Beyond Individual Differences
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Charles A. Ahern s Kenton de Kirby
Beyond Individual Differences Organizing Processes, Information Overload, and Classroom Learning
Charles A. Ahern, PhD Holy Names University and the Watershed Learning Institute 5565 College Ave., Suite 340E Oakland, CA 94618, USA
[email protected] Kenton de Kirby Graduate School of Education University of California, Berkeley Berkeley, CA 94720, USA
[email protected] ISBN 978-1-4614-0640-2 (hardcover) e-ISBN 978-1-4614-0641-9 ISBN 978-1-4614-0639-6 (softcover) DOI 10.1007/978-1-4614-0641-9 Springer New York Dordrecht Heidelberg London Library of Congress Control Number: 2011935147 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011 All rights reserved. This work may not be translated or copied in whole or in part without the written permission of the publisher (Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, 233 Spring Street, New York, NY 10013, USA), except for brief excerpts in connection with reviews or scholarly analysis. Use in connection with any form of information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed is forbidden. The use in this publication of trade names, trademarks, service marks, and similar terms, even if they are not identified as such, is not to be taken as an expression of opinion as to whether or not they are subject to proprietary rights. Printed on acid-free paper Springer is part of Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com)
This book is dedicated with love to Millicent Horne and to the memory of Stanley Horne. Charles A. Ahern
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Preface
My training is in the neuropsychology of learning, in the manner in which brain functioning influences how people acquire knowledge and skills. While most neuropsychologists provide assessments or conduct research, the focus of my career has been on intervention, on working in an ongoing way with children and adults who have some kind of difficulty in learning. In the history of neuropsychology, a pattern has been repeated many times. Observations made of those with dramatic cognitive difficulties have ultimately contributed to our understanding of the nature of learning and brain functioning in all of us. My own clinical practice has allowed for observations that followed this pattern in a particular way. The work I have done with individuals struggling with learning has pointed to – placed in relief – certain fundamental issues which appear to be relevant to all. As background, I offer the story of that work and how I came to write this book. The story begins with my first meeting with an 8-year-old boy named TJ, which took place while I was studying neuropsychology at Wake Forest Medical School. I first learned about TJ during neurology grand rounds – a meeting at which physicians discuss notes concerning a specific patient. TJ, I learned, suffered from abnormal brain development due to a congenital condition. His symptoms included profound difficulties with memory and attention. His memory deficits were of such severity, in fact, that he was considered amnesic. It was reported that he had not learned any math or reading through the second grade in his special education class. Indeed, despite concerted and varied efforts to teach him basic academic skills, he did not show evidence of having learned any academic material at school. Prospects for TJ’s learning in and out of school, based on his brain anatomy and history, were considered dismal. Given his brain abnormalities, from a certain perspective it was not surprising that TJ had not learned at school. However, it was clear in listening to the notes that he nonetheless had done considerable learning in his life. Though the presentation was about the neurology underlying his inability to learn, my attention was drawn to evidence of learning implicit in the brief social history offered as part of the presentation. It was reported that he engaged in conversation and related well with vii
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others, which reflected that he had learned vocabulary and developed language skills, including, for instance, competence with the complexities of syntax and grammar. Indeed, later testing showed verbal language skills and vocabulary to be within normal limits of development for his age. He was described as polite, charming, and engaging, and that he was perceived this way meant he had clearly learned many unspoken social rules as well. Though learning to read had thus far been beyond his grasp, it occurred to me that being literate would give him considerably more freedom in life, helping him to manage his memory difficulties by keeping notes and schedules. As I walked back to the office, I said to Dr. Frank Wood, the head of the Neuropsychology Department, “We ought to teach that boy to read.” Although my proposal might have sounded ludicrous to many of the distinguished physicians at the grand round presentation, it sounded possible to him. Dr. Wood knew from his own clinical experience and research that even amnesic individuals have some capacity to learn and remember. He answered simply, “Do it.” Soon I was meeting with TJ twice weekly. He very much wanted to learn to read but was understandably discouraged – in the past, nothing had seemed to work. Though strangely confident myself, I knew there was no playbook describing how to teach a boy with his cognitive difficulties how to read; his condition was extremely unusual. Forging ahead despite our reservations, TJ and I undertook to follow the sequence of a standard reading acquisition program. I was surprised by TJ’s initial success – he clearly had the capacity to make the auditory distinctions fundamental to reading – but the first few months were filled with instances of apparent learning and then forgetting. He would appear to have learned something substantial about a particular letter–sound relationship, and then later, by the end of the session or in a subsequent session, he would have forgotten it. He would seem to have mastered particular phonemic skills – for example, isolating the last sound of a word – and then in later sessions lose that mastery, performing it correctly sometimes, but not others. The first several months consisted of trying to understand what was preventing him from holding on to new information. That TJ had memory problems was beyond doubt, but this nonetheless struck me as an insufficient answer. I believed that his failure to learn to read – to hold onto the skills that he grasped for a brief period – was not the inevitable result of his weaknesses, but rather that TJ simply required the right conditions to learn, and that those conditions had not yet been found. Our initial setbacks forced me to shift my focus from the technical aspects of the reading intervention program to the subtleties of TJ’s effort to learn. I began to notice that he would often appear to be “wiped out” within minutes. It would make sense, given his cognitive weaknesses, that TJ’s mind was particularly sensitive to being overworked. Over time, I noticed that particular signs often preceded being “wiped out”: a blank look, briefly averted eyes, and minor errors of inattention. I began to use these as cues to stop, and this seemed to help, but – as I soon realized – I was only halfway there. I intuited that I had to find a way to stop before those signs appeared. This became a topic in an ongoing dialogue between us – when to take a break, how long a break was needed, when to say we were done for the day.
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I developed a bias toward stopping too soon rather than too late. Sometimes this meant taking a break even when we were excited about how well he was doing. We usually worked in increments as small as 3–5 min, with ample breaks between. I still remember feeling that we should be doing more – stopping after such short periods was deeply counter-intuitive – but these were without doubt the conditions under which he could make the most rapid gains. Not only did we shorten the periods of work and interject plenty of breaks, we also reduced the pace. For TJ, this meant pausing between each item, giving him the time he needed to think, to let what he just learned settle in. It felt natural to slow down with TJ, but not as much as he sometimes needed. The ideal pace seemed to vary from day to day and even minute to minute, and it almost always took a conscious effort on my part to work with TJ at the pace he needed to learn. I had come to understand that working for too long, or covering material too fast was somehow undercutting TJ’s learning – causing him to forget. Through trial and error, and careful observation, I discovered one more important parameter in my work with TJ: the importance of taking care in switching between activities or topics. I learned, for instance, that switching types of practice exercises could easily create confusion. Often, I failed to realize that I was forcing him to make a significant mental shift. What I might consider a closely related exercise on the same general concept might represent two distinct topics to him. Switching without giving any attention to helping him make the necessary mental adjustment could leave him completely lost. The first topic often got mixed up with the second, sabotaging the learning process for both. I realized that I needed to be more aware of these shifts, and to make sure TJ was clear on the first concept – and that he had time to consolidate what he had just learned – before moving on to the second. For TJ, consolidation of new information took time, and trying to hurry the process along simply meant he didn’t learn. When we did move on, I found that making the shift explicit greatly helped him make the transition smoothly, so that the new information didn’t interfere with what he had just learned. This meant comparing the new and the old, discussing their similarities and differences so that he would be able to distinguish them in his mind. Together, making these adjustments led to dramatic results. After the next 20 sessions over the course of three and a half months he was reading words, and within a year he was reading at grade level. This was a remarkable change and one that many would have considered impossible – a boy who had shown no capacity for acquiring reading skills or any other academic skill had become a proficient reader. To this day, TJ is an avid reader. Of course, this was a deeply gratifying experience and a profoundly interesting one as well. I was thankful that we had found a way to help TJ learn to read, but I was not yet aware of any more general importance. In fact, at the time, I considered this as a unique experience in every respect. And, in many ways it was unique. TJ’s developmental history was rare and his cognitive deficits unusual. However, my work with TJ sensitized me to issues about the very nature of learning, which would recur frequently as my experience in the field continued. I was being pointed in the direction of some very important insights. But it would take me years to fully understand and articulate all that I learned from this experience.
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The critical clues I had received are clear to me in retrospect. For one, working with TJ illustrated vividly that it was possible to appear to learn without really doing so. Our work together not only alerted me to this possibility, but got me in the habit of asking what conditions might make the difference in learning. What was it, I wondered, that distinguished those times when new information took hold for TJ and those in which no lasting effect was made? Whatever it was, it was not readily apparent in the moment. And in light of our success, it was clearly not a question of him lacking the requisite cognitive skills for reading acquisition. Some years later, when I set up a private practice, I began receiving referrals to work with students with learning difficulties in mainstream schools. Because I am trained as a neuropsychologist, I was often sent students who were not helped – or assessed as not likely to be helped – by typical interventions. These ranged from students with complex learning difficulties as a result of multiple cognitive weaknesses to students whose difficulties in school were far out of proportion with the mild weaknesses identified. These students’ deficits – though significant in many cases – were nowhere near as debilitating as TJ’s, or those of other students I had worked with. Yet as I went about assessing the reasons for their difficulties and trying to understand what would help, a surprising pattern emerged. I often found myself noticing issues that my experience with TJ had first sensitized me to, and returning to the kinds of questions that I had first asked in relation to TJ. Over time, I saw that being sensitive to these issues – to a consideration of whether the student is truly learning or only appearing to do so, and a curiosity about what distinguished one from the other – proved frequently helpful and sometimes critical. Many of these students would appear to have learned something and yet evidence would later emerge that the material was not clearly remembered, and was not fully available to be built on in future lessons. Because these students did not have memory deficits as severe as TJ’s, they were generally better at covering up when they hadn’t learned something – they could better give the appearance of remembering or understanding, even when they didn’t. My experience with TJ had made it possible to detect this phenomenon in far more subtle manifestations. Despite the differences between TJ and these students, I noted another underlying commonality. These students had the cognitive capacities necessary for learning – as TJ had the capacity to learn to read – even when they were not doing so. And to my surprise, I found that recalling the basic issues that had proven essential in helping TJ – being careful not to work too much or too long without a break, being mindful of the confusion that can accompany shifts in topics or activities – also proved helpful with a wide variety of students. In the course of my clinical work, I began to elaborate on these early insights, trying to understand why this forgetting was occurring, and to ascertain more precisely and understand more thoroughly the various conditions that might make the difference. As I addressed these issues in collaborating with teachers – and, eventually, shared my evolving understanding in presentations – I found that a good number of educators seemed to resonate with the basic issues I was pursuing. Many teachers stated that the concepts were helpful in understanding certain puzzling students. Just as commonly, teachers commented that these ideas seemed
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of general importance, that they were helpful in classroom teaching. Some felt intuitively that these ideas seemed to address a wider phenomenon, in which students, on the whole, were learning material less thoroughly, thinking less deeply, and showing less enthusiasm and investment in the project of learning than they had in previous eras. This feedback shed new light on my ongoing efforts to understand what distinguishes successful learning from episodes in which success is only apparent. The observational data that inform the core messages of this book were obtained in the course of my clinical pursuits. This book is written from the totality of my experience in education, including my own observations of students whom I have worked with, reports of other educators, and conversations with parents and students about learning and school. Nonetheless, I would not have been able to make the observations I made, nor would I have understood their significance, without my familiarity with neuropsychological research. Neuropsychological concepts have both enabled the observations I have made and influenced the form they’ve taken in my mind. In turn, my understanding of these concepts has been continually shaped and informed – reorganized, in the terminology of this book – by working with students week after week and year after year. As I developed these ideas, I have often experienced a sense of discovery, of finding new connections and approaches. Over and again, these ideas have helped me to better understand learning situations and more effectively be of help. In my clinical work, they have helped resolve puzzles that otherwise appeared to resist solution. I found that I was developing practices that could help students with uncommon learning difficulties, while at the same time creating a framework of fundamental concepts that is relevant to all students, whenever learning is taking place. However, looking now from the vantage point to which these insights have brought me, I can say in the most positive sense – in the sense that what is fundamental tends to abide – that what I’m presenting hardly seems new. The core message seems to me like a renewal of truths that have been known about learning for a very long time, but that have too often been in eclipse. As I continued to develop my understanding of these issues, professionals, as well as parents, have indicated it would be of value to have these ideas written down. It is with this request in mind, and in the spirit of offering something helpful, that I have written this book. Oakland, CA
Charles A. Ahern
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Acknowledgments
I would like to offer my deepest gratitude to four mentors who generously shared their knowledge and supported my exploration of the relationship between the field of neuropsychology and the complex processes of learning: Carina Grandison, Clif Leonard, Karl Pribram, and Frank Wood. The journey described in these pages could not have occurred without each of them. Additionally, I’m grateful to the classroom teachers who have shared their insights with me, first among whom is Marion Marshall. I am indebted to the educational therapists who have also taught me a great deal over the years, especially Laura Frasier, Julie Jervey, Toby Mickelson, Linda Baker, and Isabelle Ostreicher Bernal. I thank the students in my practice for the privilege of working with them. I owe a special debt to my first student TJ, whose determination and joy in learning started me along this path. Thank you to my co-author Kenton de Kirby, who appeared in the clever guise of a graduate student, but soon was revealed to be the best of colleagues and collaborators. For invaluable support of all kinds, I offer my heartfelt appreciation to Mikey Vane, Judy Vick, Li Ravicz, Stewart Pringle, Miles Woodlief, Tim Bensen, and Steve Walsh, The young people in my family – Bodie and Carson Abbott, Brett and Chris Stricker, Benjamin and Isabella Bolden-Monifa – have provided inspiration. Finally, thanks go to my wife, Lisa, for her love, support, and remarkable patience. Charles Ahern Thanks are due to my friends and family who, for more than a year, patiently accepted the same progress report: “The book is just about done, I swear.” I am grateful to my students, who gave me the confidence to write about learning, and who provided me with a professional outlet for my near compulsive love of explaining things. I hope you had anywhere near as much fun as I did. I am continually in
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awe of my co-author, Chuck, who is the type of guy to invite someone to collaborate so completely on what is truly his life’s work. What can I say? It’s an honor to know you. To my wife, Amelia, whose close reading and insightful comments saved more than one load-bearing passage. In the end, it’s all for you. All of it. Kenton de Kirby
Contents
Part I
Doing Without Learning
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A Riddle ..................................................................................................
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Below the Surface: An Introduction to Mental Organization ........... Principle 1: Our Mind Gives Meaning and Intelligibility to Our Perceptual Experience .................................................................. Principle 2: We Do Not Consciously Perceive All the Stimuli That We Take In ....................................................................................... Principle 3: What We Perceive Is Influenced by Our Goals at the Moment .......................................................................................... Principle 4: Prior Experience Also Influences What We Perceive and Understand in the Present.................................................................. Principle 5: Meaning Organizes Long-Term Memory ............................. Principle 6: Long-Term Memory Depends upon Mental Boundaries ................................................................................... Principle 7: Remembering Means Integrating Memories, Not Merely Retrieving Them ................................................................... Principle 8: Integrating New Learning Is a Process of Reorganization ....................................................................... Concluding Remarks................................................................................
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At the Time of Learning: The Encoding Process ................................ Establishing a Learning Goal ................................................................... Demarcation ............................................................................................. Selective Attention ................................................................................... Set Construction ....................................................................................... Concluding Remarks................................................................................
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How Things Go Wrong: Breakdowns in Organization ...................... Demarcation and Demand from Information ........................................... Selective Attention and Demand from Information ................................. Set Construction and Demand from Information..................................... Establishing the Learning Goal and Demand from Information ............. Concluding Remarks................................................................................
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Learning to Learn: Organization and the Student’s Experience ...... Experience................................................................................................ Approach to Learning .............................................................................. Attitudes Related to Learning .................................................................. Concluding Remarks................................................................................
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Part II
Teaching with a New Awareness
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The Role of the Teacher .........................................................................
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Awareness and Sensitivities: Four “Anchors” to Use in the Classroom ......................................................................... Anchor 1: The Learning Goal .................................................................. Anchor 2: New Information and Prior Learning...................................... Anchor 3: Shifts in Topic and Mental Transitions ................................... Anchor 4: Attentional Demand ................................................................ Concluding Remarks................................................................................
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Enlarging the Classroom: Practices for Creating Supportive Conditions ........................................................................... Learning-Goal Practices........................................................................... Practice 1: Clarify and Emphasize the Learning Goal on an Ongoing Basis ............................................................................. Practice 2: Address the Importance of the Learning Goal Explicitly ... Practice 3: Discuss Differences in the Learning Goal. ......................... New Information Practices....................................................................... Practice 1: Prioritize Review of Previous Relevant Learning ............... Practice 2: Help Students Prioritize and Direct Attention .................... Practice 3: Stagger Periods of Heaviest Demand from New Information .......................................................................... Practice 4: Provide Backup Documentation to Verbal Material ........... Shifts-in-Topic Practices .......................................................................... Practice 1: Review and Preview at the Beginning of Each Class. ........ Practice 2: Consistently Mark and Discuss Shifts in Topic as Class Progresses. .............................................................................. Practice 3: As Class Nears an End, Consider Stopping the Lecture or Discussion Before Another Transition must be Negotiated..................
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Attentional Demand Practices.................................................................. Practice 1: Make Note-Taking Optional, and Make Notes and Outlines Freely Available .............................................................. Practice 2: Regularly Offer Support for Underlying Skills.................. Practice 3: Allow for Variation in Practice and Rehearsal. .................. Concluding Remarks................................................................................ Part III 9
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The Principle View
How Enlarging the Classroom Makes Room for Variation in Cognitive Capacities ........................................ The Profile View ...................................................................................... Cognitive Weaknesses Attenuate Organizing Processes .......................... Exercising Strong Capacities Facilitates Organizing, But Does Not Guarantee It ....................................................................... Support for Organizing Processes Can Mitigate the Effects of Cognitive Weaknesses .............................................................
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Two Ways of Understanding Learning: Integrating the Profile and Principle Approaches ..............................
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Conclusion: Coming to Balance....................................................................
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References .......................................................................................................
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About the Authors ..........................................................................................
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Index ................................................................................................................
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Part I
Doing Without Learning
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Chapter 1
A Riddle
Imagine yourself at an all-day seminar. You only know a little bit about the topic, but as the seminar proceeds through the morning, you feel interested and engaged. The instructor covers many concepts and terms that are unfamiliar to you, but defines most of them clearly, and you are able to infer the meaning of the rest from their context. The instructor’s speaking rate is brisk, but you’re able to keep up and you find that her pace keeps the morning lively. You diligently take notes, hoping to keep possession of as many of the ideas as possible, enthusiastically affixing stars and exclamation points to those that strike you as most important. Now, skip ahead several hours, past lunch, to 2 pm You are still learning new concepts and new terminology. As each new topic is introduced, additional mental effort is required to understand the new idea in relation to concepts that have already been presented. You may find it harder to keep up with all that the speaker is saying, but you are still interested and feel that you have a good handle on the main ideas. Let’s skip ahead again, this time to 3 o’clock. Suppose that the speaker, who is enthusiastic about what she came to share, realizes that she is in danger of not covering all the material she had intended to cover and decides that she needs to pick up the pace in order to finish. She begins to talk faster, and she refers participants to the glossary in the back of her handout rather than take the time to define a few new terms. Still, you manage to keep up, and are glad the presenter covered all the material she did – much of what she rushed to include toward the end help clarify things you had questions about earlier. By the end of the presentation, you are tired, certainly, but you walk out of the room feeling satisfied that you had learned a great deal. Days later, you mention to a friend over the phone that you had attended an exciting seminar. Hoping to do justice to what you learned, you try to relay its main points. Much to your surprise, you find that the ideas you remember being so taken by no longer seem to have the same weight or substance when reconstituted from your memory. The sense of clarity and understanding you distinctly remember is now completely at odds with your explanation, which feels vague, partial, and a bit scattered. When you hang up the phone, you are understandably frustrated, and wonder how you could have so overestimated the depth and durability of your learning. After all, C.A. Ahern and K. de Kirby, Beyond Individual Differences: Organizing Processes, Information Overload, and Classroom Learning, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4614-0641-9_1, © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011
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nearly everything about the seminar would seem to have been in your favor – the instructor was knowledgeable, well-prepared, and enthusiastic; you gave the presentation your full attention and took good notes; you have no significant learning disability to have interfered with your capacity to understand the material – making it all the more puzzling that so much of what you remember feels out of focus. The specific details you retained are orphaned of any concept or larger context to give them significance, and what overarching ideas you do recall lack supporting or illustrative details. Thinking back, you remember feeling that some of the material covered toward the end of the day escaped your full comprehension, but you realize that even the material covered in the morning, when your mind was fresh, is now faded and jumbled in your mind. But why? What is to blame? What made the apparent learning dissipate? If pressed for an explanation, you might say in retrospect that there was quite a bit of material covered in the course of the day. Perhaps your effort to learn was frustrated by being confronted with too much information over too short a period. The material was presented too close together without enough time to let things sink in. Perhaps the preponderance of new ideas somehow affected your depth of overall understanding and limited your ability to make lasting connections between significant concepts and related details. Perhaps you weren’t given the time you needed to reflect on your understanding, to consider what aspects were of greatest interest, to think about the relationship between what you were learning and what you knew, and to determine what you hoped to clarify and discover. At first glance, this explanation – intuitive and obvious, to a certain degree – appears sufficient; case closed. But is it really? Surely, something approximating “too much information” is part of the picture, but if we take a step back and ponder this answer in relation to what we think we know about how learning happens, what emerges is a riddle – one we might call doing without learning. How is it that a student can do everything that learning seems to require, but without meaningful, lasting learning taking place? As we pointed out, the lecturer presented cogent and well-ordered material. You were focused and attentive – you listened and took notes. You had the subjective experience of learning and understanding. Nonetheless, learning did not occur in the way you expected. How is this possible? Do we not assume that such effort and attention by both teacher and student should be enough to more or less guarantee successful learning? Part of what makes this riddle so puzzling, and the initial answer of “too much information covered” so inadequate, is that the amount of material covered did not seem out of the ordinary. The pace of the presentation, the number of new ideas and terms presented did not seem unusual or excessive. It is true that she rushed at the end, but you welcomed the additional details that you felt put other ideas in context. You remember thinking, “This is what I needed. Now it’s coming together!” Still, learning did not take place in the expected way. How can this be? How shall we make sense of the fact that instances of doing without learning such as the one described in the seminar vignette seem unremarkable in every regard, and not at all unlike experiences most of us have had as teachers or students, yet nonetheless call into question some of our basic assumptions about learning?
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The overarching goal of the riddle is to lead us toward a deeper understanding of the nature of learning and therefore to a deeper understanding of the conditions which support it. To get our bearings, we will first take a step back – to discuss some general, well-established neuropsychological principles that will give us some necessary background and a useful context as we proceed.
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Chapter 2
Below the Surface: An Introduction to Mental Organization
Our aim in this chapter is to get a feel for the mind as it appears through a neuropsychological lens. This background perspective will be of great help as we delve deeper into the learning process. Our focus in our introductory study will be on a particular realm of mental functioning – that of unconscious cognition. One of the most profound and enduring truths concerning the way our minds work is that the vast majority of mental activity takes place below the level of our conscious awareness. Here we are not speaking about arcane psychological formulations such as say, deep-seated wishes and conflicted motives, but rather everyday cognitive activities such as perception, problem-solving, and understanding. If we visualize the totality of our mental activity as an iceberg, the amount that we are generally aware of can be thought of as proportional to the proverbial tip of the iceberg that juts out above the water. Just as the iceberg’s visible tip is supported by a much larger mass below the surface, so too are the conscious aspects of our mind supported by a vastness of unconscious processing. If our brain’s total processing load were suddenly made the job of consciousness, we would be stopped dead in our tracks, completely unable to function. Our unconscious mind simply does too much, and far too rapidly. It is precisely the efficiency and speed of unconscious cognition that allows our conscious mind – slow and deliberate in comparison – to do what it does so well. What we might call the iceberg concept is a widely accepted and welldocumented principle of mind among neuroscientists and experimental psychologists. The logical question, then, is what exactly takes place below the surface? What is the nature of unconscious processing? How does it function and what does it do for us? The unconscious processes of essential interest to us in this book accomplish what, in neuropsychology, is often referred to as organization. Organizing processes give structure and intelligible meaning to our experience, allowing us to make sense of what we encounter, and, therefore, to learn from it. Organizing processes are profoundly active. The mind is constantly sifting, selecting, and structuring new
C.A. Ahern and K. de Kirby, Beyond Individual Differences: Organizing Processes, Information Overload, and Classroom Learning, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4614-0641-9_2, © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011
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input – making meaning of increasing complexity from the concepts and sensations it encounters. Moreover, the precise way our mind organizes the input it receives is unique for each of us. We process and integrate new input in an inherently personal and idiosyncratic way, based on what we’ve experienced, what we know, what we value, how we learn, and what we are intending to accomplish at a given moment. And all of this takes place without us being aware of it. In the rest of this chapter, I offer some basic principles of unconscious cognition, which will lay a foundation for our discussion as we move forward. These principles represent a way of understanding how these organizing processes work, and taking some time to contemplate them will give us a more elaborated sense of just how active and pervasive these processes are. As we’ll see, their contribution is fundamental across the spectrum of human cognitive functioning, from constructing meaningful perceptual experiences out of the raw stimuli we take in through our senses, to assimilating the new and difficult concepts we encounter in our intellectual lives.
Principle 1: Our Mind Gives Meaning and Intelligibility to Our Perceptual Experience In the course of everyday life, nothing seems more passive than simply recognizing objects, words, or even concepts. Imagine yourself walking down a city street. What your eyes take in as a dimensionless blur of lines, colors and shapes, you experience as a familiar visual scene populated by discrete objects with depth and spatial relations relative to each other and yourself – a stoplight here, a storefront over there. A blast of noise is immediately recognized as a car horn and the stream of vocal sounds emitted by your fellow pedestrians are automatically registered in your mind as speech. You do not have to determine what the objects or phenomena are by consideration of the evidence (“That has a red hue, it is circular, it is adjacent to a green hue, and a yellow hue…it appears to be a stop light.” “Similar patterns of lines, light and color have proven to be buildings…this may well be a building as well.”) In our conscious experience, these things simply are. However, underlying these experiences is a great deal of unconscious organizing. Organizing processes are responsible for the effortless comprehensibility of our basic perceptual experience. It is precisely because they operate so efficiently outside of consciousness that we are apt to mistakenly conclude that the orderliness of our perception does not depend on mental processes but is simply pre-given. In fact, we might say that seeing the world as it is given requires mental processes which order our perceptions. The phenomenon of what is called “object constancy” is one illustration of the organizing function such processes play in our basic perception. Consider that, if you hold this book up and turn it clockwise, rotate it or extend your arm, you will
Principle 2: We Do Not Consciously Perceive All the Stimuli That We Take In
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notice that the shapes presented to you from various angles and distances are actually quite different. Such changes alter the visual data your eyes receive. Yet none of this disorients or disrupts your perception in the slightest – there’s no sense that the object you’re looking at has itself changed. You’re not under the illusion that the book has grown larger, smaller, thinner, or wider. The reason is that our mind’s unconscious organizing processes “understand” the dependable correlations between our position relative to other objects and the data our eyes receive. (“If the book rotates this way, it will look like that. If it instead rotates that way, it will look like this.”) By automatically accounting for these predictable changes, these organizing processes – inherent to our perception – give us the experience of a stable object. Moment to moment, our coherent experience of objects we recognize is the end result of our mind’s unconscious and ceaseless organization of sensory input.
Principle 2: We Do Not Consciously Perceive All the Stimuli That We Take In Our senses receive far more stimuli than we could possibly attend to consciously. This flood of data moment by moment must be filtered somehow, enabling us to make sense of it. We do not experience being bombarded by a dizzying barrage of sensation because this vital filtering function efficiently triages all the input we receive and delivers to our consciousness only a small fraction. This filtering of attention occurs outside of conscious awareness and is an ongoing part of our interaction with – and organization of – the world. It is difficult to imagine what it would be like, or how we could function at all in our day-to-day life, without this ability. At this very moment, as you are reading this book, your mind is filtering all kinds of sensation from your conscious awareness. Take a second to tune in to some of the feelings and sounds that are available to you as soon as you widen your attention. The feeling of the book in your hands, of your clothes on your skin, of your feet on the ground, the sound of a ticking clock perhaps. As you’ve been reading, your mind has been filtering these out so that you might concentrate on understanding what you are reading. You don’t have to do any of this screening consciously. Have you ever had the experience, when around strangers having a conversation, of your ears suddenly perking up at the mention of some familiar word or phrase – your name, school, or company, for example – even though you have no idea what they were talking about prior to that moment? Your unconscious mind was in a sense monitoring surrounding conversations, but alerted your consciousness only when something seemingly important or relevant came up. In instances where something suddenly grabs our attention, it can feel as though aiming our mind’s spotlight is a deliberate, conscious choice. That’s true in part. Imagine, for example, that you are doing some housework with the radio in the background. You’re not really listening – you’re thinking about something that came
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up at work that day. Abruptly, you stop thinking about work and attend to the radio when you become aware that they are about to give some bit of information you had been wondering about – say, the outcome of an election. The question is, how did you know that the information you wanted was about to be conveyed? You decided to direct your attention to the radio, but why at that moment? What preceded your decision? As this example shows, when we volitionally decide to attend to something, it’s often after our unconscious attention has made it available in our field of awareness. Our consciously directed attention depends on our unconscious filter, which is always at work in the background.
Principle 3: What We Perceive Is Influenced by Our Goals at the Moment A remarkable aspect of this type of attention is that, while it is unconscious and rapid, it is also “smart.” How it functions depends on our momentary goals and priorities. A person walking down the street who suddenly feels the stirrings of hunger will likely find that the restaurant signs practically jump out. One need not look at each storefront searching for clues which would indicate that a restaurant is housed behind. To one’s awareness, the restaurant simply presents itself. This kind of attention can also be responsive to less biological priorities. Once just before 5 pm, I realized that I had failed to send in my tax return, which was due that day. As I ran down the stairs, intending to walk hurriedly to the post office a number of blocks away, I noticed a mailbox located within a half block of my office. This mailbox had escaped my notice up until that moment because I wasn’t in the habit of mailing documents from work. Consider the fact that, because I believed the nearest mailbox was blocks away, I wasn’t consciously scanning for one so close to my office. Nonetheless, my unconscious attention was primed with my goal, and the mailbox that I had never before noticed was suddenly right in front of me. The unconscious yet logical judgments which guide attention are facilitated by our overall familiarity with the situation. As we become more familiar with a particular situation, we can more efficiently filter what we perceive in relation to our goal. We are able to automatically, unconsciously ignore well-known aspects of the situation and assess what new information is most important, based on how it fits into the framework of our previous knowledge. Consider the experience of driving around looking for a particular address in an area you have gotten to know well over time. Because you know, without looking or consciously considering, what many of the businesses are, there is less area for you to scan. Contrast that with circling a block in a neighborhood you are unfamiliar with. Because the address you’re looking for might be anywhere, there is much more visual data that requires your conscious attention.
Principle 4: Prior Experience Also Influences What We Perceive and Understand...
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Principle 4: Prior Experience Also Influences What We Perceive and Understand in the Present Let’s say, for example, you are driving down the street and see an octagonal red sign partially obscured by a branch that, to you, reads “ST.” Having seen countless stop signs before, you will in all likelihood never even question what you’re seeing and what you’re supposed to do. As this illustrates, what we perceive in the present is powerfully shaped by what we’ve encountered in the past. In fact, the past is the basis upon which our mind’s organizing processes operate. When we are presented with incomplete data concerning something we’ve experienced in some form before, our mind’s unconscious organizing processes tend to complete the picture, giving us no indication that anything was missing to begin with. Early motion pictures made it possible for experimental psychologists to clearly observe our capacity to complete the image, to fill in absent data. If looked at by hand, frame-by-frame, one could see that early movies had short but noticeable time gaps. They did not represent each moment and therefore did not play back fluid and continuous motion. But they appeared far more fluid than was represented in frame-by-frame analysis. The viewer knows what this sequence would look like in real life and perceives it in reference to that experience. Just as prior experience influences what we perceive, prior knowledge shapes what we understand. Let’s say that, while at home in the evening, you pick up a novel that you’d been reading and open to your bookmarked page. Within moments, the substance of what you’ve read so far – the plot, setting, characters, style, etc. – suddenly and effortlessly appears in your mind, almost as if you had never put the book down. Prior to resuming the novel, you might not be able to say exactly at what point in the story you had left off, but after the first sentence or two, you’re likely to feel a flash of recognition, a sense of knowing where you were. If you’ve ever flipped to random page in an unfamiliar book and started reading, you have an intuitive sense of what a difference it makes to have a mental context available in order to help you make sense of what’s happening in the present. Without it, you might understand what you’re reading in some limited way – the concrete meaning of each word or sentence – but you would likely lack a sense of orientation, of knowing what is going on. Countless times throughout the day we change what we’re doing, and with these changes in activity, whatever prior knowledge or skills we possess that might be relevant to the new task are brought to mind. You answer a ringing phone, for example, and at the other end is a coworker asking about a specific project and an upcoming deadline. It may be instantaneous – or may take a second or two if you’re preoccupied or exhausted – but the relevant knowledge is suddenly there to help you follow the conversation and answer the questions you’re asked. The ability of our unconscious mind to spontaneously reconstruct a mental context of prior knowledge is another facet of organization. The way we understand some new bit of information or experience depends to a large extent on this process, by which our minds organize new experience in relation to, in the context of, what we already know.
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Principle 5: Meaning Organizes Long-Term Memory When we think of excellent memory, we may think of someone who seems to recall almost everything he or she sees or hears. People sometimes comment with wonder that someone is “like a sponge.” However, this common way of speaking about memory can be profoundly misleading, as it suggests that remembering means we merely absorb episodes of past experience, and that what we remember includes a certain completeness of detail. For the most part, learning and remembering – and especially the ability to make optimal use of what one remembers – is far from a matter of passively soaking up or “recording” what one encounters and later simply “playing back” what our minds have stored. A great deal of unconscious organization is responsible for turning experience into memory. From the perspective of unconscious cognition, memory is a highly active process of selection and organization, which has little in common with the popular metaphor of recording experience through a video camera. Much to the contrary, an astounding amount of directing and editing is going on outside of awareness, even as the material is captured. Certain details are rendered significant, while others are left out of the shot. What guides this directing and editing is the meaning that your mind gives to the experience. The very nature of long-term memory is that details are organized around a meaning or meanings. These can take virtually any conceivable form – a story, narrative, concept, theme, principle, or whatever else. The meaning around which a memory coheres serves a number of critical functions. It connects thematically related details; it determines which will be remembered most clearly; it serves to tag the memory, assisting later recall; and, finally, it gives the memory significance and therefore durability. Without some sort of meaning to organize the memory, it is likely that the unconnected details will soon be forgotten. Consider a long anticipated evening at a well-known restaurant. If everything goes just so, the night might be summarized in your mind as “a great meal and highly enjoyable evening.” You might have the sense of remembering this wonderful experience in considerable detail, but as real as this impression may be, you won’t have remembered every aspect and every detail as if on video tape. Rather, you will tend to remember details that had the most to do with the success of the evening. In recounting the experience, you might remember that the service was excellent for particular reasons – the waiter was knowledgeable, paced the meal nicely, made good recommendations – but you won’t recall everything the waiter said, nor his or her every appearance at the table. Or, one might experience a beautiful ambience and some special features, but it is highly unlikely that you will have remembered every decorative object you laid eyes on. What if, on the other hand, the experience had a different meaning? Suppose it was experienced as almost great but marred by too many near misses. The details of the misses – an overly salty dish, junctures when service was inattentive or awkward – will probably be well recalled. The couple sitting at the adjacent table, however, may have the same waiter and the same food but a completely different organizing
Principle 6: Long-Term Memory Depends upon Mental Boundaries
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meaning. If, for example, they became engaged to be married during the course of the evening, their memories will probably include more specifics of their interaction and less about the food. They will walk away with a different theme, and though there may be some overlap, a different set of details will comprise the memory that their minds construct. This type of long-term memory – memory that results from the process of organizing details through meaning – stands in contrast to what we can call rote learning and rote memory. In the case of rote learning, the approach to memory formation is different – it is more passive, more closely analogous to the metaphorical video camera. In rote learning, one remembers a portion of what was seen or heard much as it was presented, as in remembering a list, learning the alphabet, or recalling as much of a conversation or lecture as possible. Of course, this type of memory has its own place and uses – certain things can be learned effectively by rote. Also, rote learning may sometimes contribute to the formation of more meaningfully organized knowledge over time. But most of what is learned only by rote will gradually fade over time. While rote learning is often what we first think of when we think of a strong memory, the importance of such memory for our general functioning can easily be exaggerated. Because details are stored in isolation rather than more deeply organized around meaning and embedded in a context of connected information, rote memory is quite limited, both in capacity and usefulness. Without an organizing meaning, we can only hold onto so much information for so long.
Principle 6: Long-Term Memory Depends upon Mental Boundaries We’ve seen that the formation of long-term memory depends upon organizing related details into a coherent whole. The results of this process are “packets” of meaningfully connected elements of experience, and the formation of these packets depends upon an organizing process by which our minds create mental boundaries. Mental boundaries give structure to our memory and greatly aid our ability to recall specific information. Consider an analogy: if you’ve ever looked up something in a large reference book, such as a textbook, you know how useful it is that the text has structure: chapters, sections, headings, paragraphs, and even punctuation. Imagine how difficult it would be to find a particular piece of information if the entire book were one continuous sentence. One of the primary functions of mental boundaries is to maintain clear separations between things we might otherwise confuse with each other. Let’s say you have two computers, one at your house and one at work, both of which have been giving you problems lately. You describe the different problems to your tech-savvy friend, who gives you two different sets of steps to take, which your friend thinks will take care of the issues. Assuming you’ll remember them – possibly overestimating your own computer skills – you neglect to write either of the procedures
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down. Of course, when you go to sit in front of one of the computers, you have to keep both sets of steps distinct in your mind and remember which one applies to which computer. What was presented to you as two distinct procedures might easily become – if you don’t maintain a mental separation between them – a mishmash of individual steps, no longer organized according to the problems they were meant to address. A common neuropsychological test of memory illustrates this function of mental boundaries. The test begins with the examiner reading the subject a brief story. The subject is then asked to recall as many details as possible, which is known as free recall. The examiner then reads a second story, again asking the subject to repeat back as much of the story as possible. The second phase of the test begins after a delay of a half an hour or 45 min. As before, the free recall task is repeated in order to see how much of each story the subject retained over the course of the delay period. Finally, the examiner reads a list of details, asking the subject to decide if each came from the first or second story. Among other aspects of memory, this test measures one’s ability to keep information distinct. Throughout, one must not only link together the details of each story so they can be recalled as a unit, but also, in the final task especially, partition these sets of details so that what one remembers from the first doesn’t interfere with one’s memory of the second, and vice versa.
Principle 7: Remembering Means Integrating Memories, Not Merely Retrieving Them Like attention, memory recall is flexible and strategic – fluidly responsive to our momentary situation. For one, the content of what we remember is influenced by our surroundings or context. To get a sense of how context affects memory, think of an occasion when you returned after some years to a childhood home, your old high school, or a former place of employment. Most people find themselves flooded with memories of events or experiences they hadn’t thought about since they occurred. The details of such familiar surroundings serve as memory cues, allowing us to remember things we had seemingly forgotten about. On the basis of our momentary context or goals, recall is flexible in form as well as content – not just in what we remember, but how. If we want to remember specific events, we can do so, provided it was important enough at the time. We can recall – from the start to finish, as it were – the night we went to a Broadway show, the morning we hiked to the rim of Yosemite Valley, or the weekend we were in the wedding party of a close friend. And we can do more than recite a list of details from the experience. A remarkable characteristic of human memory is that we have the capacity to re-live the past to a significant extent, to remember how it felt to be there. This is so despite the fact – or perhaps, from the point of view of cognition, because of the fact – that we don’t remember every detail. But there are other forms in which memory comes to us. We don’t always remember in terms of events, or remember all the related material we learned at one time, recalling the “packet” as a whole. Our ability to organize material into distinct packets
Principle 7: Remembering Means Integrating Memories, Not Merely Retrieving Them
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allows us to later recall material learned on a great number of occasions. It might be said that our memory can search any number of experiences to bring to mind a collection of information, as if it has access to a massive film library, and can search by subject, then splice and edit the material instantaneously into a coherent whole. What then comes to mind is a well-integrated presentation without the slightest hint of the staggering amount of work involved in its creation. You do not have to consciously scroll through meaningless experiences or find yourself thinking about elements of your stored knowledge that are irrelevant to your goal, but what you will recall will be what you were looking for. Cutting edge computer search engines, as remarkable as they seem, do not even approach the human mind in this capacity. To get a sense of this, think now about an area of professional or personal interest, a field you have been pursuing for some time. Now think about the most important ideas you have learned over time – three or more observations or pieces of advice that you would offer to someone new to the field. Once you have mentally outlined your answer, ask yourself where all this information came from. Where and when did you learn these lessons? Can you pinpoint a specific time and place for each? Almost certainly, these ideas represent the integration of a great many experiences. Your mind drew upon accumulated experience and selected ideas most important in light of the whole of your experience in the field. This is quite a trick! As we’ve seen, the content and form of memory can vary from one situation to the next based on the context we find ourselves in and what we are trying to accomplish in the moment. This is equally true – we might say – of the mode in which we process memory. That is, consciously or unconsciously. We know, of course, that past experiences can be consciously recalled and that information we once learned can be brought to mind such that we can communicate it explicitly. However, the mode of memory can also be unconscious, guiding us in what we perceive, how we behave and what we understand without our being aware of it. Have you ever noticed the subtle differences in the way you talk depending on whom you’re talking to – the differences in greeting, tone of voice and mode of expression? If the person is someone you already know, the way you talk will reflect your history with the person – in other words, the sum total of your experiences with them. Though you don’t have to recall any of these memories consciously, they nonetheless influence how you act. In fact, it has been observed that amnesic individuals behave toward people they have come to know over time in a way that reflects an awareness of having met them before – subtly demonstrating an unconscious knowledge of what that person is like and what their interactions have been like – even though they cannot consciously bring to mind any particular memories. This mode of memory is also a large part of what makes us skilled or knowledgeable in a certain area. Our expertise is certainly not based on what we learned at a single, specific point in time nor are we fully conscious of its influence. Rather, expertise comes from the aggregate of accumulated experiences, which guides and informs our judgment about new situations. Veteran teachers, for example, are highly adept at “reading” students – their temperament, areas of strength and weakness, learning style – and intuiting what they need. These insights and intuitions come from unconsciously comparing new students with their memory bank of those they have taught over the years.
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Principle 8: Integrating New Learning Is a Process of Reorganization We know intuitively that new material, once learned, can become progressively more organized in our minds. From experience, we know that a certain amount of clarification takes place after we’re initially exposed to something new – that it can take time for new material or experience to sink in. But this ongoing integration does not merely add to our store of knowledge, leaving the rest unchanged, as if we are adding an additional chapter to a book, or placing another book on our mental library shelf. As we learn, the effect is more like making ongoing revisions to relevant chapters and volumes in order to make them reflect our new understanding. When we consider how memory is consolidated, how new information becomes a part of our knowledge base, we may consider learning as a process involving ongoing organization and reorganization. Integrating new with existing knowledge entails reorganizing what we already know. The literary figure T.S. Eliot referred to this phenomenon when he wrote that every new work of literature one reads must necessarily change one’s understanding of every work read before. In reconciling, accommodating and integrating new ideas and experiences, reorganization actually “changes our mind,” interweaving new knowledge with what we knew before, building on – but also building into – what is already known.
Concluding Remarks Though I have long been familiar with the principles covered in this chapter, I still find myself experiencing something like a sense of wonder in summarizing them and contemplating them as a whole. It is remarkable how complex, active, and dynamic our mind appears when viewed from the perspective of these organizing processes – and how completely foreign this picture is to the way most of us commonly think about how we learn. I recently listened to a news story which recounted that the first sound recordings involved making a direct impression into a cylinder of wax. It struck me as a perfect metaphor for one common sense view of learning – that our mind is essentially a passive, pliable substance on which information can be inscribed. To this way of thinking, learning is a fundamentally simple process, requiring only the direct conveyance of information in order to make an impression, and that the information, having been recorded, can be played back in a similar fashion. It seems that we naturally and implicitly conceptualize learning in this way at least some of the time, despite our intuitions to the contrary. Why is this understanding – however inaccurate we know it to be – so basic, so resistant to being fully uprooted? It’s simply this: one of the wonders of the mind’s unconscious organization of experience is that when all goes right, things really do seem that simple. Unconscious
Concluding Remarks
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processing operates so seamlessly, steadfastly and invisibly that we get the illusion of learning as simple and passive. But it’s just an illusion, masking the incredible array of mental activity that learning represents. In this chapter, we’ve touched upon a range of unconscious processes. Some organize our perception of the world around us. Others make it possible to understand and remember – to both appreciate the meaning of what we encounter and to further organize that meaning as it becomes consolidated in memory. In the most general way of speaking, this discussion has had two goals. First, we have sought to provide you with a general sense – an understanding and a feel – for the activities of unconscious cognition and how organizing processes are essential in our functioning at all times. Along the way, our second goal has been to convey certain aspects of how attention is guided and how memory operates in order to provide a useful context as we begin our direct inquiry into the riddle of doing without learning. This information will allow you to better appreciate the significance of a few specific mental processes that will emerge as we tighten our focus on the role of mental organization in educational settings.
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Chapter 3
At the Time of Learning: The Encoding Process
How can there be doing without learning? This was the riddle we posed in Chap. 1. How is it that a student can give every major, outward indication of learning in the moment without – as we later realize – really retaining the material? How, for example, can students be listening and attending without assimilating to any significant degree what they’re attending to? How can students successfully complete assignments and tasks designed to teach certain concepts without actually learning from their work? In other words, how can students so clearly seem to be learning at the time, but without the new information being later accessible to memory and without it being able to serve as the foundation for learning in the future? Armed with the perspective we’ve developed of the breadth and complexity of unconscious processing, we can now offer a preliminary answer to this riddle of doing without learning. Learning requires more than conscious effort and outward activity. Outside the view of teachers, and beneath the awareness of students, lies a vastness of processing upon which learning crucially depends. In those instances where students display all the outward signs of learning, yet learning clearly does not take place in the anticipated way, it can be assumed that this is because the inward processes – those that take place below the surface of consciousness – were somehow compromised. The iceberg principle – the understanding that most of cognitive activity is unconscious – though firmly established by research, is nonetheless difficult to consistently hold in mind in educational settings. Because the tip of the iceberg is what we experience and what we observe, we are naturally biased in our implicit assumptions about what thinking and learning entail. Even if we’ve heard about research showing the incredible scope of unconscious cognition, we are still likely to consider the student’s experience and activity in the framework of what we observe – to focus, in other words, on the tip of the iceberg, not on what is unseen. There is so much to observe about students in the process of learning, so much that meets the eye in most educational situations, that it can be hard to maintain the perspective that much of what constitutes learning does not meet the eye. Yet it remains true that the conscious thought and visible work we associate with learning must be supported by unconscious processes that, by their very nature, cannot be directly observed. C.A. Ahern and K. de Kirby, Beyond Individual Differences: Organizing Processes, Information Overload, and Classroom Learning, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4614-0641-9_3, © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011
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As we discussed in the last chapter, a number of internal, unconscious processes organize experience, perception, and memory. Organizing processes are no less fundamental to a student’s learning than they are to our daily functioning. In fact, because of the nature of the demands placed on students in school settings, they might be considered more essential. With this understanding, we can state our answer to the riddle more precisely: doing without learning frequently occurs due to the fact that sufficient organization, for whatever reason, didn’t happen – the student was unable to organize the material to a degree necessary for lasting recall and depth of understanding. Though it certainly represents an important step in the right direction, this answer will not be all that useful by itself. We will need to be more specific, to develop our understanding of what we mean by organizing in academic settings, in order to address the riddle in a fashion that is truly helpful. We are going to consider organizing in two time frames. On one hand, we need to keep in mind that organizing in academic learning is an ongoing process. It begins the moment we encounter something new to be learned, and can continue more or less indefinitely. From our own experience, we know that we tend to understand better over time. As we learn more about the topic, integrating new information and ideas, and as we have time to consider, or to simply let things unconsciously percolate, our understanding may clarify and insight deepen. The more we unconsciously process and consciously contemplate what we learned, the more organized it progressively becomes, resulting in deeper and more lasting learning. Organizing is indeed ongoing, and this ongoing nature is at the heart of learning. Yet, organizing at the time of initial learning – at the time material is first encountered – is essential. This phase of organizing is typically called encoding, and it is far more important than it may seem. The way new information is initially encoded goes a long way toward determining the depth and longevity of learning. Although it may seem as if information can be simply absorbed first and organized later, what happens in the students’ minds while they’re grappling with new material is often the decisive factor in determining whether meaningful learning takes place or not. We know from research that, in general, difficulties in recall ultimately derive from problems at the time of encoding, when the memory is first created, as well as during the period immediately following. In my own work, addressing the riddle of doing without learning has very frequently led me back to considering difficulties a student may have in organizing at the time of encoding. Because it is often the decisive point of breakdown in learning, the focus in this chapter – and going forward – will be on organizing at the time of learning. This focus may seem a bit counterintuitive. Failures of memory are usually noticed at the time students attempt to recall material, and thus whatever difficulties they have appear to be problems with remembering – an inability to “find” or retrieve a memory. As we watch students visibly struggle or strain to remember, the natural conclusion is that the root of the struggle is with the process of recall. But as we continue our discussion and get a sense of some of what is involved in encoding, it will become easier to appreciate that recall crucially depends on organizing at the time of encoding.
Establishing a Learning Goal
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This is not to deny the importance of ongoing organizing. To the contrary, organization at the time of learning is considered essential because it serves as the foundation for any further processing or consolidation that takes place. If sufficient organization doesn’t occur as new information is encountered, developing lasting recall and a depth of understanding is all but impossible. In contrast, material that is adequately organized as students first encounter it can be clarified and refined over time. If conditions are right, the later organizing that takes place is more likely to produce deeper understanding. This deeper understanding sometimes manifests as flashes of insight or “ah ha” moments. It may also be experienced in connections that sometimes pop into our consciousness as if from nowhere. Perhaps most frequently, however, understanding simply builds gradually over time. However it manifests, this deeper understanding depends on adequate organizing. Insufficient organization at the time of learning undercuts the process of developing understanding before it can really begin. The question we’re asking in this chapter is this: what allows students to successfully organize what they’re learning, while they’re learning it? In what follows, we will examine some of the specific mental processes involved in encoding. These will include establishing a learning goal, demarcation, selective attention, and set construction. Our discussion of these processes will build on some of the basic neuropsychological principles we reviewed in the last chapter, and it will give us a conceptual framework with which to understand how organization might be disrupted. It will also lay the foundation for an explanation of what precipitates these breakdowns in organizing at the time of learning.
Establishing a Learning Goal In delving into the encoding process, we’ll again find that the metaphor of learning as absorbing, as passively “soaking up” what we encounter, is deeply misleading. Rather, we’ll see that encoding, when viewed through the lens of some of the unconscious processes involved, appears to us as intrinsically active and goal-oriented – or, better yet, strategic. In the last chapter, we saw that one of the most striking features of unconscious cognition is that it is responsive to our momentary goals and interests, that what we perceive is shaped by our priorities. One of the key ideas of this chapter is that the encoding process also operates according to this same principle. Cognitive processes involved in encoding, though generally inaccessible to consciousness, nonetheless have the capacity to operate strategically, adapting themselves to our changing intentions. Indeed, the encoding process is intrinsically geared toward operating from a relatively specific goal at a given moment. That our minds are, for lack of a better word, “designed” to learn in this way should come as no surprise. We know from research that there are modest limits to the amount of information an individual can attend to and think about at a given moment – the implications of which we will explore in detail in the next chapter.
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The fact that organization at the time of learning is inherently purposeful or strategic makes the most of our mental capacities by limiting the demand on our minds. In my observation, what this means in educational settings is that the most natural and optimal condition for learning is when the student has a clear idea of what she intends to learn – what we’ll call the student’s learning goal. The process of establishing a learning goal represents a key organizing function. Once established, the learning goal exerts a powerful influence on the student’s attention and cognition during encoding. As we’ll see in the course of this chapter, how a particular student initially organizes new information is continually shaped and guided by the student’s understanding of what she is trying to learn. The learning goal creates a state of mind – or a mindset, we might say – in which other organizing processes are continually tuned to more efficiently accomplish a certain intention. Among the results of this tuning of organizing processes is that the student’s attention is drawn to whatever seems most relevant to the learning goal. If, for example, the student intends to learn about the physics defining the earth’s orbit around the sun, details about the definition of a planet may not be registered, though details related to the earth’s orbit likely would be. Another result is that the student’s memory will also reflect the influence of the learning goal. Much like the diner’s memory of a wonderful meal or one that narrowly missed the mark, what the student recalls will be structured around an organizing theme. Details that are peripheral to the learning goal are far less likely to be recalled than those that are more central to what the student is trying to learn. A student’s learning goal can take any number of forms, from understanding a concept (that of totalitarianism, for example), to answering a certain question (What is the form of a sonnet?) to acquiring a new skill (how to multiply fractions). Contrary to what we might assume, however, the student need not consciously formulate the learning goal for it to exert a powerful influence on the encoding process – on how the student initially organizes new input. The learning goal is not something that the student’s must necessarily consciously know or decide. The process of establishing a learning goal can be both a result of, and itself a part of, unconscious processing. Establishing a learning goal is a dynamic, ongoing process. During the flow of a lesson, learning goals are likely to be taken up, jettisoned, altered, and amended. Although there are additional nuances to this process of establishing a learning goal – we’ll explore some of these later – the essential point for the time being is that encoding will not operate effectively without a clear intention concerning what is being learned. With the concept of the learning goal as our touchstone, the remainder of this chapter will present three additional organizing processes that support the student in encoding information in a way that leads to lasting learning. As we’ll see, the learning goal is integral to each; it influences and informs each process, allowing it to function as it should. First, we will take a more specific look at the process by which mental boundaries create distinct units of learning, a process I’ll call demarcation. Next, we’ll move on to selectivity, our capacity for focusing our attention on information that is most relevant to what we’re trying to learn. Finally, we’ll discuss set construction, for a more detailed understanding of the manner in which prior knowledge supports organization.
Demarcation
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Demarcation In Chap. 2 we discussed how mental boundaries are a crucial part of our mind’s unconscious organization of experience. Mental boundaries provide structure at the time of encoding, creating “packets” of meaningfully connected details and keeping distinct what would otherwise become confounded. Without them, our understanding is less clear and our memory less functional, like trying to find a particular phrase in a book with no chapters, page numbers, or even punctuation. A neuropsychological term we can use for the process by which our mind imposes these mental boundaries is demarcation. This process of demarcation is absolutely critical to memory. Demarcation plays a critical role in the way students encode new information as they’re learning. The essential role of demarcation in academic learning is to keep understanding clear in memory – to avoid confusion by keeping separate what needs to be kept separate as it is learned. In the example discussed in Chap. 2, it was noted that two sets of computer directions can become co-mingled so that the understanding they were meant to convey is lost. Similarly, a student learning about fractions must keep what he learns about adding and subtracting fractions separate from what he learns about multiplying fractions, or confusion will follow. A student listening to a lecture about Asian history may easily follow a lecture that discusses India during a certain period, then China, then Japan. If demarcations are not occurring, however, it may be difficult to later remember what happened in a particular country. Demarcation accomplishes this by allowing us to encode what we learn in distinct learning episodes – a bounded period of time during which we are trying to learn something in particular. Demarcation creates these distinct mental episodes by marking their boundaries, distinguishing between, say, how to calculate the perimeter of a triangle vs. calculating the area of a triangle. Like a capital letter at the beginning of a sentence and a period at the end, the mental start points and stop points created by demarcation determine what a particular episode encompasses and what it excludes. Once we understand that these boundaries are being imposed, the question we’re bound to ask is: When does this happen? Since these demarcations occur outside of conscious awareness and can’t be directly observed, we wonder at what point does one episode end and another begin. As we said earlier, the learning goal shapes the way organizing processes operate at the time of encoding. The process of demarcation is a case in point, a perfect illustration of how the student’s conception of what he’s learning – again, not necessarily a conscious one – guides the encoding process as it unfolds. An episode begins when the student’s mind detects a learning goal (how to find the slope of a line, for instance), at which point a “start” is encoded. The episode ends when a shift in learning goal becomes apparent, when a new goal is recognized (how to find the y intercept, let’s say). A mental “stop” marks the end of the first episode and another “start” begins the next. Without establishing successive learning goals, demarcation does not occur. As we did in our discussion of the learning goal, we want to acknowledge that there are of course further complexities related to demarcation without being distracted from the central implication. For instance, students may encode in nestled
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episodes-within-episodes. There will also be individual differences regarding when demarcation occurs for different students. In considering cognitive functions, there is always more to the story. When this process is working, it may have more variation and nuance than can be tracked or described, but when it is not working sufficiently, the results are always the same: difficulty in remembering. What’s essential at this point in our discussion is appreciating that organization at the time of learning will not be successful without this invisible ongoing process. What is the result of this kind of encoding, of organizing new learning into individual episodes according to a shifting goal? Or, to put the question another way, what is the benefit of organizing information episodically at the time of learning? The answer is that demarcation supports the process by which the newly learned material is meaningfully structured and connected in the student’s mind. Encoding information in discrete episodes helps maintain meaningful units of learning in which related information is linked together and organized around a topic – the learning goal. Finally, the creation of these packets of meaningfully connected material provides a necessary foundation for an ongoing process of consolidation and integration. Successful integration with other material can only occur when the boundaries created by demarcation are established as they’re needed at the time of learning. Of the four key processes we are considering, demarcation strikes many as the most counter-intuitive – the most difficult to imagine and appreciate. Very often our learning has the subjective quality of flowing, of moving along fluidly, of picking up tributaries here and perhaps branching off at a point downstream. As we learn, one thing may flow into another. It hardly seems intuitive that we have distinct boundaries forming as this experience flows on. What’s more, some sets of information seem so obviously separate that it may strike us as implausible that mental boundaries are needed, that the functioning of a specific neural mechanism is required to maintain that separation in one’s memory. However, as one observes students through the lens of this concept, it takes on substance in the mind of the educator and its importance can be better appreciated.
Selective Attention In the last chapter, we also saw that the process by which our mind filters the stimuli we encounter – continually selecting certain aspects for conscious attention and filtering others out – plays an integral role in organizing our experience so that we can function and focus. We noted, as one example, that while we read, many ambient stimuli that would otherwise be a distraction are screened out of our awareness without any perceptible effort on our part. This unconscious organizing process is generally referred to as selectivity or selective attention. In an educational context, selectivity draws the learner’s attention to certain information and inhibits attention to the rest, enabling students to identify and focus on salient information rather than trying to absorb everything with equal attention.
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Just as we cannot consciously experience all the stimuli around us, students cannot pay full and equal attention to each bit of information they encounter. When a student does try to attend equally and recall every idea and fact in a text, lecture, or discussion, the usual outcome is difficulty in organizing. Selective attention occurs naturally and for the most part outside of awareness. Conscious effort may sometimes play an important role in directing attention, but conscious processes are clearly ill-suited to making the countless, rapid-fire decisions that learners make about what merits their attention. Hypothetically, a student for whom selectivity is not available, leaving him to rely solely on his capacity for focusing attention by force of will, would need long stretches of time to read a short passage, and could not possibly keep up with a lecture or discussion. Each time he had finally decided what to pay attention to, the teacher would have already moved on. Remember also from Chap. 2 that our unconscious attention is responsive to what’s most important to us in the moment. This same principle holds true in the context of encoding: the learning goal continually guides selectivity so that student’s attention gravitates toward whatever is most pertinent. Other material, even material that might be important for another learning goal, fades into the background. By tuning the student’s attention in a way that is biased toward what’s most relevant to the learning goal, selectivity makes the student’s attention strategic and efficient. By reducing the amount of information that must be attended to consciously, and by relieving the student from having to continually make deliberate choices about what’s most important – choices that are “expensive” in terms of the cognitive resources they require – selective attention greatly reduces the demand on students’ attentional and cognitive systems. Selective attention frees up students’ minds to consider, analyze, and engage with what they’re learning, giving them “room to think.” Selectivity can make it possible for students to interact with what they are learning in a way that suits their interests, learning style, and repertoire of strategies. The student has more space to contemplate what she’s learning, making connections and inferences, probing her own understanding and identifying points that she may not yet fully understand. In this mode, the student’s mind can be fully and actively engaged in the process of organizing what she’s learning. Background knowledge also greatly facilitates the process of selectivity. The more a student is thoroughly familiar with a topic, and the more this knowledge is available – or activated – in her mind at the time of learning, the more readily and efficiently selectivity takes place. The unconscious yet logical judgments that guide attention are honed. New, important information is easily identified and familiar or redundant information draws little or no attention. By way of illustration, consider once more the all-day workshop from the first chapter. Suppose that instead of being new to the topic, you were an expert in the field, thoroughly familiar with most of what was to be presented. In fact, you came to the seminar not because you needed to learn more information, but simply because you wanted to hear this particular speaker’s point of view. Imagine what your experience would be like. Your mind would be effortlessly selective about what portions of the
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presentation you most carefully attended to. You would automatically, unconsciously ignore material you already know – hearing it, but letting it pass by – and you would make easy, rapid judgments about what new information is most important based on how it fits into the framework of your previous knowledge, akin to placing a puzzle piece in a jigsaw that’s 90% done. You would have had to attend closely to only a small percentage of the day’s presentation.
Set Construction In the last chapter, we discussed the fact that prior experience shapes what we understand in the present. We organize new experience in relation to, and in the context of, what we already know. In academic learning, acquired knowledge that pertains to what students are learning helps them understand what’s before them more readily, more deeply, and with greater nuance. It helps them appreciate the meaning on a global level – what’s the gist, what’s going on – and helps them appreciate the meaning of specific details as they relate to the overall picture. The way students comprehend and therefore encode new material depends to a large extent on the process by which relevant portions of their knowledge base – information, understanding, approaches, strategies, and skills – are temporarily brought to the forefront of the mind to facilitate learning. It is not enough for the student to have learned about the topic at hand at some time in the past – the knowledge must be activated when it is needed. This tapestry of available background knowledge is called a learning set. Successful encoding depends heavily upon the availability of this mental context. The learning set supplies a helpful lens through which to understand new material. It aids in comprehension and organization. It reduces the mental effort a student must expend, allowing him to assess the material from a knowledgeable framework and to see meaningful patterns, themes, and similarities more readily. Without an adequate set, learning generally becomes more laborious, less rewarding and less effective. As with demarcation and selectivity, it is again the student’s learning goal that adapts and attunes this process to a particular situation. The learning goal defines the task at hand and keys the unconscious processes that bring the most useful material to the front of mind – a process which is, for the most part, both automatic and unconscious. Most of the relevant learning that composes the learning set will neither be deliberately searched for by the student nor consciously recalled. Nonetheless, this knowledge will decisively and profoundly guide learning. The learning set influences what students give attention to, the patterns they see, the questions they consider, the strategies and modes of thinking they use, and their capacity to understand concepts, as well as the depth at which they understand them. When the learning set is in place – despite it being largely unconscious – whatever the student needs to remember explicitly will usually be recalled with ease. In Chap. 2, we discussed the reconstructive nature of recall. Our mind has the capacity to integrate elements of a seemingly unlimited number of disparate episodes
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in order to meet our present needs – to retrieve, edit, and incorporate knowledge we acquired at different points in time. Similarly, creating a learning set is not, as a rule, analogous to grabbing a specific, pre-compiled file folder and perusing all the notes from encounters with a certain topic. To the contrary, mental contexts are constructed in response to the task at hand – custom made for the occasion. That’s why, in the context of academic learning, we refer to this process as set construction. Especially in educational settings, set construction tends to be complex, drawing upon elements from many prior episodes, even when the learning set needed at a particular moment seemingly depends only on material covered in a single lecture, class or reading. To understand a history lecture fully, for example, a student might call upon several recent history lectures and readings. The student might also call upon certain things learned recently or more distantly: what the student knows about nature of historical progress, the specific country being discussed, surrounding countries, the time period, the nature of politics, religion, economics, and human psychology, as well as the nature of interactions between these strands of history. The learning set often includes ways of learning certain material – implicit cognitive strategies based on what has worked in similar situations in the past. So, this student might also call on skills and approaches and modes of thinking that have been helpful in listening to past history lectures and on knowledge about the nature of historical study. As the student’s learning goal changes, so too must the learning set. Sometimes – as a student goes from Geometry class to Spanish class, for example – this required change in the constellation of available background information can be understood as a clear shift. The prior set is inhibited or put aside, and an entirely new collection of relevant prior knowledge is made available. However, shifts in set construction can also occur more fluidly, accommodating more subtle shifts in the learning goal – for example, when the history discussion moves from economics to politics, from Russia to Germany, or simply moves along such that, as material is considered, new themes emerge, different learning sets might be called for. To sum up, the process of set construction contributes prior knowledge to understanding in such a way that fluidly unites past and present learning, bringing to the fore portions of the student’s base of knowledge that are germane to the learning goal.
Concluding Remarks In this chapter, our primary aim has been to pursue an understanding of organizing at the time of learning. We have used a consideration of four specific processes as our window into the kinds of critical organizing that takes place during encoding. These were establishing the learning goal, demarcation, selectivity, and set construction. From a neuropsychological perspective, it’s certainly possible to identify and discuss mental processes in this way – that is, one-by-one and as single, distinct cognitive functions. However, as a rule, the deeper one goes in understanding individual cognitive processes, the less independent they appear to be. Establishing the
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learning goal, selectivity, demarcation, and set construction are no exception, and it is important to keep in mind that they do not operate in isolation. To the contrary, they work very much in concert. The mental processes we have discussed here are profoundly interdependent and mutually supportive, each informing the way the others operate. In fact, we have already discussed one such relationship. The learning goal, remember, tunes the other processes, making them more strategic and efficient. As we dig deeper into the riddle, it’s worth taking the time to consider briefly some of the other relationships that these processes surrender to our examination. As one example, consider the contribution of set construction to selectivity. We have already seen that the learning goal informs selectivity, but selectivity is also supported by the student’s existing body of knowledge. By activating relevant prior learning, set construction gives selectivity a base from which to determine, moment to moment, what the student’s attentional priorities should be, enabling students to rapidly identify what is most important or salient. The more one knows about a topic, the easier it is to see what’s most important in a related discussion. The students’ attention may be directed to what is new to them, to what contradicts their understanding, to what serves as an illustration of a familiar concept, to what addresses their confusion – all of which are a function of prior learning. The more background knowledge one has learned and has available – that is, the denser and more complete the learning set – the more readily and easily these judgments can be made, and the more informed and helpful these judgments will be. Relationships between cognitive functions almost always work in both directions. Selectivity, for example, likewise supports set construction. By reducing the burden on the student’s attentional and cognitive systems, selectivity allows set construction to function more efficiently, to build a temporary platform of knowledge that is more complete and relevant to the task at hand and to fluidly alter the learning set as needed. Freed of the necessity of attending to less relevant material, students have more room to consider what they are learning in the context of what they already know. Selectivity also reinforces set construction by focusing the student’s attention on information that bears some relationship to something they’ve learned in the past, making it easier for the student’s mind to construct a learning set that aids comprehension and enriches his understanding. Throughout our discussion of these processes, we followed the thread of establishing the learning goal to explore the way organization at the time of encoding is strategic and purposeful. Because of its importance, we put the concept of the learning goal front and center in our discussion and noted its influence on each of the other three processes under discussion. Indeed, we found that the other three processes all reflect how essential a clear learning goal is to unconscious organization at the time of encoding. However, this relationship is also not unidirectional. Selectivity, demarcation, and set construction work together to support the student in establishing a clear learning goal. It’s true that the learning goal exerts a continuous “top-down” influence on selectivity, demarcation, and set construction. At the same time, however, the process of establishing a clear and effective learning goal – and establishing successive learning goals, one after another – depends upon contributions from these processes.
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To take an example, the operation of selectivity can be seen as necessary to consistently and effectively establishing a learning goal. Selectivity directs the student’s attention to explicit cues concerning the learning goal, or to important pieces of data from which the learning goal emerges. For another example, note that the availability of background information made possible by set construction will also facilitate the process of establishing the learning goal. The more a student knows, the easier the recognition of a meaningful learning goal. The student’s context-rich prior experience can provide many hints, clues, and ideas that may inform judgment about the learning goal. Individual processes also work together in the sense that they conspire to give shape to new material in the student’s mind. The continuous flow of time is carved up into units of related information based on the recognition of a learning goal. The student’s attention is biased toward what’s most important to what’s being learned. Relevant prior knowledge, approaches, strategies, and skills are brought to the tip of the student’s mind, making them readily available to aid comprehension and integration of the new information. The result is delimited “packets” of new learning containing a manageable volume of content, organized around a learning goal and in relation to prior knowledge. Finally, returning to the ongoing nature of organizing, these processes work together to achieve the same goal: to create a initial organization of new learning that paves the way for a fuller integration – a deeper sinking in – that takes place over time. Sufficient organizing at the time of learning is essential but does not mark the end point of unconscious processing – again, organizing is an ongoing process. The packets that are formed during encoding are not simply stored and later recalled in the same form. The information they contain is organized and reorganized as time goes on, making it more flexible and fluid – better able to facilitate learning in the future. Sufficient organization at the time of encoding is a necessary condition for material being further organized and integrated into the student’s knowledge base and recalled flexibly in various combinations as the need arises. It is during this continuous integration and reorganization that memories take root, understanding deepens, complexity emerges, and insights grow.
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Chapter 4
How Things Go Wrong: Breakdowns in Organization
Over the course of this book, we’ve adopted the neuropsychological concept of organization to help us characterize the unconscious processes that enable us to learn. While we are using the term in a technical sense, it is helpful for our purposes to note that organization, in the everyday sense of the word, is evocative of structure and activity. These connotations are entirely apt – they help to highlight just how much activity our minds are constantly engaged in, which, though unaware of it, we are entirely dependent upon to make our experience comprehensible and in order to learn. Developing a feel for how active the mental processes underlying learning are, and how much mental work is required during the encoding process, has given us a springboard for the next step in our discussion: the recognition that organizing processes, vital at the time of learning, can be undermined. Until now, we’ve envisioned the encoding process based on everything going right. We’ve seen that successful organizing processes such as establishing a learning goal, demarcation, selectivity, and set construction manage the flow of information, making the mind’s activities strategic and efficient. At the time of learning, these functions reduce the amount of information that must consciously be attended to, aid comprehension of what the student is focused on, and facilitate organization into units, or packets, making material clear and meaningful to the student. Of course, implicit in the understanding that many things must go right for learning to occur is the possibility that any of these processes might break down, with the result being that learning is undermined. In school settings, there is a common reason for such breakdowns. This chapter will focus on the observations indicating that when the student encounters too much information, organizing processes can be attenuated and learning undermined – that under such conditions, attempts at learning fail because the student is unable to organize the material to a degree necessary for lasting recall and depth of understanding. The central idea of this chapter, indeed of this book, is that there is a tension between information and organization. On one hand, we are all aware that information is the raw material of learning and thinking, and that new information builds knowledge and can draw attention and create interest. Yet, there is only so much C.A. Ahern and K. de Kirby, Beyond Individual Differences: Organizing Processes, Information Overload, and Classroom Learning, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4614-0641-9_4, © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011
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information our minds can successfully organize over a given period of time. There is a point at which the amount of information becomes unmanageable, when the mind simply can’t organize new material to a degree necessary for meaningful learning. Past this point, new information is not likely to attract sustained interest or attention. In fact, more information will only degrade organization further. In presenting this idea – that too much information can disrupt learning – in various forums, I have found that, on the one hand, it strikes most people as intuitively obvious. After all, we know from first-hand experience that our minds can be overwhelmed by too much input, that there is only so much we can learn at once. We can all remember instances when we’ve been “fried,” when an onslaught of new ideas and information exhausted our minds’ resources – a night class, back-to-back classes at college, even an all-day workshop during which we’d taken in all we could. We can probably remember what it feels like – the feeling of “I can’t take anymore,” being overwhelmed, mental fogginess, and fatigue. That we so readily recall experiences like these is surely responsible for the intuitive sense that this is so: “Well of course we can be overwhelmed by too much information.” In the context of such experiences, to say that information can undercut learning is apt to seem trivial, commonplace, pedestrian – a platitude. This can mask the real import and the full significance of this statement. It seems akin to saying, “lack of sleep makes us tired” or “our bodies can only withstand so much exertion without rest.” Just as there is nothing particularly subtle about being sleep deprived or exhausted after a physically demanding day, the state of being mentally burnt out seems not only obvious in its manifestations and the way it makes us feel, but in its solution as well. Our focus, however, is on the fact that learning can be undercut without obvious signs. Much like the anecdote in Chap. 1, a teacher friend once told me about going to a great all-day seminar, and enjoying it all with interest, but finding, when she tried to summarize it in her notes, that she was essentially confused. While she was certainly aware of being tired during the afternoon session, she did not feel in the least bit overwhelmed at the end of the seminar. She did not realize that anything had gone seriously awry until she tried to recall what she learned. It is certainly true that students can be pushed to the point of utter mental overwhelm. We all know the signs: heads down on their desks, faraway stares, perhaps resisting and refusing. But the students that we envisioned when formulating the riddle are not those with such manifestations. At the heart of the riddle is the student who completes his work, who appears to be learning certain material but is found later not to have learned it with any real depth – a student, in other words, who shows signs of doing without learning. Understanding such instances depends upon a crucial insight: organizing processes are far more vulnerable than we are apt to realize. That is, the point at which the demands from new information attenuates or impairs organizing processes generally comes far earlier than both the teacher and student usually suspect. The difference between learning and doing without learning is frequently obscure because in academic situations, as in general, only a percentage of cognitive activity is available to conscious awareness and to ordinary observation. Unconscious organizing processes
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can break down while the student can still listen, think, and work. There is a relatively modest limit to our ability to organize new input at the depth that is needed for real learning. Because the processes involved typically cannot be directly observed, it is not readily apparent when this threshold is reached. As a result, the point at which the quality of learning begins its descent will often go unnoticed, not only by the student, but by the teacher as well. This creates the gray area, the no-man’s land of doing without learning. It is tempting to equate the common manifestations of being utterly overwhelmed with information overload, but the reality is that when a student appears clearly overwhelmed and exhausted, it’s safe to assume that learning has probably been compromised for a considerable amount of time. Returning to the seminar vignette, we can imagine that just as most seminar participants would not sense in the moment that learning was being undermined, the instructor would not likely perceive signs that learning was disrupted among the members of her audience. Looking out, the speaker would see participants paying attention, taking notes, apparently comprehending what she’s saying. It may seem at first that any concern about demand from information is only warranted in inordinately challenging conditions. However, this book is inspired by observations indicating demand may undercut students – including exceptionally bright and exceptionally motivated students – in the initial organization critical to learning and that this disruption can occur invisibly, even while the student does her work satisfactorily and while the demand seems, to all involved, to be within normal limits. This issue is relevant for all students. While some students may tend to manage more information than others, or a particular student may manage more at one time than another, any student is vulnerable to breakdown of organizing processes in response to excessive demand. The nature of the demand on organizing processes also makes it clear why this universal vulnerability is of particular relevance in school settings. Two basic factors can be considered in understanding the demands that information places on organizing processes. These are the amount of new information presented over a given period of time, and the number of new topics introduced over a given period of time. It goes without saying that both of these factors are present in most school settings to a high degree. As a way of exploring the reversal at the heart of this chapter – those occasions in which the demands inherent in encountering information are enough to impair the very cognitive functions designed to manage and organize it – we will return to aspects of organizing that we discussed in Chap. 3: establishing the learning goal, demarcation, selectivity, and set construction. Through the lens of these processes, we’ll look at some of the implications when demand on organizing processes is too great and at the types of challenges this can create in everyday learning at school. As I stated in the preface, this book addresses a convergence between concepts identified as essential in neuropsychological research and clinical observations (my own and those of teachers and other colleagues). The present chapter, as well as the chapter that follows, will further detail these educational observations, describing what happens in academic learning situations when the demand from new information reaches the tipping point, and organizing processes are undermined.
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Demarcation and Demand from Information As stated in Chap. 3, demarcation preserves the integrity of meaningful organization, maintaining the coherence of individual packets of material by imposing boundaries at the time of learning. In simple terms, demarcation allows us to keep things separate. For students, there is a great deal to keep separate every day in school. Demarcations must occur far more frequently than we tend to realize. As was noted in the previous chapter, there are more and less obvious occasions where demarcation might be necessary. When a student goes from Spanish class to Geometry class, a demarcation must occur. In general, demarcations must also occur, for example, when a geometry discussion moves from one theorem to another, and from understanding a particular theorem to proving the theorem, and from proving the theorem to recognizing how can be used to solve specific problems. In order to appreciate the necessity of demarcation and the stress that academic learning places upon it, it helps to keep in mind a difference between students and teachers. When teachers think of a particular academic topic, regardless of how general or specific, they tend to view it as a coherent whole, and in terms of the meaningful connections or relationships between its various parts. Take the periodic table of elements, for example. What comes to the mind of a chemistry teacher is likely the way elements are arranged according to atomic number, and the way the physical and chemical properties of the elements change as one moves around the table – much more than a mere list of elements. To take another example, a history teacher – when contemplating, say, the American Revolution – relies on a series of narratives to unite disparate facts, rather than on a litany of isolated occurrences. Moreover, those narratives may form higher-order narratives that cover the period as a whole. This is precisely as it should be. The connections, after all, are what make something a meaningful topic rather than a jumble of random information. The fact that material can be understood in this way, as a coherent whole made up of meaningful connections and relationships, is a reflection of a sophisticated understanding – a level of learning that educators would hope to impart to students. The flip side of having this level of understanding, however, is that it is easy to forget that appreciating such connections depends upon first creating mental divisions. A prerequisite for understanding the relationship between units of information – whether concepts, principles, theorems, facts or whatever else – is that they first be distinct in students’ minds. What a teacher may think of as a single, unitary concept or topic might have any number of facets that demand mental boundaries for the student not yet deeply acquainted with the big picture. It’s the student’s ability to create these important divisions while learning that make it possible for her to eventually understand it at the level the teacher does – to understand how these various parts fit together into a coherent whole. If demarcation does not occur when needed, whatever connections the student seems to understand will eventually give way to confusion. This confusion often results from a phenomenon called interference. Material that has been initially
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encoded – that is, on its way to being adequately organized – remains vulnerable to disruption for a considerable period of time. It can be disturbed or disorganized after it is first encoded by the information that follows. If the boundaries between them are not sufficient, the second thing a student learns can interfere with the first. Details from separate learning packets intermingle and vague or confused memory tends to follow. The likelihood of interference increases as more – and more similar – material is presented in close temporal proximity. Consider the demands of academic learning in light of this. The very nature of school is that many topics are presented in the course of a day and that conceptually related material is apt to be presented in close succession. Presenting a series of related concepts can of course be clarifying, and add depth to understanding, but at some point the demand will interfere with the student’s need to keep things separate and learn without interference.
Selective Attention and Demand from Information The importance of selectivity for students cannot be overstated. The function of selective attention is to filter the flow of incoming information. The more new information one encounters, the more important selective attention becomes. And who encounters more new material than a student? The entire enterprise of school, after all, is based on encountering new information. Consider, for example, what the student listening to a lecture concerning the American Revolution must contend with. Most of the material will, by design, be new. There may be new twists in the progress of the war, new political developments, new events, new dates to go with the events, new principal personalities, new details regarding known individuals, new theories, new explanations, new military strategies, new information about the experience of soldiers and citizens. Then tomorrow – as well as in the next class period – a whole new set of information will be encountered. Indeed, in comparison to most situations in adult life, students must manage a tremendously high proportion of new material in relation to what they already know. Selectivity is so fundamentally important in academic learning because it reduces the demand on the student’s attention and cognition. The filtering function of selective attention means there is less material to be consciously attended to and understood. Selectivity makes students’ attention “smart” and strategic, allowing them to focus on what’s most relevant to what they’re trying to learn. As the demand from new information increases, the student’s capacity to attend selectively is challenged. At a certain point, a shift occurs. Selectivity loses its logic. Though the process, in a certain sense, must continue – since conscious attention has its limits and input must be filtered somehow – this filtering is no longer smart and strategic. When selective attention is overmatched by the amount of new material encountered, the logical process of selectivity becomes haphazard, giving way to more or less random filtering and selection.
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Once this shift occurs, students may be inundated with input. The familiar comic image of trying to keep up with an assembly line moving at an ever-increasing speed comes to mind. As a way of coping, students may intermittently disengage from what they’re learning, as their attentional system momentarily reaches its limits. Students may also begin to attend superficially, distributing their attentional resources thinly – often too thinly – in an attempt to attend to the range of input. When processes of selectivity cannot play their essential role, organizing of material is compromised.
Set Construction and Demand from Information We now know that understanding material with depth and efficiency depends to a considerable extent on the timely availability of relevant prior learning. If we break this principle down, we see that there are actually two separate but necessary conditions: first, that the material was successfully learned to begin with, and second, that it is called to mind in a timely fashion, available for the student when it is needed. The first does not guarantee the second. The degree to which relevant prior knowledge supports comprehension can vary from one situation to the next, even as the student’s general level of understanding of this background information remains the same. In Chap. 3, we used the term “learning set” to refer to the constellation of supportive elements drawn from memory that are available, whether in conscious awareness or not, as the student undertakes to learn something new. As we stated earlier, learning sets are not merely retrieved; they must be constructed: assembled and integrated, usually from material encountered on many different occasions. The complexity and flexibility of this process is precisely what makes it so valuable, allowing us to customize what we know so that it is ideally suited for aiding us in our present goal. At the same time, it is also what makes it relatively vulnerable to being overloaded; it requires considerable mental work to accomplish. This process of set construction gives us another angle from which to take stock of the demands of academic learning. Consider the frequency with which the learning set must be switched or updated during a typical school day. Each new class means constructing a new learning set. The elements of the student’s base of knowledge that they’ll have to call upon to follow a Science lecture will have little in common with what they’ll need in Spanish. And, remember, learning sets are not only switched in order to accommodate such obvious changes in subject matter. They must also be continuously revised and updated in response to the steady progression of new information and the kinds of seemingly minor changes in topic that can occur any number of times in a single class. To be a student is to be a generalist. Succeeding in school entails addressing an incredible range of disparate subjects over a relatively short period of time. Most adults, by contrast, make their living within a relatively narrow area, dealing with situations that – in their general form – they’ve dealt with many times. For instance, an experienced attorney who takes on a case will need to assimilate the facts involved
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in their client’s situation and may have to learn some new case law, but much of the knowledge necessary to address the legal issues involved will in all likelihood be familiar and recurring – a type of case the attorney has seen before. As the result of being specialists, the adults’ level of background knowledge tends to be broader, richer, more elaborated, and is called upon over and over. Students, on the other hand, are forced to make use of material they learned yesterday or last week, making their learning sets less robust and the process of set construction more effortful. Learning sets must be revised more frequently and extensively. For the student, then, set construction is typically both profoundly needed and profoundly taxed. When demand from information is too great, a student’s overall use of prior learning is less effective. He no longer makes full and consistent use of what he knows. He will temporarily forget even key and previously well-learned material. Learning sets become partial, impoverished and disorganized. When set construction is undermined in this way, the students’ level of comprehension tends toward the superficial. He may develop a more or less surface understanding, following the literal meaning of what he hears, but without a fuller understanding. The process of set construction helps in orienting students to what they’re learning, which is why there is often a subjective sense of simultaneously understanding but not understanding when a set is of insufficient help. When demand is high, the process of constructing learning sets sometimes becomes more sluggish. The student may not switch or revise the set in time to keep up with the material as it moves along. When an adequate learning set is not in place, the student is forced to divert a significant percentage of attentional and cognitive resources to deciphering clues to meaning in the current context.
Establishing the Learning Goal and Demand from Information One of the hallmarks of excessive demand is that students are found to be without an adequate learning goal. As they are pressed by the demand of more information, students lose the capacity to consistently recognize or formulate a goal adequate to facilitate successful encoding. A clear learning goal is necessary for the proper functioning of selectivity, set construction, and demarcation, fine-tuning these other processes so that encoding is successful. If, on the other hand, if an adequate learning goal is not in place, the contribution of these processes is sabotaged. However, the weakening of these other processes is not only the consequence of a failure to establish adequate learning goal, but the cause as well. As we pointed out in Chap. 3, the efficient functioning of those other processes is needed to support the establishment of a clear learning goal. The attenuation of those processes will make establishing a learning goal more difficult and less consistent. This is why, once the scales tip, difficulties related to demand from information can snowball. If demarcation, selectivity, or set construction falter, the learning goal is apt to be less consistently effective. When the learning goal is not firmly established, then these processes will be undercut – and so the snowball builds.
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4 How Things Go Wrong: Breakdowns in Organization
Concluding Remarks We have come a long way. Let’s briefly review the ground we’ve covered. Our inquiry started with a riddle concerning puzzling failures to remember, unexpected failures to achieve long-term learning. To get our bearings, we then set out to familiarize ourselves with the role that mental organization plays in our daily life, allowing us to accomplish the incredible feats of mind that, while automatic and seemingly effortless, are the result of an amount of unconscious activity that is difficult to imagine. Next, we fixed our attention on the encoding process. We saw that sufficient organization is critical at the time students are encountering new material. During encoding, organizing processes create a foundation for ongoing consolidation and reorganization, which enables lasting and meaningful learning. Accordingly, we stated as a partial answer to the riddle that failure to organize could account for the phenomenon of doing without learning. Finally, in the present chapter, we observed that organization at the time of encoding can be compromised by demands on organizing processes in the form of too much data or too frequent shifts in topic, and that this can be so without the student or teacher being aware of it. We have arrived, then, at a specific answer to the riddle of doing without learning. Organizing processes are unconscious and fundamentally necessary at the time of encoding, yet they are vulnerable to the demands inherent in encountering information. Therefore, students’ concerted efforts and focused attention are no guarantee the material will be meaningfully integrated into their base of knowledge. As we noted at the outset, answering the riddle was not the ultimate destination we intended for our inquiry. Rather, the riddle has served as a vehicle. In addressing the riddle, we have been charting a course to understand learning on a different, more fundamental level than we’re most accustomed to. To that end, we’ve explored the complex relationship between learning, organizing, and demand from information. At this point, the next step would seem to be for us to consider ways the teacher can support students’ organizing processes so as to prevent such breakdowns and encourage depth of understanding. But before we move on to addressing this question in Part II, and leave the riddle behind, there remains an important dimension of failures in organization to consider.
Chapter 5
Learning to Learn: Organization and the Student’s Experience
In Chap. 1 we presented a riddle: Imagine you attended an exciting, daylong seminar and felt confident you’d paid attention and absorbed the material. Then, a few days later, you were surprised to find you could recall very little of the meaningful material you thought you’d learned. In subsequent chapters, we investigated this riddle by tightening our focus to the level of the learning episode, examining how demand on organizing processes can influence how encoding occurs, and clarifying important facets of the relationship between learning and organizing processes. In Chap. 4, we reached our final answer to the riddle: episodes of doing without learning often occur as a result of encountering more information than can be organized effectively at the time of encoding. While we have answered the riddle, we have not yet arrived at the heart of this book. As you’ll recall from the introduction, the journey I am recounting here started with students’ puzzling failures to remember material that they had apparently learned. I saw this first with TJ and then with other students I came across. As I pursued the matter of how memory works, another, broader dimension emerged: I found that there were greater educational implications to the conditions under which students attempt to learn – and these implications relate not just to what is learned and what is forgotten but to how students come to approach learning and how they come to value it. Here again, I can see clearly in retrospect the clues present in my work with TJ that pointed me in an important direction. The first clues I mentioned – those we have been pursuing in the last few chapters – related to the observation that TJ’s learning could be disrupted before there was any subjective awareness of the disruption on TJ’s part or clear signs that I could observe. Another clue emerged after I understood the learning conditions that helped TJ better retain the material we covered. At some point after these conditions were in place, changes in TJ began to emerge. Something was different about the manner in which he approached learning. While he had been determined and hard-working from the beginning, he became notably more eager to learn and more willing to trying difficult exercises after we’d figured out how to manage some of the demands from information. He became generally more enthusiastic and open, more excited about learning, and over time C.A. Ahern and K. de Kirby, Beyond Individual Differences: Organizing Processes, Information Overload, and Classroom Learning, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4614-0641-9_5, © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011
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was clearly more confident in his capacity to learn. This change in TJ sensitized me to an essential connection between the conditions for learning and the manner in which students view and approach it. In subsequent years, it became clear to me that while difficulties in organizing during a learning episode can occur without the student’s awareness that anything is amiss, these difficulties can profoundly affect his experiences of learning – and have lasting effects. In other words, learning may not feel “off” during any isolated episode of doing without learning, but learning feels very different depending on whether students are, in general, organizing successfully or not. In this chapter, we’ll discuss this connection between organizing processes and the experience of the student by shifting our focus from individual episodes to repeated experiences of doing without learning and examining their cumulative effects. We’ll find that whether or not successful organizing occurs affects the student’s experience of learning, and those experiences are critical to the student’s development over the long term. This will bring into view the full importance of the insights we developed in the first four chapters. Occasional episodes of “doing without learning” – like the discrete experience we proposed in our riddle – are probably unavoidable for any student, and are unlikely to be significant in themselves. But what happens when demand from information regularly undercuts organizing processes at the time of encoding? Failures to organize can, over time, have effects on students that go well beyond their retention of a particular lesson or activity. One of these consequences may be obvious: as such episodes accumulate, they can limit the students’ overall knowledge base in a given subject area. But there are other, broader repercussions: when students continue to experience doing without learning, the range and effectiveness of the approaches they develop for engaging in learning may become limited. In addition, these experiences can negatively shape their long-term attitudes and beliefs about the value of education and about their own capacities as learners.
Experience If we start by looking at what students experience when organizing processes fail, we can see more clearly how their reactions to those experiences, if left unchecked, can negatively affect the approaches they develop toward learning, as well as their attitudes and beliefs about education. Over the long term, the effects of excessive demand on organizing processes can manifest in different forms: a student might fail to learn a subject altogether, or she might remember some of the material, but only vaguely, perhaps mixing it up in her mind with a related topic. This can result in a kind of “half-learning,” a fuzzy, piecemeal or disorganized recollection that does not strongly link concepts with details, and results in poor understanding. A student may remember some key general ideas, but without sufficient supporting details or any depth of comprehension. Conversely, she may recall a number of details, but without a coherent picture of how they fit together around a central concept.
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To make matters worse, interference sometimes occurs. Recall from Chap. 4 that when interference occurs, difficulties go beyond a lack of clear understanding: the student actually encodes a misunderstanding, forming connections based on temporal proximity rather than conceptual unity. For example, a student who learns about determining both the perimeter and the area of a square in the same lesson may confuse the concepts and procedures well into the future. A student who learns about French and English history in the same lesson may, if organizing processes are attenuated, associate certain facts about one country with the other in memory. Such associations may not be readily apparent, and if identified, take a good deal of time and effort to untangle. Note that the time frame between the learning episode and the manifestation of incomplete or inaccurate understanding can vary significantly. A pupil in a math class, for example, might feel like she’s grasped the concept of long division during a lesson one day, only to find that she doesn’t understand what a “remainder” is while doing her homework later that same night or during an assignment the following day. She might even pass a quiz on long division but weeks later realize that she doesn’t really comprehend the topic. Another student may successfully complete a series of assignments for his biology class covering the basics of DNA and RNA, but later, when he goes to study for a test for the genetics unit, he might find that those basics look foreign to him. In other words, the material never sunk in, and not only has he lost the earlier information, he now lacks the foundation to support the new material he’s about to encounter in the next unit of the class. As we might expect, this lag between the learning episode in which organizing processes fail and their subsequent effects (forgotten, half-understood or misunderstood material) can be particularly frustrating. These frustrations can be exacerbated when a student’s performance fails to coincide with his effort and expectation. In other words, equivalent efforts may yield different (inconsistent and unpredictable) outcomes. A student might breeze through a math test one week but falter another week despite putting in the same effort and hours in preparation. Or prepare diligently for a spelling test – and expect to do well – but then fail to meet his own expectations. As episodes of doing without learning accrue, the student may observe that her efforts are not being consistently met with extrinsic rewards: grades or other positive feedback congruent with her own work and expectation. But a student without the foundation of sufficient organization at the time of learning can also miss out on internal rewards: the excitement of discovery; the pride and delight of gaining a deep or unexpected insight; the satisfaction of building a depth and complexity of understanding. We know that these emotional rewards are more than a just a source of extra motivation – they are an integral aspect of learning. Until a student can understand from experience that learning can be inherently rewarding, real education has not yet begun. As failures to organize at the time of encoding accumulate – even when the learner does not recognize them as such – it becomes more and more likely that a student will start to feel overwhelmed in general. A feeling that material is not truly being learned can give way to the sense that schoolwork is altogether “too much.” A student may feel that she is not truly keeping up because she senses on some level
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that she is not truly understanding what she is supposed to understand. And she may become weighted down with the fear that she is not really learning. Over time, this can become dreary and demoralizing.
Approach to Learning We often talk about students’ approaches to learning as if they are influenced primarily by the student’s own intentions. In fact, though, students’ learning experiences greatly influence how they approach learning and the value they ascribe to it. As episodes of doing without learning add up, and the attendant frustrations mount, students respond by adopting (for the most part, unconscious) modes of engaging with the material at hand. If demand from information is too great, students tend to limit their attention in one way or another as a means of coping. These approaches are understandable and reasonable in the sense that they address the immediate problem of encountering too much information by limiting, in one way or another, what is attended to. Alas, these approaches tend to be counterproductive in the long term. They are not “smart” in the way selective attention is when demand is manageable. Instead of guiding attention toward specific material that relates to a learning goal, the student who is experiencing high demand from information may attenuate her attention to reduce demand, but in ways that don’t support learning. One of the most common (and, again, usually unconscious) strategies that students use to adapt to high demand from information is to approach material superficially, directing attention and effort toward only that which seems immediately necessary. In a kind of triage-run-amok reaction to excessive demand on organizing processes, the overloaded student tries to meet the immediate requirements of schoolwork by relying heavily on rote memorization and facile connections in lieu of real understanding. His focus will shift toward procedure – to what needs to be done – and he may start to approach school-related tasks as hurdles to be cleared, and tests as exercises in holding onto a sufficient amount of material just long enough to clear those hurdles. Sometimes a student will appear to be disinterested in instruction – about content or the learning process itself – which the educator may know is likely to be very helpful. While it may appear that the student is, say, fundamentally disinterested or inflexible, in fact this closed stance is strategic, a way of trying to cope with the demand from information. A second common response to high demand is a subtle disengagement of attention. Here students are not attending more narrowly – as when attention is directed toward expedient ways of getting the assignments done – but instead attending broadly to a range of information at the expense of depth. Imagine someone trying to water a football field with a limited amount of water. The entire area gets sprinkled – which seems to coincide with the task – but there is not enough water distributed in any one area to soak into the roots. In an analogous way, the student is indeed paying attention to a lot of material but, for the most part, not enough attention to learn.
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Over time, the student’s individual reactions to high demand on organizing processes can coalesce into patterns or habits. What this means is the approaches a student establishes in order to cope with specific situations become go-to modes, even when they are not necessary – in other words, even when demand on organizing processes is not too high. We should remember once again that this is not primarily the result of any conscious decision on the student’s part to approach material in a certain way. It is better understood as a reflection of accumulated experience – the student has learned implicitly and developed habits in the course of coping with a recurrent predicament. This is what I mean by the title of this chapter: learning to learn. When students’ organizing processes are frequently compromised, it follows that the exercise and development of higher-order cognitive processes – like critical thinking, reflection, and analysis – will begin to suffer. There are two reasons for this. First, as we have been discussing, attentional and cognitive resources are primarily occupied in dealing with the flow of information. This usually leaves sparse resources to devote toward higher-order thought processes. The second reason is inadequate comprehension of a topic. When the foundational material is vague, it’s less likely to spur the kind of curiosity that provides an impetus for higher-level cognitive activity, and less likely to provide a level of understanding that can support the exercise of more advanced thinking. Often students who appear to have limitations in their higher-order thinking simply are not in a position to exercise these capacities. But when the foundational material is clear and the demand from information is not too great, these same students can show (and experience) unexpected capacities. It’s again important to recognize the cumulative impact: a few “missed opportunities” to develop higher-order cognitive processes might not be significant in themselves, but if students’ organizing processes are repeatedly frustrated, their potential may remain undeveloped in these more advanced cognitive areas. When demand on organizing processes is too great, a student can also miss out on the opportunity to develop cognitive flexibility as it relates to learning – a range of strategies and modes of engagement to address different types of material and different learning goals. This is because high demand influences students to stick with learning strategies that have proven successful in keeping their heads above water, even if those strategies don’t support understanding or aren’t ideal for the particular material at hand. (Think of a swimmer who is using all her energy just to reach the edge of the pool as quickly as possible: she stands little chance of improving her swim stroke under such conditions.) These effects are compounded over time, because a flexible cognitive approach depends critically on accumulated experience. That is, a student needs many opportunities to experiment with different strategies, both consciously and unconsciously, and to experience their effects. When demand on organizing processes is too great, students miss out on opportunities, and ultimately these missed opportunities can mean that their repertoire of available strategies is more limited than it might have been. As a result, their overall approach to learning may become less flexible and responsive.
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It’s understandable how a student who is repeatedly overloaded with information might continue to narrow his own approach to learning. Instead of depth and intellectual exploration, he clings to superficial but achievable tasks and procedures; instead of nurturing a range of cognitive approaches, he falls back on a limited number of strategies. Superficial and constricted modes of learning become intertwined, and harmful habits set in. And important qualities such as curiosity, intellectual openness and exploration do not bloom to their full potential.
Attitudes Related to Learning Repeated experiences with excessive demand from information can also lead a student to develop negative attitudes about both his own abilities as a learner and about the value of education in general. He may find success in learning to be unpredictable and elusive and he may experience few intrinsic or extrinsic rewards from it. This may be exacerbated by the self-reinforcing cycle we described in the last section: When a student develops narrow, limited approaches to learning, his attempts at learning are likely to be less rewarding and less successful. As students experience the effects of overload more frequently, they’re more likely to underestimate their own capacity to learn. If they fail to see consistent results from their efforts, they sometimes conclude that they are not smart enough or don’t work hard enough. This attitude can snowball as their own self-assessment limits their confidence. Even intellectually gifted students can come to believe that they are ineffective learners. When learning is too often a struggle, it is easy to suppose you are just not good at it. This self-doubt naturally has a negative effect on motivation, which has been aptly described as “memory of the future.” In other words, students’ expectations (future) are built on their experiences (memory). And if their memory is increasingly filled with unrewarding experiences, their future expectations diminish accordingly. This can be particularly troubling for students who have a history of intense intellectual curiosity and subject-mastery outside of school. These positive experiences contrast with – and may become buried beneath – their negative experiences of doing without learning in school. Beyond doubting their own abilities, students who continue to be overloaded by demand on organizing processes may also develop negative attitudes and beliefs toward education in general. Unfortunately, the frequently overloaded student’s experiences can corroborate these beliefs. His attitudes and experience begin to feed each other in a self-reinforcing cycle: Work is mere busy work when the material cannot be retained. Material is boring when its meaning cannot be explored and examined. Lessons do lack true relevance – both to gaining knowledge and to developing one’s intellect – when new information is not integrated into existing knowledge. For some students, these thoughts can grow beyond transitory complaints and become entrenched as beliefs. When hard work does not pay off consistently, when the path to learning and academic success seems vague and unsure, when students find that
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they cannot demonstrate the learning they thought they had accomplished, they may quite naturally come to question the efficacy and value of study and hard work.
Concluding Remarks Once we become sensitized to the difference between successful and unsuccessful organizing, we are in a position to observe the difference this makes in students’ experiences of learning and how profound the longer-term influences of experience can be. In this chapter, we got a window into that experience: we saw how repeated experiences with excessive demand on organizing processes may lead students to adopt constricted approaches to learning, which can ultimately affect the exercise and development of capacities for higher-order thinking and cognitive flexibility, and it may dampen curiosity and intellectual openness. We also saw how the accumulation of such experiences has a cascading effect as students may develop negative and self-reinforcing beliefs about their own abilities and to view the process of education and even learning itself in a negative light. The good news is that, just as the experiences that follow from failures to organize adequately can have unexpected negative consequences, the experience of consistently organizing material can have far-reaching benefits. Such experiences can help students not only with learning the material at hand, but also with becoming competent and confident learners with positive attitudes about their own abilities and the endeavor of education in general. Positive experiences in relation to learning form a necessary foundation for long-term intellectual development. I have had the opportunity to observe many students who have been negatively affected by experiences of doing without learning but who are affected positively as they accumulate experiences of learning under “good enough” conditions. In some cases, for example, modes of learning that did not seem available to the student – that did not take hold even when the modes were taught directly – steadily emerged and developed as a result more supportive conditions. These conditions gave students the opportunity and the space to develop the skills – on their own – that they had previously been taught but that had never “stuck.” In fact, I’ve often seen students change their approach to the material without having been instructed to do so. In other words, they manifest new approaches to thinking, understanding and learning through practice and through the process of learning itself. Most importantly, their experience of learning changes, and their attitudes about learning and school change as they accumulate more consistently rewarding experiences. I’ve also found that a more immediate relationship can be inferred between unconscious organization and the student’s felt experience. When conditions are good, when demand is not too great, students start to report more frequently that they experience learning differently in the moment. Over time, they say they understand more clearly, more thoroughly, and more readily; they report a greater sense
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of clarity and a more refined sense of when things start to become fuzzy. Consequently, they say they experience less stress and less sense of effort. When demand on organizing processes is brought within a manageable range, learning feels different. The importance of students’ attitudes and beliefs about learning and about their own capacities as learners seem intuitive to many. Here, though, we have focused on a less commonly appreciated aspect of students’ views toward learning: namely, the quality of their own experiences in learning, which play a critical role in influencing their beliefs about themselves and about education. If we want to make sense of the attitudes and approaches students develop in relation to learning, we have to consider the nature of their experiences in the course of learning and attempting to learn – and unconscious organizing processes are a crucial part of these experiences. Students often receive positive messages about the value of school and especially about their own abilities. The effect of these messages can be compromised, though, when the student’s experience of learning does not match the positive tenor of the messages. By the same token, such messages are amplified when they converge with positive experiences. Similarly, the importance of developing higher-order cognitive processes such as critical thinking, the need to develop flexible intellectual approaches, and the high value of intellectual curiosity and openness are axiomatic to our current views of education. The observations summarized here have led me to conclude that the development of such capacities depends critically on the student’s ongoing experience in the course of learning. In other words, the development of intellectual capacities in the broadest sense depends not just on assignments and exercises that we think of as targeting these capacities, but also on the nature of the student’s interaction with material over time. I’ve drawn two main conclusions from the observations summarized above, which can serve as a summary to our discussion in this chapter. First, experiences of learning, minute by minute, hour by hour, and day by day, serve as the building blocks for the development of attitudes, approaches, and capacities related to learning. Second, organizing processes profoundly impact the student’s experience of learning. We’ve come to the end of Part I, which has examined the importance of unconscious organizing processes in learning. We started the book by addressing the role of these processes in memory and here, in Chap. 5, we looked at their broader implications on students’ experience and development. With a clearer understanding of these implications on students’ approaches, attitudes, and beliefs, we’ll now move to Part II, where we’ll investigate ways of establishing conditions that can best support organizing processes in the classroom.
Part II
Teaching with a New Awareness
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Chapter 6
The Role of the Teacher
Let’s briefly recap some of the major points we covered in Part I, in which we addressed some fundamental issues of learning: We established that organizing processes are essential but can nonetheless break down under seemingly ordinary conditions. We looked at how breakdowns in organizing processes influence not just whether students learn, but how they experience learning. And we saw how repeated instances of frustrated organization may have long-term effects on students’ approaches and attitudes toward learning and, ultimately, their very capacity to learn. In Part II, we can now turn our attention to what this perspective on learning might mean for teaching. But this discussion will take a course that may be unexpected. Having concluded Part I with a discussion of the significant implications that may follow from ongoing failures to organize, one might naturally expect this section to begin with a description of what to do in order to minimize these instances. But for reasons that will become clear, moving directly to issues of practice would leave us at risk of missing some of the most important implications of the view of the mind developed in Part I. And if we skipped directly to practices, you might ultimately find it more difficult to integrate an understanding of unconscious organizing processes into your framework for teaching – an understanding that will turn out to be crucial to whatever practices you implement. With the goal of facilitating this integration, we will begin, in this chapter, by addressing what our understanding of the mind means for the role of the teacher. Then, in Chap. 7, we will discuss how teachers might change the way they perceive and assess phenomena in the classroom – how the material from Part I can become part of the teacher’s overall intellectual framework. Only then will it be possible to discuss teaching practices in a way that does justice to the complexity present every day in the classroom, a discussion we will undertake in Chap. 8. As we address the role of the teacher, we confront an unusual circumstance that took me a good many years to appreciate. The questions that are most likely to come to mind in response to the material covered in Part I are questions which in fact cannot be answered. And they cannot be answered because of the very nature of organizing processes. C.A. Ahern and K. de Kirby, Beyond Individual Differences: Organizing Processes, Information Overload, and Classroom Learning, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4614-0641-9_6, © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011
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For example, because we have seen the significant consequences of excessive demand on organizing processes, we might naturally wonder how teachers can make sure they are not overloading the student. How can they monitor, measure and control information to ensure it is manageable for students? Similarly, because we have seen that organizing is crucial, we might ask how teachers can instruct students in the processes necessary for organizing. How can teachers be sure that students are demarcating episodes at the right moments and operating from the right learning purpose? With such questions in mind, we might begin to search for effective practices for precisely measuring the amount of information we convey, structuring the material we present to students, monitoring their organization as lessons progress, repairing any problems that arise and filling any gaps that we notice. These questions follow so naturally that it takes some doing to understand what the complications might be in answering them directly. But as we explore those complications, we will begin to understand how the kinds of questions we asked above are based on tacit assumptions about a teacher’s capabilities and responsibilities. And some of those assumptions may be fundamentally incompatible with the perspective we have elaborated so far. This insight will allow us to more fully appreciate what Part I suggests about the teacher’s role in the student’s learning. One of the major assumptions behind the kinds of questions we’ve asked above is the idea that teachers are responsible for precisely measuring and dispensing material so as to keep demand on organizing processes at some ideal level – a calculated golden mean. This would amount to a Goldilocks conception of information, where the burden placed on students’ should be neither too much nor too little, but always within a narrow band of “just right.” The questions also assume that teachers can be directly responsible for regulating students’ organizing processes to ensure that the material will be understood, integrated, and retained. But this kind of precise regulation of information and direct orchestration of students’ organization is not only impractical – it’s impossible. Fortunately, as we’ll see, it’s also completely unnecessary. Let’s start with “impossible.” To understand why this approach to teaching is unfeasible, even in theory, we have to look at what it assumes about the mind. In order for a teacher to track students’ mental processing as it happens, the cognitive activity that makes learning possible would have to be largely conscious. In other words, both teachers and students would have to be able to observe the workings of organizing processes directly. This assumption, however, goes against a core principle of the neuropsychological perspective and the keynote of our discussion from the beginning – namely, that organizing functions operate outside of conscious awareness. This means that a teacher cannot consistently assess, in a given moment, to what degree and in what manner students are engaged in organizing the material. Breakdowns in organization are often imperceptible to both teacher and student. What’s more, the unconscious workings of the mind are too fast and too complex to be tracked. One could not possibly describe (much less direct or coordinate) the full spectrum of unconscious processing the student is engaged in at a given moment. As we learned in Chap. 3, what looks like a quite simple scene – say, a ninth grader listening to a presentation on the American Civil War – can involve a great deal of complexity. For example, how could one expect to know how successfully and how
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quickly a student is bringing forth a learning set, let alone the nature of the learning set – whether it is, say, rich or sparse, on target and supportive of comprehension, or more general and not as helpful? Likewise, it would be impossible to know whether the student has attended in a highly selective manner or not, whether or not the student is cleanly demarcating episodes – and where the boundaries of those episodes might be for the particular student. The process of organizing is also inherently idiosyncratic. Hence, a student’s own internal organization of new material cannot be replaced by the external organization in the teacher’s presentation. This is not to say that the teacher’s thoughtful, wellstructured presentation of new academic content won’t help. Rather, the form that new content eventually takes in the student’s mind is ultimately the result of her own internal processing, regardless of how expertly the teacher supports her learning. Just as it is impossible for a teacher to closely monitor – or to present material in a way that replaces – students’ ongoing mental organization, it is likewise impossible for a teacher to determine with precision the ideal amount of new information for any particular student. At a given moment, one cannot be certain whether a student needs more information or what information he needs. Further information may clarify or confuse, facilitate consolidation or disrupt it. Additional information may benefit the student by, say, clarifying a learning purpose, establishing connections, providing essential context, or sparking an insight. By the same token, the student may benefit from some time without further input, which might provide an opportunity to think about, to more thoroughly examine, to more deeply consider. Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that it were possible to determine some ideal dosage of information for a single student, and to track the cognition of the student more closely and directly as it unfolded. Even if this were possible, it would be clearly impractical in the context of the classroom situation, where the complexities of any one individual student are multiplied exponentially. While the issues related to organizing and learning are common to all students, they operate differently – with different timing and different contours – in each student and for the same student at different times. Thus, at a particular moment in a lecture or group presentation, more information may hurt some students’ learning but help others. Therefore, a teacher cannot consistently assess with precision where the “sweet spot” lies for any individual – much less balance the individual needs of each member of the group simultaneously. This inescapable reality presents an apparent dilemma at the heart of teaching. It is both theoretically impossible and logistically impractical for teachers to dispense some ideal level of information or coordinate students’ ongoing organization of new material. At the same time, learning fundamentally depends upon the functioning of organizing processes, which in turn depend upon a workable measure of information. Whether the student is organizing sufficiently is an essential issue, yet it’s impossible to consistently assess when the student is doing so. Happily, this dilemma is only apparent. It arises if we assume that (a) adequate organization will only occur if the level of information is “just right” for each student; and (b) that the teacher somehow activates and conducts the essential cognitive processes. This assumption is an expression of a more general attitude: that meaningful learning won’t occur in students unless teachers somehow make it happen.
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But this attitude flies in the face of another tenet of our discussion: The mind is “designed” to organize and learn. This means that, under adequate condition, mental processes that organize learning operate of their own accord. In considering all the mind must do in order to learn, we must constantly remind ourselves of all that the mind can and will do if given the chance. That is why it is also unnecessary, let alone impossible and impractical, for teachers to directly cause students’ organizing processes to function, or to maintain an exact and ideal level of demand. It may appear as though we’re suggesting a more limited role for teachers, but I believe the contrary is true. Taken together, an appreciation of the power, speed and complexity of unconscious organizing processes, and the fact that they operate on their own accord under adequate conditions can lead us to an understanding of just how powerful the teacher’s role can be. An effective teacher can create an environment in which the innate powers of the mind can be unleashed and fully exercised. However, in order to be fully open to these possibilities, we first must free ourselves of assumptions about the teacher’s role that are not consistent with what we know about the mind. If we accept that teachers cannot be charged with directly coordinating each student’s organizing of information in an ongoing fashion, we will be in a position to understand the ways in which teachers can support and facilitate organization. If we let go of the Goldilocks (“just right”) idea of information and acknowledge that the ideal level is bound to differ for each student, and to vary from moment to moment, this will allow us to consider the powerful effects of maintaining a level of information that is good enough, most of the time. And if we understand that we cannot judge, in any given moment, to what degree and in what way students are engaged in organizing what they’re learning, we can then become more attuned to whether students are organizing over time. In some essential respects, the teacher’s situation – to elaborate on a familiar but useful metaphor – is like that of a gardener. Just as the gardener does not directly cause a plant to grow, so the teacher does not directly cause a student’s complex organizing processes to function. The gardener cannot and need not fully understand and track the complex processes by which the plant grows. He cannot somehow activate and guide each aspect of its development. He need only provide certain basic conditions – the right kind of soil, the right amounts of sunlight and water – with the knowledge that, under these conditions, complex processes will take place and growth will happen naturally. Moreover, the gardener doesn’t need to be precise about these conditions. A plant can withstand days without sunshine, and water doesn’t need to be measured by the ounce. It may be obvious when the plant is either grossly overwatered or dehydrated, but outside of these extremes it’s usually helpful before adjusting conditions to wait for a time to see how matters play out – to see if the plant remains healthy. So, too, with a teacher facilitating organizing processes. Often, the most effective strategy is to think in terms of maintaining adequate conditions. The teacher cannot so much cause learning to happen, but rather can cultivate an environment that generally supports organizing processes – and then monitor and adjust conditions over time. This perspective stands in contrast to some common (and implicitly held) beliefs about teaching and learning, wherein interactions between the teacher and student
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are seen as a kind of rigorously controlled and highly predictable system in which instruction predictably leads to learning. Rather than a gardener, the exemplary teacher is seen as analogous to a laboratory scientist: the more regulated her efforts, the more meaningful the results will be. But the perspective we are developing in this book is different in both its assumptions and approach. In our model, the ongoing interactions between the teacher and student are rooted in the understanding that certain essential cognitive processes can be described but not always observed directly – supported and facilitated but not directly controlled. Over the course of the next several chapters, we will offer a framework to help teachers integrate this approach into their own unique style, with their own unique set of students and their own academic subject matter. Our intention is to present concepts that are general enough to be adaptable and yet concrete enough to be readily implemented. Now that we’ve addressed what the view of the mind we laid out in Part I means for the role of the teacher, we will look at teaching from two additional angles: First, we’ll discuss how teachers can develop sensitivities that will allow them to create positive conditions in the classroom over time. Then, we’ll look at some examples of how these sensitivities might be put into action in the form of specific practices for classroom teaching.
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Chapter 7
Awareness and Sensitivities: Four “Anchors” to Use in the Classroom
Having just examined how we might think about the role of the teacher, we are well underway in carrying forward the perspective of Part I into the classroom. As we move ahead, we’ll want to keep sight of a central principle of our discussion so far: Supporting students in organizing and learning is a matter of facilitating rather than directing – of creating classroom conditions that support the functioning of organizing processes. While our intention will be to create conditions that support all students, we should keep in mind the inevitable variability among individuals. As we discuss what would constitute ideal support, then, it is important to remember that our goal is conditions that are good enough, most of the time. This is not a position of compromise. On the contrary, it’s a guideline toward fostering an environment conducive to growth. We should also keep in mind that, because of the complexity and constant flux of the classroom, there are no simple formulas or prescriptions for creating such conditions. The basic premise of this chapter is that in order to create a supportive classroom environment, the teacher must integrate her appreciation of the essential role of organizing processes in learning into her moment-to-moment perception of what is occurring in the classroom. To merely understand abstractly or intellectually the perspective of Part I is not enough to actually implement it in teaching, and this is precisely why we are taking time, in this chapter, to address awareness and sensitivities before we jump into practices. Teachers are constantly making small and large decisions in the flow of classroom life. Such decisions are made in planning for a unit or an individual lesson, but they also include split second decisions that are based on teachers’ real-time understanding of a given situation and their assessments about what is needed at a particular moment. These assessments are in turn based on the teacher’s general frames of reference – the teacher’s implicit notions about what variables are important, about what is telling or indicative of students’ learning, and about what is necessary for learning to take place. Our goal is to fold into those existing frames of reference an understanding of the organizing processes we’ve considered – an understanding that can inform what the teacher observes, how she interprets her observations, what moment-to-moment decisions she makes about how to support C.A. Ahern and K. de Kirby, Beyond Individual Differences: Organizing Processes, Information Overload, and Classroom Learning, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4614-0641-9_7, © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011
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students’ learning, and how she plans future lessons accordingly. The goal of this integration is to harmonize what we have discussed with the teacher’s existing expertise, intuition and ongoing judgment in dealing with the variability and complexity of her own particular situation. We must acknowledge, though, that this deep level of integration is no small matter, and working toward it is no easy task. It is quite possible to accept – even to enthusiastically embrace – the basic perspective of Part I without holding it in mind consistently in the classroom. After all, there is much to consider in planning or teaching a class. What’s more, integrating the present material means not only adding to this list of things that require thought and attention, but also cultivating the habit of attending to phenomena that are imperceptible to both teacher and student. Because there is so much to observe about students’ learning – so much that meets the eye in most educational situations – it can be hard to maintain the awareness that much of what constitutes learning does not meet the eye. So, when there is so much that obviously requires attention, how is it possible to attend to what isn’t obvious? The strategy that we’ll take up in this chapter is to develop anchors – concepts that help keep a teacher’s awareness and sensitivity directly connected to conditions that support organizing and learning in the classroom. We will discuss four anchors in this chapter: (1) the learning goal; (2) new information and students’ prior knowledge; (3) shifts in topics; and (4) demand on attention. Cultivating a thoughtful sensitivity in these areas can help the teacher in the same way that sensitivity to the influence of water, sunlight, and soil quality helps the gardener: it can guide her thinking about what is happening and what is needed, both in the moment and over time. While there are a great many factors that can affect a plant’s development, some are clearly essential. When these factors are not within an adequate or “good enough” range, growth will be impaired. If there are not sufficient nutrients in the soil, if the amount of light or the amount of water is not within the proper range, the plant will not thrive, no matter how favorable other conditions are. Similarly, while a great many factors might influence whether a student is organizing successfully and learning meaningfully, the four anchors we will discuss here are essential. And when conditions are out of kilter in relation to them, we can expect learning to be undermined – no matter how fortuitous other factors may be.
Anchor 1: The Learning Goal We have said that operating from a learning goal is essential. It defines learning episodes, guiding selectivity, set construction and demarcation. In order for a student to encode material effectively and remember it meaningfully, the material must be understood in relation to a learning goal. This anchor takes as a premise something that I have learned in the course of clinical observation: The nature of a student’s own learning goal is typically available to introspection. While the learning goal is often formed without conscious awareness, one finds that, when cued, students can describe the goal they are
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working from. This fact provides teachers with an opportunity to develop sensitivity to the extent to which students are operating from a learning goal that supports organizing. In order to cultivate awareness around learning goals, we should first consider students’ learning goals in the ongoing flow or hubbub of the classroom, and make sure we’re clear on what we mean by an effective learning goal in this context. A good place to begin this discussion about the essential elements of an effective learning goal as they relate to the classroom is by emphasizing that knowledge about the assignment does not, in and of itself, constitute a learning goal. If it did, we’d hardly need to address the importance of cultivating awareness of the learning goal. Teachers routinely discuss learning objectives in all kinds of ways, and students usually have knowledge about what a unit or assignment is about or what the directions are. However, all of this does not necessarily mean that students are working from learning goals in the sense we are using the term. In fact, one important element of awareness about the learning goal is recognizing just how frequently students can operate without one. A student can know a good deal about an assignment unit without necessarily working from a learning goal that is sufficient to inform selectivity and set construction. So what distinguishes an effective learning goal – one that facilitates meaningful learning – from mere knowledge about the assignment? The most basic consideration is whether students are operating from a goal that is integrally related to learning, as opposed to simply getting the work done. Even students who appear focused and engaged, and who work steadily and with apparent logic, sometimes have no goal in relation to something they wish to learn about or understand more clearly. Instead, their goal is related to what they are doing (e.g., finishing homework, completing an assignment, or being a thorough student), rather than what they are trying to learn. And the surest route to doing without learning is approaching tasks without a clear learning-based goal. The most important consideration of our first awareness anchor is whether a student has a goal related to learning. But this awareness leads logically to another question: How specific should a learning goal be? This question is perhaps best answered not with any precise definition, but by identifying two important qualities of an effective goal: In order to support organizing processes, the learning purpose must be sufficiently specific and connected to more general learning goals. Let’s discuss specificity first. While there is no magic formula for determining precisely how specific a learning goal needs to be in a given context, we can operate according to some basic guidelines: In most cases, a learning goal needs to be specific enough to make the concept and procedure comprehensible, to organize details around, to support understanding and to avoid interference with material that may be closely related but will confuse matters if encoded in the same learning packet. To illustrate the dimension of specificity, let’s revisit an example we mentioned in a previous chapter: a student learning concepts and procedures related to adding fractions. In this case, a goal like “learn math” is clearly too general and will likely be insufficient for effective organizing. “Learn about fractions” is a better goal, but still probably not specific enough. The concepts and procedures associated with
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adding fractions and multiplying fractions, for example, might interfere with one another if all are encoded in relation to “fractions.” The student might later have trouble distinguishing when a common denominator is needed (as it is when adding and subtracting) and when it isn’t (as it is when multiplying). Thus, the learning goal “Learn why a common denominator is necessary for adding fractions” would be specific and focused enough for most students. But sufficient specificity is only part of the story. A specific goal alone may not offer enough context to support clear understanding and meaningful learning. In most instances, a specific learning goal should be connected to a more general or higher-order learning goal in order to provide wider meaning and greater relevance. So, for example, the goal of understanding common denominators might be nestled in the goal of learning to add fractions, which might be nestled in the goal of understanding fractions, which might be nestled in an understanding of relating parts to the whole. Similarly, the goal of learning about economic conditions in England might be nestled in learning about social, economic and political conditions in England, which might be nestled in understanding such conditions across Europe, which might in turn be framed by the intention to understand the movement to develop the European Union. Without such higher-order connections, a student might understand the material, but not deeply, and not in connection to other material. He may recall it in some circumstances, or as an isolated chunk of information that is not intricately connected in memory to a range of topics that make it more readily brought to mind when needed. The core awareness that comprises our first anchor is that in most instances organizing processes are well supported when the learning goal is specific enough to organize understanding and memory, but also connected to higher-order goals. As is generally the case when we consider mental processes in the context of a class full of individuals, we have to allow for some “play” – some variation in how the processes manifests at a given moment for different individuals. While all students need to operate from a learning goal, this does not mean that learning goals will be identical for each student. In fact, we should expect variation. Students have different constellations of relevant prior knowledge in both content and organization, and they understand or perceive the material in slightly different ways. Therefore, the specificity and nature of each student’s goals may also vary – slightly or more markedly. Leaving aside for the time being the implications of the relationship between the student’s own learning goal and the learning goals laid out by the teacher (a relationship we will address in the next chapter), the bedrock awareness we want to establish here is this: Each student needs a sufficient learning goal, and goals should be expected to vary among different students.
Anchor 2: New Information and Prior Learning When we answered the riddle of doing without learning, we saw how organizing processes can be disrupted when we cover too much material at one time. Here is another aspect of this for teachers to hold in their awareness: material that does not
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have a strong relationship to prior learning can more easily disrupt organization. But we have not yet discussed in detail an essential aspect of the awareness the teacher can hold in the classroom: considering the effects of the level of information on students means considering new information in relation to prior learning. Remember from earlier chapters that the demand from material depends to a great extent on students’ relevant prior knowledge. This is true, in the first place, because material that students have already learned does not require the same degree of attention. They don’t have to focus on and think about what they already know. In the second place, receiving new information in the context of rich background knowledge – a robust learning set – makes selectivity more strategic; it oils the wheels of comprehension; and it makes establishing a learning goal easier, all of which provides a boost to organization. For these reasons, fully understanding demand on organizing processes means placing the flow of information in the context of students’ prior knowledge, taking into account what students already know. This idea about demand on organizing processes in the classroom might, at first, seem counterintuitive. This is because we tend to think about information in an external or objective way. A teacher may consider, for instance, how much material he intends to cover in a particular lesson or over the course of a unit, or how long and how dense a reading assignment is. However, if we are to carry forward our understanding of the effects of prior learning, we have to include what students already know in the equation. And with this awareness, we can see how a shorter lesson with little connection to prior relevant learning for the students may actually place more demand on organizing processes than a longer lesson that connects integrally to previous learning. Let’s consider, as another example, a classroom introduction to a laboratory experiment. The teacher might discuss the equipment involved, proper procedures for using the equipment, the composition of the materials involved, the concepts motivating the experiment, and the independent and dependent variables. For a student brand new to laboratory procedures, the demand from organizing processes is high, based on the fact that all of this information is new to her. For her lab partner, who has previously learned about the equipment and the procedures, the demand is considerably less. Here we can see that while the amount of information contained in the presentation is a part of the equation, it is not the whole equation. In addition to the amount of information, we also need to consider the ratio of new information to what’s already familiar to each student. As a general guide, the higher the ratio between new and familiar material, the more a student’s organizing processes will be taxed. A second angle from which to approach the issue of new information is based on the idea that a strong foundation of relevant understanding – a robust learning set – naturally helps students organize whatever is new. The teacher can therefore consider the extent of students’ relevant prior knowledge, including background knowledge that is outside of what the teacher specifically intends to cover. Thus, the teacher might consider questions like: How much background knowledge do students have? How much do they know about the topic of the lesson, homework assignment or unit? Taking into account what students know therefore means that a teacher can move beyond the question of how much of the specific content he plans
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to present to students is new and how much has been covered. He can also look at the extent to which students are familiar with concepts and information – though not covered directly – that would tend to help them better grasp whatever they will soon be learning. For instance, prior to a lesson covering various explanations for the cause of the Great Depression in 1929, a teacher might consider what students know about economics. Our awareness of the relationship between new information and unconscious cognition should include a third key point: Contrary to what is sometimes supposed, exposure to material – even repeated exposure – does not necessarily support new learning in the future. A student may review the periodic table, for example, without learning all or even some aspects to the point where they are meaningfully integrated and organized. This happens frequently in the life of the classroom. And when material has not been integrated and organized, it does not constitute prior relevant learning in the robust sense we’ve had in mind. While prior exposure of this type sometimes helps, the teacher should be aware that it may not help significantly. Aware of this distinction, the teacher can consider how much of the students’ assumed “prior knowledge” has actually reached the level of stable consolidation in memory. Consider, for example, a lesson that builds on the prior knowledge of adding fractions. If the class has covered adding fractions a number of times, it is natural that the teacher might not attend to the question of who does and who does not understand the subject thoroughly. Instead, his awareness might remain on a more general level: “All my students know – or are somewhat familiar with – adding fractions.” But if he reframes his awareness and asks himself, “This lesson seems to depend on having a strong understanding of adding fractions – do all of my students have it?” he will usually have a ready estimate of who does and does not, and the situation will look quite different. Likewise, a teacher approaching a unit on the beginning of the French Revolution might assume that, since her students have had previous exposure to the history of Europe in preceding decades, she can relate the new material to this foundation. However, this depends on the students having a clear sense of the events and issues involved. If recall and understanding are vague, this prior exposure cannot be expected to offer powerful help in understanding and organizing. Despite their exposure to the topic, many students may not have integrated the material. And it is what the student knows at this deeper level that provides the greatest support to organizing processes.
Anchor 3: Shifts in Topic and Mental Transitions As we discussed in Chaps. 3 and 4, classroom learning for each student will include mental transitions. These transitions are initiated in moments in which students recognize, consciously or not, a meaningful change in their own learning goal. When a transition happens, a new goal is established and a demarcation must occur, bringing to a close one learning episode and initiating another. As part of the same transition, the process of set construction must synthesize – not merely retrieve – a new
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mental context that aids comprehension and supports organizing processes. Requiring such a wealth of activity, mental transitions are critical junctures in the encoding process. Cultivating an awareness of transitions is important because they occur so frequently in students’ daily experience. Primary and secondary education are distinguished by students having to cope with a considerable number of different subjects, topics, and subtopics. Shifts in topic, both obvious and subtle, are the most likely occasion for mental transitions, and therefore worthy of special attention from the teacher interested in conditions related to lasting learning. Sometimes, as when a student goes from English class to Science, the shift is obvious and the need for a mental transition can be assumed. However, more subtle shifts in topic might also occasion a transition. For example, mental transitions may also occur when the geometry lesson moves from theorems to proofs, or when the history discussion moves from culture to politics, from North Africa to Sub-Saharan Africa. On the surface, shifts in topic usually do not appear significant. Despite appearances, however, we know that in response to these simple external shifts, underlying organizing processes may undergo a significant transition to accommodate a new goal and create a new learning episode. As the frequency of topic-shifts increases, so too do the odds that something will go awry. Because there is so much that needs to happen – and happen more or less just so – there is likewise a great deal that can go wrong. A new learning goal may be needed but not established, a needed demarcation may not occur, or the construction of a new learning set may not keep pace with the flow of the lesson. In fact, even minor delays in set construction, even a single missed demarcation, or even a slight lack of clarity in a student’s learning goal can be enough to significantly disrupt learning. The fallout of a failed or disrupted transition during encoding is that immediate learning packets are not kept distinct, thereby undermining the process of building larger, more complex and integrated bodies of knowledge over time. One challenge the teacher faces in maintaining an awareness of the demands from mental transitions stems from the teacher’s own considerable depth of knowledge in the subject she’s teaching. Her deep familiarity may actually obscure junctures where transitions are likely necessary for students. The teacher’s knowledge is so thoroughly organized and integrated that she will tend to accommodate shifts in topic effortlessly and, indeed, instantaneously. In most cases, the teacher has established an overarching organization for the material, such that changes in topic do not occasion a mental transition for her at all. Thus, what strikes the teacher as a minor shift within a single topic, the student may experience as a significant shift from one topic to another. To the teacher, who can reconstruct well-established learning sets with ease and speed, it may naturally be challenging to recognize all of the shifts in topic that require the complex activity of mental transitions. Here again, recognition of inevitable variation is a key part of developing the awareness. Just as there is important variation between teacher and student, so too is there variation from one student to another in regards to how transitions happen. Students will not always make mental shifts at precisely the same time, or in precisely the same manner. A key source of variability is the manner in which the
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individual student’s learning set – its density, its specificity, and its structure – influences the junctures at which transitions take place. A change in topic that is inconsequential to one student – that is to say, fits well within her current learning goal and learning set – may occasion a transition for another student, who needs a new learning goal to understand and remember clearly.
Anchor 4: Attentional Demand We have discussed the fact that when demands on attention are too numerous, the attentional system becomes inundated, and organizing at the time of encoding is undermined. We have focused so far primarily on attentional demands arising from engaging with new information. However, in order to understand classroom conditions more fully, we need to be aware of attentional demands that, strictly speaking, do not result from encountering new information. These demands on attention stem from tasks and procedures related to learning and practicing. These can be understood as falling into two categories: those intrinsic to the learning goal and those extrinsic to the learning goal. A good example of intrinsic mental activity is the need to perform basic math operations in the course of learning an algebraic concept. To take a straightforward example, consider learning to solve for the unknown in the problem 3x + 4 = 13. The student achieves the learning goal when he knows the steps involved in solving for an unknown and understands key concepts. Ideally, he will come to understand and remember the sequence of steps, the rationale behind each step, and the overall concept of solving for an unknown. A lesson covering this material is not meant to directly address competency with division and subtraction. Nevertheless, it is still intrinsic to the learning goal in that, in order to follow the lesson, the student will need to perform basic mathematical operations such as subtracting 4 from 13 and dividing 9 by 3. Even though they’re unavoidable, it is important to remember that these basic operations may still require significant attention. The degree to which attention is taken by intrinsic demands depends on prior knowledge, on how readily the needed information is available to the student. In this particular example, we can define this readiness in terms of the extent to which the student has achieved automaticity – effortless and unconscious fluency – with these basic math operations. On one end of the spectrum is the student who knows the answer without thinking about it, and we can assume that no significant attentional demand is involved. On the other end of the spectrum is the student who has to labor intensively to perform the basic arithmetic operations, devoting attention to the process until it is complete. The more attention that a student needs to devote to operations not related to the learning goal itself, the more likely it is that there will be a negative impact on successfully organizing an understanding of solving for a variable. Where a student lands on this spectrum at a given moment can matter a great deal. In this example, the more attention a student needs to devote to basic arithmetic operations, the more likely there will be a negative impact on organizing an understanding of solving for a variable. In fact, even a relatively small difference
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in how much attention a student needs to devote to this kind of sub-task can be a decisive one. If a student has to think even for a moment about the answer of 9 divided by 3, he is shifting attention away from the core ideas of the lesson. And whatever attention he gives to the basic operations may undercut his organization of the material. Another example of intrinsic demand on attention often occurs in writing essays. In this case, students are asked to formulate a thesis and develop and write a paper in relation to it. The nature of such a thesis and the way it relates to selecting and discussing material – the mode of thinking suggested by this way of organizing the paper – is subtle and complex, requiring time and experience for students to master. This mode of thinking includes, for instance, understanding what constitutes a proper thesis; defining a proper scope that is not too difficult to research and address; understanding how a thesis influences the selection of evidence; developing a feel for conceptual proximity, for finding evidence that is related closely enough to the thesis; and understanding the various ways the included material pertains to the thesis – for example, supporting or questioning, delineating or explicating, sharpening or expanding. To the extent that this complex mode of thinking is readily understood and implicitly available, the students’ attention can be freed to address the material at hand. She can focus and attune her attention to a fine-grained understanding of the kinds of connections and statements to which the particular essay subject lends itself. (And, along the way, she’ll be adding to her general knowledge about the essay-writing process and technique in general.) By contrast, a student who understands the essay process enough to move forward with the assignment – but without fullness, depth, or ease – will need to devote significant conscious attention to more basic considerations. As a result, he’ll have fewer cognitive resources to direct toward the specific subject he’s writing about. For example, instead of comparing codes of morality in the novel Huckleberry Finn, he may be spending most of his time asking basic questions about the essay form or process, such as, “Is this a good topic sentence?”; “Is this the kind of thing I’m supposed to say?”; “How do I know where to start a new paragraph?”; “Is this a good quote?”; “Where does it fit?” If his attention is spread too thin, it less likely that the student will learn a substantial amount about the material at hand or the mode of thinking involved. The second component of this awareness is extrinsic demands on attention. The term extrinsic here simply means that the mental activity requiring attention is not essentially related to the material being learned. Taking notes on a lecture is a good example of an extrinsic mental activity that nonetheless requires attention. Imagine, for example, a high school student in chemistry class furiously transcribing her teacher’s lectures on the trends in the periodic table. This student is trying to understand and integrate new information and ideas while simultaneously trying to write it all down. Her note taking requires a two-pronged act of attention: both to the task of selecting what to write down and to the act of writing itself. She is alternating her attentional focus between listening and writing, understanding and selecting. And her note taking requires attention that is not intrinsically related to understanding the trends in the periodic table. A simple mental experiment helps make this distinction: It is easy to imagine certain students learning this material without the act of note
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taking, especially if the material is also available in, say, the textbook. The student might learn from hearing it, reading it, studying the periodic table, or discussing or asking questions. Because the material can be learned without note taking, the act of note taking is, for some students, extrinsic to the learning goal. We say “some students” because the example highlights the importance, once again, of variability among students in what extrinsic activities mean to learning. A particular source of demand on a student’s attention – while not essential to the learning goal – may nonetheless support organizing in a certain context. Depending on the situation and the student, activity extrinsic to the learning goal may be valuable, disruptive, or anywhere in between. Taking notes is no exception – it may support learning or detract from it. For some students, the act of taking notes focuses their attention profitably; for these students, listening and taking notes often is experienced subjectively like a single activity. For other students, the attention required for note taking detracts from understanding and organizing. Some students report that they experience note taking as a distraction, or that they take down everything but do not understand it when they return to their notes. In other words, they’re doing without learning. Another example of an extrinsic mental activity is completing maps or diagrams of, say, the heart, the brain or the circulatory system. Such tasks generally involve using some rationale to color-code material presented in a black and white outline. Notice that the acts of determining what sections to fill in, what the boundaries are, and what colors to use according to the conceptual scheme may all require considerable attention distinct from the attention required to learn the material (again, varying by student). And once again, this further attentional demand may lead to different results, making classroom conditions more positive or more negative for certain students. To recap the elements of our attentional demand anchor: Teachers can develop sensitivity to important classroom conditions by engaging in an ongoing consideration of demands on attention, both in the moment and over time. This consideration should include an awareness that students must use their attention to engage with and understand new material, but also to engage with activities related to learning the material. Thus, sensitivity to the effects of attentional demand in the classroom means thinking about the fact that even tasks that support learning – and those that are not conceptually challenging – can add to attentional demand.
Concluding Remarks In this chapter, we’ve discussed ways of anchoring four abstract concepts to the moment-to-moment realities of the classroom. Our guiding premise is that, in order for the material articulated in Part I to be useful, it must be integrated fully into the teacher’s perception and thinking. In other words, putting into action this way of thinking about learning requires more than simply implementing certain suggested procedures or following a recommended series of steps.
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Students’ organizing processes can be influenced either positively or negatively by classroom conditions – and classroom conditions are complex and constantly changing. At any given time, there are a great many factors that bear upon the overall conditions in which students’ minds work to filter, select, structure, and integrate new input. And because these conditions are in a state of perpetual flux, there is no single practice or procedure – no matter how well conceived – that we could reasonably expect to be effective in every situation. This is why we’ve taken the time to talk about these anchoring sensitivities before discussing practices that are, in general, consistent with the perspective we have developed. Any perspective, however essential, best serves students and teachers when it is integrated with the teacher’s body of knowledge and familiarity with the students in her particular classroom. With this in mind, we will look in Chap. 8 at some practices that in most situations will be consistent with the awareness and sensitivities outlined here. These practices can serve as classroom-ready interventions, or simply as examples to spur your own thinking about other possible approaches. The intention remains to inform the teacher’s knowledge base and to encourage the exercise of the insight and intuition that springs from it.
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Enlarging the Classroom: Practices for Creating Supportive Conditions
Now that we have some grasp of how certain essential variables can bear on students’ learning we are bound to ask how we can intervene to create classroom conditions that support organizing. In this chapter, we will address this question by offering some specific practices aimed at creating supportive conditions. The practices are grouped according to the four anchors we presented in the last chapter: (1) (2) (3) (4)
Learning goals New information and prior learning Shifts in topic Attentional demand
I will present three to four practices within each area. After briefly introducing each practice and its rationale, I will offer examples of what a teacher might do or say when implementing it in the classroom. For some of the practices, we will also look at some additional considerations and ideas for preparation. Finally, we will discuss how the practice “enlarges the classroom” – how it contributes to supportive conditions. Enlarging the classroom, in the sense I intend, means making room for organizing, for the kind of encoding and engagement that meaningful learning requires. It also means making space for a wide range of students to learn more effectively. My hope is that discussing this thematic idea of enlarging the classroom in the context of each practice will serve as a fresh way of describing the underlying intention common to all practices in this chapter. This list of practices is not meant to be exhaustive. There is any number of conceivable practices, beyond those presented here, that might facilitate supportive conditions in the classroom. In response to specific circumstances, or simply because of his own individual inspiration, a teacher may devise practices that are not listed in this chapter – and may not have been contemplated by other educators.
C.A. Ahern and K. de Kirby, Beyond Individual Differences: Organizing Processes, Information Overload, and Classroom Learning, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4614-0641-9_8, © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011
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That said, these practices are nonetheless deeply consistent with supporting organizing processes. They are compatible with the role of the teacher that we articulated in Chap. 6, and they are expressions of the anchors mentioned above. They emanate from the kind of awareness and sensitivity to classroom conditions that are so vital in carrying forward the perspective of this book into the classroom. With these considerations in mind, the following practices can serve a number of purposes: they might be adopted in the classroom; they may prompt the development of other practices consistent with supporting organizing processes; or they may serve as illustrations to deepen understanding of the anchoring principles.
Learning-Goal Practices Practice 1: Clarify and Emphasize the Learning Goal on an Ongoing Basis This practice extends from the understanding that the process of establishing and maintaining learning goals, though essential, may nonetheless break down. Because students face a steady flow of new information as well as other demands on attention, it’s common for students to fail to discern or to lose track of learning goals. The simple intention here is to support this process through describing the basic goal as the teacher envisions it, and to do so repeatedly, offering guidance and reminders for the student in establishing his or her own goal around which to organize the new material.
Implementation The essence of this practice is to identify and discuss learning goals early and often in any unit or lesson. The learning goals the teacher identifies should be succinct and relatively few in number. When they are too vague or too numerous, they tend to be less effective in helping students organize material. There are junctures at which it is particularly apt to clarify goals. It is usually most important to state the overall goals at the beginning of each unit and at the start of each lesson. Students can be reminded of goals at points during the lesson, and specific goals might change as the period progresses. Generally, it is helpful to connect more specific goals to higher-order ones. For example, at the beginning of a lesson, a teacher might say, “Remember, the overall goal of this unit is to understand fractions and how to do the basic operations with them. The major goal this week is to understand adding fractions. The lesson right now is for understanding why common denominators are needed in order to add fractions.” As the lesson goes on, the teacher might offer reminders of important learning goals. In this connection, I often think of the rhythm of a radio interview as a model.
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Within the flow of the conversation, the listener is regularly reminded of the identity of the interviewee (“We’re talking with so-and-so, who has written the book such and such.”) For the listeners, knowing whom the interviewee is and the central topic of conversation tends to clarify the meaning of what they’re hearing. Regular clarification and reminders of the learning goal can have a similar effect in the classroom. The teacher, for example, may point back to key learning goals in the form of statements such as, “Remember my goal for these assignments is for you to understand more about why we need common denominators in order to add fractions,” or questions, such as “Is the need for common denominators becoming clearer?” A physics teacher might connect the larger goal with the day’s lesson-goal by saying, “Our overarching goal is to understand how apparently different phenomena can actually be different aspects of the same phenomenon. Today’s lesson about motion and heat is a prime example.” Notice that in these reminders, the teacher is addressing different levels of goal (for the unit, for the lesson, for the present activity) and being specific at each level.
Preparations and Considerations We said in Chap. 7 that depending on the task, learning goals might legitimately and naturally vary from individual to individual. Thus we should state explicitly that for the purposes of this practice, we mean the teacher should clarify her own learning goal. This is based on my observation that when the teacher is clear about what she wants students to learn, the students are more likely to operate from their own learning goal, whether it matches the teacher’s or not. We have said that, to be effective, learning goals should be stated succinctly. But how succinctly? As a general rule of thumb, a clear learning goal can be expressed in a line or two. It is helpful to keep in mind that learning goals act like focal points – a good deal of other significant material will be organized around each learning goal. Consider this example of an overarching learning goal from a basic chemistry class that is succinct and clear: “Remember, the overall learning goal right now is to develop an understanding of the key components of a scientific experiment.” This goal might be supported by equally succinct goals for specific lessons or activities, such as, “One concept I want you to be sure to think about today is the hypothesis.” Because the goals the teacher states should also be limited in number and scope, a foundation for this practice is to become very clear on priorities. This requires careful consideration of what goals to focus on and how to frame them. In this process of clarifying and prioritizing, the teacher might ask herself questions such as, “What is essential for the students to learn as they move forward?” What are my most important content goals (i.e., what material do I definitely want my students to know when the unit is complete)? Are there skills that are essential to develop? The flip side of this inquiry is “pruning” potential goals, deciding which to leave out in any given lesson. Accordingly, the teacher might ask, “Which potential goals,
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although important, are not my highest priority at present?” Once goals for the unit are clear, they can serve as a basis for ongoing consideration: “Given my goals for the unit, what are my priorities for this week? For this class? For this assignment?” It is also helpful to keep in mind that clarifying and emphasizing learning goals can sometimes be an interactive process – a collaboration with students. The teacher can take a step back from regular learning-goal reminders and gauge students’ sense of clarity about those overarching goals. For example, she might ask questions such as, “Do you feel like you’re getting closer to understanding when and how the hypothesis should be used?” or “What did you learn this week about the nature of scientific experimentation?” One additional question that often comes up when I discuss learning goals with teachers involves so-called discovery assignments, in which students are meant to arrive at their own insights through a process of trial and error. Many teachers wonder whether stating the nature of the insight interferes with that process. The answer is that it need not interfere if we broaden our conception of the learning goal a bit. In discovery assignments, the teacher can provide a learning goal simply by stating the intention of the activity explicitly. For example: “This activity is designed so that, as you do it, you may gain an insight about the way shapes or numbers work” or “Remember, as you’re working on this assignment, or once you come to an answer, you may learn something about the relationships between the variables we’ve been talking about.” Beyond stating the general intention of a discovery activity, the teacher can support students’ organization by stipulating the range of answers she’s seeking. When that range is narrow – i.e., when the assignment is designed for students to arrive at a single insight – it is generally best to say so. (For example: “There is one thing in particular this task is designed for you to discover.”) On the other hand, if a variety of insights will be entertained, it helps to state that as well: “There is no one insight that I am expecting you come to. Just focus on any relation between the shapes that pops out or interests you as you work with them.” Notice that the teacher isn’t pointing to any specific goal but is still applying the same principle by letting students know what the object of the task is.
How It Enlarges the Classroom In any particular unit or lesson, the students in a class will represent a considerable range in effectiveness of establishing and tracking learning goals. Depending on the student and the material at hand, some will do this readily, with little effort, and have little need for support. Others can do it only with considerable effort, and are apt to lose track. And of course, many students will land somewhere along the spectrum. However, when the learning goal is emphasized and clarified, organizing processes are supported in many or most students. Elevating the learning purpose enables some students, who might otherwise get lost during a given class, to benefit from the lesson. But the practice does not facilitate organizing only in such students. By virtue of reducing the effort that students must expend, the practice supports
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organizing and learning in general, and we can expect that many or most students in a given class will be freed to devote more attentional and cognitive resources to understanding and organizing. Thus, the practice “enlarges” the classroom by supporting a wide range of students.
Practice 2: Address the Importance of the Learning Goal Explicitly The essence of this practice is for the teacher to engage students in discussion about the power and importance of having a clear learning goal. This may, over time, support students in reflecting on – and taking charge of – their own learning process. Implementation The teacher can convey that in most instances it is essential to have a learning goal – namely, a clear intention of what one wants to accomplish in a learning task. He can also explain that, in the absence of learning goals, attempts to learn are apt to be inconsistent, ineffective, and more difficult, and material will come across as more vague and will be more easily forgotten. I should note that, in my experience, schoolaged students from first grade up can understand the idea that it is important to know what you are trying to learn. In fact, it often resonates with their own experience. Specific statements and questions that might go along with this message include: “I am emphasizing these learning goals because having a goal is very important to learning”; “Before we begin, is my explanation of the learning goals clear?” As a lesson continues, the teacher might ask: “Do you see a connection between the material we are covering and the goals we’ve been working toward?”; “Are you keeping your goals in mind? Does that help you decide what to focus on?” At the end of a task or discussion, the teacher might say something like, “Did you learn what you wanted to?” “Did having a clear goal help a little, a lot, or not at all?” For most students, coming to appreciate the power of learning goals is a longterm process to be undertaken at their own pace. As students become more mindful of learning goals and their potential importance, they naturally refine their sense of what kind of goals serve them best in different situations. Thus, this process can be framed as an interesting long-term experiment about one’s own mind, in which students are invited to notice whether devoting attention to their learning goals does indeed help them understand and remember. How It Enlarges the Classroom As students come to understand the value of having a specific intention, they become more active – consciously and unconsciously – in seeking and clarifying learning goals. And as they begin to understand this as a natural part of learning, they start to
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check in frequently with their learning goals. Over time, students can take more initiative in this area, opening the door for a kind of metacognitive development in which the student understands more about how the learning goal works in his own learning and thinking. The classroom is enlarged because each student can arrive at this realization in her own time and in her own way. This practice offers a prime example of how students can be given the opportunity to operate independently in response to the same material, making their own adjustments to suit their individual needs.
Practice 3: Discuss Differences in the Learning Goal Another way of assisting students in working from effective learning goals is to discuss certain nuances, such as the fact that a student’s learning goal may be different from the teacher’s, as well as from those of his peers. The practice recommended here is to facilitate an ongoing dialogue about these potential differences. In the course of reflecting on this over time, students may come to understand more about how learning goals best support them in various situations. Implementation In my experience, students tend to be naturally curious about how altering their learning goal can influence what and how they learn. To facilitate this natural curiosity, the teacher can point out that learning goals may vary from one student to another, even though they’re encountering the same material. And also that their goals may be subtly or drastically different from what the teacher has in mind. The essence of this practice is to invite students to consider the specific aspects of their learning goals. Making the fact of these divergences an explicit topic of conversation can lead to a deeper understanding of learning for the student, refining his insights about what kinds of goals support learning in various situations. Whenever (and however frequently) it seems appropriate, the teacher can invite consideration and discussion along these lines. For example, the teacher might ask, “Is your immediate goal more or less specific than mine? How similar is your learning goal to the one I described? Is your interest drawing you in another direction? Do you think your learning goals are the same as or different from the majority of your classmates’?” An important issue that is likely come up at some point is whether a student wants her goal to be the same as the teacher’s or to those of other students’. In some cases it’s important – or at least quite helpful – for students’ goals to be more or less in the same ballpark as those articulated by the teacher. For example, in learning to add fractions, to factor quadratic equations, or about the basic plot of a novel, goals will need to be more similar than different. In other cases (for example, digging deeply into a historical period, or pursuing a part of the science unit that interests one most), learning goals will tend to vary more, and without causing any difficulty; instead, this variation can be an important part of the learning process.
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Preparation and Consideration While the last two practices are likely to be useful in some form or another in most any classroom, this practice rests on the teacher’s assessment of students’ readiness to engage in the kind of discussion suggested here. A key consideration in assessing readiness is whether this practice will obscure or clarify the basic message on that working from specific learning goals is important – i.e., whether it will amplify or detract from the effects of the previous two practices. It may be helpful to underscore that this practice is, in a sense, different in kind than practices 1 and 2. Those practices are meant to convey information, namely to help students be clear on the teacher’s intention and on the power of having a specific learning goal. Practice 3 is meant to facilitate an introspective process by which each student comes to understand more about the manner in which learning goals operate for him.
How It Enlarges the Classroom This kind of discussion and reflection helps students understand more about the conditions and approaches that work for them personally. As they gain experience with this awareness, they can continue to find increasingly effective and fulfilling ways to approach learning and eventually develop a more refined sense of what kind of learning goals tend to work for them in what kinds of situations. This practice gives students direction and guidance to support their development, but because the process is ongoing rather than deadline constrained, each student will have the space to find his own way and develop naturally, in accord with his individual needs and preferences. This practice enlarges the classroom by encouraging the natural propensity of the mind to find its own most-effective techniques. By elevating the concept of a learning goal in the classroom discourse, teachers can take advantage of this propensity and contribute to a kind of fundamental metacognitive understanding that allows students – who are in the same classroom – to adapt conditions for themselves, so that their experience is, in effect, individualized. The more students understand about how learning goals work for them, the more likely their conditions will be good enough, most of the time.
New Information Practices Practice 1: Prioritize Review of Previous Relevant Learning This practice follows from an understanding of the integral relationship between what is known (the learning set) and what is being learned. Textbook chapters and
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other sources often reflect assumptions that students will have certain knowledge and certain skills available, but these assumptions are not always correct. It is difficult to learn new information when simultaneously engaged in relearning background material. Thus, it is a “high-risk strategy” to assume that students have the requisite skills and knowledge available to take on new learning, and review of relevant material should be given high priority.
Implementation In this practice, the teacher gives ongoing consideration to whether the necessary learning set is in place for students and makes it a priority to review relevant knowledge. The need for review is well accepted and reviews are commonplace, but the importance is in the details – namely, in how frequently and how thoroughly reviews take place. The essence of this practice is to maintain openness to the need for, or even a bias toward, more thorough review of previously taught material rather than less. One way to approach this is to precede each unit with a review of foundational material and skills. The teacher can also begin classes with a review of key information from prior units and/or key points covered in the present unit to date. Another possible variation in this practice is to make optional review sessions and review materials available. Students are capable of understanding at a surprisingly early age that it is not enough to have mere familiarity with material they are building upon – that material will need to be understood deeply enough and skills will have to be fluent enough to support further learning. As a part of adopting this practice, the teacher can regularly assess her students’ relevant knowledge. Questions the teacher might ask herself at the beginning of a unit include the following: “What material or skills are foundational for my learning goals in this unit? How long ago were these learned? Do I think students have learned this material to sufficient depth or mastery for the material? Given the demands of this unit, how readily available does the relevant knowledge have to be? How available do I think it is to them now? Are necessary skills sufficiently fluent?” As the unit goes on, the teacher can make ongoing assessments. If students are not learning the new material in the manner expected, the teacher can reassess whether foundational knowledge is in place and can consider whether more review within the unit might be helpful. Of course, not all students will need to review or need it to the same degree, and students may approach review sessions with different attitudes depending on their familiarity with the particular material. The teacher can remind students that even if it does not feel that they need review, it might help, and that learning is not just a simple matter of remembering or not remembering: differences in the clarity and ease with which material is available can make for significant differences in the effort that’s needed. Those who feel comfortable with the bulk of the material reviewed can be encouraged to try to listen for one helpful fact, new insight, or area they want to clarify. They may be encouraged to think critically about the point of
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view espoused in a particular reading or assignment, or even to try to write study questions for themselves or for a classmate. If they choose, students can engage with these kinds of review strategies as ongoing metacognitive experiments, checking for understanding and considering how review influences their learning at different times under different circumstances.
How It Enlarges the Classroom This practice enlarges the classroom by helping a range of students, not just those obviously struggling. With extra review, some students who might have become lost in the course of the study will be able to effectively learn. As importantly, many students who would not have been lost will nonetheless receive a boost, understanding more readily and with less effort. Others may have learned the material, but review sessions will bring the material to the fore and make learning conditions more advantageous.
Practice 2: Help Students Prioritize and Direct Attention Once learning goals are established, teachers can support students further by helping them attend selectively to material that is most relevant to those learning goals. This practice is motivated by the awareness that, if attention is not sufficiently selective, organizing can be drastically undercut. By supporting selective attention in this way, the teacher can help students meet the demands inherent in encountering new information, and to organize that information around the learning goal.
Implementation The essence of this practice is for the teacher to tell students what material he considers most important in relation to the learning goals. A simple way to think of this is, “If I were taking notes, what material would I be sure to include?” The basic approach of this practice can be captured in the following formula: “Notice these several points: I think they are particularly important because they relate to our learning goal.” To further help students prioritize and direct attention, the teacher can preview material of particular importance before a task (“Three key points that relate to our learning goal will be discussed in your reading. They are x, y, and z”); identify it in the midst of a task (“Notice we are talking here about three ways in which a hypothesis may be faulty or misleading. These relate to our goal of understanding the nature of hypotheses”); and review it in the course of summarizing (“Critical highlights of the material covered in last night’s reading and today’s discussion are as follows”).
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Teachers may also tell students directly what they will be expected to remember. The process of selectivity is often helped when students are told what they are going to be asked to know – and how they will need to demonstrate it – at the beginning of the unit. This can help students develop a picture of what is expected, which will help them in the complex process of attending selectively. In fact, study guides that are sometimes given out just before a test would often serve this purpose very well if they were distributed at the very start of the unit, in order to support selective attention. Providing outlines to students at the beginning of the unit can be of particular help, too, giving them a roadmap to look at before, during, and at the end of the journey. Another way that the teacher can convey what is important is by helping students identify material that is not essential to recall. For instance, the teacher might say, “What I am telling you right now is primarily for background information. You don’t need to remember it, but it may help you understand the three main points we are pursuing.” Or again, “The second part of the reading assignment does not make new points but does explain some points made in the first part.” The teacher should use her own real-time assessment to determine how often to highlight material that is pertinent to learning goals. But it is helpful to keep in mind that the need for support in selectively attending is generally hidden “underwater.” It is fair to say that students can generally use more help prioritizing and directing attention rather than less.
Preparation and Considerations As a starting point, the teacher should return to the previous practice of identifying learning goals. Bringing to mind the goals for the current unit, the current lesson, and current assignment will allow the teacher to consider what material is most important for pursuing those goals. A number of guiding questions may be helpful during this process: “What are my priorities for this unit or class period? What material is most essential to understanding these priorities? What material in this unit will be most important for the students to know going forward? Is this essential material or background material? What information is actually necessary, and what information might fill in the picture for some students but is not necessary for all? Which points need close attention?”
How It Enlarges the Classroom While the process of attending selectively can occur naturally, without support and without any conscious attention on the part of the student, in school settings the demand from a continual stream of information is especially high. As a result of factors such as differing degrees of background knowledge and developmental differences, there are apt to be significant differences between students’ abilities to
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attend selectively in any given classroom situation. For some, insufficient selective attention means that organizing processes cannot operate as they should. For others, organizing remains possible but requires far greater effort than it does for their peers. The more the teacher can help students prioritize and direct their attention to key points, the fewer the students who will fall behind, and the fewer whose organizing processes will be taxed to the point of breakdown.
Practice 3: Stagger Periods of Heaviest Demand from New Information Another approach to addressing the demand from new information is to adjust school schedules so that periods of highest demand are staggered. This practice manifests the awareness that the volume of new information during these periods can contribute to undercutting organizing processes. By directing this awareness to students’ schedules, and making whatever changes seem appropriate and practical, the teacher can help prevent different subjects and classes from working against each other.
Implementation There are several possibilities for staggering periods of heavy demand. Teachers can consider arranging work schedules so that midterm tests in different subjects do not occur on the same days or in close succession. Due dates for major projects and papers (both final due dates and interim milestone dates) might be arranged so that they don’t coincide closely with midterms or other tests. Final exams can be spaced out to the extent possible. Sometimes this can be accomplished by using final projects or papers that need not be completed during dead week. If final exams are numerous and bunched tightly together, the effects of high demand can be mitigated by making sure that the pre-finals study period is both as long as possible and strictly respected so that there is no new material covered during study week.
Preparation and Considerations The first step of planning might be to take stock of all the tasks that will likely involve dealing with a high demand. At the start of any unit, for example, there is apt to be a heavy concentration of new concepts, vocabulary, procedures, and perspectives. The beginnings of major papers and projects tend to be similar in these respects, and they may also require students to engage with new information intensively on two levels: what they need to know about the topic (content) and what they need to do (procedure). Of course, preparing for major tests and project due dates usually involve heavy demand as well.
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Once these information-intense tasks draw our attention, an issue comes into focus: in the course of an academic year, scheduling of the different phases of a class tends to take a more or less natural course, guided by the curriculum and bounded by natural landmarks such as the beginning of the term, the end of the term, or the approach of a vacation break. However, this natural bunching creates interludes of super intensity in demand from information. Tests and major due dates tend to occur at the end of the term and just before a break. When all classes conclude units at the end of the term or just before breaks, new units begin when classes resume. Due to formal scheduling, or simply as a result of these parameters, midterm tests often come in close succession as well. Once the tasks for the term are considered, and when the tasks that are highest in demand from information have been identified, the next step in preparation is scheduling in order to minimize periods of high demand. Staggering or redistributing these tasks and due dates requires careful advanced planning involving coordination with other teachers and assessment of the true demands of certain tasks that may not be perceived as taxing at first glance. As educators, we are on the far side of having done these tasks dozens or even hundreds of times, and it can be difficult to appreciate that, for example, learning to take research notes in a certain format, to create proper footnotes, or to build a three-dimensional model may involve coping with a good deal of new information. While this is a straightforward approach in that it mainly requires coordinated scheduling, it is by no means always easy to execute. The influence of the academic calendar cannot be dismissed. For one thing, it can make good educational sense in many ways to end units and have tests before a weeklong break. In some circumstances, it may not be practical to completely avoid grouping together major due dates. But even small changes can have a large impact. For example, if it’s impractical in a certain instance to space out major due dates, the faculty might consider: Is there one due date that can be moved forward or back? Even three major due dates in close proximity is a big improvement over four, just as two is a big improvement over three.
How It Enlarges the Classroom Periods of super intensity “shrink the classroom” because the high demand from new information hampers the organizing processes of students who would otherwise not be affected. Moreover, when introductions to new units, exams, or due dates for papers and projects pile up, a greater number of students will find they have little leeway in customizing their own learning approach, as they are placed in a position of coping with information rather than actively considering how to facilitate understanding. By staggering periods of heaviest demand, teachers can enlarge the classroom by minimizing the number of students who will have organizing processes undercut by such periods, in turn allowing more students the opportunity to individually adjust their approach to learning.
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Practice 4: Provide Backup Documentation to Verbal Material In any given situation, each student has a limit to how much material he can organize and learn. In a lengthy discussion, some students will miss important material, and as a presentation continues, more gaps may appear for more students. Providing backup material allows students to get all the benefits of verbal presentations without paying a disproportionate penalty if they happen to miss key information.
Implementation Sources for backup material might include teachers’ outlines or lecture notes, printed copies of slides or overhead transparencies, written summaries or citation of specific pages in a text that cover material discussed during class.
Preparations and Considerations The teacher might create a library of extra materials designed to backup class discussion, which may also include related readings that go beyond what is covered in class. This may remove some burden from both the teacher and the students: The teacher does not have to attempt the impossible in seeking to assure that each student gets neither too much nor too little information; likewise, students don’t have to attempt the impossible in always absorbing key points the first time through. Perhaps the most difficult aspect of this practice is believing that it is necessary to provide backup materials consistently and thoroughly. Although it is a commonplace observation – and a keynote of our entire discussion – that students often do not remember the material covered, despite attending and understanding, it can nevertheless be difficult to accept this in the moment. When students are paying attention to a discussion and seem to be understanding, it’s hard to believe that they may not remember certain essential things. I find this is still the case myself, even after many years of not only considering this phenomenon, but also teaching it to other professionals.
How It Enlarges the Classroom Whenever material is being discussed in class, we can expect there to be limits to what students can effectively learn. The chances of material being missed increases with the length of a lecture or discussion. This can have immediate effects on learning, of course, and these effects can reverberate throughout the unit and beyond if the missed knowledge is required as a foundation for later material.
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In other words, the many benefits of lecture and class discussion come with a “side effect” – that almost assuredly some students will miss key points. But this side effect can be mitigated considerably when reference to backup materials is part of the class culture. The classroom is enlarged because students exhibiting a range of capacity to learn information on a given day can adjust to circumstances and fill in the gaps (or reinforce what they’ve learned) when a library of backup materials is consistently available. A discussion about the use of this library can also encourage metacognitive lessons. The teacher can explain that we all have different capacities to organize information at different times and that we can all, at times, benefit from more information and/or more time to think. Deciding when and how to use the library presents an opportunity for the student to learn about what he needs to do in different situations to learn effectively. For example, a student may try following an entire presentation as closely as possible one day, and the next day he might select just a few issues to focus on intently, confident that others can be addressed later. On a separate occasion, he might choose to focus on understanding the key points of the presentation without concern about the supporting details. The backup material provides a safety net for students to explore different ways of learning and discover what works bests for them.
Shifts-in-Topic Practices Practice 1: Review and Preview at the Beginning of Each Class This practice springs from the awareness that relevant prior knowledge (the learning set) is essential for learning. When the student’s sense of context is vague, unconscious processes are much less likely to support organizing. The rationale here is to support the process of set construction – of bringing relevant prior knowledge to mind – by simply reviewing information or concepts that the teacher feels will facilitate comprehension of upcoming material. Another suggestion is to preview what’s coming up – another means of supporting set construction.
Implementation I once heard a movie director say in an interview that the major part of his job was reminding actors where they were in the story. This, to me, captures the essence of this practice. When students are mentally situated with some precision and detail in the “story” being told in the classroom – that is, the concepts being developed and the learning goals being pursued – unconscious processes can be marshaled toward the support of learning.
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The first element of this practice entails reminding the students of the story so far. This might involve discussing the themes and highlights of past classes that pertain to what will be covered today. It may also include making reference to learning goals at various levels. What is the overarching learning goal at present? What related but more specific goals were addressed in prior sessions? From there, the second element of the practice – previewing – follows naturally: “What are the learning goals for the day?” “What are the essential connections between recent material and the highlights that lie ahead?” An essential part of what must be brought to mind are details about material the class has been covering recently as well as exactly where it left off. This specific context provides cues for the construction of the learning set, helping bring to mind other relevant knowledge. In addition to providing context and cues for the learning set, this practice is also designed to provide time to construct or reconstruct a learning set. Thus, while reviews and previews need not be lengthy, they should not be hurried either. Another aspect of this process can be allowing a brief time for students to recall and reflect. The teacher might use prompts such as, “Does what I’m talking about ring a bell? Do you have a sense of where we’re going today?” This reflection time – even if only a minute – can be most helpful in preparing the student for material to come. Preparations and Considerations At any given time in the school year, a student is addressing multiple subjects and developing numerous distinct bodies of knowledge simultaneously (not to mention the many concerns and interests she’s attending to outside of school). These various demands on attention increase the chances that students will not readily recall what has been covered most recently in any given class. This is why transitions are crucial. Once students are in their seats and attentive, it is natural to assume that they are ready to engage with the material to be presented that day. After all, the teacher, the rules of the class, and the students are all the same as before, and the material picks up where it left off. In reality, though, students’ minds are dealing with any number of distractions and demands, and clear transitions can set the stage for what the student will experience in the following hour. If a transition doesn’t happen – or doesn’t happen quickly enough – the effects are likely to echo through the entire session as a student never completely understands and never quite catches up. By contrast, routinely offering a gradual start (pausing and reflecting) at the beginning of class can act as a kind of gathering in of students – making sure everyone in the group is ready to travel together and get the most out of the journey before the next stage begins.
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How It Enlarges the Classroom Some students would be lost without the extra cues and the extra time this practice recommends, but reviews and previews are not just beneficial for those who would otherwise fall behind. Reviewing and previewing helps a greater number of students evoke the richest possible learning set. It may also help many students consolidate what was learned in prior classes. Therefore, the practice of reviewing and previewing can support many or most students in understanding, organizing, and integrating. It enlarges the class by helping students – some dramatically, and some more subtly – get the most out of class. In addition, pausing and reflecting provides an opportunity for students to experience, over time, the value of reflection as well as a chance to anticipate and be curious. The message conveyed by this practice is that while rote memorizing may sometimes occur at a single point in time, learning does not. Learning is a matter of reviewing, rethinking and reflecting – looking at new material in light of what you’ve learned and reconsidering what you’ve learned in the light of new material.
Practice 2: Consistently Mark and Discuss Shifts in Topic as Class Progresses While small or subtle shifts during a class may not necessitate a mental transition for every student on every occasion, we can assume that certain students will need to make mental transitions in response to most shifts of topic. Acknowledging and discussing shifts in topic give students an opportunity to make important demarcations that may otherwise be missed. Implementation The essence of this practice is to note shifts in topic during class and to give some description of similarities and differences between the topics you’re transitioning between. The practice is captured in the format, “We’re still talking out in general about X, but we’re now talking specifically about X2, not X1.” Here are a few examples of mid-class topic shifts: “We are still talking about adding fractions, but now we will be talking about what to do when the denominators are different, not what to do when the denominators are the same.” “We are still talking about basic operations involving fractions, but now we will be talking about multiplying fractions, not adding fractions. Multiplying means something very different in terms of how we need to treat the denominators.” “We’re still talking about English history in the 1760s, but notice we are moving from a concentration on politics to everyday life.”
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“We are still talking about European history in the second half of the eighteenth century, but right now we are moving from England to France.” “We’re still talking about France but we want to circle back and compare what we learned about French government with what we earlier learned about English government at this time. For many of you, it will take some work to keep the details of the two governments separate.”
Preparations and Considerations After the start of class, shifts in topic take on a different character. They tend to be smaller in magnitude – within the same subject matter, and most often between closely related topics. While these kinds of small shifts in topic can be numerous – and it would be counterproductive to try to mark every shift – it’s generally good practice to do so as frequently as possible. One challenge inherent in this practice for the teacher is to develop sensitivity to the presence of shifts. As we talked about previously, this is particularly difficult because shifts that necessitate mental transitions in students often will not require mental transitions for teachers. From the students’ point of view, small shifts in topic may occur with some frequency, while from the teacher’s more developed understanding, there are far fewer shifts. Thus, the challenge is to think the material through from the students’ point of view, recognizing where shifts in topic may exist for students new to the material. This can be hard, at first, to do in the moment, and so it may help to think through a class plan with this issue in mind.
How It Enlarges the Classroom In school settings, where topic shifts are frequent, many students are likely to be expending significant effort making mental transitions, and it is more than likely that some transitions will be missed. While the shifts described here are far more subtle than those typical of the beginning of a class, they are no less likely to cause students to get lost or to fall behind. Providing conditions that support each student in making these transitions supports learning for a wider variety of students. In other words, regularly marking shifts in topic helps keep more students in the game, so to speak. This practice can help students devote fewer attentional and cognitive resources to keeping up, and more to understanding.
Practice 3: As Class Nears an End, Consider Stopping the Lecture or Discussion Before Another Transition must be Negotiated Shifts in topic are critical moments that increase demand on organizing processes. An additional shift at the end of class – after significant material has already been
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covered – may end up being disruptive for some students. Simply being mindful of this fact, and finding an appropriate stopping point, may help students leave class with a sense of relative closure, rather than confusion. At the level of unconscious organization, this practice helps guard against interference that results from missed demarcations, insufficient set construction and an absent or inappropriate learning goal.
Implementation In the latter part of class, as the teacher becomes aware that another topic shift is approaching, she can make a judgment about whether to continue through the next shift. The practice recommended here is to consider pausing rather than introducing a new topic. Of course, if the teacher decides to stop before the end of the class, there are any number of things the teacher can do, from highlighting learning goals to encouraging individual review and reflection. A question-and-answer period can fit well here, too. The teacher can keep in mind – and even state explicitly – that if students feel “full,” they need not attend closely to the question-and-answer period. The idea here is that the work of paying attention is essentially done – and pushing it further may yield few benefits, or even be counterproductive.
Preparations and Considerations Typically, a teacher’s decision about whether or not to continue a presentation focuses on the amount of time left in the class period and the apparent state of the class. In other words, if there’s time available to discuss further material and students appear attentive, it would seem natural to continue. However, with our new awareness of the need for mental transitions – and the demand that tends to accompany shifts in topic – the situation is a bit more complicated. Such awareness adds more texture to the way the teacher assesses the situation as class approaches an end. From our new perspective, it becomes clear that in making this decision, the teacher can consider how shifts in topic may be highly disruptive to learning. Her judgment can be informed by such considerations as: how “busy” the presentation has been so far in terms of shifts in topic; whether the next shift is easy or apt to be confusing; whether there is time to mark and discuss the shift in topic, and to help students understand the difference between this topic and the last; whether there is time to get some distance into this new topic so it makes a certain amount of sense (in itself and in relation to the preceding topic). As a rule of thumb, if the students appear hurried, it is probably a good idea to stop.
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How It Enlarges the Classroom Shifts in topic increase demand on organizing processes, and this can have an amplified effect if students are approaching the end of class. Rushed or excessive transitions may result in interference and thereby disrupt present learning and prior learning. In other words, a poorly considered final shift in topic might become the final straw, undoing learning that came before. By contrast, a strategic early break at the conclusion of a lesson can enlarge the classroom by enabling a greater percentage of students to come away with a good, clear understanding of what was covered in class.
Attentional Demand Practices Practice 1: Make Note-Taking Optional, and Make Notes and Outlines Freely Available Learning and organizing depend on sufficient attention. When note-taking is mandatory and/or backup materials are not available, students who have difficulties in taking accurate notes, or for whom taking notes requires disproportionate attentional resources, may frequently struggle to organize the material.
Implementation The foundation of this practice is simply to provide outlines of class lectures, presentations and discussions whenever possible. An easy place to start is to distribute whatever outlines already exist in the teacher’s files as well as any materials used for demonstration during class. In some cases, designated students – students who like and benefit from taking thorough notes – can share their notes with the class. The idea is that outlines and notes become “open source,” as in the computer-programming practice where information is freely accessible and anyone can benefit from it. The teacher may choose to make discussion about this practice brief and straightforward, or he may develop the discussion over time. For example, he may wish to simply state that notes are going to be provided so that nobody misses anything because of a gap in their own notes. Or he can explain that note-taking is optional and the students can choose to just listen if they wish. Students can be encouraged to determine whether they will take notes and, if so, what format to use, or they can be invited to experiment and to consider whether and how note-taking helps or hinders their learning overall.
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Preparation and Considerations This practice does not require absolute or rigid policies. For example, the teacher might provide notes and outlines when feasible, but not always. The teacher might require note-taking in some situations, even when notes are available, if there is a specific reason to do so. In short, teachers can focus on note-taking primarily as it contributes to understanding and learning, not as a primary means of recording data. This recommendation goes against the grain of the fairly common perspective that note-taking is an essential part of learning the material – that it supports students in focusing and understanding. However, when we consider that deciding what to write requires attention, that the act of writing itself requires attention, and that alternating focus between a presentation and a notepad requires frequent shifts in attention, the matter becomes more complex. Note-taking appears to be strenuous for some students and easy for others; helpful in learning for some students and less so for others; a support in focusing attention for some students but a distraction for others. I still recall learning a few years ago that some law schools routinely provide notes for class lectures, and that law school study groups often share notes of reading assignments. In this high-stakes environment, it was widely understood that everyone had to attend the lectures but not necessarily take notes on them; likewise, everyone was expected to do the reading, but not necessarily outline it. These practices suggest very neatly the position I’ve arrived at regarding note-taking: It appears that for most students having notes is essential to learning, or at least an essential support to learning; however, the question of whether taking notes supports or detracts from learning is a more individual matter, depending on the student and the situation. The essence of this practice is not that note-taking should be done away with altogether or that skills in this area should not be taught and developed; rather, it is that note-taking should not be habitually required. Ultimately, each student will find an approach to note-taking that works best for her. She will discover whether note-taking is always helpful, sometimes helpful or rarely helpful in her own learning. Some students come to realize that they actually benefit from taking thorough notes even when they’re not required to do so. Others may find that just listening is the best approach, and still others may take idiosyncratic, partial notes in ways that help them stay engaged with the presentation. Students may find that formal systems of note-taking are most helpful in some situations, while in other situations they may discover that the individualized note formats they develop over time are most helpful. Direct instruction and concerted practice in note-taking can play an important role in helping the student come to understand the best way to listen and learn during lectures.
How It Enlarges the Classroom This practice enlarges the classroom because it accounts for the great variety in students’ capacities to take effective notes and learn simultaneously. For some
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students, attention devoted to note-taking is considerable and clearly takes away from understanding and learning. But even students who find that taking notes helps them listen selectively may find that a backup enhances their experience. When the student is released from the requirement to record, his capacity – the attention available – to think critically and creatively about the material may also be enhanced. He is free to concentrate on understanding, and then make decisions about what details to fill in using the provided notes and outlines. When note-taking is optional, a wider range of students will have more success in understanding and learning because they will use approaches that are most effective for them in specific situations.
Practice 2: Regularly Offer Support for Underlying Skills Learning tasks typically depend to some extent on the exercise of underlying skills – skills that are not the direct target of a learning activity but are assumed to be already established for each student. However, in the reality of the classroom, students acquire these skills with varying degrees of mastery, and support for underlying skills can allow more attentional resources to be directed toward learning the primary task.
Implementation Examples of this practice include making calculators or tables available when problems involve (but are not intended to teach) math calculation; giving students a checklist or other help in reviewing papers for grammatical issues before turning them in, so that they do not “sink or swim” with their ability to apply grammatical rules correctly the first time through; and giving extra help with research practices (such as formatting citations properly) to students who are not familiar with such procedures. The teacher can acknowledge to students that it is hard for everyone to learn too many things at once, and she can explain that their basic skills will develop over time, with practice. The teacher can also emphasize that support is available to anyone who wants it in order to help better focus on the learning task at hand, and provide separate opportunities for students to practice underlying skills as needed – when students are identified (or identify themselves) as needing extra help. I have found that when students want this kind of support, they usually learn better once it is provided, and they tend to let go of such supports eventually, on their own. Of course, there may be occasions when students need encouragement to let go of a support, but these become apparent over time. Moreover, in most circumstances, the consequences of holding onto support too long are usually minimal compared to the consequences of not having sufficient attentional resources available for learning.
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Preparation and Considerations Demand on attentional processes is cumulative, and the attention required to execute underlying tasks draws from the same finite pool of attention as organizing and learning new material draws from. Hence, in preparing for this practice, the teacher should focus on all that will be asked of the student doing a lesson or task, not just what is involved in the targeted learning. She can consider what underlying skills the student might need to call upon and the easiest and most direct ways to offer support. It is easy to assume that underlying skills can be practiced during the learning of new material. While this is sometimes true, when students do not have the underlying skills developed to fluency, they generally are not in a position to develop them while learning something new as well. In short, it’s very difficult to learn two or more different things at once. Many teachers are in the habit of offering support for underlying skills when there is a clear reason for doing so – when the student appears to need it for a specific reason. For these teachers, adopting this practice may be a matter of adjusting their decision bias about when this practice is necessary. In other words, instead of offering support for underlying skills only when there is a clear reason, the teacher can change her default practice to offering support unless there’s a clear reason not to do so. This change in bias makes sense when we consider that we cannot directly assess how much attention is required for students to exercise underlying skills or what effect the exercise of underlying skills is having on any given student, much less on a group of students.
How It Enlarges the Classroom This practice enlarges the classroom by increasing the likelihood that each student will have the necessary attention to learn. In any given learning task, we can assume that students will possess a wide range of abilities with the underlying skills required. The primary task itself will also require different levels of attention from different students. When certain underlying skills are weak, they may undermine a student’s learning repeatedly as they are called upon for a variety of assignments and activities. Students with relatively strong underlying skills will also benefit from support as more of their attentional resources will be freed up to devote to what’s of primary importance.
Practice 3: Allow for Variation in Practice and Rehearsal A significant measure of attention is needed to benefit fully from practice. As individual practice sessions continue, it becomes more likely that attention will fluctuate or wane, causing difficulties in encoding. Practice where it is not needed may also deplete the students’ capacity to attend effectively during subsequent tasks.
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Implementation The first step in adopting this practice is to identify appropriate assignments (i.e., those that include rehearsals of procedures or reviews of basic information). Math and science problem sets, with repetitions of similar problems, often present such pure review tasks. Question sets and other exercises in history textbooks are also frequently designed for the rehearsal of basic information and often overlap, requiring basic information to be rehearsed in various ways. In discussing this practice with students, a teacher can relate the practice to the relevant learning goals. He might say, for example, “The purpose of this assignment is to become more comfortable with adding fractions, and specifically to become more clear on common denominators.” This reminds students that practice is always meant to help them progress toward a learning goal. In some instances, it’s useful for the teacher to be specific about the details related to the learning goal. For example: “The facts about this historical period you are expected to remember and understand are listed on page 189 at the end of the chapter. The outlining assignment, the short answer assignment, and questions one and three in the summary-paragraph assignment all address an understanding of these facts. You can do those assignments in any combination that allows you to understand and remember.” or … “You should be able to successfully solve for X in these equations, and this includes equations in which X is negative and equations in which X is on both sides of the equal sign.” Students can be advised that with any given task there is a helpful range of practice. In other words, it is possible to practice either too little or too much, and part of this process is learning what kind of practice works best for them. I’ve found that sports analogies can help illustrate this point. The teacher might explain, for example, that if one wants to become good at shooting baskets or hitting tennis balls, a great deal of practice is necessary over time. A tennis player might need more repetition in order to make a strong stroke more natural and automatic. But it’s important that she’s practicing correctly. Sloppy practice – practice when one is tired or can’t concentrate – can make the athlete more likely to repeat her mistakes because she is learning to do the activity incorrectly. As a result, she may be worse off than when she started, and she’ll have to later “undo” the faulty practice with extra hours of proper practice. Students can be encouraged to experiment and discover what kind and amounts of practice benefit them most. If they take note of how they felt and practiced each day, and then notice the effects (i.e., how clear the material is the next time they return to it), they will have a more accurate feel for the kind of practice they need. (The teacher can also prompt the students to notice at the beginning of each practice session whether the material is clearer than it was before last practice session.) In my experience, even very young students understand that there will be differences in how much and where they need to practice, depending upon the circumstances.
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The teacher can also make this kind of experimentation optional, providing the assignments as usual and letting students decide, within a certain range, amount of practice will best support their learning.
How It Enlarges the Classroom In any learning situation, the amount of practice needed by individual students will vary, depending on a great variety of factors. Allowing variation in the attention students give to review and rehearsal tasks enlarges the classroom because it gives them a chance to use their “daily allotment” of attention strategically and focally. It greatly reduces the likelihood that students will fail to learn from “over-practice,” wherein they continue until their attention is attenuated and their understanding is vague. It encourages students to create the conditions that work best for them – and get the most out of their time and attentional resources – in the context of assignments provided for the entire class. This practice can also support learning overall if students have more attention available to direct toward deeper understanding, analysis and other avenues of higher-order thinking.
Concluding Remarks While the practices presented in this chapter address the classroom as a whole, we’ve seen that they do so by creating conditions that can support learning among the wide range of individual learners almost certain to be found in any class. This is precisely why I settled on the term “enlarging the classroom” for this chapter. Enlarging the classroom means reducing the chances for all students that conditions will undercut organizing and learning. As students organize more frequently and with less effort overall, they will have more room to engage with information in different ways – to seek more information or less, to clarify, to think through, to seek understanding more deeply, and to experiment with a range of approaches and responses to what they’re learning. When individual students have the latitude to approach the same material somewhat differently, they become active learners and seek the specific conditions that support them individually. The teacher’s sensitivity to conditions that support organizing processes, and to students’ ongoing efforts to learn, remain the foundations from which to create supportive classroom conditions. Without this sensitivity, any practice can be applied too rigidly, without sufficient consideration of the complex set of circumstances present in the classroom at given time. This is why, even as I presented practices that are likely to be helpful the vast majority of the time, I was also careful to include ways to think about the anchor variables in our discussion of the practices. When sensitivity to the conditions relevant to organizing processes is maintained in the context of the teacher’s sense of general classroom conditions, these practices can be used fluidly, flexibly and strategically, taking into account whatever is occurring
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in the flow of classroom conditions in any given moment. The teacher’s overall understanding can guide him in applying and adapting these practices to the needs of the present – to his own individual teaching style, lessons, subjects and students. If the teacher holds in mind the depth and breadth of unconscious organizing processes, he is bound to understand more deeply the specific practices presented in this chapter. If he adopts the practices discussed in this chapter as expressions of sensitivity to organizing processes, he can better make sense of the intention behind them and how they engage important conditions in the classroom. The teacher’s overall understanding of what is occurring in the classroom – his ongoing assessment, his hunches and intuitions – can be informed by knowledge of the kind of processing that is crucial for successful organizing and learning. With this, we’ve come to the end of Part II. With the goal of carrying forward the perspective of Part I into the classroom, we’ve covered the role of the teacher, important sensitivities and practices for enlarging the classroom. My hope is that as you practice with this new understanding in mind, you’ll find that it continues to contribute to your understanding of learning and teaching in the classroom. In the final three chapters, we’ll take some initial steps in exploring the some wider implications for an understanding of learning and teaching that extend from the principles in Part I.
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The Principle View
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Chapter 9
How Enlarging the Classroom Makes Room for Variation in Cognitive Capacities
This chapter begins Part III of the book. In Part I, we developed an understanding of largely unconscious organizing processes that are essential to learning. In Part II, we considered what this understanding means for classroom teaching. Here in Part III, we will reflect on the material covered so far, with the goal of gaining a deeper appreciation of the perspective we have developed. In Chap. 8, we focused on classroom practices, observing that they “enlarge the classroom” by accommodating variation among students. By addressing conditions that are fundamental and relevant to all learning, the practices are meant to make room for variation between learners – in other words, to support a wide range of individual students despite their many differences. Our goal in Chap. 9 is to further explore how and why addressing fundamental conditions works in this way.
The Profile View Our discussion will now include a language, and a perspective, we have not yet employed. We will be using the terminology of discrete cognitive weaknesses and strengths, or a student’s “cognitive profile.” This approach springs from the fact that neuropsychology has established different domains of mental functioning – such as attention, language, or visual processing. It focuses on an understanding that each student has a different profile, a different combination of strengths and weaknesses. For shorthand, we’ll refer to this as in “profile view”. The profile view often goes hand-in-hand with an approach called differentiated instruction, which aims to provide variations in curricula for different subsets of students based on their cognitive profiles. A related strategy involves providing individual accommodations in the classroom based on individual cognitive differences. By contrast, the practices we presented in the last chapter were aimed at the classroom level, and the focus was on classroom conditions that support organizing processes in all students. For this reason, the practices covered in Chap. 8 will have been, for many, an unfamiliar way of applying neuropsychological thinking to education. C.A. Ahern and K. de Kirby, Beyond Individual Differences: Organizing Processes, Information Overload, and Classroom Learning, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4614-0641-9_9, © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011
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Some readers will likely be very accustomed to thinking about learning differences in terms of the profile view. It’s the most prevalent way of talking about individual differences in educational circles. For many teachers, the concept of students’ cognitive weaknesses and strengths is not only their primary way of thinking about individual differences, but of understanding what goes on in the classroom, including the surprising failures to learn referred to in the riddle we posed at the beginning of our inquiry: Why do some students struggle to learn from typical assignments and under ordinary conditions? Certainly, most teachers, at one time or another, have regarded certain students through the lens of the profile view. That is, they’ve worked with students whose struggles in learning they became accustomed to thinking about in terms of discrete cognitive weaknesses – often identified on the basis of neuropsychological assessment – and with students whose intellectual achievement is closely associated with a cognitive strength in one particular domain, such as visual-spatial processing or verbal learning. We have so far set aside a discussion of the profile approach, not to abandon it, but in order to fully explore another way of thinking, one that has focused on processes integral to all learning and all learners, whatever their individual differences. And now that we have thoroughly discussed this way of thinking, we are in a good position to see how it relates to the profile view. It will become clear – if it is not already – that the alternate perspective developed in this book in no way contradicts the more familiar cognitive-profile approach. To the contrary, they are highly complementary. In the following section, we will look at how learning conditions interact with cognitive strengths and weaknesses. We will describe some points of relationship between strong and weak capacities in students on the one hand (the focus of the profile view), and organizing processes on the other. We will see that the two are deeply intertwined – that the relative weakness or strength of cognitive capacities influences the functioning of organizing processes, and that support for organizing processes influences the effect of cognitive strengths and weaknesses on learning. Understanding these relationships will help us to see more clearly how practices for enlarging the classroom can make room for different individual profiles, how support for organizing processes goes a long way toward addressing issues that arise from the presence of distinct weaknesses in certain students.
Cognitive Weaknesses Attenuate Organizing Processes We usually take for granted that when a given task requires cognitive capacities that are weak in a student, he will have more difficulty learning. Yet, we don’t often consider why. We might say that a student is struggling because of a certain weakness – the connection seems self-explanatory. Of course, we know perfectly well that the weak capacity does play a role in undermining learning, but we rarely wonder about the actual mechanism by which learning is sabotaged as a result. One way of describing this basic dynamic constitutes our first point of relationship between organization and cognitive functions: Cognitive weaknesses attenuate organizing processes.
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In my own experience working with students on a one-to-one basis, I’ve found that difficulties with learning that are traceable to cognitive weaknesses are frequently the result of problems with organizing processes. Over time, evidence has accumulated in my clinical practice that cognitive weaknesses frequently lead to difficulties in organizing, which in turn undermine learning. Sometimes the relationship between specific weaknesses and organizing processes appears to arise because of the effects of the weaknesses at a particular juncture. For example, a student with a deficit in attention may experience her attention fading at an inopportune time, causing her to miss important data about the learning goal. Or a student with compromised receptive language may not be able to take in verbal information comprehensively enough to put together cues that a shift in learning set is needed at any given moment. This type of immediate effect, however, isn’t the only way in which it appears that weak cognitive functions can undermine organization. In some cases, it appears that the effects of cognitive weakness accumulate in a way that disrupts organizing. We might observe a student who, due to weaknesses in cognitive capacities underlying reading, puts so much effort into appreciating the meaning – word-by-word and sentence-by-sentence – that she does not have sufficient resources to devote to organizing the content of a chapter. On the basis of these kinds of observations, it appears that, as a general rule, when a student is exercising a cognitive weakness or weaknesses, she has fewer attentional and cognitive resources available for processes related to organizing. In other words, it seems to take greater mental resources – to “cost more”– to exercise areas of weakness. Consequently, the student is overloaded more readily than she otherwise would be. Of course, the specifics of how different cognitive weaknesses may affect organizing processes will vary depending on the weaknesses involved, the task at hand, and the particular student. However, an understanding of organization directs our attention to the commonality – the fact that cognitive weaknesses of all types tend to have an impact on the fundamental processes integral to organizing in learning. Regardless of the specific area of weakness, we find that it tends to make maintaining a learning goal more difficult, demarcating learning packets more problematic, and overload more frequent.
Exercising Strong Capacities Facilitates Organizing, But Does Not Guarantee It Just as we take for granted that deficits make learning more difficult, we also assume, correctly, that strong capacities make learning easier. In fact, to say that strong cognitive capacities support learning may seem redundant. (“Well of course. That’s what strong capacities do!”) However, looking more closely at the connection between strong capacities and organizing processes provides deeper insight into some of the mechanisms by which they support learning. As a general observation, it seems that students exercising cognitive strengths can organize more successfully, and in response to greater demand, than students who are drawing on areas of cognitive
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weakness. In general, students engaged in tasks that draw heavily on cognitive strengths appear to have a greater reservoir of attentional and cognitive resources available for supporting organizing processes. Why might this be so? Since stronger capacities can be exercised with more ease and fluency, and sustained over time more readily, there appears to be less effort involved in decoding and understanding material that engages a student’s strengths. For example, a student who is strong in verbal comprehension will likely need to expend less effort to decode the basic meaning of what’s being said during a presentation. Another student, with a strong attentional capacity, can attend to the presentation more fully and with less effort. As the presentation wears on, threatening their peers with inundation, these students are less likely to be overloaded, as their strengths continue enabling organizing processes to do their much-needed job. Not only do strengths make overload less likely, they also tend to deepen understanding and, thereby, support organizing processes. More mental resources means processing can be more extensive and comprehension more thorough. The appreciation of patterns, connections, nuances, and the big picture – all of which support understanding and organizing – tend to go along with strong capacities. For example, a student strong in verbal comprehension more readily appreciates nuances, connotations, implications, and other subtle shades of meaning. This greater understanding can support ongoing recognition of a learning goal, of material most salient in relation to the goal, and of the need for transitions. Similarly, the student with strong visual processing skill may more readily appreciate the essential patterns represented in a series of diagrams and thereby more consistently formulate a learning goal and organize material in relation to it. Considering this connection between organizing processes and individual strengths also helps us understand the exceptions to the rule – those times when cognitive strengths don’t ensure meaningful learning. It is not uncommon to find that a student drawing on strong and intact cognitive capacities nevertheless fails to learn. This is, in fact, a restatement of our seminar riddle, where the participant couldn’t pin her surprisingly spotty memory of the presentation on any learning disabilities or differences (the kinds of causes that the profile view would look for). In the profile view, discrete strengths and weaknesses in cognition are the primary ways of explaining why learning breaks down when it does. And in the absence of any areas of weakness to appeal to, the profile view might ignore an experience of doing without learning – dismissing it as anomalous, rather than significant, despite the fact that such experiences are common and completely ordinary. Our answer to the riddle, however, reminds us that exercising strong or intact capacities does not guarantee any real learning. Specifically, the exercise of strong and intact capacities is neither an assurance that organizing will take place nor a safeguard against inundation and failure to organize. Cognitive strengths may increase the demand a student can manage, but it is still possible for demand to reach a level at which organizing processes are undercut. While the profile view makes us aware of strengths, an appreciation for organizing processes reminds us that even strong capacities have limits. Any student can be overloaded – whether the cognitive capacities needed for the learning task are weak, within normal limits, or strong.
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Support for Organizing Processes Can Mitigate the Effects of Cognitive Weaknesses There’s another important exception to what the profile perspective alone would predict – one that teachers are also well aware of – namely, that learning is still possible even when a student’s weaknesses are needed for a task. Even substantial deficits do not necessarily preclude learning. We are all aware of this, but why might it be so? What separates those times when learning fails as a result of weak capacities and those when learning succeeds in spite of them? Here again, thinking about cognitive capacities in relation to organizing will provide some answers. A key observation here is that the involvement of cognitive weaknesses is less likely to be disruptive to learning when demand on organizing processes is moderate. As we’ve said, one way cognitive weaknesses exert their effect is by requiring the student to expend greater attentional and cognitive resources in order to understand what’s in front of him, thereby reducing the mental resources available for organizing the material. The inverse also appears to be true: Manageable demand means that the attentional and cognitive resources available are more likely to be sufficient for the task of organizing. The need to call upon cognitive weaknesses may decrease the level of demand a student can manage, but if the demand remains below that level, this effect does not become relevant. For example, when overall demand during a lecture is not too great, the student with a weakness in receptive language is presumably still exerting more effort than her classmate with a strength in this area, but the effort she needs to put forth in understanding and processing verbal language is less likely to interfere with her learning. This helps us understand why, when mental demands are not too high, students can more frequently succeed in learning despite their cognitive weaknesses. In addition to reducing overall demand, whatever the teacher does to better support organization in the moment may also reduce the occasions in which specific organizing processes are derailed. A weakness in any of a number of cognitive domains can cause students to miss creating an adequate learning goal, miss a necessary transition, or fail to attend selectively to the necessary extent. Therefore, supporting the recognition of the learning goal, marking transitions, and identifying salient material all reduce the effect weaknesses have on learning. Any classroom will likely include students with a wide variety of cognitive profiles, more or less suited to the specific learning task at any given point. This fact helps us understand what makes addressing overall conditions – enlarging the classroom – so effective. It provides conditions that can (a) reduce the negative effects on learning of a range of cognitive weaknesses; and (b) allow students to successfully exercise a range of strengths. The practical implication is that when fundamental conditions for organizing are supported in the classroom, students and teachers face fewer challenges as a result of cognitive weaknesses and can better capitalize on areas of strength. Moreover, differentiated instruction and individual accommodations will be far more effective and helpful in such a setting. In other
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words, enlarging the classroom creates fertile ground for whatever the teacher does in the way of differentiated instruction, targeted interventions or individual accommodations. That’s the benefit of addressing what’s fundamental. The effects radiate upward and outward, offering the educator greater insight into learning and greater possibilities for teaching.
Chapter 10
Two Ways of Understanding Learning: Integrating the Profile and Principle Approaches
This final chapter is offered as an opportunity to reflect on the book as a whole, and to appreciate how the perspective we’ve developed amounts to a fundamentally different way of understanding not just differences between students, but learning itself. The more familiar approach, which focuses on the identification of discrete weaknesses and strengths in individual students, we’ve already identified as the profile view. In Chap. 9, we talked about the profile view in order to understand more about enlarging the classroom and how it works at the level of the individual student. In Chap. 10, we will continue this discussion, but with a somewhat different intention – to reflect on the nature of learning itself. For reasons we’ll explain, we’ll refer to the perspective developed in this book as the “principle view.” The questions we are now asking are as follows: How does this new mode of thinking – which follows from appreciating the essential role of unconscious, vulnerable organizing processes – differ from what we’re most accustomed to? What is the relationship between these two ways of thinking about and understanding learning – the principle and the profile view? In this chapter, we will consider how these perspectives are both compatible and complementary – not only at a practical level, but also at a more conceptual level. We saw in Chap. 9 that we can bring both of these perspectives to bear on thinking about individual differences in classroom conditions – that sensitivity to fundamental learning conditions and an awareness of practices that support organizing goes a long way toward addressing issues that arise from the presence of distinct cognitive weaknesses in certain students. Our intention now is to actually integrate these two ways of thinking in a deep way, developing for ourselves a more inclusive viewpoint for understanding students’ learning. Above all, we will find that a perspective that integrates these two ways of thinking offers the educator greater insight into learning and greater possibilities in terms of teaching. Combining the principle and profile approaches will provide the teacher with a more nuanced, inclusive, and ultimately more useful understanding of how to support learning for a wide range of students and across a wide range of situations.
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In order to understand how these two views complement one another, it is first necessary for us to define and distinguish them as clearly as possible. Let’s first take the more familiar “profile” point of view. The profile approach begins with the basic neuropsychological insight that the concept of intelligence isn’t a unitary quality – a single scale along which people vary. Rather, the profile view offers the idea that our ability to learn – our intelligence in the broadest sense – can be better understood by breaking it down into multiple, more or less discrete cognitive domains. Visual processing and language processing are two examples that many are familiar with. In fact, the profile approach demonstrates that domains such as these can be analyzed further, into even more specialized functions. For example, in the domain of language, expressive language (that is, communicating with words) can be distinguished from receptive language (understanding them). Moving down yet another level of analysis, it’s been shown that receptive language capacity can itself be differentiated into the capacity for understanding written material vs. that for understanding spoken material. Nor does it stop there – a number of different capacities underlie these as well. One question that may arise is, how do we know? How can we tell when one capacity is actually distinct from another? Within the profile view, cognitive capacities are distinguished from one another, or broken down into different components, on the basis of a certain type of evidence. That evidence is found when students can be shown to be stronger in one capacity than another. For instance, because there are students who perform better on receptive language tasks than they do on expressive language tasks – and vice versa – we are justified in considering these capacities to be separate from one another. In other words, they are not simply expressions of a single function for language or for intelligence in general. When applied to education, this approach gives rise to the concept of a cognitive profile – hence the name we’ve given it: the profile view. The central idea is that, although all students draw on the same set of universal cognitive capacities, their comparative levels of strength create a profile that is more or less unique. Any given student has a unique combination of capacities that are considered strong, weak, or in the normal range. It follows that a student’s ability to learn from a given episode may be influenced by the particular combination of cognitive functions needed to address the task. If we understand what a student’s profile is, we’ll have a window into students’ functioning, a way of explaining – even predicting – in what situations and to what extent they will learn successfully. Knowledge of the student’s profile may also help us to tailor specific interventions, remediation strategies or accommodations designed to mitigate the effects of weaknesses while maximizing the student’s strengths. The profile approach stems from one major domain of neuropsychological thinking and research – the study of individual differences – and applies it to education. The material at the heart of this book has drawn from another major domain of neuropsychological thinking and research: the study of the process of learning itself. In this approach (which we are referring to as the “principle” approach), the intention is not so much to understand differences between learners but to articulate principles of learning necessarily common to all learners and to all learning situations.
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The principle view focuses on understanding cognitive processes that, with few exceptions, are necessary for learning to take place. It begins with the basic neuropsychological insight that, despite differences in individuals and in learning tasks, certain cognitive processes – such as the organizing processes we have been discussing throughout – remain essential. Any recognizable form of meaningful learning would be impossible without them. The investigation we’ve undertaken into the role of organizing processes is one example of the principle approach, showing that it too – though often overlooked – can be fruitfully applied to education. From this point of view, accommodating differences among students actually begins with developing a sensitivity to the presence of these essential processes, and it leads to the idea of creating conditions that support the widest possible range of individual variation, regardless of where this variation comes from, be it different degrees of background knowledge or levels of strength in particular cognitive functions. With these two approaches well defined, we can now set about integrating the two, allowing this sensitivity to conditions related to organizing processes to permeate our prior conception of how strong and weak capacities impact students’ learning. This will actually allow us to redefine the very concepts of cognitive strengths and weakness – not just in terms of how they work, but, in some sense, what the concepts actually mean. A central tenet of our book has been that any learner is subject to breakdowns in organizing. Chapter 9 specified that overload can and does occur in the absence of cognitive weaknesses, even when particularly strong capacities are involved. In a sense, information overload gives students temporary cognitive weaknesses, as otherwise-intact capacities are not able to serve the purpose of learning. While trying to learn under overload, a student who doesn’t have cognitive weaknesses may function similarly, if not identically, to one who does. Take, for example, a student diagnosed with attention deficit disorder because, compared to others of his age and intelligence, he has less capacity to sustain attention effectively. On a practical level, this means that there will be times in class when he cannot attend effectively, try as he might. When an unaffected student is overloaded – one without diagnosable ADD – he will also be unable to pay sufficient attention to learn. Similarly, a student with severe visuo-spatial deficits may struggle to reason through complex geometric proofs, but another student – one with comparatively strong visuo-spatial functioning – may be similarly unable to use these same capacities for the purpose of learning while demand is too great. Thus, in a given situation, the overloaded student may, for example, lack sufficient attention (like a student with ADD), may understand a lecture partially and superficially (like a student with a receptive speech deficit) or may fail to recognize the essential logic of a geometric drawing (like a student with visual-spatial processing difficulty). The other side of this coin is that, given the right conditions, weaknesses can also function like strengths. That is to say, they can be used effectively in service of learning. This was the last point of relationship we discussed in Chap. 9. So, if strong capacities can act like weaknesses, and weak capacities strengths, where does that leave us? How does it affect our understanding of these familiar concepts? Until now, we’ve been assuming that we know what it means to say that a student has a
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strength or weakness in a specific area of mental functioning. But do we really? Do we fully understand the meaning of such statements – to say, for example, that a student has weak executive functioning or strong expressive language? For many, such statements sound simple and straightforward. But when considered in light of the dynamic relationship between conditions for learning and a student’s profile, we find that the way we understand the familiar concepts of strengths and weakness requires some reexamination – maybe even revision. In fact, a reexamination is actually a powerful way to develop an integrated perspective. By placing cognitive strengths and weaknesses within the broader context of essential organizing processes, we will not only gain a fuller picture of how the functions work, but – more fundamentally still – what they are. To begin, let’s look at some basic features of the way cognitive capacities are assessed, some essential points about how neuropsychological tests of specific cognitive functions are conducted. The first is that, in most cases, neuropsychological tests seek to measure a capacity’s functioning in isolation. The idea is that, inasmuch as it is possible, the performance measured does not depend critically on any cognitive capacity other than the one under measurement. The student’s performance on these tests is then compared to that of her peers, to assess whether performance is strong, weak or average relative to students of the same age. Beyond the intention of isolating each capacity, neuropsychological tests also aim to evaluate the capacity in the abstract. For the most part, tests of cognitive functioning “get at” a particular cognitive capacity by presenting novel tasks – tasks that will be new to the student both in content and in process. The aim is to minimize any effects from prior knowledge and experience, as these effects would vary from one student to the next, making comparisons less helpful. The approaches of isolating capacities and minimizing contextual influence are at the heart of neuropsychological assessment’s power. They are done in the service of gathering data that will be helpful in generalizing across contexts, forming a basis for understanding how a capacity is likely to perform across a range of circumstances. A third aspect of assessment that is relevant to this discussion might be considered a matter of practicality. An assessment is, by its very nature, time-limited. Because there are limited hours for testing, the clinician cannot directly observe or measure the process of building knowledge, of learning over an extended period of time. As we consider these aspects of assessment, the contrasts to everyday learning situations are apparent. On any learning task, many interacting capacities are involved; no single capacity acts in isolation. Far from being a-contextual, learning is informed in many ways by prior knowledge, which deeply influences a student’s understanding and depth of thinking about the material being presented – a fact that we now know well. Finally, learning in school is essentially, intrinsically a matter of building knowledge over time, and cannot be replicated within the constraints of a time-limited assessment. Tests are effective because neuropsychologists have found ways to assess particular functions by removing basic elements of learning situations. After all, how would it be possible to say with any certainty or precision that a specific mental capacity of a particular student is, let’s say, in the normal range only on the basis of observing what unfolds in the classroom over the course of days or weeks? There are
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simply too many variables involved. Put another way, neuropsychological tests are effective, not because they mimic everyday learning situations, but because – in certain basic ways – they do not. The implication is that information gained from this type of assessment must be “translated back” into real-life learning situations. Such testing gathers data likely to be helpful in a wide range of circumstances, but cannot by its nature be definitive with respect to any particular situation. The strength or weakness of a cognitive capacity takes its full meaning in relation to a specific context, in relation to the specific nature of the task and the conditions in which it is exercised. In order to formulate an overall impression and prognosis, the assessor – realizing the limitations of the data – must extrapolate. He must consider how the profile constructed from testing might explain success and failure in past learning, and how it might play out in the future. To properly use information regarding the strength and weakness of discrete cognitive capacities, one must keep in mind that these data represent abstractions, that they are obtained in situations quite distinct from everyday experience in school. The educator, here, is in a privileged position. While the assessor can gather data from various sources about how learning has progressed, she cannot observe the student in real learning situations over time. The educator, informed by assessment data, can observe the student’s attempts to build knowledge over time and in a variety of situations. And here is where an integrated perspective can offer an invaluable tool: Because the principle approach calls our attention to essential aspects of the learning conditions in specific situations, a combination of the principle and profile approaches allows the teacher to put information about a student’s profile to better use, to understand more thoroughly the significance of cognitive weaknesses and strengths, and to understand how conditions can magnify the effectiveness of intact capacities for supporting learning and to mitigate the impact of weak capacities. Especially because the identification of cognitive strengths and weaknesses is associated with rigorous testing and formal assessment, the knowledge it hands down about a student’s cognitive profile tends to have a highly compelling quality. A summary of a student’s cognitive profile may give an educator the sense that a student’s performance has been explained and understood, and there can be an accompanying sense of closure. We may even think of strengths and weaknesses as intrinsic characteristics of students – analogous to, say, height or eye color – whose nature and extent are independent of whatever is going on around them. As we’ve seen, though, the significance of cognitive strengths and weaknesses in any particular learning situation is a more complex matter. Intact and strong cognitive capacities are not enough to ensure successful learning, and weak capacities do not always preclude learning. In other words, as conditions change, so too can the significance of a student’s cognitive profile. This all points to the fact that there is a more fundamental issue at play than whether the capacities needed for a specific task are assessed as weak, strong, or within normal limits. And that is whether the cognitive capacities necessary for the task are able to support learning in a given situation. The key point is that the “strength” or “weakness” of a cognitive capacity takes its full meaning in relation to the overall conditions of the situation in which it is exercised.
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We can now venture what approximates a new working definition of cognitive strengths and weaknesses. A strong capacity is one that is capable of functioning sufficiently – that is, of supporting the process of learning – in a wide variety of circumstances. Only significant fluctuations in demand from information or other conditions will affect its efficiency to the point that it can no longer support learning. A weak cognitive capacity, then, is one that is able to serve learning only in a more narrow range of conditions. A weak cognitive capacity tends to increase the overall level of demand on organizing processes and depends upon a lower range of demand in order to function effectively. And the weaker it is, the more overall conditions matter. The intention behind this chapter has been to facilitate a first step in integrating the principle view – in the form of organizing processes – and the profile view. The general approach has been to reflect upon some fundamental differences between the viewpoints, as well as on some important points of contact. We’ve focused on the guidance each viewpoint provides when dealing with the range of differences in students’ readiness to learn that characterizes most any classroom situation. Over the course of this chapter, we’ve seen that the familiar profile view is only part of the story neuropsychology has to tell about learning in the classroom, that it is important to integrate the profile view with what we know about the fundamentals of learning. Because the profile view is in a sense so encompassing – surveying a wide range of cognitive functions and learning styles – it may be challenging to appreciate that more is really needed. Still, as we come to appreciate this, we may notice that information about a student’s profile no longer provides the sense of complete understanding – of closure – it once did. We may perceive knowledge about a student’s cognitive profile – no matter how helpful – is in fact just the beginning of understanding a student’s experience and capacity for learning. However, this integration can be expected to take time and effort. In fact, it may be daunting to consider that both organizing processes and cognitive strengths and weaknesses are both at play whenever learning is happening. After all, each perspective provides a different level of description, each as valid and important as the other. With all this complexity, the thought of integrating these two perspectives – and actually putting this integrated perspective into practice – may seem challenging. To say that the profile and principle approaches are profoundly compatible – which is certainly true, as we’ve seen – is unlikely to make the processes of integrating them seem any easier. How is it possible, then, to hold both the principle and the profile approach in mind all the time? The answer is that it’s probably not. I don’t believe it’s realistically possible to always keep them in mind simultaneously. Fortunately, there’s no need. Maintaining an integrated perspective does not require that each perspective – in all its complexity – be held in mind continuously. To the contrary: for most, holding an integrated perspective comes down to changing one’s lens from time to time, reminding oneself to shift perspectives intermittently. So, to offer one example, a teacher might plan lessons with the intention of supporting organizing processes and shift to a profilebased analysis if difficulties arise for specific students. Or a teacher may focus on developing a lesson that provides different activities for different types of learners,
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but then give a final “proofreading” to check to see if general conditions also seems to support organizing processes. Adopting an integrated perspective simply means holding the awareness that each perspective can be accessed at any time, and that each affords different insights. Over the years, reflecting on learning from an integrated perspective has cast a new light, in my own mind, on a variety of issues in education. For one, it has deeply influenced my understanding of the nature of the classroom as a setting for learning. In particular, it has changed my perception of the possibilities it offers. I’ve come to think that we very often underestimate the classroom – that, in fact, the classroom holds greater possibilities than we might assume, particularly if our thinking is tied primarily to the profile approach. In the past few decades, the profile view has without question had powerful effects on educational thinking and practice. It has made educational achievement available to a wider range of students, by articulating that specific cognitive weaknesses or learning disabilities do not signify less potential to learn. It seems to me, however, that even as the profile view broadens our sense of what is possible for particular students, it can narrow our sense of what is possible in the classroom overall. The profile view focuses attention on the different types of learners that are likely to be present in a classroom and, indeed, on the uniqueness of the cognitive profile each student brings to learning. As important as this understanding is, it can cast a shadow on the very idea of classroom instruction, making it seem that learning in the classroom is somehow less than it should be. As the various differences between learners become more fully articulated, the implicit suggestion can seem to be that students benefit most from tasks that are a close “match” with their profile – tasks that, for example, rely on cognitive strengths and minimize reliance on areas of weakness whenever possible. But, of course, each individual profile cannot be “matched” in a classroom context. It’s not logistically possible. This can lead to the sense that the essence of classroom experience includes an unfortunate but necessary compromise between what is best for any individual student and what can reasonably be provided, given the needs of other students. In this respect, classroom teaching may seem to be a zero-sum game in which there is not enough time to support each student as one would like. This leaves a series of trade-offs by which no student gets the individual learning conditions he needs. The addition of the principle view allows one to step back from this conclusion, and view the situation from a wider perspective. It becomes clear that the less supportive overall classroom conditions are, the more frequently students will be affected by weak cognitive capacities, and the more important it becomes to directly address these weaknesses. In this situation, the presence of students with different cognitive profiles and different learning styles in the classroom quite naturally appears as a formidable challenge. But when this is not the case, when conditions for students are “good enough most of the time,” the sense of what is possible in the classroom is enlarged. Adopting an integrated perspective allows us to see other avenues to address differences. Attention to fundamental conditions does more to accommodate differences than might be imagined. This means that not all differences in profile need be addressed directly in order to be accommodated – and, as
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we’ve seen, whatever is done at the level of individual differences can be amplified by attention to classroom conditions. A major contribution of the profile view has been the understanding that teaching can be differentiated – that students may benefit from different approaches to teaching the same material. This has led to the development of techniques that seek to support learning in students with different cognitive profiles. Facilitating conditions that support organizing processes, on the other hand, opens new possibilities for differentiation in the classroom, but of a different kind altogether. The profile view naturally leads to differentiated teaching, or differences in curricula that address different learning profiles. Sensitivity to organizing processes makes way for differentiated learning: under good enough conditions, a level of differentiation occurs naturally for the student in the course of learning. Creating good enough conditions opens up the field for the student to explore different approaches to learning, and to reflect upon different experiences in learning. When there is time to devote to being sure one understands the material at hand, to think, and to experiment with the best way to do that, students gain insight (both consciously and unconsciously) into how they learn best. When students have opportunities to vary their approach and register the differences in results, they grasp the kinds of lessons about their own learning that can only emerge from accumulated experience. At this level, differentiation is more individualized than any curriculum or teaching technique could be. Each student finds her own way, developing multiple paths and approaches. Each student has the chance to develop intricate strategies for understanding and problem-solving that are unique and can even be deeply personal. These are influenced not only by the student’s cognitive profile, but also by the student’s knowledge and experience. From this integrated perspective, students can be invited to participate fully in their own development. As students are encouraged to consciously maintain ongoing curiosity about how conditions affect learning for them, they create their own differentiated learning experience, which will – once again – enhance differentiated teaching. An integrated perspective also expands classroom possibilities in relation to students with weak cognitive capacities. Looked at through the lens of the profile view alone, awareness of cognitive weakness in a student directs attention to the need for accommodation and remediation. Accommodation is characterized in general by attempts to avoid drawing on weaknesses, thus allowing the student to avoid using the weak capacity whenever possible. Underlying this strategy of avoidance is the assumption that when weak capacities are enlisted, the student is unlikely to learn. When necessary, one-to-one remediation outside the classroom is encouraged – on the assumption that weak capacities develop outside of the classroom, for the most part. The possibility of students actually developing their weak capacities in the classroom may be dismissed. However, when the principle view is integrated with the profile view, an additional possibility emerges: Enlisting cognitive weakness on a task need not mean that there is a likelihood of failure. Moreover, one appreciates that classroom
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experience can in fact contribute to the development of weak cognitive capacities. The integrated perspective allows us to see that, under the right conditions, weak capacities may be used successfully in learning – and develop as a result. Such conditions make it more likely that the student can exercise the weak capacity more frequently in the service of learning. In fact, I have found that reports that students have “failed to generalize” skills or processes that they have worked on outside a classroom sometimes results from the fact that learning conditions make it too difficult to express these capacities. What is perceived as a need for more one-to-one work might actually be addressed by creating classroom conditions that will allow the student to exercise and develop a weak capacity. The profile view makes the educator aware that students have different learning styles – different preferred ways of learning. It draws attention to potential benefits available to students when they have the opportunity to learn in a way that most suits them. So, for instance, one student may seem to learn especially well visually, another verbally and a third with hands-on projects. Some students may be bigpicture learners who derive particular benefit from contemplating the overarching issues at length before delving into detail, while other students may in general thrive with a detail-first approach. From the profile perspective alone, the presence of different learning styles can appear to represent a significant limitation to classroom learning. It may seem, given the potential benefits of tasks that are in keeping with one’s preferred way of learning, that an ideal educational setting would provide such experiences consistently. But this would not be possible even if most students fit neatly into one learning style or another in all situations. Integrating the principle approach provides a complementary insight, and thereby a more optimistic viewpoint. The integrated perspective reminds us that at the very core of the matter, the issue is not how students approach learning but whether students are successfully understanding and organizing. While it is no doubt favorable for the student to have ample opportunities to learn in a manner consistent with a predominant learning style, it is equally true that when general conditions are favorable, students can learn in a variety of ways. Moreover, there is good reason to think that they actually benefit from a variety of learning experiences. Intellectual development is facilitated, fundamentally, by reaching for understanding and insight and persisting until it is achieved. Experience with different types of learning tasks enhances the ability to take different perspectives and gain various kinds of insight – to think with flexibility and agility. Along these same lines, there are a great many potential advantages to students encountering other kinds of learners and other kinds of minds. Learning, as we have said, is a matter of ongoing integration, of organization and reorganization – learning more, understanding differently and more fully, integrating more deeply. These processes are catalyzed by encounters with different viewpoints, with alternate interpretations, with varying opinions regarding the material at hand. They are also catalyzed by differences – subtle or pronounced – in modes of understanding and expression that often follow from differences in cognitive profile and learning style. From an
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integrated perspective, the presence of these differences is not seen as a limitation, but rather as one characteristic of classroom situations that – when supportive conditions are created – can naturally facilitate intellectual development. Thus, by shining new light on learning, an integrated perspective lifts the shadow that has been cast on the classroom, exposing opportunities for supporting each student and all students simultaneously.
Conclusion: Coming to Balance
Front and center in the last several chapters has been the idea of integrating a new way of thinking about learning into our more familiar modes. In this final chapter, I want to touch on an even broader integration to which this book was intended to contribute: the integration of neuropsychology and educational practice. During the last 15 years or more, there has been tremendous growth in neurosychological research. During this same period, there has also been tremendous effort devoted to the application of neuropsychological insights to education. Over time, however, I found that a great many teachers felt that overall conditions for learning in the classroom may not have improved, despite all this effort. In fact, it may be the case that classroom conditions are even less consistent with the most basic insights of neuropsychology than they were before. Of course, there is no question that this effort has paid off in many specific situations and for countless individual students. Still, the fact that the question can be entertained at all – that it is not overwhelmingly obvious that matters have improved dramatically after all this effort – seems to indicate at the very least that the potential inherent in the collaboration between neuropsychology and education has not yet been fully realized. This state of affairs would seem to call for a determined effort to continue to improve the dialogue between the two fields. As I considered all of this, it led to the realization that relatively little of this dialogue between neuropsychology and education has focused on what one might call fundamental issues of learning. Rather, the primary focus has been on differences between learners. I hope this book has made a convincing case that a full appreciation of what neuropsychology has to offer includes attention to both individual differences and the neuropsychology of learning itself. Experience has taught me, however, that attending to the significance of fundamental neuropsychological issues in the context of education – in addition to being extremely fruitful – can also be extremely difficult. I shared in the introduction that there was a period in the development of my own thinking that occurred between when I first learned how to respond to puzzling failures to remember in TJ and others, and when I was able to fully articulate what I had learned in the context of a
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neuropsychological framework. But there was another period of development that I found surprising. Once I had developed this clear formulation, and it was deemed potentially helpful by classroom teachers, it seemed to me – and to my closest colleagues in education – that it would be relatively easy to translate it into recommendations for the classroom. However, this expectation was not borne out in my experience. I found it was by no means easy to arrive at guidance that truly seemed consistent with the insights about organizing processes and truly appropriate to the complexity of the classroom setting. This has required sustained consideration and ongoing collaboration with educators over a period of years. But why should this be so difficult? The experience of writing this book has given me ample opportunity to consider this question. I now believe that the challenges I faced are intrinsic to any effort to apply neuropsychological insights to education. More specifically, it seems to me that the bulk of the difficulty is due to the fundamental differences in the circumstances and settings in which these two professions are situated, and the different types of data that are gathered. As we touched on in the last chapter, neuropsychological research and assessment both take place in controlled conditions, in which cognitive functions are isolated to the fullest extent possible and the effect of other variables is minimized. The contrast with the classroom could hardly be greater. For any individual student, cognitive functions are far from isolated and variables are far from minimized. There are always a great number of cognitive functions at play during any single task, and the classroom setting is one in which there are always a great number of interacting variables. And when we consider that the classroom includes a collection of students – each of whom is engaged in both individual learning processes and the social world of the classroom – it is clear that the situations are different indeed. There is, in other words, a broad gap that must be bridged in order to bring neuropsychological insights to bear on education. These insights cannot simply be transferred and put into action. They must be thoughtfully translated, mindful of the very different domains of these fields. Ignoring this gap may make the process of generating useful recommendations less painstaking, but I have come to think that there are considerable limitations in doing so. In my efforts to bridge this gap, I have come to think in terms of certain balances that must be maintained. The first is the need to balance knowledge derived from neuropsychology with data obtained in the classroom. In Part I, we found that a neuropsychological framework was indeed essential to understanding observations that students fail to learn when they appear to have done so. These observations could not be addressed effectively without considering fundamental neuropsychological issues such as the nature of unconscious processes which organize experience and memory. However, there were limits to what neuropsychological ideas could contribute. As we saw, neuropsychology can highlight the issue of demand on organizing processes and the reasons underlying it, but cannot offer a direct antidote, in, say, an
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abstract formula to determine how much is too much – especially because learning can be undercut by too little information as well as too much. Thus, in this case as in many cases, neuropsychology can define the issues and offer the teacher helpful guidance in how to come to a solution, but the solution itself must come from the teacher, based on what he observes about his class in the moment and over time. An ongoing challenge, then, in bridging this gap is to be aware that neuropsychological data, for all its clarity, cannot define classroom practice. Neuropsychology can uncover important issues in the classroom to attend to, but the teacher’s observations and judgment remain crucial in determining how to address those issues at any given time. Making use of a neuropsychological understanding about learning always relies on the teacher’s overall understanding and assessment of her students in a given situation. The insights of neuropsychology must be clarified by the teacher and crafted to the specific situation. Another recurrent balance that must be struck is between how specific or general recommendations for practice should be. In Part II, this balance was in the forefront. As I mentioned at the beginning of Chap. 6, the most common and natural question that follows a presentation of the material covered in Part I is: What should one do? In a sense, of course, this is the only reasonable question to ask. But in trying to figure out the best way to answer it, I again found that the integration of education and neuropsychology is not always as simple as it might first appear. Sufficient specificity is of course important when discussing recommendations for classroom practice. If a recommendation is too broad, the guidance may become vague or unworkable. It needs to be clear what might change in teaching because of the neuropsychological insight being referenced. On the other hand, as a recommendation becomes more specific, it may also become less widely applicable, and it may not be flexible enough to be useful in changing classroom situations. Its specificity may obscure opportunities for adapting the technique to different situations or how it might relate to other important practices and considerations. The solution I hit upon was to offer guidance on various levels of specificity, moving from more general to more specific. Part II started with defining the role of the teacher in relation to mental processes under consideration. The thinking was that unless the bounds of the teacher’s influence on the mental processes were defined, there would be too much room for things to go astray in the application of one practice or another. Next, we talked about conceptual anchors, so the teacher would have recourse, not just to practices, but the intentions behind the practices. As with the discussion of the role of the teacher, these anchors meant to inform the teacher’s perception and judgment, in the hope that this would provide help in determining when and how to employ the practices suggested in the following chapter. With this guiding context in place, we offered specific classroom practices. Even though these were selected because they are apt to be helpful in a wide variety of situations, it was still important to emphasize that they should not be applied mechanically, but in keeping with the teacher’s assessment of the overall situation. The general point to carry forward is that neuropsychological insights do not generally convert directly into classroom practice. Neuropsychological understanding is specific in description of mental functioning, but not specific to any circumstance.
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For instance, it is easy to be clear, from a neuropsychological perspective, that a learning goal is essential. It is quite a bit more challenging to do justice to the countless ways the neuropsychological issues involved in maintaining effective goals may manifest. In dealing with the “what to do” questions, we need to balance the value of having recommendations for specific things to do or say and the need for recommendations that allow the teacher to use them flexibly as the classroom changes from day to day. A third crucial balance is between analysis on one hand and contextualization on the other. In Chaps. 9 and 10, we considered this very balance. We saw that, while it can be essential to understand the student’s strengths and weaknesses, it is equally important to place such knowledge in a wider context, lest we misunderstand what the relative strength or weakness actually means in relation to the student’s effort to learn in any specific situation. We noted that individual functions never operate in isolation, but always in concert with other functions necessitated by the task at hand, and, most importantly, that overall cognitive functioning is always influenced by classroom conditions. Failure to be aware of strengths and weaknesses, and failure to understand this information in context, can lead to critical misunderstandings of students’ needs and potential. Either omission can limit our appreciation of what students are capable of, and our ability to encourage their development. For this balance, the general idea to carry forward is that in bridging the gap between neuropsychology and education, analysis based on the distinction between distinct mental functions needs always to be accompanied by re-contextualization. Identifying the relative strength of individual functions can serve the purpose of clarifying, of placing certain issues in relief, of elevating them in our perception – and this may allow us to perceive ways that we can help that would not otherwise be apparent. But it is critical to complete the circle, to appreciate that mental functions do not – in the mind of the student or the experience of the student – represent distinct or separately functioning entities. In my own experience, these balances have served both as a guide in my efforts to find what is helpful, and a resource for helping me wrestle with the dilemmas that seem to inevitably appear when addressing this integration. I have shared them in hopes that they will support you in your continued efforts to bridge this gap, and thereby move forward the dialogue between neuropsychology and education.
References
Preface Ahern, C., Wood, F., & McBrien, C. (1998). Preserved vocabulary and reading acquisition in an amnesic child. In K. H. Pribram (Ed.), Brain and values: Is a biological science of values possible (p. 277). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Brady, S. (1997). Ability to encode phonological representations: An underlying difficulty of poor readers. In B. A. Blachman (Ed.), Foundations of reading acquisition and dyslexia: Implications for early intervention (pp. 21–47). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Felton, R., & Brown, I. (1990). Phonological processes as predictors of specific reading skills in children at risk for reading failure. Reading and Writing, 2(1), 39–59. Wagner, R., & Torgesen, J. (1987). The nature of phonological processing and its causal role in the acquisition of reading skills. Psychological Bulletin, 101(2), 192–212. Webster, P., Plante, A., & Couvillion, L. (1997). Phonologic impairment and prereading. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 30(4), 365.
Chapters 2 and 3 Bechara, A., Damasio, H., Tranel, D., & Damasio, A. R. (1997). Deciding advantageously before knowing the advantageous strategy. Science, 275, 1293–1294. Biederman, I., & Gerhardstein, P. C. (1993). Recognizing depth-rotated objects: evidence and conditions for three-dimensional viewpoint invariance. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 19, 1162–1182. Broadbent, D. E. (1958). Perception and communication. New York: Pergamon. Cherry, E. C. (1953). Some experiments on the recognition of speech, with one and with two ears. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 25, 975–979. Craik, F. I. M. (1989). On the making of episodes. In H. L. Roediger & F. I. M. Craik (Eds.), Varieties of memories and consciousness: Essays in honor of Endel Tulving (pp. 43–57). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Damasio, A. (2005). Descartes’ error: Emotion, reason, and the human brain. New York, NY: Putnam. Fass, W., & Schumacher, G. M. (1981). Schema theory and prose retention: Boundary conditions for encoding and retrieval effects. Discourse Processes, 4, 17–26.
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Felton, R., Naylor, C., & Wood, F. (1990). Neuropsychological profile of adult dyslexics. Brain and Language, 39(4), 485–497. Köhler, W. (1929). Gestalt psychology. Oxford, England: Liveright. Pribram, K. (1969). The amnestic syndromes: Disturbances in coding. In G. A. Talland & N. C. Waugh (Eds.), The pathology of memory (pp. 127–157). New York, NY: Academic. Pribram, K. (1971). Languages of the brain. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Pribram, K., Yasue, K., & Jibu, M. (1991). Brain and perception. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Rawson, K. A., & Kintsch, W. (2004). Exploring encoding and retrieval effects of background information on text memory. Discourse Processes, 38(3), 323–344. Schacter, D. (1985). Priming of old and new knowledge in amnesic patients and normal subjects. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 444(Memory dysfunctions: An integration of animal and human research from preclinical and clinical perspectives), 41–53. Tulving, E. (1972). Episodic and semantic memory. In E. Tulving & W. Donaldson (Eds.), Organization of memory. New York, NY: Academic Press. Tulving, E. (1983). Elements of episodic memory. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press. Turnbull, O. H., Carey, D. P., & McCarthy, R. A. (1997). The neuropsychology of object constancy. Journal of the International Neuropsychology Society, 3, 288–298. Wood, F., Brown, I., & Felton, R. (1989). Long-term follow-up of a childhood amnesic syndrome. Brain and Cognition, 10(1), 76–86. Zeigarnik, B. V. (1972). Experimental abnormal psychology. New York, NY: Plenum Press.
Chapter 4 Clark, R., Nguyen, F., & Sweller, J. (2006). Efficiency in learning: Evidence-based guidelines to manage cognitive load. San Francisco, CA: Pfeiffer. Egeland, J., Johansen, S. N., & Ueland, T. (2010). Do low-effort learning strategies mediate impaired memory in ADHD? Journal of Learning Disabilities, 43(5), 430–440. Kahneman, D. (1973). Attention and effort. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Miller, G. (1956). The magical number seven, plus or minus two: Some limits on our capacity for processing information. The Psychological Review, 63, 81–97.
The Following Works in Various Ways Informed the General Perspective and Key Ideas of this Book Baddeley, A. (2007). Working memory, thought, and action. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Baron, I. S. (2004). Neuropsychological evaluation of the child. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Gardner, H. (2006). Multiple intelligences: New horizons. New York, NY: Basic Books. Kinsbourne, M., & Wood, F. (1975). Short-term memory processes and the amnesic syndrome. In D. Deutsch & J. A. Deutsch (Eds.), Short-term memory (pp. 258–291). New York, NY: Academic. Kinsbourne, M., & Wood, F. (1982). Theoretical considerations regarding the episodic-semantic memory distinction. In L. S. Cermak (Ed.), Human memory and amnesia (pp. 195–217). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
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Liberman, A., & Whalen, D. (2000). On the relation of speech to language. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 4(5), 187–196. Pribram, K. (1966). Some dimensions of remembering: Steps toward a neuropsychological model of memory. In J. Gaito (Ed.), Macromolecules and behavior (pp. 165–187). New York, NY: Appleton-Century-Crofts. Rohrer, D., & Pashler, H. (2007). Increasing retention without increasing study time. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 16(4), 183. Schacter, D., Chiao, J., & Mitchell, J. (2003). The seven sins of memory. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1001(1), 226–239. Trabasso, T., Bower, G., & Gelman, R. (1968). Attention in learning: Theory and research. New York: Wiley. Tulving, E. (1985). Memory and consciousness. Canadian Psychology/Psychologie Canadienne, 26(1), 1. Willingham, D. (2009). Why don’t students like school? A cognitive scientist answers questions about how the mind works and what it means for the classroom. San Francisco, CA: JosseyBass. Zajonc, R. (1966). Social psychology: An experimental approach. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.
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About the Authors
Charles A. Ahern, PhD, is a neuropsychologist specializing in the application of neuropsychology to education. Dr. Ahern received his doctoral degree in clinical psychology from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He trained in the neuropsychology of learning and learning disabilities at Wake Forest Medical School, and completed his postdoctoral training at the University of California, San Francisco Medical Center, where he was an Irving B. Harris Fellow. Formerly on staff at UCSF Medical Center, Dr. Ahern is currently in private practice. In addition to working directly with students and their families to address learning difficulties, he consults with schools and educational therapists. Dr. Ahern is frequently invited to speak to educators and parent groups and has lectured nationally and published on topics pertaining to the neuropsychology of learning. He is on the faculty of Holy Names University. Kenton de Kirby, is a PhD student in Education at the University of California at Berkeley, where he also received his BA in Linguistics. For over 10 years, Kenton has worked one-on-one with students of varying ages and with a range of learning differences. He lives in Oakland with his wife, Amelia.
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Index
A Academic achievement, 107 Assessment learning goals, 76 neuropsychological, 96 students’ readiness, 73 teacher’s general frames, 55 testing and formal, 105 Attention demand algebraic concept, 62 awareness, 63 basic arithmetic operations, 62 conceptual scheme, 64 description, 62 elements, 64 essay process, 63 extrinsic mental activity, 64 intrinsic mental activity, 62 note-taking optional, 85–87 practice and rehearsal, 88–90 prior knowledge, 62 students attention, 63, 64 thinking mode, 63 two-pronged act, 63 underlying skill support, 87–88 understanding and organizing, 64 resources, 36
B Brain functioning, 7
C Classroom attention demand, 55, 62–64, 85–90
complexity and constant flux, 55 conditions, 55 educational situations, 56 environment, 55 information practices backup documentation, verbal material, 79–80 prioritize review, 73–75 stagger periods, 77–78 students prioritize and direct attention, 75–77 integration level, 56 learning goal clarify and emphasize, 68–71 differences, 72–73 importance, 71–72 new information and prior learning awareness, 58 background knowledge, 59 laboratory procedures, 59 materials, 59 organizing process, 59 “prior knowledge”, 60 robust learning set, 59 shifts-in-topic practices lecture/discussion, end of class, 83–85 mark and discuss shifts, 82–83 review and preview, 80–82 students’ learning, 55 teacher’s awareness and sensitivity, 56 topic and mental transitions inevitable variation, 61 mental shifts, 61–62 organizing process, 61 teacher’s knowledge, 61 topic-shifts, 61 variability source, 61–62 121
122 Classroom learning clarify and emphasize, 68–71 differences, 72–73 importance, 71–72 Classroom teaching cognitive weaknesses learning, 96 organizing process, 99–100 reading capacity, 97 weaknesses and organizing process, 97 profile view cognitive weaknesses and strengths, 95 learning conditions, 96 neuropsychological thinking, 95 organizing processes, 95 strong capacities, 97–98 Conduct, 51 Conversation description, 69 recalling, 13 sense monitoring, 9
D Demand practices make notes and outlines classroom enlargement, 86–87 implementation, 85 preparation and considerations, 86 practice and rehearsal variation implementation, 89–90 learning situation, 90 underlying skill support classroom enlargement, 88 implementation, 87 preparation and considerations, 88 Development attitudes, 46 background knowledge, 76–77 higher-order cognitive processes, 43 intellectual capacities, 46 political, 35 student, 40 weak cognitive capacities, 108–109 Differentiated learning, 108
E Encoding process academic learning, 20 demarcation cognitive functions, 24 conscious awareness, 23 consolidation and integration, 24
Index distinct mental episodes, 23 key process, 24 learning, 23 mental boundaries, 23 educational settings, 19 learning goal cognitive process, 21 description, 22 mental boundaries and capacities, 22 metaphor, 21 student’s memory, 22 mental process, 21 organizing importance, 21 process of recall, 20 selective attention awareness, 25 learning goal, 25 organizing process, 24–25 previous knowledge, 26 salient information, 24–25 set construction academic learning, 26 demarcation and selectivity, 26 description, 27 educational settings, 27 knowledge, 26 learning set, 26 prior knowledge, 27 reconstructive nature, 26–27 student’s learning goal changes, 27 student’s experience and activity, 19 unconscious processing, 19 understanding, 20
I Impairment, 32, 33, 56 Information overload approach to learning, 44 cognitive weaknesses, 103 common manifestations, 33 Information practices backup documentation, verbal material classroom, 79–80 implementation, 79 preparations and considerations, 79 prioritize review classroom, 75 implementation, 74–75 stagger periods classroom enlargement, 78 implementation, 77 preparation and considerations, 77–78
Index students prioritize and direct attention classroom, 76–77 implementation, 75–76 preparation and considerations, 76 Intervention, 65, 100, 102
K Knowledge background, 59 complex and integrated bodies, 61 elements, 15 framework, 10–11 intrinsic demands, 62 mental context, 11 store, 16 student’s base, 27 temporary platform, 28
L Language domain, 102 neuropsychology, 95 verbal information, 97 visual processing, 102 weakness, 99 Learning concepts and new terminology, 3 depth and durability, 2–3 disability, 4 nature, 5 and understanding, 4 Learning disability, 4, 98, 107 Learning goal awareness, 57 clarify and emphasize classroom enlargement, 70–71 implementation, 68–69 preparations and considerations, 69–70 clinical observation, 56 concepts and procedures, 57 differences classroom enlargement, 73 implementation, 72 preparation and consideration, 73 economic conditions, 58 essential elements, 57 guidelines, 57 importance, explicitly classroom, 71–72
123 implementation, 71 mental processes, 58 qualities, 57 teachers, 57
M Memory content and form, 15 long-term, 12–13 mental boundaries, 13–14 mode, 15 recall, 14 separation, 24 supportive elements, 36 Mental organization boundaries, long-term memory distinct procedures, 14 elements of experience, 13 neuropsychological test, 14 primary functions, 13 goals biological priorities, 10 logical judgments, 10 unconscious and conscious attention, 10 iceberg concept, 7 learning, 7–8 long-term memory learning and remembering, 12 nature, 12 rote learning and memory, 13 unconscious organization, 12 neuropsychological principles, 8 neuropsychology characterizing, 7 perceptual experience familiar visual scene, 8 object constancy, 8 organizing processes, 8 predictable changes, 9 prior experience, 11 remembering capacity, 14 events/experiences, 14 memory mode, 15 stored knowledge, 15 reorganization process, 16 stimuli conscious awareness, 9 filtering function, 9 unconscious attention, 10 unconscious processing, 7
124 N Neuropsychology general principles, 7 learning, classroom, 106 mental functioning, 88
O Organization breakdowns challenging conditions, 33 common manifestations, 33 demarcation and demand, information academic learning, 34 interference, 34–35 time of learning, 34 understanding level, 34 units of information, 34 encoding process, 31 first-hand experience, 32 learning and thinking, 31 learning goal and demand, information demarcation, 37 selectivity, 37 mental overwhelm and process, 31–32 neuropsychological research and clinical observations, 33 school settings, 31 selective attention and demand, information academic learning, 35 attentional resources, 36 function, 35 logical process, 35 political developments, 35 student’s capacity, 35 set construction and demand, information background knowledge level, 37 comprehension level, 37 learning sets, 37 prior learning, 36 process, 36 teacher and student, 32 Organizing processes active role, 8 basic perceptual experience, 9 breakdown, 33, 49 classroom conditions, 95 cognitive weaknesses, 96–97, 99–100 demand, 43 depth and breadth, 91 encoding process, 39 functioning, 51 learning goal, 23 mental boundaries, 13
Index strong capacities, 98 student’s experience, 46 tuning, 22 workings, 50
P Profile and principle approaches accommodation, 108 analysis level, 102 classroom learning, 109 nature, 107 cognitive processes, 103 cognitive profile and learning style, 109–110 cognitive strengths and weaknesses, 105 definition, 103 educational achievement, 107 knowledge building process, 104 learners types, 106–107 learning conditions, 104 styles, 109 mode, thinking, 101 neuropsychological thinking and research, 102 neuropsychology, 106 organizing processes and cognitive strengths, 106 real-life learning situations, 105 students knowledge, 102 learning, 101 teaching technique, 108 thinking depth, 104 universal cognitive capacities, 102 visual and language processing, 102 visuo-spatial deficits, 103 weak cognitive capacities, 109
R Reading learning goal, 75 mental boundaries, 14 students, 115
S Shifts-in-topic practices lecture/discussion, end of class classroom enlargement, 85 implementation, 83 preparations and considerations, 84
Index mark and discuss shifts classroom enlargement, 83 implementation, 82–83 preparations and considerations, 83 review and preview classroom enlargement, 82 implementation, 80–81 preparations and considerations, 81 Students attention, 63 experience and organization attitudes, learning, 44–45 conditions, learning, 40 description, 40 excessive demand effects, 40 half-learning, 40 internal rewards, 41 knowledge, 40 learning approach, 42–44 misunderstanding, 41 performance, 41 learning, 55 prioritize and direct attention classroom, 76–77 implementation, 75–76 preparation and considerations, 76
T Teaching. See also Classroom teaching
125 capabilities and responsibilities, 50 classroom situation, 51 description, 49 essential cognitive process, 51 information and direct orchestration, 50 information level, 51–52 learning purpose, 51 metaphor, 52 neuropsychological perspective, 50 organizing process, 51 students interactions, 52–53 learning, 51 mental processing, 50 overloading, 50 unconscious processing, 50
V Visual processing and language processing, 102 skills, 98
W Weak cognitive capacities classroom possibilities, 108 development, 108–109 learning, 106 organizing processes, 106
