygotsky admired Piaget's detailed pictures of children's thinking, his assertion that development occurs in distinct, measurable, and observable stages, his focus on what children have, not what they lack, and his finding that the difference between adults' and children's thinking is qualitative, not quantitative.[83] However, he also believed that there were flaws in Piaget's methods.
Vygotsky clearly was willing to work with and learn from others. But he was not intimidated by the official consensus of party ideologues.[84] For example, Vygotsky opposed the Marxist reflexologists (behaviorists), who were politically if not intellectually, ascendant at that time." He did so at great personal risk considering the nature of the Stalinist regime.[85] Also Vygotsky took on the man who had hired him R. N. Kornilov, director of the Kornilov Institute,. "One year after joining the Institute, Vygotsky saw fit to reject Kornilov's attempt at a compromise solution to the consciousness problem (i.e., "reactology"), subjecting it to...a devastating philosophical criticism."[86]
We see, then, that Vygotsky did not put consensus building above what he regarded as truth seeking. On the other hand, Cole explains that "... it was characteristic of both Vygotsky and his close colleague Luria that they attempted to place their research within the general circle of contemporary scientific ideas influencing psychology. In order to be maximally persuasive, they sought to demonstrate both the correctness of their own approach and the points where it made contact with (and then diverged from) the ideas of their contemporaries."[87] We see, then, that Vygotsky was aware of and sensitive to the professional consensus that he respected.
Citations
[1] "Lev Semonovich Vygotsky" http://evolution.masey.ac.nz.asssign2MHR/indexvyg.html
[2] Lev S. Vygotsky: The Man and the Era, International Journal of Group Tensions, vol 31, #4, http://www.springerlink.com/content/v3145jv768818187/
[3] Vygotsky, Lev Semenovich (1896-1934), MIA: Encyclopedia of Marxism: Glossary of People, http://www.marxists.org/glossary/people/v/y.htm
[4] Idem.
[5] "Psychology Applied to Education: Lev. S. Vygotsky's Approach" Communiquè 25, no. 2 (1997), http://www.bgcenter.com/Vygotsky_Appr.htm.
[6] Preston D. Feden and Robert M. Vogel, Methods of Teaching: Applying Cognitive Science to Promote Student Learning (New York: McGraw Hill, 1993).
[7] Richard Hamilton and Elizabeth Ghatala, Learning and Instruction (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994), 255.
[8] Ibid., 258.
[9] Preston D. Feden & Robert M. Vogel, Methods of Teaching: Applying Cognitive Science to Promote Student Learning ( New York: McGraw Hill, 1993).
[10] M.F. Goldfarb, The Educational Theory of Lev Semenovich Vygotsky (1896-1934)
[11] Robert Silverman, Educational Psychology. L.S. Vygotsky. Introduced by V.V. Davydov (St. Lucie Press, Florida, 1992), ch. 17.
[12] Vasily V. Davydov and Stephen T. Kerr. 1995. The Influence of L. S. Vygotsky on Education Theory, Research, and Practice. Educational Researcher 24 (3). 18.
[13] Sûlr˙n B. KristinsdÛttir, Lev Vygotsky, 31 July 07, Retrieved September 10, 2007 from http://starfsfolk.khi.is/solrunb/vygotsky.htm
[14] Fosnot, C. T., Constructivism: A Psychological Theory of Learning. In C. T. Fosnot (Ed.), Constructivism: Theory, Perspectives, and Practice 1996 (New York, NY: Teachers College Press)
[15] Paula Wellings. 2003. School learning & Life learning: The interaction of spontaneous and scientific concepts in the development of higher mental processes. http://ldt.stanford.edu/~paulaw/STANFORD/370x_paula_wellings_final_paper.pdf (accessed September 12, 2007): 3.
For an independent supporting analysis, see Edward G. Rozycki (1970) The Philosophical Foundations of Human Cognition available at http://www.newfoundations.com/CogTheo/CogTheoPro.html
[16] Idem..
[17] Ibid., 3-4.
[18] Ibid., 3.
[19] Ibid., 4.
[20] Jeremy Roschelle. 1995. Learning in Interactive Environments: Prior Knowledge and New Experience. http://www.astc.org/resource/education/priorknw.htm (accessed September 12, 2007).
[21] Spirkin, A. "On the Human Being and Being Human" http://www.markists.org/reference/archive/spirkin/works/dialectical-materialism/ch05.html
[22] Ibid
[23] L. S. Vygotsky, Mind in society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1978), 38-39.
[24] Richard Hamilton and Elizabeth Ghatala, Learning and Instruction (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994), 259.
[25] Gredler, M. and Shields, C. (2004) Does No One Read Vygotsky's Words? Commentary on Glassman. Educational Researcher 33 (2), p.21.
[26] Preston D. Feden & Robert M. Vogel, Methods of Teaching: Applying Cognitive Science to Promote Student Learning (The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc, 2003).
[27] Preston D. Feden & Robert M. Vogel, Methods of Teaching: Applying Cognitive Science to Promote Student Learning (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2003).
[28] Vygotsky, 1934; Understanding Vygotsky, Retrieved September 13, 2007 from http://www.indiana.edu/~intell/vygotsky.shtml
[29] Lev Vygotsky, Mind in Society, edited by M. Cole, V. John-Steiner, S. Scribner, and E. Souberman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 85-86.
[30] Luis C. Moll, Vygotsky & Education: Instructional Implications and Applications of Sociohistorical Psychology (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 50.
[31] Luis C. Moll, Vygotsky & Education: Instructional Implications and Applications of Sociohistorical Psychology (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 50.
[32] L. S. Vygotsky, Mind in society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1978), 90
[33] Lev Vygotsky, Thought and Speech (The M.I.T Press, 1962), Ch 4. Retrieved September 10, 2007 http://www.marxists.org/archive/vygotsky/works/words/ch04.htm
[34] "Social Development Theory (Vygotsky)", http://www.learning-theories.com/vygotskys-social-learning-theory.html.
[35] Idem.
[36] L.S. Vygotsky, Mind in Society, pg 86.
[37] Deborah J. Leong and Elena Bodrova. "Pioneers in Our Field: Lev Vygotsky – Playing to Learn. Scholastic Early Childhood Today., (2001). http://content.scholastic.com/browse/article.jsp?id=3549
[38] Preston Feden, Robert Vogel, Education (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2006), 187-190.
[39] Idem.
[40] Social Development Theory (Vygotsky), 2007, http://www.learning-theories.com/vygotskys-social-learning-theory.html
[41] Chad Galloway, Vygotsky's constructivism, 2007, http://projects.coe.uga.edu/epltt/index.php?title=Vygotsky's_constructivism
[42] Richard Hamilton and Elizabeth Ghatala, Learning and Instruction (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994), 277.
[43] Preston Feden, Robert Vogel, Education (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2006), 189.
[44] James A. Jaramillo. "Vygotsky's sociocultural theory and contributions to the development of constructivist curricula." Education. (1996), http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3673/is_199610/ai_n8734319/pg_
[45] Tharp, R. G., & Gallimore, R. (1988). Rousing minds to life. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.
[46] L. S. Vygotsky, Pedagogicheskaia psikhologiia [Pedagogical psychology], 2nd Ed. (Moscow: Pedagogika, 1991), 118.
[47] L. S. Vygotsky, "The development of scientific concepts in childhood," in Problems of general psychology, Vol. 1, Collected works of L. S. Vygotsky, ed. R. W. Rieber and A. S. Carton (New York: Plenum, 1987), 216.
[48] Margaret Gredler and Carol Shields. 2004. Does No One read Vygotsky's Words? Commentary on Glassman. Educational Researcher 33 (2). 22.
[49] Richard Hamilton and Elizabeth Ghatala, Learning and Instruction (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994), 277.
[50] Preston D. Feden & Robert M. Vogel, Methods of Teaching: Applying Cognitive Science to Promote Student Learning (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2003).
[51] Alison F. Garton and Chris Pratt, Learning to Be Literate: The Development of Spoken and Written Language (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1998), 49.
[52] Idem.
[53] University of Iowa, College of Education. n.d. Comparing Piaget and Vygotsky. http://www.education.uiowa.edu/resources/tep/eportfolio/07p075folder/Piaget_Vygotsky.htm (accessed October 3, 2007).
[54] Richard Hamilton and Elizabeth Ghatala, Learning and Instruction (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994), 254.
[55] Mooney, C.G., An Introduction to Dewey, Montessori, Erikson, Piaget & Vygotsky (St. Paul, MN: Redleaf Press, 2000), 85.
[56] "Education about and through technology: In Search of More Appropriate Pedagogical Approaches to Technology Education", http://herkeles.oulu.fi/isbn9514264878/html/x340.html.
[57] Retrieved September 23, 2007 from //www.funderstanding.com/vygotsky.cfm
[58] Retrieved October 6, 2007 from http://www.massey.ac.nz/~alock/virtual/colevyg.html.
[59] Retrieved October 6, 2007 from http://tip.psychology.org/vygotsky.html
[60] Retrieved October 6, 2007 from http://books.google.com/books?id=GUTyDVORhHkC&pg=PA50&lpg=PA50&dq=vygotsky+educational+process&source=web&ots=tukEYQGhtK&sig=Dn_NpU6EXMKrjklhZfyCZ-l0JwM#PPA50,M1.
[61]L. S. Vygotsky, Educational Psychology, translated by Robert Silverman (Boca Raton, FL: St. Lucie Press, 1997, 50.
[62] Vygotsky. n.d. http://userwww.service.emory.edu/~pthoma4/Vygotsky.htm (accessed October 9, 2007).
[63] Michael Glassman. 2001. Dewey and Vygotsky: Society, Experience, and Inquiry in Educational Practice. Educational Researcher, 30 (4), 13.
[64] Retrieved October 6, 2007 from http://books.google.com/books?id=GUTyDVORhHkC&pg=PA50&lpg=PA50&dq=vygotsky+educational+process&source=web&ots=tukEYQGhtK&sig=Dn_NpU6EXMKrjklhZfyCZ-l0JwM#PPA50,M1
[65] L. S. Vygotsky, Mind in Society. Retrieved October 5, 2007 from http://userwww.service.emory.edu/~pthoma4/Vygotsky.htm
[66] L.S. Vygotsky, Educational Psychology, (St. Lucie Press, Florida, 1997), 47.
[67] Clabaugh, G. and Rozycki, E. School and Society, Oreland PA. NewFoundations Press 2007, p. 14.
[68] Ibid.
[69] J. Tudge. Vygotsky, the zone of proximal development and peer collaboration: Implications for classroom practice. In L.C. Moll (Ed.), Vygotsky & Education: Instructional Implications and Applications of Sociohistorical Psychology (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 157.
[70] Idem.
[71] B. Gindis. 1999. Vygotsky's Vision: Reshaping the Practice of Special Education for the 21st Century. http://www.bgcenter.com/Vygotsky_Vision.htm (accessed October 14, 2007).
[72] Luis C. Moll, Vygotsky & Education: Instructional Implications and Applications of Sociohistorical Psychology (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 1.
[73] L.S. Vygotsky. Sobraniye Sochinenii [Collected Works], Vol. 5 (Moscow: Pedagogika Publisher, 1983), 96.
[74] www.allaboutphilosophy.org/what-is-marxism-faq.htm
[75] Idem.
[76] Thomas J. Bernard. The Consensus-Conflict Debate: Form and Content in Social Theories (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 89.
[77] Ibid., 96.
[78] Idem.
[79] Idem.
[80] Karl Marx. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Marx
[81] Thomas J. Bernard. The Consensus-Conflict Debate: Form and Content in Social Theories (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 98.
[82] Conflict Theory. http://www.unc.edu/~kbm/SOCI10Spring2004/Conflict_Theory.doc.
[83] Vygotsky, L. (1962). Thought and language. Cambridge, MA. MIT Press.
[84] Richard S. Prawat. 2000. Dewey Meets the "Mozart of Psychology" in Moscow: The Untold Story. American Educational Research Journal, 37 (3). 668.
[85] Ibid., 667.
[86] Ibid., 668.
[87] Michael Cole, Introduction to "The Making of Mind." http://www.marxists.org/archive/luria/comments/cole.htm
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The following text may be found online at: http://www.newfoundations.com/GALLERY/Vygotsky.html
©2007 NewFoundations Gary K. Clabaugh, EdD, & Edward G. Rozycki, EdD, Editors
The Educational Theory of Lev Vygotsky: an analysis
Researched and Written by:
M. Dahms, K. Geonnotti, D. Passalacqua. J. N. Schilk, A. Wetzel,
and M. Zulkowsky
vygotsky
RETURN
edited 11/8/08
Introduction
Born in Czarist Russia in 1896, Lev Vygotsky lived a relatively short life, dying of tuberculosis in 1934. Because he was Jewish, the law limited his higher education options. He was, however, one of the 5% maximum of Jews permitted admission to a university. He was, however, not permitted to fulfill his ambition to pursue training as a teacher. In consequence, between the years of 1913 and 1917, Vygotsky studied medicine, philosophy, history, and law.[1]
Vygotsky began teaching in his home city almost immediately after the 1917 Communist Revolution. However, he was disappointed if he anticipated that this upheaval would result in greater overall freedom. The ascension of Joseph Stalin to power in 1922 meant that all of Vygotsky's scholarly work was to be accomplished in an ever more repressive police state.
Vygotsky's investigations of child development and educational psychology were influenced by his own Marxism – a philosophy that emphasizes the importance of one's social origins and place in the scheme of production.[2] Vygotsky's works, consisting of more than one hundred books and articles, were not published until after his death in 1934. Just two years later they were suppressed. This suppression endured for two decades during which time his works were held in a secret library that could only be accessed by permission of the Peoples Commissariat for Internal Affairs — commonly known as the NKVD.[3] Despite this prolonged attempt to suppress his ideas, Vygotsky's work survived and, particularly after the Cold War, came to wield considerable influence in the field of educational psychology.[4]
I. Theory of Value: What knowledge and skills are worthwhile learning? What are the goals of education?
Vygotsky's stresses the importance of looking at each child as an individual who learns distinctively. Consequently, the knowledge and skills that are worthwhile learning varies with the individual.
The overall goal of education according to Vygotsky is to "generate and lead development which is the result of social learning through internalization of culture and social relationships."[5] He repeatedly stressed the importance of past experiences and prior knowledge in making sense of new situations or present experiences.[6] Therefore, all new knowledge and newly introduced skills are greatly influenced by each student's culture, especially their family environment.
Language skills are particularly critical for creating meaning and linking new ideas to past experiences and prior knowledge. According to Vygotsky, internalized skills or psychological tools "are used to gain mastery over one's own behavior and cognition."[7] Primary among these tools is the "development of speech and its relation to thought."[8]
Vygotsky maintained that language plays a central role in cognitive development. He argued that language was the tool for determining the ways a child learns "how" to think. That is because complex concepts are conveyed to the child through words. "Learning, according to Vygotsky, always involves some type of external experience being transformed into internal processes through the use of language."[9] It follows that speech and language are the primary tools used to communicate with others, promoting learning.
Vygotsky promoted the development of higher level thinking and problem solving in education. If situations are designed to have students utilize critical thinking skills, their thought processes are being challenged and new knowledge gained.[10] The knowledge achieved through experience also serves as a foundation for the behaviors of every individual.[11]
II. Theory of Knowledge: What is knowledge? How is it different from belief? What is a mistake? A lie?
According to Davydov and Kerr, it was a momentous occasion in the history of psychology when Vygotsky asserted "...specific functions are not given to a person at birth but are only provided as cultural and social patterns."[12] Vygotsky saw "intellectual abilities as being much more specific to the culture in which the child was reared."[13] Through observation and study Vygotsky came to understand that people adapted to their surrounding environment based on their interpretations and individual perceptions of it.[14] Thus, humans are not born with knowledge nor is knowledge independent of social context. Rather, one gains knowledge as one develops by way of social interactions with peers and adults.
Vygotsky does not make as drastic a distinction between knowledge and belief as some other theorists do. For him, knowledge is obtained through past experiences, social situations, as well as ones general environment. In similar manner, beliefs are instilled into an individual via culture and parental upbringing.
"Mistakes are crucial in Vygotsky's theory of learning. In the course of development, mistakes are made during the process of "concept formation." They are important in that they impact future learning.[15] From Vygotsky's perspective, "A concept emerges and takes shape in the course of a complex interaction aimed at the solution of a problem...[A] concept is ...an active part of the intellectual process."[16]
We see, then that, for Vygotsky, concept formation is a dynamic, ever-changing activity during which "... the child relies on their own perception to make sense of objects that appear to them to be unrelated ... the child creates his or her own subjective relationships between objects and then mistakes his or her egocentric perspective for reality."[17] This stage of development is known, paradoxically, as "incoherent coherence."[18] During this stage, the making of mistakes is an integral part of a child's development.
Also at this time, the child's organization schema becomes less egocentric and begin to incorporate additional information gained from experience into his or her thought processes.[19] In this way, mistakes can be corrected and new knowledge gained. Therefore mistakes are developmentally necessary, resulting from the "...role of social interaction in transformation of prior knowledge.[20]
Tentatively one might infer that Vygotsky would view a lie as something that occurs as a result of the desire to conform to social norms. For example one might feel one way but report a more socially acceptable reality.
III. Theory of Human Nature: What is a human being? How does it differ from other species? What are the limits of human potential?
According to Marxist theory, "The essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations."[21] Vygotsky would agree that we develop as humans through the ways we interact with those around us. His view of human nature fits with his Marxist ideology. Human beings can only be understood within the context the time period and the part of the world in which they live. Human nature cannot be understood as never-changing and universal, but as always depending on its specific social and historical formation. This principle does not leave out biological factors.[22] To be human, however, means that you have surpassed a level of functioning that your biological traits would otherwise dictate.
[23]
Although some animals have the ability to create and use material tools, humans have the ability to utilize psychological tools. In other words, human beings are differentiated by their ability to develop psychological tools that are "used to gain mastery over one's own behavior and cognition"[24] that other forms of life are not capable of developing. Some psychological tools include: "language, different forms of numeration and counting, mnemotechniques, algebraic symbolism, works of art, writing, schemes, diagrams, maps, blueprints, etc."[25]
In his theories, Vygotsky placed great emphasis on the importance of spoken language, arguably the most critical tool that sets us apart from other species. He asserts that "speech is a very powerful psychological tool that lays the foundation for basic structures of thinking later in one's development."[26] Vygotsky further explains that speech is the first psychological tool used by children to communicate with others who share the environment. Naturally, this is continued through adulthood, as speech is a primary tool used for learning. Vygotsky insists that "humans learn best in cooperation with other humans."[27]
"Vygotsky contended that, unlike animals - who react only to the environment, humans have the capacity to alter the environment for their own purposes. It is this adaptive capacity that distinguishes humans from lower forms of life. ...The animal can only be trained. It can only acquire new habits. It can through exercises and combinations perfect its intellect, but is not capable of mental development through instruction in the real sense of the word."[28]
Vygotsky's concept of the zone of proximal development (ZPD) posits that human potential is theoretically limitless; but the practical limits of human potential depend upon quality social interactions and residential environment. This zone of proximal development is "the distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers."[29] In theory, then, so long as a person has access to a more capable peer, any problem can be solved.
IV. Theory of Learning: What is learning? How are skills and knowledge acquired?
According to Piaget, learning is what results from both mental and physical maturation plus experience.[30] That is, development preceded learning. In contrast Vygotsky observed that learning processes lead development.[31] Vygotsky maintained that "learning is a necessary and universal aspect of the process of developing culturally organized, specifically human, psychological functions."[32] In other words, learning is what leads to the development of higher order thinking.
According to Vygotsky the two primary means of learning occur through social interaction and language. Language greatly enhances humans' ability to engage in social interactions and share their experiences. "The most important fact uncovered through the ... study of thought and speech is that their relationship undergoes many changes."[33] Initially, a child's new knowledge is interpsychological, meaning it is learned through interaction with others, on the social level.[34] Later, this same knowledge becomes intrapsychological, meaning inside the child, and the new knowledge or skill is mastered on an individual level.[35]
The previously mentioned idea of the zone of proximal development (ZPD) is central to Vygotsky's view on how learning takes place. He described this zone as, "the distance between the actual development level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers."[36] Vygotsky maintained that learning occurs just above the student's current level of competence.[37] It follows then, that the copying student will have a higher performance when working with a more capable student.
The zone of proximal development works in conjunction with the use of scaffolding. "Scaffolding is a six-step approach to assisting learning and development of individuals within their zone of proximal development."[38] Knowledge, skills and prior experiences, which come from an individual's general knowledge, create the foundation of scaffolding for potential development. At this stage, students interact with adults and/or peers to accomplish a task which could possibly not be completed independently. The use of language and shared experience is essential to successfully implementing scaffolding as a learning tool. [39]
V. Theory of Transmission: Who is to teach? By what methods? What will the curriculum be?
Vygotsky defined those who are to teach as the "More Knowledgeable Other." The MKO is anyone who has a better understanding or a higher ability level than the learner, particularly in regards to a specific task, concept or process.[40] Traditionally the MKO is thought of as a teacher or an older adult. However, this is not always the case. Other possibilities for the MKO could be a peer, sibling, a younger person, or even a computer. The key to MKO is that they must have more knowledge about the topic being learned than the learner does.[41] Teachers or more capable peers can raise the student's competence through the zone of proximal development (ZPD).
Vygotsky's findings suggest methodological procedures for the classroom. "In Vygotskian perspective, the ideal role of the teacher is that of providing scaffolding (collaborative dialogue) to assist students on tasks within their zones of proximal development."[42] During scaffolding the first step is to build interest and engage the learner. Once the learner is actively participating, the given task should be simplified by breaking it into smaller subtasks. During this task, the teacher needs to keep the learner focused, while concentrating on the most important ideas of the assignment. One of the most integral steps in scaffolding consists of keeping the learner from becoming frustrated. The final task associated with scaffolding involves the teacher modeling possible ways of completing tasks, which the learner can then imitate and eventually internalize. [43]
Vygotsky recommended a social context wherein a more competent learner would be paired with a less competent one, so that the former can elevate the latter's competence. This social context promotes sustained achievement and cognitive growth for less competent students."[44] Accordingly, students need to work together to construct their learning, teach each other so to speak, in a socio-cultural environment. In-class opportunities for collaboration on difficult problem-solving tasks will offer support to students who are struggling with the material. By interacting with more capable students who continue to mediate transactions between the struggling students and the content, all students will benefit.[45]
The implications of Vygotsky's theories and observations for educators are several and significant. In Vygotsky's view, the teacher has the collaborative "task of guiding and directing the child's activity."[46] Children can then solve novel problems "on the basis of a model he [sic] has been shown in class."[47] In other words, children learn by solving problems with the help of the teacher, who models processes for them and his or her peers, in a classroom environment that is directed by the teacher. In essence, "the child imitates the teacher through a process of re-creating previous classroom collaboration."[48] It is important to note that the teacher does not control the class with rule and structure; rather, the teacher collaborates with the students and provides support and direction.[49]
Assignments and activities that can be accurately completed by a student without assistance, indicate that the student has previously mastered the necessary prior knowledge. In the majority of classrooms this would be the conclusion of a unit; however, this is Vygotsky's entry point. However, as previously mentioned, the teacher must carefully group the student that "can potentially develop in collaboration with a more capable person."[50]
In our research, we found limited references to Vygotsky's specific views on curriculum content. One exception involves the teaching of writing to preschoolers. According to Garton and Pratt, Vygotsky argued for shifting the teaching of writing to preschool. They explain that Vygotsky differentiated between two forms of speech: spoken and written. Vygotsky, as cited by Garton and Pratt, asserts that a child develops an understanding that spoken speech can be symbolized in writing by progressing from "drawing things to drawing speech."[51] Vygotsky suggested then that the preschool curriculum should be designed so that it was organized to "ease child's transition from drawing things to drawing speech."[52]
Learning to master tools and technologies should also be included in the curriculum. "Students should be taught how to use tools such as the computer, resource books, and graphs in order to better utilize these tools in the future.[53] In this way, students will benefit as these tools and technologies influence the individual's thinking (along with the development of language).[54]
In sum, Vygotsky's findings suggest that the curriculum should generally challenge and stretch learner's competence.[55] The curriculum should provide many opportunities to apply previous skills, knowledge and experiences, with "authentic activities connected to real-life environment."[56] "Since children learn much through interaction, curricula should be designed to emphasize interaction between learners and learning tasks."[57]
VI. Theory of Society: What is society? What institutions are involved in the educational process?
According to Vygotsky, "society is the bearer of the cultural heritage without which the development of mind is impossible."[58] This 'society' allows the learner to develop cognitively through social interactions. As a result, the use of language makes it possible for a child to communicate and share the environment from within their society. "Every function in the child's cultural development appears twice: first, on the social level, and later, on the individual level; first, between people (interpsychological) and then inside the child (intrapsychological)."[59]
Perhaps Vygotsky was comfortable generalizing about 'society' in this way because he was living in post-revolutionary times. The revolution had been accomplished in Russia, and the "New Soviet Man", was emerging in the Soviet Union, and the dictatorship of the proletariat" was at hand.
So far as the institutions involved in the educational process are concerned, Moll reports that Vygotsky "considered school the best laboratory of human psychology."[60] He noted: "At first glace, it may be easily seen that no special educational environment is needed, that education may be accomplished in any environment whatsoever. ... It is not very hard to conclude that no sort of artificial educational environment has to be created, that life educates better than any school. ... This view is wrong, however."[61]
For Vygotsky, society (and therefore social interaction) happens in schools. "Schools are incorporated into the larger society and have that as their context, so that some of their activity settings are determined by this larger contextuality."[62] "For Vygotsky the classroom is also a social organization that is representative of the larger social community ... it is the social organization ... that is the agent for change in the individual."[63]
Fhis statement was not meant to "imply that informal education was not important."[64] Rather, as we stated before, for Vygotsky informal education is used by children through speech and language to develop higher mental functions. He stressed that "children's learning begins long before they attend school. ... Any learning a child encounters in school always has a previous history."[65]
VII. Theory of Opportunity: Who is to be educated? Who is to be schooled?
Vygotsky repeatedly asserts that it is within the "social environment" that learning takes place. Since no individual is able to escape their social surroundings, all within a society are inadvertently being educated.
Vygotsky writes:
"...In this sense, education in every country and in every epoch has always been social in nature. Indeed, by its very essence it could hardly exist as anti-social in anyway. Both in the seminary and in the old high school, in the military schools and in the schools for the daughters of the nobility ... it was never the teacher or the tutor who did the teaching, but the particular social environment in the school which was created for each individual instance."[66]
Every person is socialized in the society in which they are enveloped. Socialization is the process of cultural transmission, both unintentional and deliberate.[67] According to Vygotsky, this process is central to education.
We have already established that Vygotsky was a Marxist and, so far as we know, a supporter of the revolution; and further that socialization, education, and schooling are in a symbiotic relationship. So it seems likely that he would have favored reform of the entire socialization and educational process up to and including schooling, in order to create "The New Soviet Man."
Schooling, while similar to education, involves formalized teaching by a specialist in a specific place designated for instruction, such as a traditional school.[68] Vygotsky's Russia of the late 1920's and early 1930's was populated by millions of illiterate peasants and workers, and it is difficult to imagine that he would have regarded them as unworthy of the opportunities that schooling affords. Indeed, Vygotsky probably understood his theories to be, in part, a response to the need to solve the urgent and practical problems of schooling the new socialist state.
When referring to the education of children with disabilities, Vygotsky pointed out that "changes in the context of education may have profound consequences for the developmental processes."[69] He went on to say that children with disabilities should be included in the general education classroom, and not be separated into self-contained classrooms, because he felt that those children who were educated separately from "normal" children "would proceed in a totally different, and not beneficial, manner".[70] If he were alive today, Vygotsky would call this the model of full inclusion.[71]
Vygotsky also "considered the capacity to teach and to benefit from instruction a fundamental attribute of human beings".[72] He noted that "a child whose development is impeded by a disability is not simply a child less developed than his peers; rather, he has developed differently." [73] Given this, one can see that Vygotsky thought all children should be schooled side-by-side in a regular education classroom.
VIII. Theory of Consensus: Why do people disagree? How is consensus achieved? Whose opinion takes precedence?
To contemplate Vygotsky's theory of consensus, one must consider his Marxist perspective. Though Marxism is a very broad and diverse theory with many variations, certain commonalities exist.[74] The Encarta Reference Library defines Marxism as "a theory in which class struggle is a central element in the analysis of social change in Western societies."[75]
Depending on one's views, society can be seen in its natural or normal state as either a society of conflict or a society of consensus. Being a Marxist, Vygotsky would have looked at the world through the same lens as Karl Marx, who "...described all advanced....societies in conflictual terms." [76] However, it should be remembered that Vygotsky was living in the post-revolutionary Soviet Union. Consequently, at least some of the conflict mentioned above would be ameliorated by revolutionary attempts to build a classless and conflict-free society.
Anyway, the primary conflict that Marx saw was based on the "...conflict between the material forces of production and social relations of production."[77] Material forces of production "... can be considered society's capacity to produce ..." and has been somewhat continuous throughout time.[78] Social relations, on the other hand, can be seen as the "...distribution of income generated by the material forces of production" and tend to change only abruptly and violently.[79] As written in Marx's Communist Manifesto, "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles." [80] Marx added, however, that conflict was normal due to social structures and not due to human nature.[81]
Keeping his Marxism in mind, Vygotsky would probably have said that, at least prior to the revolution, people disagree ultimately because they are engaged in class struggle for dominance among competing social groups - classes, genders, races, religions, etc. When conflict theorists such as Marx look at society, they see the social domination of subordinate groups through the power, authority, and coercion of dominant groups. In the conflict view, the most powerful members of dominant groups create the rules for success and opportunity in society, often denying subordinate groups such success and opportunities; this ensures that the powerful continue to monopolize power, privilege, and authority.[82]
Since Vygotsky was involved in mutual consultation with other theorists and was clearly aware of the social context in which learning takes place, one can safely assume he appreciated that the evolution of consensus among experts was central to learning about learning, as well as to learning in general. His theories all were influenced by the other learning theorists of his time.
Consider Vygotsky's evaluation of Piaget's theories and findings. After detailed examination, Vygotsky concluded that Piaget had developed a clinical method that revolutionized the study of children's language and thought. Vygotsky admired Piaget's detailed pictures of children's thinking, his assertion that development occurs in distinct, measurable, and observable stages, his focus on what children have, not what they lack, and his finding that the difference between adults' and children's thinking is qualitative, not quantitative.[83] However, he also believed that there were flaws in Piaget's methods.
Vygotsky clearly was willing to work with and learn from others. But he was not intimidated by the official consensus of party ideologues.[84] For example, Vygotsky opposed the Marxist reflexologists (behaviorists), who were politically if not intellectually, ascendant at that time." He did so at great personal risk considering the nature of the Stalinist regime.[85] Also Vygotsky took on the man who had hired him R. N. Kornilov, director of the Kornilov Institute,. "One year after joining the Institute, Vygotsky saw fit to reject Kornilov's attempt at a compromise solution to the consciousness problem (i.e., "reactology"), subjecting it to...a devastating philosophical criticism."[86]
We see, then, that Vygotsky did not put consensus building above what he regarded as truth seeking. On the other hand, Cole explains that "... it was characteristic of both Vygotsky and his close colleague Luria that they attempted to place their research within the general circle of contemporary scientific ideas influencing psychology. In order to be maximally persuasive, they sought to demonstrate both the correctness of their own approach and the points where it made contact with (and then diverged from) the ideas of their contemporaries."[87] We see, then, that Vygotsky was aware of and sensitive to the professional consensus that he respected.
Citations
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[2] Lev S. Vygotsky: The Man and the Era, International Journal of Group Tensions, vol 31, #4, http://www.springerlink.com/content/v3145jv768818187/
[3] Vygotsky, Lev Semenovich (1896-1934), MIA: Encyclopedia of Marxism: Glossary of People, http://www.marxists.org/glossary/people/v/y.htm
[4] Idem.
[5] "Psychology Applied to Education: Lev. S. Vygotsky's Approach" Communiquè 25, no. 2 (1997), http://www.bgcenter.com/Vygotsky_Appr.htm.
[6] Preston D. Feden and Robert M. Vogel, Methods of Teaching: Applying Cognitive Science to Promote Student Learning (New York: McGraw Hill, 1993).
[7] Richard Hamilton and Elizabeth Ghatala, Learning and Instruction (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994), 255.
[8] Ibid., 258.
[9] Preston D. Feden & Robert M. Vogel, Methods of Teaching: Applying Cognitive Science to Promote Student Learning ( New York: McGraw Hill, 1993).
[10] M.F. Goldfarb, The Educational Theory of Lev Semenovich Vygotsky (1896-1934)
[11] Robert Silverman, Educational Psychology. L.S. Vygotsky. Introduced by V.V. Davydov (St. Lucie Press, Florida, 1992), ch. 17.
[12] Vasily V. Davydov and Stephen T. Kerr. 1995. The Influence of L. S. Vygotsky on Education Theory, Research, and Practice. Educational Researcher 24 (3). 18.
[13] Sûlr˙n B. KristinsdÛttir, Lev Vygotsky, 31 July 07, Retrieved September 10, 2007 from http://starfsfolk.khi.is/solrunb/vygotsky.htm
[14] Fosnot, C. T., Constructivism: A Psychological Theory of Learning. In C. T. Fosnot (Ed.), Constructivism: Theory, Perspectives, and Practice 1996 (New York, NY: Teachers College Press)
[15] Paula Wellings. 2003. School learning & Life learning: The interaction of spontaneous and scientific concepts in the development of higher mental processes. http://ldt.stanford.edu/~paulaw/STANFORD/370x_paula_wellings_final_paper.pdf (accessed September 12, 2007): 3.
For an independent supporting analysis, see Edward G. Rozycki (1970) The Philosophical Foundations of Human Cognition available at http://www.newfoundations.com/CogTheo/CogTheoPro.html
[16] Idem..
[17] Ibid., 3-4.
[18] Ibid., 3.
[19] Ibid., 4.
[20] Jeremy Roschelle. 1995. Learning in Interactive Environments: Prior Knowledge and New Experience. http://www.astc.org/resource/education/priorknw.htm (accessed September 12, 2007).
[21] Spirkin, A. "On the Human Being and Being Human" http://www.markists.org/reference/archive/spirkin/works/dialectical-materialism/ch05.html
[22] Ibid
[23] L. S. Vygotsky, Mind in society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1978), 38-39.
[24] Richard Hamilton and Elizabeth Ghatala, Learning and Instruction (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994), 259.
[25] Gredler, M. and Shields, C. (2004) Does No One Read Vygotsky's Words? Commentary on Glassman. Educational Researcher 33 (2), p.21.
[26] Preston D. Feden & Robert M. Vogel, Methods of Teaching: Applying Cognitive Science to Promote Student Learning (The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc, 2003).
[27] Preston D. Feden & Robert M. Vogel, Methods of Teaching: Applying Cognitive Science to Promote Student Learning (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2003).
[28] Vygotsky, 1934; Understanding Vygotsky, Retrieved September 13, 2007 from http://www.indiana.edu/~intell/vygotsky.shtml
[29] Lev Vygotsky, Mind in Society, edited by M. Cole, V. John-Steiner, S. Scribner, and E. Souberman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 85-86.
[30] Luis C. Moll, Vygotsky & Education: Instructional Implications and Applications of Sociohistorical Psychology (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 50.
[31] Luis C. Moll, Vygotsky & Education: Instructional Implications and Applications of Sociohistorical Psychology (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 50.
[32] L. S. Vygotsky, Mind in society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1978), 90
[33] Lev Vygotsky, Thought and Speech (The M.I.T Press, 1962), Ch 4. Retrieved September 10, 2007 http://www.marxists.org/archive/vygotsky/works/words/ch04.htm
[34] "Social Development Theory (Vygotsky)", http://www.learning-theories.com/vygotskys-social-learning-theory.html.
[35] Idem.
[36] L.S. Vygotsky, Mind in Society, pg 86.
[37] Deborah J. Leong and Elena Bodrova. "Pioneers in Our Field: Lev Vygotsky – Playing to Learn. Scholastic Early Childhood Today., (2001). http://content.scholastic.com/browse/article.jsp?id=3549
[38] Preston Feden, Robert Vogel, Education (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2006), 187-190.
[39] Idem.
[40] Social Development Theory (Vygotsky), 2007, http://www.learning-theories.com/vygotskys-social-learning-theory.html
[41] Chad Galloway, Vygotsky's constructivism, 2007, http://projects.coe.uga.edu/epltt/index.php?title=Vygotsky's_constructivism
[42] Richard Hamilton and Elizabeth Ghatala, Learning and Instruction (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994), 277.
[43] Preston Feden, Robert Vogel, Education (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2006), 189.
[44] James A. Jaramillo. "Vygotsky's sociocultural theory and contributions to the development of constructivist curricula." Education. (1996), http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3673/is_199610/ai_n8734319/pg_
[45] Tharp, R. G., & Gallimore, R. (1988). Rousing minds to life. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.
[46] L. S. Vygotsky, Pedagogicheskaia psikhologiia [Pedagogical psychology], 2nd Ed. (Moscow: Pedagogika, 1991), 118.
[47] L. S. Vygotsky, "The development of scientific concepts in childhood," in Problems of general psychology, Vol. 1, Collected works of L. S. Vygotsky, ed. R. W. Rieber and A. S. Carton (New York: Plenum, 1987), 216.
[48] Margaret Gredler and Carol Shields. 2004. Does No One read Vygotsky's Words? Commentary on Glassman. Educational Researcher 33 (2). 22.
[49] Richard Hamilton and Elizabeth Ghatala, Learning and Instruction (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994), 277.
[50] Preston D. Feden & Robert M. Vogel, Methods of Teaching: Applying Cognitive Science to Promote Student Learning (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2003).
[51] Alison F. Garton and Chris Pratt, Learning to Be Literate: The Development of Spoken and Written Language (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1998), 49.
[52] Idem.
[53] University of Iowa, College of Education. n.d. Comparing Piaget and Vygotsky. http://www.education.uiowa.edu/resources/tep/eportfolio/07p075folder/Piaget_Vygotsky.htm (accessed October 3, 2007).
[54] Richard Hamilton and Elizabeth Ghatala, Learning and Instruction (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994), 254.
[55] Mooney, C.G., An Introduction to Dewey, Montessori, Erikson, Piaget & Vygotsky (St. Paul, MN: Redleaf Press, 2000), 85.
[56] "Education about and through technology: In Search of More Appropriate Pedagogical Approaches to Technology Education", http://herkeles.oulu.fi/isbn9514264878/html/x340.html.
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[61]L. S. Vygotsky, Educational Psychology, translated by Robert Silverman (Boca Raton, FL: St. Lucie Press, 1997, 50.
[62] Vygotsky. n.d. http://userwww.service.emory.edu/~pthoma4/Vygotsky.htm (accessed October 9, 2007).
[63] Michael Glassman. 2001. Dewey and Vygotsky: Society, Experience, and Inquiry in Educational Practice. Educational Researcher, 30 (4), 13.
[64] Retrieved October 6, 2007 from http://books.google.com/books?id=GUTyDVORhHkC&pg=PA50&lpg=PA50&dq=vygotsky+educational+process&source=web&ots=tukEYQGhtK&sig=Dn_NpU6EXMKrjklhZfyCZ-l0JwM#PPA50,M1
[65] L. S. Vygotsky, Mind in Society. Retrieved October 5, 2007 from http://userwww.service.emory.edu/~pthoma4/Vygotsky.htm
[66] L.S. Vygotsky, Educational Psychology, (St. Lucie Press, Florida, 1997), 47.
[67] Clabaugh, G. and Rozycki, E. School and Society, Oreland PA. NewFoundations Press 2007, p. 14.
[68] Ibid.
[69] J. Tudge. Vygotsky, the zone of proximal development and peer collaboration: Implications for classroom practice. In L.C. Moll (Ed.), Vygotsky & Education: Instructional Implications and Applications of Sociohistorical Psychology (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 157.
[70] Idem.
[71] B. Gindis. 1999. Vygotsky's Vision: Reshaping the Practice of Special Education for the 21st Century. http://www.bgcenter.com/Vygotsky_Vision.htm (accessed October 14, 2007).
[72] Luis C. Moll, Vygotsky & Education: Instructional Implications and Applications of Sociohistorical Psychology (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 1.
[73] L.S. Vygotsky. Sobraniye Sochinenii [Collected Works], Vol. 5 (Moscow: Pedagogika Publisher, 1983), 96.
[74] www.allaboutphilosophy.org/what-is-marxism-faq.htm
[75] Idem.
[76] Thomas J. Bernard. The Consensus-Conflict Debate: Form and Content in Social Theories (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 89.
[77] Ibid., 96.
[78] Idem.
[79] Idem.
[80] Karl Marx. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Marx
[81] Thomas J. Bernard. The Consensus-Conflict Debate: Form and Content in Social Theories (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 98.
[82] Conflict Theory. http://www.unc.edu/~kbm/SOCI10Spring2004/Conflict_Theory.doc.
[83] Vygotsky, L. (1962). Thought and language. Cambridge, MA. MIT Press.
[84] Richard S. Prawat. 2000. Dewey Meets the "Mozart of Psychology" in Moscow: The Untold Story. American Educational Research Journal, 37 (3). 668.
[85] Ibid., 667.
[86] Ibid., 668.
[87] Michael Cole, Introduction to "The Making of Mind." http://www.marxists.org/archive/luria/comments/cole.htm
TO TOP
Preston's Lecture Notes: Vygotsky
Please read this outline actively, and feel free to post comments or questions-- if Pound and Eliot could demonstrate the value of social learning by sending letters across the Atlantic, surely we can do it on our blog!
__________________________________________________________________________
Lev Semenovich Vygotsky and Social Learning Theory
“A word devoid of thought is a dead thing, and a thought unembodied in words remains a shadow.”
We tend to think of words and thoughts as independent entities, separated and distinct from one another. However, as we learned from our discussion on Linguistic Relativity, the relationship between thought and language is much more complex and interdependent. Vygotsky’s work in this area allows us some insight into how the collaboration between thoughts, words and interaction between individuals facilitates learning.
Most American Literature students will tell you that T.S. Eliot wrote “The Waste Land,” and any bibliographic research would appear to confirm this simple fact. However, it is simply not true. That poem was the result of a collaborative process between Eliot and Ezra Pound, in which dozens of letters and manuscripts were passed back and forth to facilitate a thought process that would not have been possible otherwise. “The Waste Land” exists as evidence of thinking between at least two creative sources, and we turn to Vygotsky for some illumination on what has come to be known as “the teachable moment.”
First some biographical facts:
• Vygotsky lived from 1896-1934
• Like several researchers/theorists we have studied, Vygotsky turned his attention to education and psychological development after exploring other fields
• Vygotsky died of TB, and his work did not become well-known in the U.S. until after the cold war
ORIGINS OF THOUGHT & LANGUAGE
• In Vygotsky’s model, the development of thought and language can be imagined as the strands of the DNA double-helix; they grow interdependently
• Around the age of 2, thought becomes verbal and speech becomes rational
• The child first uses language for superficial social interaction; later language becomes embedded and becomes the actual structure of conscious thought
WORD MEANING & CONCEPT FORMATION
• “…A problem must arise that cannot be solved otherwise than through the formation of new concepts.”
• The child solves a problem by naming it; when she doesn’t have a name, she substitutes from other sources
• Through this process, word meaning becomes the basis for concept formation
SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIVISM
• All fundamental cognitive activities take shape in context of socio-history and socio-historical development
• NOTE: this development is not innate—it is the product of activities within social institutions
• Language is crucial tool because advanced modes of thought are transmitted by means of words (here we may make a connection with Piaget’s abstract/hypothetical thinking in the formal operations stage)
ZONE OF PROXIMAL DEVELOPMENT
• Includes all functions/activities as a child/learner can perform only with assistance from someone else (adult or peer)
• EXAMPLE: I.Q. Testing/ in isolation 2 children score at 8 year-old level, and with assistance one scores at 9, one scores at 12
IMPLICATIONS
• Human learning presupposes a specific social nature
• Learning is part of a process by which children grow into the intellectual life of those around them
• Learning awakens a variety of internal processes that are able to operate ONLY when the child is in the action of interacting with people in her environment
KEYS
• Authenticity of environment
• Affinity between participants
VYGOTSKY’S INFLUENCE
• Krashen’s language acquisition theory
• Less structured, more natural/communicative/experiential approaches to learning
• Emphasis on real-world human interaction
• Assessment: Is the individual the only/best unit of analysis?
• “Teachable moment”
• Value on knowledge as a profoundly social process
• Recognition that often the epitome of ignorance is the reluctance to seek help
__________________________________________________________________________
Lev Semenovich Vygotsky and Social Learning Theory
“A word devoid of thought is a dead thing, and a thought unembodied in words remains a shadow.”
We tend to think of words and thoughts as independent entities, separated and distinct from one another. However, as we learned from our discussion on Linguistic Relativity, the relationship between thought and language is much more complex and interdependent. Vygotsky’s work in this area allows us some insight into how the collaboration between thoughts, words and interaction between individuals facilitates learning.
Most American Literature students will tell you that T.S. Eliot wrote “The Waste Land,” and any bibliographic research would appear to confirm this simple fact. However, it is simply not true. That poem was the result of a collaborative process between Eliot and Ezra Pound, in which dozens of letters and manuscripts were passed back and forth to facilitate a thought process that would not have been possible otherwise. “The Waste Land” exists as evidence of thinking between at least two creative sources, and we turn to Vygotsky for some illumination on what has come to be known as “the teachable moment.”
First some biographical facts:
• Vygotsky lived from 1896-1934
• Like several researchers/theorists we have studied, Vygotsky turned his attention to education and psychological development after exploring other fields
• Vygotsky died of TB, and his work did not become well-known in the U.S. until after the cold war
ORIGINS OF THOUGHT & LANGUAGE
• In Vygotsky’s model, the development of thought and language can be imagined as the strands of the DNA double-helix; they grow interdependently
• Around the age of 2, thought becomes verbal and speech becomes rational
• The child first uses language for superficial social interaction; later language becomes embedded and becomes the actual structure of conscious thought
WORD MEANING & CONCEPT FORMATION
• “…A problem must arise that cannot be solved otherwise than through the formation of new concepts.”
• The child solves a problem by naming it; when she doesn’t have a name, she substitutes from other sources
• Through this process, word meaning becomes the basis for concept formation
SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIVISM
• All fundamental cognitive activities take shape in context of socio-history and socio-historical development
• NOTE: this development is not innate—it is the product of activities within social institutions
• Language is crucial tool because advanced modes of thought are transmitted by means of words (here we may make a connection with Piaget’s abstract/hypothetical thinking in the formal operations stage)
ZONE OF PROXIMAL DEVELOPMENT
• Includes all functions/activities as a child/learner can perform only with assistance from someone else (adult or peer)
• EXAMPLE: I.Q. Testing/ in isolation 2 children score at 8 year-old level, and with assistance one scores at 9, one scores at 12
IMPLICATIONS
• Human learning presupposes a specific social nature
• Learning is part of a process by which children grow into the intellectual life of those around them
• Learning awakens a variety of internal processes that are able to operate ONLY when the child is in the action of interacting with people in her environment
KEYS
• Authenticity of environment
• Affinity between participants
VYGOTSKY’S INFLUENCE
• Krashen’s language acquisition theory
• Less structured, more natural/communicative/experiential approaches to learning
• Emphasis on real-world human interaction
• Assessment: Is the individual the only/best unit of analysis?
• “Teachable moment”
• Value on knowledge as a profoundly social process
• Recognition that often the epitome of ignorance is the reluctance to seek help
Zull Chapter 6
If you're a chapter 6 expert, please post your summary of the chapter as a comment to this post. Everyone is encouraged to read each summary and chime in with questions and/or ideas.
Zull Chapter 5
If you're a chapter 5 expert, please post your summary of the chapter as a comment to this post. Everyone is encouraged to read each summary and chime in with questions and/or ideas.
Zull Chapter 4
If you're a chapter 4 expert, please post your summary of the chapter as a comment to this post. Everyone is encouraged to read each summary and chime in with questions and/or ideas.
Sunday, November 16, 2008
Week 4 Resources
Please publish your resources for week 4 (November 18) as comments to this post. Thanks!
Saturday, November 8, 2008
Week 3 Resources
Please publish your resources for week 3 (November 11) as comments to this post. Thanks!
Skinner Quiz
Test your expertise by answering the following questions. Please either post your answers, or a general comment about your confidence in your knowledge, so that I have an idea of how much time we need to spend discussing/reviewing on Tuesday.
1. Define operant conditioning and describe an example.
2. According to Skinner, what is the likely outcome when a behavior is followed by a reinforcing stimulus?
3. Describe the difference between Skinner's schedules of reinforcement (i.e., continuous, fixed interval, fixed ratio, variable).
4. Define shaping and describe an example.
5. What is the difference between negative reinforcement and punishment?
6. What does Skinner's approach suggest about his view of human nature? Do you agree?
1. Define operant conditioning and describe an example.
2. According to Skinner, what is the likely outcome when a behavior is followed by a reinforcing stimulus?
3. Describe the difference between Skinner's schedules of reinforcement (i.e., continuous, fixed interval, fixed ratio, variable).
4. Define shaping and describe an example.
5. What is the difference between negative reinforcement and punishment?
6. What does Skinner's approach suggest about his view of human nature? Do you agree?
Week 2 Resources
Following are the resources for which I received hard copies on 11/4. If you don't see yours here, please post it as a comment.
www.brainpop.com
(submitted by Sarah Duarte)
This resource is a website I use in my classroom. BrainPop is an online animated educational program that includes videos and quizzes. Tim (a human) and Moby (a robot) are the characters that teach lessons from all subjects that align with state standards. BrainPop makes learning fun for kids because it is funny and interactive. BrainPop is relevant to ED 606 because it covers the brain and how the brain functions in one of its health video lessons. It also covers neurons.
http://www.molecularstation.com/science-news/2008/07/brain-function-and-learning
(submitted by Debbie Trujillo)
This article goes along with the first chapter of THE ART OF CHANGING THE BRAIN by James E. Zull, beginning with the assertion that neuroscientists at Georgetown University Medical Center have recently "solved a mystery that lies at the heart of human learning" that may explain some forms of mental retardation and overall brain functioning. Read the article to learn more about a specific gene, BDNF, that is indirectly responsible for the neuronal connections that facilitate memory and learning.
www.brainpop.com
(submitted by Sarah Duarte)
This resource is a website I use in my classroom. BrainPop is an online animated educational program that includes videos and quizzes. Tim (a human) and Moby (a robot) are the characters that teach lessons from all subjects that align with state standards. BrainPop makes learning fun for kids because it is funny and interactive. BrainPop is relevant to ED 606 because it covers the brain and how the brain functions in one of its health video lessons. It also covers neurons.
http://www.molecularstation.com/science-news/2008/07/brain-function-and-learning
(submitted by Debbie Trujillo)
This article goes along with the first chapter of THE ART OF CHANGING THE BRAIN by James E. Zull, beginning with the assertion that neuroscientists at Georgetown University Medical Center have recently "solved a mystery that lies at the heart of human learning" that may explain some forms of mental retardation and overall brain functioning. Read the article to learn more about a specific gene, BDNF, that is indirectly responsible for the neuronal connections that facilitate memory and learning.
Tuesday, November 4, 2008
B.F. Skinner & Behaviorist Theory
B.F. Skinner & Behaviorist Theory
B.F. Skinner (1904-1990) was a well-known psychologist and Harvard professor whose theory of Radical Behaviorism has greatly influenced American psychology and public education policy. Skinner’s book Verbal Behavior proposed that human language is not a function of free will, personality, or purpose, but of operant conditioning, just like any other behavior.
Operant conditioning is the relationship between an individual organism and the world around it. The organism operates on its environment in a series of actions that last a lifetime. I bounce a ball, breathe, turn the key in my car’s ignition. Every moment I act the environment responds. Once in a while it responds kindly, in a way that makes us want to feel the effect again. So, according to Skinner, we assume that we cause the effect, and if we repeat the behavior that immediately preceded the effect the first time then it will happen again. Skinner called this positive environmental feedback a reinforcing stimulus or reinforcer. The reinforcer increases the operant, the preceding behavior that the organism believes causes the effect.
To test his theories, Skinner built a contraption called the operant conditioning chamber. The cage contains a lever on one side. When a rat or mouse pushes the lever a food pellet is released into the cage. The rat may or may not see a lot of action in this cage, but it doesn’t compare to getting fed whenever she presses the lever. This rat comes to associate this particular operant with a very pleasant reinforcer, which further encourages her to repeat the operant.
Here are two sets of notes on Skinner. Please read them actively (print and mark up the text, take notes, jot down questions). We will spend some time next week discussing the major ideas and implications, as well as the influence of Pavlov. For your journals, I’d like you to focus on the application of Skinner’s theories. Do you see evidence of these ideas in schools? Does the Radical Behaviorist approach work?
ARTICLE/NOTES 1: http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/skinner.html
B. F. SKINNER
1904 - 1990
Dr. C. George Boeree
Biography
Burrhus Frederic Skinner was born March 20, 1904, in the small Pennsylvania town of Susquehanna. His father was a lawyer, and his mother a strong and intelligent housewife. His upbringing was old-fashioned and hard-working.
Burrhus was an active, out-going boy who loved the outdoors and building things, and actually enjoyed school. His life was not without its tragedies, however. In particular, his brother died at the age of 16 of a cerebral aneurysm.
Burrhus received his BA in English from Hamilton College in upstate New York. He didn’t fit in very well, not enjoying the fraternity parties or the football games. He wrote for school paper, including articles critical of the school, the faculty, and even Phi Beta Kappa! To top it off, he was an atheist -- in a school that required daily chapel attendance.
He wanted to be a writer and did try, sending off poetry and short stories. When he graduated, he built a study in his parents’ attic to concentrate, but it just wasn’t working for him.
Ultimately, he resigned himself to writing newspaper articles on labor problems, and lived for a while in Greenwich Village in New York City as a “bohemian.” After some traveling, he decided to go back to school, this time at Harvard. He got his masters in psychology in 1930 and his doctorate in 1931, and stayed there to do research until 1936.
Also in that year, he moved to Minneapolis to teach at the University of Minnesota. There he met and soon married Yvonne Blue. They had two daughters, the second of which became famous as the first infant to be raised in one of Skinner’s inventions, the air crib. Although it was nothing more than a combination crib and playpen with glass sides and air conditioning, it looked too much like keeping a baby in an aquarium to catch on.
In 1945, he became the chairman of the psychology department at Indiana University. In 1948, he was invited to come to Harvard, where he remained for the rest of his life. He was a very active man, doing research and guiding hundreds of doctoral candidates as well as writing many books. While not successful as a writer of fiction and poetry, he became one of our best psychology writers, including the book Walden II, which is a fictional account of a community run by his behaviorist principles.
August 18, 1990, B. F. Skinner died of leukemia after becoming perhaps the most celebrated psychologist since Sigmund Freud.
Theory
B. F. Skinner’s entire system is based on operant conditioning. The organism is in the process of “operating” on the environment, which in ordinary terms means it is bouncing around its world, doing what it does. During this “operating,” the organism encounters a special kind of stimulus, called a reinforcing stimulus, or simply a reinforcer. This special stimulus has the effect of increasing the operant -- that is, the behavior occurring just before the reinforcer. This is operant conditioning: “the behavior is followed by a consequence, and the nature of the consequence modifies the organisms tendency to repeat the behavior in the future.”
Imagine a rat in a cage. This is a special cage (called, in fact, a “Skinner box”) that has a bar or pedal on one wall that, when pressed, causes a little mechanism to release a food pellet into the cage. The rat is bouncing around the cage, doing whatever it is rats do, when he accidentally presses the bar and -- hey, presto! -- a food pellet falls into the cage! The operant is the behavior just prior to the reinforcer, which is the food pellet, of course. In no time at all, the rat is furiously peddling away at the bar, hoarding his pile of pellets in the corner of the cage.
A behavior followed by a reinforcing stimulus results in an increased probability of that behavior occurring in the future.
What if you don’t give the rat any more pellets? Apparently, he’s no fool, and after a few futile attempts, he stops his bar-pressing behavior. This is called extinction of the operant behavior.
A behavior no longer followed by the reinforcing stimulus results in a decreased probability of that behavior occurring in the future.
Now, if you were to turn the pellet machine back on, so that pressing the bar again provides the rat with pellets, the behavior of bar-pushing will “pop” right back into existence, much more quickly than it took for the rat to learn the behavior the first time. This is because the return of the reinforcer takes place in the context of a reinforcement history that goes all the way back to the very first time the rat was reinforced for pushing on the bar!
Schedules of reinforcement
Skinner likes to tell about how he “accidentally -- i.e. operantly -- came across his various discoveries. For example, he talks about running low on food pellets in the middle of a study. Now, these were the days before “Purina rat chow” and the like, so Skinner had to make his own rat pellets, a slow and tedious task. So he decided to reduce the number of reinforcements he gave his rats for whatever behavior he was trying to condition, and, lo and behold, the rats kept up their operant behaviors, and at a stable rate, no less. This is how Skinner discovered schedules of reinforcement!
Continuous reinforcement is the original scenario: Every time that the rat does the behavior (such as pedal-pushing), he gets a rat goodie.
The fixed ratio schedule was the first one Skinner discovered: If the rat presses the pedal three times, say, he gets a goodie. Or five times. Or twenty times. Or “x” times. There is a fixed ratio between behaviors and reinforcers: 3 to 1, 5 to 1, 20 to 1, etc. This is a little like “piece rate” in the clothing manufacturing industry: You get paid so much for so many shirts.
The fixed interval schedule uses a timing device of some sort. If the rat presses the bar at least once during a particular stretch of time (say 20 seconds), then he gets a goodie. If he fails to do so, he doesn’t get a goodie. But even if he hits that bar a hundred times during that 20 seconds, he still only gets one goodie! One strange thing that happens is that the rats tend to “pace” themselves: They slow down the rate of their behavior right after the reinforcer, and speed up when the time for it gets close.
Skinner also looked at variable schedules. Variable ratio means you change the “x” each time -- first it takes 3 presses to get a goodie, then 10, then 1, then 7 and so on. Variable interval means you keep changing the time period -- first 20 seconds, then 5, then 35, then 10 and so on.
In both cases, it keeps the rats on their rat toes. With the variable interval schedule, they no longer “pace” themselves, because they can no longer establish a “rhythm” between behavior and reward. Most importantly, these schedules are very resistant to extinction. It makes sense, if you think about it. If you haven’t gotten a reinforcer for a while, well, it could just be that you are at a particularly “bad” ratio or interval! Just one more bar press, maybe this’ll be the one!
This, according to Skinner, is the mechanism of gambling. You may not win very often, but you never know whether and when you’ll win again. It could be the very next time, and if you don’t roll them dice, or play that hand, or bet on that number this once, you’ll miss on the score of the century!
Shaping
A question Skinner had to deal with was how we get to more complex sorts of behaviors. He responded with the idea of shaping, or “the method of successive approximations.” Basically, it involves first reinforcing a behavior only vaguely similar to the one desired. Once that is established, you look out for variations that come a little closer to what you want, and so on, until you have the animal performing a behavior that would never show up in ordinary life. Skinner and his students have been quite successful in teaching simple animals to do some quite extraordinary things. My favorite is teaching pigeons to bowl!
I used shaping on one of my daughters once. She was about three or four years old, and was afraid to go down a particular slide. So I picked her up, put her at the end of the slide, asked if she was okay and if she could jump down. She did, of course, and I showered her with praise. I then picked her up and put her a foot or so up the slide, asked her if she was okay, and asked her to slide down and jump off. So far so good. I repeated this again and again, each time moving her a little up the slide, and backing off if she got nervous. Eventually, I could put her at the top of the slide and she could slide all the way down and jump off. Unfortunately, she still couldn’t climb up the ladder, so I was a very busy father for a while.
This is the same method that is used in the therapy called systematic desensitization, invented by another behaviorist named Joseph Wolpe. A person with a phobia -- say of spiders -- would be asked to come up with ten scenarios involving spiders and panic of one degree or another. The first scenario would be a very mild one -- say seeing a small spider at a great distance outdoors. The second would be a little more scary, and so on, until the tenth scenario would involve something totally terrifying -- say a tarantula climbing on your face while you’re driving your car at a hundred miles an hour! The therapist will then teach you how to relax your muscles -- which is incompatible with anxiety. After you practice that for a few days, you come back and you and the therapist go through your scenarios, one step at a time, making sure you stay relaxed, backing off if necessary, until you can finally imagine the tarantula while remaining perfectly tension-free.
This is a technique quite near and dear to me because I did in fact have a spider phobia, and did in fact get rid of it with systematic desensitization. It worked so well that, after one session (beyond the original scenario-writing and muscle-training session) I could go out an pick up a daddy-long-legs. Cool.
Beyond these fairly simple examples, shaping also accounts for the most complex of behaviors. You don’t, for example, become a brain surgeon by stumbling into an operating theater, cutting open someone's head, successfully removing a tumor, and being rewarded with prestige and a hefty paycheck, along the lines of the rat in the Skinner box. Instead, you are gently shaped by your environment to enjoy certain things, do well in school, take a certain bio class, see a doctor movie perhaps, have a good hospital visit, enter med school, be encouraged to drift towards brain surgery as a speciality, and so on. This could be something your parents were carefully doing to you, as if you were a rat in a cage. But much more likely, this is something that was more or less unintentional.
Aversive stimuli
An aversive stimulus is the opposite of a reinforcing stimulus, something we might find unpleasant or painful.
A behavior followed by an aversive stimulus results in a decreased probability of the behavior occurring in the future.
This both defines an aversive stimulus and describes the form of conditioning known as punishment. If you shock a rat for doing x, it’ll do a lot less of x. If you spank Johnny for throwing his toys he will throw his toys less and less (maybe).
On the other hand, if you remove an already active aversive stimulus after a rat or Johnny performs a certain behavior, you are doing negative reinforcement. If you turn off the electricity when the rat stands on his hind legs, he’ll do a lot more standing. If you stop your perpetually nagging when I finally take out the garbage, I’ll be more likely to take out the garbage (perhaps). You could say it “feels so good” when the aversive stimulus stops, that this serves as a reinforcer!
Behavior followed by the removal of an aversive stimulus results in an increased probability of that behavior occurring in the future.
Notice how difficult it can be to distinguish some forms of negative reinforcement from positive reinforcement: If I starve you, is the food I give you when you do what I want a positive -- i.e. a reinforcer? Or is it the removal of a negative -- i.e. the aversive stimulus of hunger?
Skinner (contrary to some stereotypes that have arisen about behaviorists) doesn’t “approve” of the use of aversive stimuli -- not because of ethics, but because they don’t work well! Notice that I said earlier that Johnny will maybe stop throwing his toys, and that I perhaps will take out the garbage? That’s because whatever was reinforcing the bad behaviors hasn’t been removed, as it would’ve been in the case of extinction. This hidden reinforcer has just been “covered up” with a conflicting aversive stimulus. So, sure, sometimes the child (or me) will behave -- but it still feels good to throw those toys. All Johnny needs to do is wait till you’re out of the room, or find a way to blame it on his brother, or in some way escape the consequences, and he’s back to his old ways. In fact, because Johnny now only gets to enjoy his reinforcer occasionally, he’s gone into a variable schedule of reinforcement, and he’ll be even more resistant to extinction than ever!
Behavior modification
Behavior modification -- often referred to as b-mod -- is the therapy technique based on Skinner’s work. It is very straight-forward: Extinguish an undesirable behavior (by removing the reinforcer) and replace it with a desirable behavior by reinforcement. It has been used on all sorts of psychological problems -- addictions, neuroses, shyness, autism, even schizophrenia -- and works particularly well with children. There are examples of back-ward psychotics who haven’t communicated with others for years who have been conditioned to behave themselves in fairly normal ways, such as eating with a knife and fork, taking care of their own hygiene needs, dressing themselves, and so on.
There is an offshoot of b-mod called the token economy. This is used primarily in institutions such as psychiatric hospitals, juvenile halls, and prisons. Certain rules are made explicit in the institution, and behaving yourself appropriately is rewarded with tokens -- poker chips, tickets, funny money, recorded notes, etc. Certain poor behavior is also often followed by a withdrawal of these tokens. The tokens can be traded in for desirable things such as candy, cigarettes, games, movies, time out of the institution, and so on. This has been found to be very effective in maintaining order in these often difficult institutions.
There is a drawback to token economy: When an “inmate” of one of these institutions leaves, they return to an environment that reinforces the kinds of behaviors that got them into the institution in the first place. The psychotic’s family may be thoroughly dysfunctional. The juvenile offender may go right back to “the ‘hood.” No one is giving them tokens for eating politely. The only reinforcements may be attention for “acting out,” or some gang glory for robbing a Seven-Eleven. In other words, the environment doesn’t travel well!
Walden II
Skinner started his career as an English major, writing poems and short stories. He has, of course, written a large number of papers and books on behaviorism. But he will probably be most remembered by the general run of readers for his book Walden II, wherein he describes a utopia-like commune run on his operant principles.
People, especially the religious right, came down hard on his book. They said that his ideas take away our freedom and dignity as human beings. He responded to the sea of criticism with another book (one of his best) called Beyond Freedom and Dignity. He asked: What do we mean when we say we want to be free? Usually we mean we don’t want to be in a society that punishes us for doing what we want to do. Okay -- aversive stimuli don’t work well anyway, so out with them! Instead, we’ll only use reinforcers to “control” society. And if we pick the right reinforcers, we will feel free, because we will be doing what we feel we want!
Likewise for dignity. When we say “she died with dignity,” what do we mean? We mean she kept up her “good” behaviors without any apparent ulterior motives. In fact, she kept her dignity because her reinforcement history has led her to see behaving in that "dignified" manner as more reinforcing than making a scene.
The bad do bad because the bad is rewarded. The good do good because the good is rewarded. There is no true freedom or dignity. Right now, our reinforcers for good and bad behavior are chaotic and out of our control -- it’s a matter of having good or bad luck with your “choice” of parents, teachers, peers, and other influences. Let’s instead take control, as a society, and design our culture in such a way that good gets rewarded and bad gets extinguished! With the right behavioral technology, we can design culture.
Both freedom and dignity are examples of what Skinner calls mentalistic constructs -- unobservable and so useless for a scientific psychology. Other examples include defense mechanisms, the unconscious, archetypes, fictional finalisms, coping strategies, self-actualization, consciousness, even things like hunger and thirst. The most important example is what he refers to as the homunculus -- Latin for “the little man” -- that supposedly resides inside us and is used to explain our behavior, ideas like soul, mind, ego, will, self, and, of course, personality.
Instead, Skinner recommends that psychologists concentrate on observables, that is, the environment and our behavior in it.
Readings
Whether you agree with him or not, Skinner is a good writer and fun to read. I’ve already mentioned Walden II and Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971). The best summary of his theory is the book About Behaviorism (1974).
Copyright 1998, 2006 C. George Boeree
________________________________________________________________
NOTES 2: http://www.coe.uh.edu/courses/cuin6373/idhistory/skinner.html
B. F. Skinner
Burrhus Frederic Skinner(1904-90) was a psychologist. Born in Susquhanna, Pa., he studied at Harvard, teaching there from 1931-6 and again from 1947-74. A leading behaviorist, he was a proponent of operant conditioning, and the inventor of the Skinner box for facilitating experimental observations.
Research for testing and instruction continued to be piecemeal until the work of B.F. Skinner. Skinner's research was in stimulus-response and reinforcement. His research contributed to an understanding of the usefulness and application of teaching machines. He stated that, although positive reinforcement has been proven important in learning, schools use little reinforcement but instead use aversive control. Skinner (1954) also noted that the learning process should be divided into "a very large number of very small steps and reinforcement must be contingent upon the accomplishment of each step." Skinner also stated that by making the steps of learning small, the frequency of reinforcement can be increased and the frequency of being wrong is reduced.
In order to accomplish the goal of positive reinforcement delivered frequently to reward small steps in the learning process, Skinner suggested using mechanical devices. He noted that the teacher was not able to succeed in implementing increasing reinforcement because of the limitations of class size and styles of teaching and grading being used. Skinner (1954) stated:
If the teacher is to take advantage of recent advances in the study of learning, she must have the help of mechanical devices. The technical problem of providing the necessary instrumental aid is not particularly difficult. There are many ways in which the necessary contingencies may be arranged, either mechanically or electrically...The important features on the device are these: Reinforcement for the right answer is immediate. The mere manipulation of the device will probably be reinforcing enough to keep the average student at work for a suitable period each day, provided traces of earlier aversive control can be wiped out. A teacher may supervise an entire class at work on such devices at the same time, yet each child may progress at his own rate, completing as many problems as possible within the class period. If forced to be away from school, he may return where he left off. The gifted child will advance rapidly, but can be kept from getting too far ahead either by being excused from arithmetic for a time or by being given special sets of problems which take him into some of the interesting by-paths of mathematics. The device makes it possible to present carefully designed material in which one problem can depend upon the answer to the preceding and where, therefore the most progress to an eventually complex repertoire can be made. ( p. 95)
Skinner concluded with the theory that the proposed changes would free the teacher for more important functions and that mechanized instruction should be integrated into all schools, not as a replacement for, but as an adjunct to the teacher.
Skinner (1958) later developed a machine that was built on Pressey's model but differed in several ways. He stated that a teaching machine should have several important features. First, the student should compose his response rather than select it from a set of possible answers. Skinner supported this idea with the fact that responses should be recalled, not simply recognized, and that wrong selections may seem out of place and strengthen unwanted recall. Second, Skinner stated that a teaching machine should present information in a carefully designed sequence of steps.
Skinner also noted that the machine itself does not teach, but brings the student into contact with the person who composed the material it presented. The machine is a labor-saving device because it can bring one programmer into contact with an infinite number of students.
Skinner (1958) compared his teaching machine to a private tutor. The machine induces sustained activity while keeping the student active and busy and would not allow the student to proceed unless he understands the materials. The material is presented in sequence as the student is ready to receive it. The machine helps the student arrive at the correct answer both by a logical presentation of material and by "hinting, prompting, suggesting, and so on, derived from an analysis of verbal behavior" (1958, p. 971). Finally Skinner stated that the machine reinforces the student for every correct response with immediate feedback.
Another important part of Skinner's research included the program that the teaching machine contained. Skinner developed the concept of nearly errorless learning through two ideas - prompting and fading. Prompting was used to construct the correct or desired response; fading was the gradual withdrawing of stimulus supports. Both techniques were used to promote efficient learning.
Skinner's ideas launched the programmed instruction movement in the United States. Skinner's ideas attracted many followers who embraced the idea of programmed instruction as the first truly efficient method of learning.
B.F. Skinner (1904-1990) was a well-known psychologist and Harvard professor whose theory of Radical Behaviorism has greatly influenced American psychology and public education policy. Skinner’s book Verbal Behavior proposed that human language is not a function of free will, personality, or purpose, but of operant conditioning, just like any other behavior.
Operant conditioning is the relationship between an individual organism and the world around it. The organism operates on its environment in a series of actions that last a lifetime. I bounce a ball, breathe, turn the key in my car’s ignition. Every moment I act the environment responds. Once in a while it responds kindly, in a way that makes us want to feel the effect again. So, according to Skinner, we assume that we cause the effect, and if we repeat the behavior that immediately preceded the effect the first time then it will happen again. Skinner called this positive environmental feedback a reinforcing stimulus or reinforcer. The reinforcer increases the operant, the preceding behavior that the organism believes causes the effect.
To test his theories, Skinner built a contraption called the operant conditioning chamber. The cage contains a lever on one side. When a rat or mouse pushes the lever a food pellet is released into the cage. The rat may or may not see a lot of action in this cage, but it doesn’t compare to getting fed whenever she presses the lever. This rat comes to associate this particular operant with a very pleasant reinforcer, which further encourages her to repeat the operant.
Here are two sets of notes on Skinner. Please read them actively (print and mark up the text, take notes, jot down questions). We will spend some time next week discussing the major ideas and implications, as well as the influence of Pavlov. For your journals, I’d like you to focus on the application of Skinner’s theories. Do you see evidence of these ideas in schools? Does the Radical Behaviorist approach work?
ARTICLE/NOTES 1: http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/skinner.html
B. F. SKINNER
1904 - 1990
Dr. C. George Boeree
Biography
Burrhus Frederic Skinner was born March 20, 1904, in the small Pennsylvania town of Susquehanna. His father was a lawyer, and his mother a strong and intelligent housewife. His upbringing was old-fashioned and hard-working.
Burrhus was an active, out-going boy who loved the outdoors and building things, and actually enjoyed school. His life was not without its tragedies, however. In particular, his brother died at the age of 16 of a cerebral aneurysm.
Burrhus received his BA in English from Hamilton College in upstate New York. He didn’t fit in very well, not enjoying the fraternity parties or the football games. He wrote for school paper, including articles critical of the school, the faculty, and even Phi Beta Kappa! To top it off, he was an atheist -- in a school that required daily chapel attendance.
He wanted to be a writer and did try, sending off poetry and short stories. When he graduated, he built a study in his parents’ attic to concentrate, but it just wasn’t working for him.
Ultimately, he resigned himself to writing newspaper articles on labor problems, and lived for a while in Greenwich Village in New York City as a “bohemian.” After some traveling, he decided to go back to school, this time at Harvard. He got his masters in psychology in 1930 and his doctorate in 1931, and stayed there to do research until 1936.
Also in that year, he moved to Minneapolis to teach at the University of Minnesota. There he met and soon married Yvonne Blue. They had two daughters, the second of which became famous as the first infant to be raised in one of Skinner’s inventions, the air crib. Although it was nothing more than a combination crib and playpen with glass sides and air conditioning, it looked too much like keeping a baby in an aquarium to catch on.
In 1945, he became the chairman of the psychology department at Indiana University. In 1948, he was invited to come to Harvard, where he remained for the rest of his life. He was a very active man, doing research and guiding hundreds of doctoral candidates as well as writing many books. While not successful as a writer of fiction and poetry, he became one of our best psychology writers, including the book Walden II, which is a fictional account of a community run by his behaviorist principles.
August 18, 1990, B. F. Skinner died of leukemia after becoming perhaps the most celebrated psychologist since Sigmund Freud.
Theory
B. F. Skinner’s entire system is based on operant conditioning. The organism is in the process of “operating” on the environment, which in ordinary terms means it is bouncing around its world, doing what it does. During this “operating,” the organism encounters a special kind of stimulus, called a reinforcing stimulus, or simply a reinforcer. This special stimulus has the effect of increasing the operant -- that is, the behavior occurring just before the reinforcer. This is operant conditioning: “the behavior is followed by a consequence, and the nature of the consequence modifies the organisms tendency to repeat the behavior in the future.”
Imagine a rat in a cage. This is a special cage (called, in fact, a “Skinner box”) that has a bar or pedal on one wall that, when pressed, causes a little mechanism to release a food pellet into the cage. The rat is bouncing around the cage, doing whatever it is rats do, when he accidentally presses the bar and -- hey, presto! -- a food pellet falls into the cage! The operant is the behavior just prior to the reinforcer, which is the food pellet, of course. In no time at all, the rat is furiously peddling away at the bar, hoarding his pile of pellets in the corner of the cage.
A behavior followed by a reinforcing stimulus results in an increased probability of that behavior occurring in the future.
What if you don’t give the rat any more pellets? Apparently, he’s no fool, and after a few futile attempts, he stops his bar-pressing behavior. This is called extinction of the operant behavior.
A behavior no longer followed by the reinforcing stimulus results in a decreased probability of that behavior occurring in the future.
Now, if you were to turn the pellet machine back on, so that pressing the bar again provides the rat with pellets, the behavior of bar-pushing will “pop” right back into existence, much more quickly than it took for the rat to learn the behavior the first time. This is because the return of the reinforcer takes place in the context of a reinforcement history that goes all the way back to the very first time the rat was reinforced for pushing on the bar!
Schedules of reinforcement
Skinner likes to tell about how he “accidentally -- i.e. operantly -- came across his various discoveries. For example, he talks about running low on food pellets in the middle of a study. Now, these were the days before “Purina rat chow” and the like, so Skinner had to make his own rat pellets, a slow and tedious task. So he decided to reduce the number of reinforcements he gave his rats for whatever behavior he was trying to condition, and, lo and behold, the rats kept up their operant behaviors, and at a stable rate, no less. This is how Skinner discovered schedules of reinforcement!
Continuous reinforcement is the original scenario: Every time that the rat does the behavior (such as pedal-pushing), he gets a rat goodie.
The fixed ratio schedule was the first one Skinner discovered: If the rat presses the pedal three times, say, he gets a goodie. Or five times. Or twenty times. Or “x” times. There is a fixed ratio between behaviors and reinforcers: 3 to 1, 5 to 1, 20 to 1, etc. This is a little like “piece rate” in the clothing manufacturing industry: You get paid so much for so many shirts.
The fixed interval schedule uses a timing device of some sort. If the rat presses the bar at least once during a particular stretch of time (say 20 seconds), then he gets a goodie. If he fails to do so, he doesn’t get a goodie. But even if he hits that bar a hundred times during that 20 seconds, he still only gets one goodie! One strange thing that happens is that the rats tend to “pace” themselves: They slow down the rate of their behavior right after the reinforcer, and speed up when the time for it gets close.
Skinner also looked at variable schedules. Variable ratio means you change the “x” each time -- first it takes 3 presses to get a goodie, then 10, then 1, then 7 and so on. Variable interval means you keep changing the time period -- first 20 seconds, then 5, then 35, then 10 and so on.
In both cases, it keeps the rats on their rat toes. With the variable interval schedule, they no longer “pace” themselves, because they can no longer establish a “rhythm” between behavior and reward. Most importantly, these schedules are very resistant to extinction. It makes sense, if you think about it. If you haven’t gotten a reinforcer for a while, well, it could just be that you are at a particularly “bad” ratio or interval! Just one more bar press, maybe this’ll be the one!
This, according to Skinner, is the mechanism of gambling. You may not win very often, but you never know whether and when you’ll win again. It could be the very next time, and if you don’t roll them dice, or play that hand, or bet on that number this once, you’ll miss on the score of the century!
Shaping
A question Skinner had to deal with was how we get to more complex sorts of behaviors. He responded with the idea of shaping, or “the method of successive approximations.” Basically, it involves first reinforcing a behavior only vaguely similar to the one desired. Once that is established, you look out for variations that come a little closer to what you want, and so on, until you have the animal performing a behavior that would never show up in ordinary life. Skinner and his students have been quite successful in teaching simple animals to do some quite extraordinary things. My favorite is teaching pigeons to bowl!
I used shaping on one of my daughters once. She was about three or four years old, and was afraid to go down a particular slide. So I picked her up, put her at the end of the slide, asked if she was okay and if she could jump down. She did, of course, and I showered her with praise. I then picked her up and put her a foot or so up the slide, asked her if she was okay, and asked her to slide down and jump off. So far so good. I repeated this again and again, each time moving her a little up the slide, and backing off if she got nervous. Eventually, I could put her at the top of the slide and she could slide all the way down and jump off. Unfortunately, she still couldn’t climb up the ladder, so I was a very busy father for a while.
This is the same method that is used in the therapy called systematic desensitization, invented by another behaviorist named Joseph Wolpe. A person with a phobia -- say of spiders -- would be asked to come up with ten scenarios involving spiders and panic of one degree or another. The first scenario would be a very mild one -- say seeing a small spider at a great distance outdoors. The second would be a little more scary, and so on, until the tenth scenario would involve something totally terrifying -- say a tarantula climbing on your face while you’re driving your car at a hundred miles an hour! The therapist will then teach you how to relax your muscles -- which is incompatible with anxiety. After you practice that for a few days, you come back and you and the therapist go through your scenarios, one step at a time, making sure you stay relaxed, backing off if necessary, until you can finally imagine the tarantula while remaining perfectly tension-free.
This is a technique quite near and dear to me because I did in fact have a spider phobia, and did in fact get rid of it with systematic desensitization. It worked so well that, after one session (beyond the original scenario-writing and muscle-training session) I could go out an pick up a daddy-long-legs. Cool.
Beyond these fairly simple examples, shaping also accounts for the most complex of behaviors. You don’t, for example, become a brain surgeon by stumbling into an operating theater, cutting open someone's head, successfully removing a tumor, and being rewarded with prestige and a hefty paycheck, along the lines of the rat in the Skinner box. Instead, you are gently shaped by your environment to enjoy certain things, do well in school, take a certain bio class, see a doctor movie perhaps, have a good hospital visit, enter med school, be encouraged to drift towards brain surgery as a speciality, and so on. This could be something your parents were carefully doing to you, as if you were a rat in a cage. But much more likely, this is something that was more or less unintentional.
Aversive stimuli
An aversive stimulus is the opposite of a reinforcing stimulus, something we might find unpleasant or painful.
A behavior followed by an aversive stimulus results in a decreased probability of the behavior occurring in the future.
This both defines an aversive stimulus and describes the form of conditioning known as punishment. If you shock a rat for doing x, it’ll do a lot less of x. If you spank Johnny for throwing his toys he will throw his toys less and less (maybe).
On the other hand, if you remove an already active aversive stimulus after a rat or Johnny performs a certain behavior, you are doing negative reinforcement. If you turn off the electricity when the rat stands on his hind legs, he’ll do a lot more standing. If you stop your perpetually nagging when I finally take out the garbage, I’ll be more likely to take out the garbage (perhaps). You could say it “feels so good” when the aversive stimulus stops, that this serves as a reinforcer!
Behavior followed by the removal of an aversive stimulus results in an increased probability of that behavior occurring in the future.
Notice how difficult it can be to distinguish some forms of negative reinforcement from positive reinforcement: If I starve you, is the food I give you when you do what I want a positive -- i.e. a reinforcer? Or is it the removal of a negative -- i.e. the aversive stimulus of hunger?
Skinner (contrary to some stereotypes that have arisen about behaviorists) doesn’t “approve” of the use of aversive stimuli -- not because of ethics, but because they don’t work well! Notice that I said earlier that Johnny will maybe stop throwing his toys, and that I perhaps will take out the garbage? That’s because whatever was reinforcing the bad behaviors hasn’t been removed, as it would’ve been in the case of extinction. This hidden reinforcer has just been “covered up” with a conflicting aversive stimulus. So, sure, sometimes the child (or me) will behave -- but it still feels good to throw those toys. All Johnny needs to do is wait till you’re out of the room, or find a way to blame it on his brother, or in some way escape the consequences, and he’s back to his old ways. In fact, because Johnny now only gets to enjoy his reinforcer occasionally, he’s gone into a variable schedule of reinforcement, and he’ll be even more resistant to extinction than ever!
Behavior modification
Behavior modification -- often referred to as b-mod -- is the therapy technique based on Skinner’s work. It is very straight-forward: Extinguish an undesirable behavior (by removing the reinforcer) and replace it with a desirable behavior by reinforcement. It has been used on all sorts of psychological problems -- addictions, neuroses, shyness, autism, even schizophrenia -- and works particularly well with children. There are examples of back-ward psychotics who haven’t communicated with others for years who have been conditioned to behave themselves in fairly normal ways, such as eating with a knife and fork, taking care of their own hygiene needs, dressing themselves, and so on.
There is an offshoot of b-mod called the token economy. This is used primarily in institutions such as psychiatric hospitals, juvenile halls, and prisons. Certain rules are made explicit in the institution, and behaving yourself appropriately is rewarded with tokens -- poker chips, tickets, funny money, recorded notes, etc. Certain poor behavior is also often followed by a withdrawal of these tokens. The tokens can be traded in for desirable things such as candy, cigarettes, games, movies, time out of the institution, and so on. This has been found to be very effective in maintaining order in these often difficult institutions.
There is a drawback to token economy: When an “inmate” of one of these institutions leaves, they return to an environment that reinforces the kinds of behaviors that got them into the institution in the first place. The psychotic’s family may be thoroughly dysfunctional. The juvenile offender may go right back to “the ‘hood.” No one is giving them tokens for eating politely. The only reinforcements may be attention for “acting out,” or some gang glory for robbing a Seven-Eleven. In other words, the environment doesn’t travel well!
Walden II
Skinner started his career as an English major, writing poems and short stories. He has, of course, written a large number of papers and books on behaviorism. But he will probably be most remembered by the general run of readers for his book Walden II, wherein he describes a utopia-like commune run on his operant principles.
People, especially the religious right, came down hard on his book. They said that his ideas take away our freedom and dignity as human beings. He responded to the sea of criticism with another book (one of his best) called Beyond Freedom and Dignity. He asked: What do we mean when we say we want to be free? Usually we mean we don’t want to be in a society that punishes us for doing what we want to do. Okay -- aversive stimuli don’t work well anyway, so out with them! Instead, we’ll only use reinforcers to “control” society. And if we pick the right reinforcers, we will feel free, because we will be doing what we feel we want!
Likewise for dignity. When we say “she died with dignity,” what do we mean? We mean she kept up her “good” behaviors without any apparent ulterior motives. In fact, she kept her dignity because her reinforcement history has led her to see behaving in that "dignified" manner as more reinforcing than making a scene.
The bad do bad because the bad is rewarded. The good do good because the good is rewarded. There is no true freedom or dignity. Right now, our reinforcers for good and bad behavior are chaotic and out of our control -- it’s a matter of having good or bad luck with your “choice” of parents, teachers, peers, and other influences. Let’s instead take control, as a society, and design our culture in such a way that good gets rewarded and bad gets extinguished! With the right behavioral technology, we can design culture.
Both freedom and dignity are examples of what Skinner calls mentalistic constructs -- unobservable and so useless for a scientific psychology. Other examples include defense mechanisms, the unconscious, archetypes, fictional finalisms, coping strategies, self-actualization, consciousness, even things like hunger and thirst. The most important example is what he refers to as the homunculus -- Latin for “the little man” -- that supposedly resides inside us and is used to explain our behavior, ideas like soul, mind, ego, will, self, and, of course, personality.
Instead, Skinner recommends that psychologists concentrate on observables, that is, the environment and our behavior in it.
Readings
Whether you agree with him or not, Skinner is a good writer and fun to read. I’ve already mentioned Walden II and Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971). The best summary of his theory is the book About Behaviorism (1974).
Copyright 1998, 2006 C. George Boeree
________________________________________________________________
NOTES 2: http://www.coe.uh.edu/courses/cuin6373/idhistory/skinner.html
B. F. Skinner
Burrhus Frederic Skinner(1904-90) was a psychologist. Born in Susquhanna, Pa., he studied at Harvard, teaching there from 1931-6 and again from 1947-74. A leading behaviorist, he was a proponent of operant conditioning, and the inventor of the Skinner box for facilitating experimental observations.
Research for testing and instruction continued to be piecemeal until the work of B.F. Skinner. Skinner's research was in stimulus-response and reinforcement. His research contributed to an understanding of the usefulness and application of teaching machines. He stated that, although positive reinforcement has been proven important in learning, schools use little reinforcement but instead use aversive control. Skinner (1954) also noted that the learning process should be divided into "a very large number of very small steps and reinforcement must be contingent upon the accomplishment of each step." Skinner also stated that by making the steps of learning small, the frequency of reinforcement can be increased and the frequency of being wrong is reduced.
In order to accomplish the goal of positive reinforcement delivered frequently to reward small steps in the learning process, Skinner suggested using mechanical devices. He noted that the teacher was not able to succeed in implementing increasing reinforcement because of the limitations of class size and styles of teaching and grading being used. Skinner (1954) stated:
If the teacher is to take advantage of recent advances in the study of learning, she must have the help of mechanical devices. The technical problem of providing the necessary instrumental aid is not particularly difficult. There are many ways in which the necessary contingencies may be arranged, either mechanically or electrically...The important features on the device are these: Reinforcement for the right answer is immediate. The mere manipulation of the device will probably be reinforcing enough to keep the average student at work for a suitable period each day, provided traces of earlier aversive control can be wiped out. A teacher may supervise an entire class at work on such devices at the same time, yet each child may progress at his own rate, completing as many problems as possible within the class period. If forced to be away from school, he may return where he left off. The gifted child will advance rapidly, but can be kept from getting too far ahead either by being excused from arithmetic for a time or by being given special sets of problems which take him into some of the interesting by-paths of mathematics. The device makes it possible to present carefully designed material in which one problem can depend upon the answer to the preceding and where, therefore the most progress to an eventually complex repertoire can be made. ( p. 95)
Skinner concluded with the theory that the proposed changes would free the teacher for more important functions and that mechanized instruction should be integrated into all schools, not as a replacement for, but as an adjunct to the teacher.
Skinner (1958) later developed a machine that was built on Pressey's model but differed in several ways. He stated that a teaching machine should have several important features. First, the student should compose his response rather than select it from a set of possible answers. Skinner supported this idea with the fact that responses should be recalled, not simply recognized, and that wrong selections may seem out of place and strengthen unwanted recall. Second, Skinner stated that a teaching machine should present information in a carefully designed sequence of steps.
Skinner also noted that the machine itself does not teach, but brings the student into contact with the person who composed the material it presented. The machine is a labor-saving device because it can bring one programmer into contact with an infinite number of students.
Skinner (1958) compared his teaching machine to a private tutor. The machine induces sustained activity while keeping the student active and busy and would not allow the student to proceed unless he understands the materials. The material is presented in sequence as the student is ready to receive it. The machine helps the student arrive at the correct answer both by a logical presentation of material and by "hinting, prompting, suggesting, and so on, derived from an analysis of verbal behavior" (1958, p. 971). Finally Skinner stated that the machine reinforces the student for every correct response with immediate feedback.
Another important part of Skinner's research included the program that the teaching machine contained. Skinner developed the concept of nearly errorless learning through two ideas - prompting and fading. Prompting was used to construct the correct or desired response; fading was the gradual withdrawing of stimulus supports. Both techniques were used to promote efficient learning.
Skinner's ideas launched the programmed instruction movement in the United States. Skinner's ideas attracted many followers who embraced the idea of programmed instruction as the first truly efficient method of learning.
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