DOCUMENT RESUME ED 305 426 CE 050 678 AUTHOR …DOCUMENT RESUME ED 305 426 CE 050 678 AUTHOR Fellenz, Robert A., Ed. TITLE Cognition and the Adult Learner. INSTITUTION Montana State

DOCUMENT RESUME

ED 305 426 CE 050 678

AUTHOR Fellenz, Robert A., Ed.TITLE Cognition and the Adult Learner.INSTITUTION Montana State Univ., Bozeman. Center for Adult

Learning Research.SPONS AGENCY Kellogg Foundation, Battle Creek, Mich.PUB DATE May 88NOTE 70p.; Selected papers presented at the meeting of a

summer Institute on Adult Cognition (Bozeman,Montana, 1987).

PUB TYPE Collected Works General (020) ReportsResearch /Technical (143) Speeches/ConferencePapers (150)

EDRS PRICE MF01/PC03 Plus Postage.DESCRIPTORS Adult Basic Education; Adult Education; *Adult

Learning; Adult Students; *Biology; *CognitiveProcesses; Educational Technology; *Epistemology;High School Equivalency Programs; Posts_condaryEducation; *Problem Solving; Research andDevelopment; Research Methodology; Research Needs;*Theory Practice Relationship

ABSTRACT

This report contains six research papers and asummary of a panel discussion on the topic of cognition and the adultlearner. The papers are as follows: "Psychology and Adult Cognition"(Wilbert J. McKeachie); "Biology and Adult Cognition" (Frank Farley);"Technology and Adult Cognition" (Barbara Grabowski); "EnhancingCognitive Skills" (Richard A. Block); "How We Solve Problems"(Charles E. Moon); and "From Research to Practice: The Practitioner'sPerspective" (Joanne Erickson). The panel discussion focused on"Doing Research in Adult Learning." (KC)

********A*************************************************************** Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made* from the original document. *

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COGNITION AND THE ADULT LEARNER

Papers from an Institute Sponsored by

The Center for Adult Learning ResearchMontana State University

Bozeman, Montana

Funded by

The W. K. Kellogg Foundation

EditorRobert A. Fellenz

May1988

Center For Adult Learning ResearchMontana State University

Bozeman, Montana

Copyright © by Kellogg Center for Adult Learning ResearchMontana State University

Table of Contents

Psychology And Adult CognitionWilbert J. McKeachie 1

Biology And Adult CognitionFrank Farley 13

Technology And Adult CognitionBarbara Grabowski 33

Enhancing Cognitive SkillsRichard A. Block 39

How We Solve ProblemsCharles E. Moon 45

From Research To Practice: the Practitioner's PerspectiveJoanne Erickson 49

Doing Research In Adult LearningAn Interrogator Panel 53

PREFACE

Shortly before his death J. Roby Kiddstated in Library Trends (Spring, 1983)that he had come to an exciting realization:the focus had changed from adult educa-tion to adult learning. This he saw as sucha tremendous transformation that hestruggled for words to describe it-- callingit "a paradigm shift," a "perspective trans-formation," "a leap in consciousness" (p.527). It is to this shift of attention to adultlearning and to prophets, such as Kidd,who expounded on the value of attendingto adult learning research that thismonograph is dedicated.

The articles in this publication are theresult of an Institute on Adult Cognitionheld at Montana State University duringthe summer of 1987. The institute wassponsored by the Kellogg Center for AdultLearning Research which had been estab-lished at the University through a grantfrom the W. K. Kellogg foundation. In linewith the mission of the Center to stimulateresearch in adult learning, a small groupof professors of adult education were in-vited to meet with several national leadersin cognitive psychology. The hope was thatthe insights of the experts in cognitionwould be infused into relevant researchand theory development by the adulteducation professors.

McKeachie's opening presentationoverviewed a decade or more of develop-ment in cognitive psychology. Key con-cepts, such as levels a:attention, clumpingand visualizing as memory aids, the rela-tion of automatization and elaboration toretention, and the vital role of motivationin all learning were deecribed. But Mc-Keachie also mapped out potentially richsources for adult education research insist-ing that researchers in adult educationshould focus on the student and delve intosuch areas as the effect of previousknowledge on learning and the strategies

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used by adult learners in noncaptive set-tings.

Farley's comments were futureoriented in that he addressed recent find-ings in brain research and postulatedvarious biological bases for the examina-tion of learning. He integrated much of hisrecent thought into a stimulating descrip-tion of the "Type T Personality" which hethen applied to many educational situa-tions. Farley, too, constantly reminded theadult educators present of the impact ofmotivation on learning and the need tolearn more about it.

Grabowski summarized the majorprinciples to be cognizant of when examin-ing the effect of technology on adult learn-ing. She tied such research to recentdevelopments in cognitive psychology byshowing how the internal processing of in-formation received through media isreceiving major attention by researchers.Grabowski joined Farley and McKeachieas a panel responding to questions of theadult educators regarding the implemata-tion of adult learning research.

Collaborative efforts are often calledfor in adult learning research. In ail at-tempt to model some practical approachesto collaboration on learning research,Charles Moon and Richard Block, profes-sors at regional universities, and JoanneErickson, a Montana practitioner, werealso invited to share their research ideaswith the group. Block's paperdemonstrates a psychologist's approach toa question of interest to many adulteducators, i.e., helping others learn how tolearn. Moon gave numerous examples ofcollaboration between cognitive psychol-ogy and adult education in doctoral disser-tation work. Erickson's presentationstimulated thought regarding the varietyof opportunities that do exist for prac-titioners and researchers to work together.

These papers have been included in thismonograph both for the insights they con-tain and the potential for collaborationthey exemplify.

Kidd's observation that adult educa-tion is moving from an emphasis on educa-tion to a focus on learning is most timely.The "black box" of the behavioral schoolhas been pried open by the cognitivepsychologists, and that very process has

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unearthed exciting challenges for researchin adult learning. At the same time biol-ogy, sociology, and technology are suggest-ing mind brggling scenarios for tomorrow'seducators that call for much deeper in-sights into how adults learn. It is the hopeof the Kellogg Center for Adult LearningResearch that monographs such as thiswill contribute to conceptual developmentand research on adult learning.

Robert A. FellenzMontana State University

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The funding for the Institute on AdultCognition and the publication of thismonograph was provided through a grantfrom the W. K. Kellogg Foundation. Thelong-standing support of this foundationfor continuing adult education and for in-quiry into issues relevant to lifelong learn-ing is broadly recognized.

Special appreciation is also due to thepresenters of the papers. All were mostgracious in reviewing transcripts of theirpresentations and turning their verbalmessages into documents more easily read.But even more appreciated is the time andeffort they gave to applying their insightsto the cause of adult learning research andto their stimulating interaction with in-stitute participants.

Staff members of the Kellogg Centerfor Adult Learning Research contributedmuch time and effort to this publication.Joyce Clark not only directed the typing ofthe manuscripts but kept the wholeproduction process moving. Randy Knuth,with his insight into computers anddesktop publishing, made the words ap-

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pear on paper so neatly and orderly.Gloria Gregg, project coordinator, directedcover design and production efforts. Kel-logg doctoral fellows, Rodney Fulton, Bar-bara btorm, and Betty White did muchproofing of manuscripts.

Finally, acknowledgement is due to theparticipants ofthe summer institute, espe-cially the professors of adult education whocame to sit on a distant mountain top tocontemplate promotion of adult learningresearch. Rosemary Caffarolla, Ron Cer-vero, Chere Coggins, Michael Day, David

.eulette, Lloyd Korhonen, Helen Lewis,Larry Martin, Sharan Merriam, DanPratt, and Burt Sisco shared, questioned,and supported all involved. Their con-tinued support of the Center for AdultLearning Research is appreciated. GaryConti and Ralph Brockett together withformer Kellogg fellows Barbara White,Connie Blackwood, Patricia Lundgren,and John Rogers, were the supporting castwho assisted in carrying out this fascinat-ing investigation .into adult learning re-search.

Editor

PSYCHOLOGY AND ADULT COGNITION

My task is to present a brief summaryof cognitive psychology. This is not as dif-ficult as it may appear to be. To some ex-tent what psychologists have come to in thelast 20 yearsthe field that's called cogni-tive psychology--is not as remote fromevery day thinking about learning andthinking as the behavioristic theory whichpreceded cognitive psychology. For ex-ample, if I asked you why you came heretoday, you would probably say somethinglike, "Well, I thought that maybe I couldlearn something from it. I decided thatthis might be more importan.t to me thanspending the day playing tennis or hikingor doing something else." You can see thatin describing why you act the way you do,you are using terms like "I thought" or "Ithink" or "I decided I'd learn." These areterms that imply that something is goingon inside your head. This is the way peoplehave for years thought about. why peoplebehave the way they do.

So why did psychology ever get awayfrom this common sense view? In the earlypart of this century psychologists felt thatthey could not become scientific unlesspsychologists focused on those things thatwere observable and replicable variablesthat could be pinned down and measuredvery precisely, just as chemists measuredvarious aspects of the chemical elementsand chemical compounds. When I was agraduate student in 1945-48, "mind" was adirty word in the language of psychologybecause things that were in the mind wereunobservable. Hence, the feeling was that

Wilbert McKeachie is the Director of the Universityof Michigan's National Center for Research toImprove Postsecondary Teaching and Learning andProfessor of Psychology and Education at thatinstitution.

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Wilbert J. Melleachie

thought could not really be part of a scienceof the sort that psychologists were tryingto build. During the period from 1912 to1960 or thereabouts, the dominant way ofstudying psychologi:al phenomena was tomeasure behavior in situations that werevery well controlled. You could repeat anexperiment; you could report it in theliterature; somebody else could do it; andyou could see whether they got the sameresults. The attempt was to make thesesituations simpler and simpler so that youcould be very sure exactly what was hap-pening.

When I started as a graduate student,psychologists had already decided thathuman beings had too much past ex-perience and too many different kinds ofthings happening to be good organisms tostudy. Research was largely done withwhite rats. In the Natural Science Build-ing at Michigan we had a room which hadbeen designed by Professor Shepard, theChairman, just for a rat maze. Graduatestudents could lie on the floor on the roomabove and look down at this enormousmaze with all of these blind alleys. Aboutthe time that I was a graduate student,psychologists decided that such mazeswere too complicated. So the mazes be-came straight T-mazes in which the ratonly had to decide whether to turn left orright. I used "decide"; the behavioristwould have thought that the rat didn'tdecide. It learned to turn right or leftdepending on where the food was and builtup habit strength by the reinforcement ofthe food.

While I was still a graduate studentsome people said, "That's still too complex.We will have to measure how fast they cango down a maze to get to the end of it and

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that will be even more precise." Well, asyou can see, that had great advantages interms of precision, and objectivity. W,,3

learned a good deal during the period whenbehaviorism was dominant. Progress wasmade in establishing certain variables thatmade a difference for behavior, at leastrats' behavior. Sometimes there was dif-ficulty in extrapolating these results fromthe rats, to the human being. B F Skin-ner, who is pi obably our most prominentliving behaviorist, actually wrote booksabout how we could revolutionize learningin schools if we would just apply these prin-ciples that had been learned from rats.

In the early 1960's there was a big flur-ry of book companies and high-tech com-panies such as Xerox and Raytheon gettinginto the manufacture of teaching machinesthat were to teach in ways that were muchmore efficient than simple naive humanbeings could teach because they were goingto embody the principles of learning thatSkinner had discovered. It turned out thatteaching machines could teach, but not aswell as human beings. In the first place,people got bored. Machines turned out tobe useful for some things, but in generalthe dreams of great wealth that the firstteaching machine creators had in mindnever came true.

Now, what was wrong? Well, thebehaviorists' notions of why we act the waywe do were b ased upon looking at experien-ces people had in the past, saying thatwhatever you do at this moment in time isa function of what has happened to you inthe past. And that's a logical type of as-sumption to make. In everyday life weoften explain behavior in terms of past ex-periences, our childhood training, our lackof opportunity. The behaviorists' notionwas that the reason you decided to comehere today is a function of past experiencesin coming to conferences and listening tolectures and reinforcement as a result ofthose experiences. The "Reinforcement"means essentially that things that hap-pened that were pleasant or rewarding

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strengthened the tendency of the same be-havior to happen again.

To a large extent that theory workspretty well; that is, people do tend to repeatthings that have been rewarding. Butwhen you start looking at behavior of realhuman beings, and even of animals, youfind out that this law of learning and theprinciples that Skinner and his predeces-sor, Thorndike, had developed did notwork in ,very situation. For example,Eelen and d'Ydewalle at the University ofLeuven in Belgium showed that if yourewarded a rat for turning right, the next,time the rat would turn left. There was atendency not to repeat things that wererewarded on the next trial. This seemed tobe contrary to the rules of behavior as weknew them at that time.

Harry Harlow at the University of Wis-consin studied monkeys and their problemsolving. Harlow found that if you gavemonkeys puzzles to solve, (e.g. little wirepuzzles where you are supposed tomanipulate the wires until you can pull theparts apart), they love to do this. If Har-low rewarded them every time they solveda puzzle and then stopped giving a reward,the monkeys wouldn't do the puzzlesanymore. But if Harlow did not give themrewards, they kept on solving puzzles.That seemed to be contrary to the notionthat rewards strengthened behavior.

During the period of changing views,one of our students was a New Zealandphysical educator or kinesiologist, DavidRussell, who is now head of the school ofkinesiology at Otago University. In hisdoctoral dissertation, Russell did some-thing that seemed to be contrary to be-havioristic principles. One of theprinciples of behavior is: if you practicesomething and you're given feedback aboutwhether you've made the right or wronganswer, you will learn that practicedresponse. It is not just practice alone thatmakes perfect; it is practice plus feedbackthat makes perfect. In general, somethingyou've practiced and been given feedback

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about the correct response should be bet-ter than something that hasat been prac-ticed. That just seems to be common senseas well as behaviorist theory. If you don'tpractice a response how can you learn it?What Russell did was to compare twogroups on a task. Seated in the dark, thesubject's task vs A3 to move a pencil to hit adot of light 16 cm from the starting point.This is a simple motor skill. Half of hissubjects practiced that movement; i.e. theystarted at the required point and practicedthe required movement. The other half ofhis subjects never practiced that task, butthey practiced from other point 16 cmfrom the target. When he compared theperformance of the two groups after theirpractice the group who had never practicedthe task did just as well as those who hadpracticed it. This, of course, seems not tofit with conventional notions of be-haviorism. It does fit, however, with thenotion that even in motor skills we arebuilding up in our minds some kind ofschema, a mental map or picture of the waythings are. It is that mental map whichguides our behavior rather than just aspecific mental response. A schema is anorganized set of concepts or an organizedset of movements; it is something in thehead. So, psychology in the last 26-30years has moved away from behaviorism,in the sense that we now talk about thingsthat are inside the head. We call this cog-nitive psychology. It is now legitimate totalk about mind, about intentions, aboutthoughts, about feelings.

So what is cognitive psychology? Well,cognitive psychology is how we get or-ganized and store information--how wemake sense out of our experiences, andthen remember and use our past ex-perience to guide our behavior. Cognitivepsychologists are still behaviorists in thesense that their ultimate criterion is stillbehavior and their theories are testedagainst behavior. Ultimately the dif-ference is that now, in trying to be preciseabout how behavior is determined, we're

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talking about things going on inside thebrain, inside the head. (You'll hear moreabout the brain probably from Frank Far-ley in his The new psychology is likeeveryday psychology, our ordinary think-ing, in that we are using terms like "think,""decide," "solve problems," "feel," and soforth. The difference between psychologyas it is today and the kind of everydaypsychology that people have used for cen-turies is that psychologists now have quiteprecise methods of measuring some of thethings that are going on in the mind. It'snot that they are sticking electrodes in thehead and measuring them, (although theyare doing that too), but we have methodsfor measuring what is going on in the mind.An example is the use of reaction timemethods. A person is given tasks which,according to our theory, involve differentsteps or different cognitive activities (dif-ferent things going on in the head). Theexperimenter then measures whether ornot there are two steps or one step bymeasuring very precisely in millisecondsthe time that it takes to respond. In sum-mary, part of the reason that cognitivepsychology came into play was that be-haviorism was not working for somethings. There were some things that couldnot be well explained.

A second reason was that new methodswere developed that were more precise forstudying short-term mr mory and othermenial processes in wad that could berepeated and were observable.

Probably a third reason we switchedfrom behaviorism was people just got boredwith running rats. It was just more inter-esting to work with human beings and towork with meaningful material than withthings that were not very meaningful andreally did not make much difference toanybody. The behavior. tis (e.g. Hulliantheory) got more and more technical andless and less interesting because theyseemed so far removed from the realworld.

Cognitive psychology is doing that too.

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There are very technical, very intricatetheories of cognition. In perception we candebate set theory, prototype theory, fea-ture similarity theory, and other theoriesof how a thing is recognized. There arevarious theories which have slightly dif-ferent ways of accounting for and explain-ing learning and memory. We haveelaboration theory and depth of processingtheory and so forth. There are still manytheoretical controversies and I am notgoing to take you into these. They are in-teresting, but I'll try to give you what I seeas some of the dominant notions thatmight make a difference for education. AsI said this is not going to be greatly dif-ferent from the way you now think aboutthinking, but our hope is that cognitivepsychology will give you some differentways of thinking that will be stimulatingto you and heuristic in thinking aboutkinds of research you might do. This is not"TRUTH" in some kind of absolute form;it's a way of looking at how people thinkand why they behave the way they do.There will be other waye. 10-20 years fromnow that presumably will build on thiskind of theory just as this builds on someof the things that were learned in be-haviorism. But this is where we are rightnow, and for me it's a fascinating area.

Let's look at some of the key problemsthat cognitive psychologists are concernedabout. One of the first is attention. If stu-dents are going to learn, they typicallyhave to be paying attention. That does notmean that you do not learn things thatyou're not paying attention to. You couldprobably tell me where the doors are in thisroom even though you may not have paidvery much attention to them. So there islearning without conscious attention, butgenerally speaking you are going to learnmore if you try to pay attention to me thanif you are doing something else and myvoice is just the background. When I wasa graduate student, we had the notion thatyou could pay attention to only one thingat a time. I remember that we were con-

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cerned about the problem, "How does anorganist handle the complexity of playingan organ?" The organist has to keep bothfeet and hands going, road the music, thinkabout how to phrase the music and workout how to interpret it. 1 seemed from ourtheories of dint period that to play anorgan was beyond the human capacity ofattention, and yet organist's did it. Ourtheory was that they switched attention.At first they paid attention to their hands

-' then to their music and then to theirfeet and so forth. They were switchinghack and forth very, very rapidly. This wasnot c very satisfactory theory; so let's seewhether current theory is likely to do bet-ter.

Ow theory now is that attention is notEke a search light that focuses in on onearea ar d leaves everything else in dark-ness, but that attention is a capacity inwhich certain things are in focue. Theseare the primary things that you are payingattention to. Right now I would hope thatthat is my voice and face; that you'repaying attention to me. I should say thatone can separate visual, auditory atten-tion, but one of the reasons why peopleshould not sit in the bark of a hall is thatauditory attention is pretty well driven byvisual attention. If you can't see me verywell, you're probably not going to listen aswell either. In fact, there's some evidencethat if you can see my lips move you willget more--not just because you are lip read-ing but because that is another way offocusing your attention on what I'msaying. So, a primary task is listening tome. making sense out of what I'm saying.At the same time some of you at least aretrying out a secondary task, taking notes.Presumably you're taking notes at thesame time that you're listening, so you'vegot two things going on at once. Just asBarbara, who drove us here, was talkingwhi3-. she was driving . . . .two activities.If both of them tasks are relatively easytasks for you, there might also be somespare capacity that you are not even using.

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In most situations there might also be acertain amount of attentional capacitythat is used just to keep track of dangersin the environment, so that if there's a loudnoise or an earthaaake Sir C4aritething, we'regoing to respond. Presumably we evolvedin a time when we had to worry about at-tacks by other human beings or by wildbeasts or by falling trees so that we're cm-structed in a way that leaves a certainamount of our capacity available to pick upsignals that might lead to danger. This isan example of what cognitive psychologistsare concerned about. One of the key thingsis this notion of primary tasks, secondarytasks, spare capacity, and surveillance assharing attentional capacity.

When I speak to an audience that isprimarily second language English speak-ing, I'm aware that I have to speak moreslowly because they are going to havetrouble keeping track of my Englishvocabulary. It is going to be more difficultfor them, and it is going to take more oftheir capacity to understand my language.When I tackle a new topic in psychology, Itry to put in more repetition and I try tospeak a little more slowly because it ismore like a second language for the stu-dents. Some of the things that are com-monplace to me are not commonplace tothem. If I speak to freshmen I use a dif-ferent vocabulary than I would if I werespeaking to a group of graduate studentsand I try to present ideas more simply andput in more redundancy.

Because the task of note taking, whichI encourage my students to do (and I'll tellyou later why note taking is a good techni-que), takes capacity as well, while they'retaking notes on difficult, new, materialthey're not able, at the same time, to hearwhat the lecturer is saying. There'sevidence from studies by Jim Hartley, anEnglish psychologist, as well as fromstudies in this country, that students whoare less competent or ha- less back-ground, should take fewer notes ratherthan more notes. So we have this

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paradoxical situation that ijA general themore difficult the material, the fewer notesyou should take; otherwise you're going tomiss a lot of the leci.;;re.

The is also the problem of sparecapacity. Let's suppose that we ha7e aprimary task that doesn't take very muchcapacity and a secondary task that also iswell learned. You've got a lot of sparecapacity left. One of the characteristics ofattention is that when the situation is tooeasy, not demanding enough, that sparecapacity tends to draw you off intodaydreaming or other kinds of activities.That leads to the converse of what I justsaid about note taking. If it's a very easylecture it's probably a good idea to takemore notes to keep your mind on the topic;otherwise you're going to have too muchspare capacity left and you're more likelyto lose attention. So attention is an adap-tive thing, and understanding attentiongives us some notion of why people learnthe way they do in studying assignments,in listening to lectures, and in other kindsof educational situations. There are wholecourses on attention but this gives yousome notion of how cognitive psychologiststhink about attention.

Another major topic is perception. Ob-viously I'm not going to have time to spendon each of these topics, I have written inmy notes here skip perception if runningbehind schedule. This is a fascinating areafor psychologists but it's a little lessrelevant to adult education, at least at anelementary level. Perception is concernedwith how we organize incoming informa-tion, how we recognize things, how we con-struct out of meaningless materialorganized figures and patterns. But if youthink of information coming in through thesense organs and some of it being selectedin terms of its relevance to our primary andsecondary tasks, the next major part of theinformation processing system that I wantto talk about is "Working Memory" or"Short-term Memory." In a sense it invol-ves some of the same things as attention.

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Infor-mation

PersonWorkingMemory

I Long TermMemory

Senses Attention ---. PerceptionI

You'll find soma kind of diagram of thissort in textbooks and I'm going to talk toyou in that sequenc-h, but I don't want togive the impression that this is just a se-quential process. One or the characteris-tics of human beings is that these thingtiare all going on at the same time; they'reinteracting they'-e part of a system that isnot just a sequential system, but one inwhich the parts are interactive.

So, what do I mean by workingmemory? Let me give you some personalexperience with this. This is an examplethat you probably had in your introductorypsychology course. Almost everybody has.This is a demonstration that I used whenI first began teaching psychology in 1946,and we're still using it. Now we use it as ademonstration of this modern concept ofthe working memory. It's called digit span.If I give you six numbers, you probably canrepeat them back to me. Let's try it out: 3,2, 2, 1, 0, 4. How many people think youcould repeat it back? I won't test you.

Now try this. This time I'm going togive you ten numbers: 2, 2, 1, 8, 8, 7, 0, 1,0, 2. How many of you think you couldrepeat those back? Probably one or twowhich is about right. How many think youcould remember six of them? Probably notas many because one of the phenomena ofthis working memory is that there is alimited capacity and when it gets over-loaded it seems to just push things out.You don't even get as much retained aswhen the capacity is fitted to the task. Letme give you that same series which was tendigits in a way which should enable you toremember all 10 of them. This is not theway we do it in the laboratory because youhave already had practice at it, but it willdemonstrate the principle anyway. I'vegoing to give them to you in clusters. 221,897, 01, 02. How many of you think that

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you could repeat that back to me? Well,quite a few of you. That's one of the prin-ciples of working memory; we call it"chunking."

George Miller, former president of theAmerican Psychological Association, wrotea classic article, probably the most widelycited article in all of psychology, called"The Magic Number 7 + or - 2." He pointedout that a number of mental phenomenainvolve a capacity of approximately 7. Youcan remember about 7 digits in the digitspan test. If I show you a visual displayyou can pick up about 7 elements of avisual display. There are other kinds ofthings as well which involve capacityaround 7. But, that doesn't mean that wecan only say seven words to our studentsand expect them to remember that manywords. We can do better than that if thematerial is organized. Chunking essen-tially is giving things in groups, givingthings in an organized fashion, and itmeans that that capacity increases so thatinstead of seven separate digits you canprobably remember five or six chunks oftwo digits or three digits; so you increasethe capacity to maybe 10, 12, 15 or some-thing of random numbers. Actually insome digit span tests that have been donerecently they have trained subjects in thelaboratory to remember up to 80 or 90digits which is phenome_cd! It is still hardfor me to imagine that that is possible, butit is achieved through these techniques ofgrouping and familiarity.

Suppose I give you the sequence 2, 4, 6,8, 10, 12, 14. How many digits do you thinkyou're going to remember? Well, chancesare, almost an infinite number. All youneed is one principle of organization. Or-ganization is part of the principle of encom-passing things in one's working memory.A concept that links these two phenomena

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is "automatization." Automatization is amental process that has been so well prac-ticed that things are chunked together andyou can handle them without thinking ofthe separate elements as you had to dowith the digit span test. Barbara's talk-ing and driving is an example of carryingout two tasks which are both pretty wellautomatized. Most of us have driven somuch that we can drive and talk at thesame time. In fact, on the expresswaygoing to the airport yesterday I passed avan where the guy was reading and driv-ing. I think that's trusting automatizationa little too much! However, in general wecan take notes and listen at the same timebecause we have already learned theEnglish language with its grammar andsyntax so that we can pick up whole sen-tences as blocks, whole thoughts as blocks.We can write notes automatically becausewe've learned how to spell and, typicallywe've learned a system oftaking notes thatwe can do almost automatically, so that thecapacity needed for these tasks is muchless than it would be if we were trying totake notes in another language. There isa good deal of evidence that taking notesschematically; that is, drawing arrows be-tween things, making circles, maybe put-ting concepts in a hierarchical tree is moreefficient, is better for learning, than simpleoutline note taking or key word notetaking, the kinds of note taking we usual-ly do. I've tried sometimes to have my stu-dents practice taking their notes inschematic form. 'What happens is thatthey get lost because when you try to beginto take notes schematically you find outthat it takes too much capacity. When Iuse schematics, I run out of space on apage; I haven't got the concepts where Iwant them; and I've got to loop backaround and insert things. The space justgets all messed up and I get so lost in thenotes that I can't listen to what's going on.There's a book by Holley and Dans ereau onschematic methods of representing con-cepts. My conclusion (in my chapter in the

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book) is that schematics are great if you'vegot at least 12 to 20 hours to practice suchnote taking. But if you need to take notesand you haven't practiced schematicsbefore, you will not be able to handle thecapacity that is required in using a newnote taking system. Things that areautomatized take less capacity and enableyou to attend to larger blocks of things andincrease the capacity that is available forthe primary task.

The next element of the system is whatI call "Long-term Memory." Long-termmemory is where we store everything thathas ever happened to us. Some theories oflong-term memory say that we store per-manently anything that we have everlearned--that we have stored say for morethan a few secondssuch as a telephonenumber that we looked up and we keptrehearsing until we got to the telephoneand dialed it and maybe looked it up againand dialed it later because it was busy andso forth. That telephone number is some-where there in your mind. In fact, I oncespoke to Dick Atkinson, who is Chancellorat the University of California in SanDiego and one of the leading learningtheorists, and said, "Dick, do you meanthat somewhere in my head I've got amemory of every place I've ever parked mycar?" He said, "Sure, if you remembered itlong enough to get back at the end of theday or after shopping or something. Thatmemory is there someplace."

Well, I still find that hard to believe be-cause I've parked my car a lot of differentplaces. I don't know. But it is clear thatwe have a lot of capacity and that there isa lot in our heads that most of the time wecan't retrieve. The memory only comes outwhen we're able to restore the conditionsunder which it was learned.

One of the theories of memory is that ifyou have learned something in a variety ofsituations then it is more likely that youwill be able to retrieve it later becausethere's a better chance that in the retrievalsituation there are going to be some of the

same elements that were there when youlearned it. That has implications forteaching in that it suggests that if studentshave not just rehearsed something overand over again but have heard differentkinds of examples, have thought about itin different contexts, they're more likely toremember it and retrieve it.

One of the key concepts here in termsof how you get things from workingmemory into long-term memory and howyou retrieve them is the concept calledelaboration. An alternative theory whichhas a lot in common with the elaborationtheory is called depth of processing.Elaboration/depth of processing theorysays that if you're transferring somethingfrom working memory to long-termmemoryif you're learning itthe morethat you think about it, the more you re-late it to other things that you know, or themore you question it or transform it intoyour own words, the more likely you are toremember it. That goes back to what I saidabout why note taking is a good thing.There have been experiments in which in-structors have supplied complete notes tostudents; there have been experiments inwhich students have taken verbatimnotes.If you compare verbatim notes or in-structor-provided notes with students'own notes and with no notes, in general thestudents' own notes will come off betterthan instructor-provided or verbatimnotes or transcripts. Why is that? Notetaking works for two reasons. In the firstplace it acts as an external memory. If youhave something in your notes you can goback and review for the exam. It's thereand you don't have to get it out of your ownhead. You have some words that providecues and that enable you to recall it. Itprovides extra cues for memory. Itprovides cues for review and that externalpart is probably the most important part ofnote taking. That's what most studentsassume note taking is for; something toreview. But if that's all that note takingdoes, the verbatim notes or the instructor-

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provided notes should be better. Thereason that the student's own notes workis twofold. First is of elaboration or deepprocessing. In taking notes, the studenthas to do something to extract informationfrom the lecturer's words and to pick outkey words or key ideas and put them intohis or her own words. Students typicallysay, "I wish I could take shorthand. I'd beso much better off in a lecture." They wouldnot be better off because if they were justtaking shorthand, they would not be think-ing about the material and trying to makesense out of it. The other reason that one'sown notes are good is that it is a way ofkeeping attention on the task, particular-ly an easy task.

One of the difficulties students havewhen they subscribe to a note taking ser-vice which provides notes taken by an ex-pert is that if they figure that somebody isgoing to give them the notes, there is agreat tendency to go to sleep or not payvery much attention because they assumethat the notes will be sufficient.

There are exceptions, as I said, andwhat the exception is depends upon whatkind of notes you take. Generally speak-ing, if students organize material for them-selves they do better than if theorganization is provided. That runscounter to a lot of our stereotypes aboutgood teaching because we think that a goodteacher is somebody who is well-organized.But the data seem to indicate that provid-ing an organization for students does notresult in as good a memory or retrieval asan organization which the student hasworked out for himself or herself.However, if a student has little back-ground or is less able to organize things forhimself or herself, that their notes don'trepresent the key concepts, they miss im-portant qualifications.

Let me give you a tip; if you're lectur-ing to students, if you say something is notsomething, a significant proportion of yourlisteners are going to have in their notesthat it is the thing that you said it was not.

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We tend to miss the note and so poor notetaking often involves getting things justthe opposite from what they are supposedto be in addition to sometimes being con-fused. So for the students with less back-ground or less ability to organize,providing some organization is important.One of the reasons that I put key words onthe blackboard is to provide a schematic or-ganization. In general, Hartley's worksuggests that for an ordinaryheterogeneous class, the optimal solutionto the problem of getting students to payattention and develop their own organiza-tion without coming out confused is toprovide a schematic outline in which thestudents have to fill in points.

We've talked, then, about attention,perception, working memory and long-term memory. We mentioned the conceptsof automatization and elaboration. Thoseare key concepts that I see as beingrelevant if you're thinking about cognitivepsychology as it relates to your own re-search plans. Let me, however, point outthat there is another area that is alsorelevant to education and that also, Ithink, has made significant strides for-ward and which has also been influencedby this move toward cognition. That is thearea of motivation. As I suggested, thetheories of motivation when I was a stu-dent suggested that one is motivated be-cause one has been rewarded forsomething in the past. The basic notionwas that we respond to consequences. Iran an experiment once in which I tried totrain some teaching assistants just toreward studentsa good Skinnerian prin-ciple. Generally people work well when wecut down on punishing types of responsesand provide more rewards. But it turnedout that our reward strategy didn't seemto make any difference to students. Ingeneral, that kind of simplereward/punishment theory of motivationhad limitations.

For example, sometimes a teacherlooks at the paper of a poor student and

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says, "Oh, that's very good; you're makinga lot of progress." Instead of thinking, "I'vegot to work harder because, I've beenrewarded," the student thinks, "Theteachers must think I'm terribly dumb ifthey praise me for something so simple."We've found in motivation research as wellas in learning research that the effects ofconsequence depend upon how peoplethink about them and that in some casesreproving students is likely to encouragegreater effort because it indicates that theteacher thinks they can do better.

I flunked my prelims when I was a doc-toral student and I wasn't happy about it.The department chairman said, "Your per-formance was good enough that we'dprobably let most people by, but we thinkyou can do better so we're going to makeyou take another six months and takethem over again." At the time I wasn't agood cognitive theorist so I did not ap-preciate that. But it would be an exampleof the cognitive approach to motivation.Nt w motivation theorists think muchmore about people's anticipations of the fu-ture and feel that behavior is guided muchmore by our sense of competence and whatwe anticipate is going to happen than whathas happened in the past. I think this isparticularly relevant to adult educatorsbecause as you deal with older adults oneof their expectations is that intellectualabilities involving learning and thinkingare going downhill as they get older. Infact, when I was a gradute student, wethought that intelligence dropped off afterabout age 19 so most of us, according to theold theories, are well into the decline of in-telligence. Fortunately we now know thatthat theory is not true. Intelligence keepsgoing up, at least aspects of intelligence,probably until 80 or so depending upon thekinds of things done. You h.ve probablyheard the phrase "use it or lose it." As longas we're practicing verbal abilities, theytend to keep getting better as we get olderand there's no reason why older peoplecan't learn effectively. But if they have a

failure, older people are likely to feel it isan indication that their mind is not as goodas it used to be and so there is no point incontinuing to try to learn because they aresimply going to get worse. This notion ofexpectation is a very important one in cog-nitive theory.

Let me now summarize some ideasfrom cognitive theory that seem to me tohave potential value for adult education.One key idea is that learning is a construc-tive process. Students are like scientists inthat they have already in their heads somenotions of what the world is all about, somenotions of what the subject matter you aretrying to teach them is all about. Theyhave these theories or hypotheses whenthey come into a course and they test themagainst what is in the course. Theyelaborate their theories; sometimes theybuttress their own ideas and ignore thosethings that don't fit in with their ownideas; sometimes they revise theirtheories; sometimes they construct newtheories as a result of their experiences inthe course. If we're going to be effectiveteachers, we need to have an awareness ofwhat is in the mind of the learners.Probably one of the key aspects of researchis that instead of concentrating on instruc-tional design in terms of the goals of the in-structor and the nature of the subjectmatter, we should figure out what the stu-dents hr re in their heads. How are theirideas structured? How can we build abridge between what we have in mind andin the course and what the students al-ready know and what they are bringing tothe learning experience? How are theygoing about constructing the knowledgethat they're going to take away from thesituation and from what we provide? Un-less we know both endsthat is, what wehave to offer educationally and how they'regoing about constructing the knowledgeout of what we bringwe're not going to besuccessful as educators.

Research in adult education, from theperspective of cognitive theory, should be

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more focused on the student and lessfocused on the subject matter. This doesnot mean that all we have learned aboutinstructional design and about estab-lishing goals is irrelevant. What it meansis that it is incomplete. In addition to look-ing at the instructional goals and the con-tent, we need to look at the students' goalsand the students' prior experience. One ofthe key things that we have learned in cog-nitive psychology about learning andproblem solving is that the learners' priorexperience, prior knowledge, and prior ex-pectations are keys to their learning. Thatsuggests also that one element we need tostudy is the students' studying. Learninginvolves what the students are doing, notonly in the classroom but also out of theclassroom. That doesn't mean that weshould give up studying teaching, but ourresearch lacks much more in under-standing what students are doing to makematerial meaningful and how they'regoing about getting meaning out of theeducational situation than in classroomlearning.

Another research area is motivation.Now we realize much more that whetherstudents are learning is a function of whatthey want to learn; not just the value theyplace on the learning experience but alsotheir expectations about the chance of suc-cess if they devote effort to learning. Intraditional decision-making terms, oreconomic terms, the student has to decidewhether or not it is worthwhile investingtime and effort, emotion and commitment,to a learning situation in terms of thelikelihood of the payoff and the value of thepayoff. My teaching assistants get veryfrustrated because some of their studentsdo not do well on the first test. When theteacher suggests that the people whoaren't doing well should come in, they don'tcome in. I suggest, "You have a couple ofstudents who are doing very poorly; whydou't you give them a call and set up an ap-pointment?" So they call the students andthe students won't come in. The TA's are

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motivated and want to be helpful; butthey're likely to get very frustrated andangry and almost punishing to these stu-dents who don't seem to want to make aneffort. They blame the student for notbeing interested and not being motivated.I tell them, "This may not be a lack ofmotivation; this may be strong motivationto avoid a situation in which, according tothe student's perception, failure is verylikely to occur. "It is easier to come out of acourse saying, 'Well, I got a D, but, youknow, I just never got around to studyingin the course; I didn't really think it wasworth putting any effort into.' than it is tomake an effort, talk to the teacher, tryhard, and still fail. If you fail when you arereally trying then that has implicati ins foryour own self-esteem and your ownability."

So in motivation theory we now realizethat the students' sense of competence, ofefficacy in the situation, is important.Thus we need a good deal of research onhow you help students develop a sense ofefficacy.

I was meeting with my teaching assis-tants this week to talk about my owncourse. I offer a freshman course called"Learning to Learn." In that course I'mtrying to teach students cognitive psychol-ogy theory along with applications of it totheir own learning in college. One of theproblems is that the students who come inwith the least background are probablydeveloping some skills but they take thefirst test and they get a C. They take thesecond test and they get another C andthey take the final exam and still get a Ceven though they've made good progress.We do not mark on a curve. Each test isactually measuring additional skills;probably the standards are somewhathigher so that as the term progressesgrades don't give students a sense ofprogress. Particularly in classes wherethey are graded on a curve, they can belearning a good deal and still be on the bot-tom of the curve. How do you give them

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some sense that they are developing com-petence? My teaching assistants and I aretalking about ways that will give studentsa greater sense that they're makingprogress, such as comments on theirpapers, multiple drafts rather than singledrafts of term papers, things of this sort.We have students turn in journals everythree weeks, and we have agreed that wewant them to report upon how they'redeveloping skill in reading and thinkingabout the course as a way of giving themsome sense of the fact that they are makingprogress.

As I suggested, we need research onhow students study and how they ap-proach the material. We also need re-sea,-ch on how students are motivated andhow they can develop strategies for main-taining motivation. Barbara McCombs ofthe University of Denver has worked withbasic skills education in the armed forcesand has developed techniques which, Ithink, are effective not only there butwould be effective for adult learnerseverywhere. She is working on gettingstudents to establish goals; not only goalsin terms of how this material is relevant totheir life generally, but subgoals in termsof how they're going to achieve a particularstandard of performance on a single unit,and even e goal for studying today. She hasdone some research that gives us a start onthe notion that students can do a good dealto maintain their own motivation, but westill do not know a great deal about waysof helping students maintain their motiva-tion.

A final suggestion is that in any coursethere are several levels of learning goingon. We tend to focus on learning theknowledge in the course (and frequentlyknowledge is defined in terms of a multi-ple choice, true/false test that is primarilyfactual). We know now that these in-dividual facts, individual bits ofknowledge, are not retained very well andseldom are retrieved once the examinationis over. If they're going to be retrieved and

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learned and used later to form a basis forfurther learning, they need to be organizedinto schemas. Thus an important thing isthe structure of the learning, the organiza-tion of the learning, rather than just thenumber of facts that are involved. So atthe knowledge level we need to think aboutstructure as well as number of facts. Butin addition to the knowledge level, stu-dents are learning skills for further learn-ing. They may be learning that in yourcourse the thing to do is to read and rereadan assignment and to memorize anythingthat is a list or a definition or they may belearning that it is important to think abouthow this relates to what has been going onpreviously. Some of the interesting ex-periments on deep processing have beendone at the University of Gothenburg inSweden by Ference Marton and his as-sociates. Their research shows how stu-dents approach material differentlydepending upon what kind of test they'regoing to have. If they're going to have atest that involves thinking more broadly,such as an essay test, they are likely, in ap-proaching their study, to look for relation-ships and see what the main point of thechapter is rather than just to memorize theindividual facts.

So students are learning how to learnin my course. My course focuses on thissecond level; but it is not something that Ithink should be taught only in separatecourses. I think learning how to learn issomething that's going on in all courses.My own research right now is concernedwith helping teachers in English, Biology,and Psychology to see how we can build inmore emphasis on these skills of learningalong with the content of their courses.

A third level we teach involvesstrategic learning. There are times whenit pays to memorize things, and there areother times when it is better not tomemorize but to try to think about themeaning. So part of what we're trying to

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.1.ozo=irr.t.m.mvvimomima

do in most courses is to give students agreater sense not only of how to developskills, but to know when and where to usethem.

A fourth level of learning courses ismotivation. Students get more interestedor less interested. No matter how effectivewe are in presenting the knowledgeaspects of the course, if we have led themto believe, "This is a boring area that I don'twant to have anything more to do with,"we probably have not been very successful,and they are likely going to forget the fac-tual knowledge fairly rapidly.

I think there is some evidence (but wedo need more research) that we can helpteachers be more effective in all of theseareas if they think about them, and aremore explicit about what they're doingwhen they make assignments or carry outclassroom activities. Why do term papersprovide an important type of learning ex-perience? Why is it important to have anessay test rather than a true/false test?Why do you expect that they should dosome thinking about a textbook assign-ment and not just read and reread? Why isa laboratory experience worthwhile andwhat are the skills that students are ex-pected to get out of it? When should theyexpect to use these skills later on?

The whole area of research on teachingand learning seems to me to be one that inthe 40 years I have been involved in it hasgotten more and more complicated. Itstarted out originally as research to findout what was the most effective method ofteaching. I found out long ago that that isnot an answerable question. What is mosteffective depends upon what you are tryingto do, what kinds of students you have,what the content is--a whole multitude ofvariables. At the same time that it has got-ten more complicated, it has gotten moreinteresting. You will find there are a lot ofinteresting problems that are still un-answered.

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BIOLOGY AND ADULT COGNITION

Today I'm going to talk about brain andcognition and body and mind. One of thelast questions at the end of BillMcKeachie's session was on the soul, anenormously important concept. It's notclear what the soul is but it's probably con-nected to the mind somehow or other.

On the way in, there was a group ofMSU students outside and they said,"You're pretty duded up. What are youhere for?" I said, "I'm giving a talk over atso and so hall." And they said, "Oh, yeah,what's it on?" I said, "It's on the brain andthinking." They said, "You mean like mindand matter?" I said, "Yeah." And theysaid, "Well what's mind?" I said, "No mat-ter." And they said, "What's matter?" Ireplied "Never mind." Well, they're ob-viously brilliant students, always ques-tioning. It's one of the central aspects ofcognitive psychology, always questioning,always constructing and reconstructing,and it's alive and well in Montana.

There are a couple of preparatory com-ments I would like to make . . . to get mybiases out on the chemistry bench here. I'dlike to quote Nils Bohr. Bohr was not abore by the way, but one of the great scien-tists of the 20th century, of the hard scien-ces, if people still believe that there is hardscience versus soft science! Bohr used topreface his lectures with a wonderful state-ment. He was one of the really great open-minded scientists of our time, who saidbefore many of his lectures, "Treat every-thing I say as a question." So I sort of fol-low that precept. My other bias orpreparatory comment is also based on a

Frank Farley is Professor of Educational Psychologyat the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

©1987 by Frank Farley

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Frank Farley

20th century physicist. I happen to believein simplicity, and that things are simplerthan they seem. I think there is much jus-tification for that statement. Lord Ruther-ford, England's greatest contribution Isuppose to 20th century physics, a greatexperimental physicist, had a dictum. Healso believed in simplicity. I've sort ofbolderized his dictum a little bit, but in anutshell he said, "If you can't explain yourtheory to the local bartender, your theoryhas no chance of being proved true." Ibelieve that. In fact I've been explainingmy theory to my local bartender for sometime, and he hasn't scotched any of myideas yet!

There is one other related commentabout simplicity. I think there's a greatprinciple of art that's applicable to science;that is, in diversity lies unity. Behindcomplexity is simplicity. That is what weshould be searching for. It is unfortunatethat many professors seem to be in thebusiness of making things more complexthan they need to be. I remember as astudent--I can barely remember as a stu-dent--professors always saying, "This isvery complex." It often struck me at thetime, I don't think that is what they shouldbe saying. They should be in the businessof trying to make things clear and simple.It is like current physics where they are at-tempting to find fundamental physicalprocesses, and they are down to some-where between four and six at this stage ofthe game. I think that is the kind of ap-proach we should take. We should be look-ing for the hand behind things. We shouldbe trying to get behind behavior. Weshouldn't be too confused by all of thosetrees, instead we should stand back andlook at the forest. There is enormous

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"error" in in nefure, and we don't want to beswamped by error. If you focus too closelyon the little things, you may lose the bigpicture. I think we should view things thatway; go for the most simple explanationsand try to relate things from differenl.fields.

Well, when I get to my Type T Theory,if I get to it, you'll see that it's a simpletheory in which I attempt to account for awide range of phenomena. It's a deliberatestrategy. I've tried to account for everything! Then we can cut bank the parts ofit that don't work and find out what is thetrue core.

Biological Research and Education

Today I'm going to outline some pos-sibilities for connecting biological thinkingand biological research to the research andtheory of education and educators. Cogni-tive psychology, whose boundaries widento increasingly encompass much of whatscientific psychologists do, may have itsfinest hour in its contributions to the im-provement of education. To educationalresearch broadly defined, making educa-tion more effective, more enjoyable, andmore appropriate to the mindscape oflearners is a wonderful application of cog-nitive science and cognitive psychologyUnfortunately, much of education seems tobe a battle between learners and learning.But the potential of cognitive psychology toease the ter lona is great. Galileo wouldhave been pleased with this possibilivy.One might recall Galileo's requirementthat all science be applied science. Hedefined the sole goal of science to be, "tolighten the toil of human existence." Well,this definition seems most appropriate tothe consideration of learning and educa-tion, to lighten the toil of human existence.A caveat is needed here, however. The no-tion of applying cognitive psychology onthe one hand, to education on the otherhand, is to some extent inappropriate.Much of what is of interest and power in

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cognitive psychology and cognitive sciencehas arisen from within educational con-cerns and discussion, a sort of phoenix thathas arisen from the burnout of earlierbehavioristic and humanistic education, aspointed out by Bill McKeachie this morn-ing. Along with the increasing centralityof cognition in scientific psychology and ineducation has been a burgeoning develop-ment of theory and method in the brainsciences, a field of exponential growth inthe past decade. Cognitive psychology andbrain science are natural allies, indeed,some writers view them as two sides of acoin; complementary disciplines in the ac-counting of mental life. A concern for mindas contrasted with the attention of earlierdecades to mindless behavior invokes arole for the brain. I think we all assumethe mind is somehow connected to thebrain. With cognitive processespresumably located inside the head we willneed a brain science to fully comprehendthem. Thus, in the past few years, we haveseen "brain and cognition" develop as afledgling body of knowledge, theory, andmethod.

Education, however, has had little con-sort with brain science. Brain science con-cepts and research are seldom referencedin the educational literature. Perhaps thisis to be expected in the concern for sup-posedly rapid payoff in educational im-provement that has characterized much ofrecent educational research. Brainscience might seem remote to this concern.Indeed, why should an educational re-searcher be concerned about the brain andsuch seemingly esoteric disciplines aspsychobiology, psychophysiology, neuro-psychology, neurochemistry and theneurosciences generally? Well, theanswer's that the best evidence indicatesthe brain is the center of human learning,memory, cognition, affect, attitudes,motivation, judgment, emotion, love, hateand last, but definitely not least, good re-search ideas.

In addition to this widespread under-

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standing about the role of the brain inhuman affairs, it is also clear that we arein a revolution concerning our knowledgeabout the brain and the biological basis ofhuman behavior generally. Educationalresearch has always treated the neuros-ciences as the dark side of the moon. Thebrain is assumed to come into play in thelearning process only when there is some-thing wrong with it. We have pretty muchleft the brain out of the learner, out of theteacher, out of the administrator, and outof our data. I find our reluctance here as-tounding and ill-advised. As I mentionedearlier, there is currently exponentialprogress in the neurosciences; new concep-tions of the biological bases of life, of theneural basis of behavior, have led toremarkable new science, to the directmanipulation of genetic matter, the trans-fer and mix and match of vital organs, theself-regulation of neural activity. Thesefindings have led to an understanding ofbrain function that is light years beyondthat of a mere half generation ago. For ex-ample, it has been estimated that in thelast 20 years we've learned more about thebrain than in all of recorded history.

So we have today a set of biological dis-ciplines, some of whose work has sig-nificant implications for educationalresearch. I believe it is high time we beginpaying some attention to these efforts inour thinking about education. I believethat education in the years ahead will beradically altered by emergingpsychobiological conceptions of what thebrain can do and what we can do to thebrain. Biochemical treatments, phar-macological treatments, electrophysiologi-cal treatments, biofeedback, self-control,neuromonitoring and neuroself-control,instructional conditions adapted to knownfeatures of central nervous system func-tion, and the important identification of in-dividual differences in central nervoussystem characteristics and the relevance ofthese individual differences to effectivelearning and instructions, will all even-

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tually find their way into the lexicon ofhuman cognition and educational im-provement. I believe we can enter an eraof the highest drama where the under-standing and improvement of teaching andlearning are concerned by including thebrain in our equations for the enhance-ment of education.

Brain Research and Learning

The brain is a wonderful gismo, threeand a half pounds approximately, veryeasily produced. Unskilled labor is all thatis needed. One of my favorite definitionsof a human was by a cyberneticist whosaid, "a human is a nonlinear ser-vomechanical feedback system capable ofmass production by unskilled labor." It's awonderful thing, the brain. I estimatethat we have almost 300 pounds of brainin this room today! It's incredible. Withthat 300 pounds of brain we could solve allof the human problems, I would hope. Nocomputing machine is even light yearsfrom being in the league of this 300 poundsof matter.

Let's get down to nuts and bolts. Howmight we increase our attention to neuro-science concepts in our efforts to helplearners and improve education? Well,one thing is certain. We will have to con-sider concepts and techniques that at firstblush may seem unsuited or irrelevant toeducation and foreign to individualstrained in more traditional aspects ofeducational research. We might look atbrain hemisphere differences and hemi-sphere specialization as one approach, youknow, the left side of the brain and theright side of the brain. There has been agreat deal written about this lately, but I'mafraid that many writers here have goneoff the deep end, to use that wonderful oldphrase, giving a role in education to hemis-pheric specialization that evidence forsuch specialization cannot carry off grace-fully. Some individuals are designing com-plete curricula for left brain versus right

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brain processing and our currentknowledge of such processing differencescannot support these efforts. Perhaps wehave here our old nemesis, an educationalfad. I hope not. Suffice it to say that whatis known for sure about left brain versusright brain functions, in terms of their im-plications for education, is fairly slim atpresent. Much of the research is fascinat-ing and important but we need much morebasic research here and much less rhetoricbefore we can enter these brain hemi-sphere factors into our educational con-siderations in a major way. I might pointout however that some of the work to datesuggests relationships between brainhemisphere differences and psychologicalfactors, such as the spatial versus verbalperformance idea, that had been identifiedyears ago in traditional psychometricstudies. Thus this particular aspect ofhemispheric specialization fits nicely withsome major findings of measurement re-search and work on abilities over the last75 years.

I'd like to present a table that sum-marizes what we know. This is taken fromthe work of Jerre Levy [EducationalLeadership, Jan. 1983, p. 68]. In myopinion, she is one of the leading brainhemisphere researchers of our time. Thistable is taken from a 1983 article by Levyin which are summarized the main thingsthat we know for sure.

You'll notice that this is a relativelyshort list. So I am astounded when I goaround the country to see people designingcurricula based on putative left brainprocesses or right brain processes. I beginto wonder if some of these are really justhalf brain curricula! Then I get concernedabout things like split brain reliability- -you know there's all sorts of issues to beresolved here!

In addition to the possibilities of brainhemisphere research, one might look atsome other psychobiological research andtheory that bears upon a number of impor-tant conceptions in -ognition and educa-tion. Gagne and Dick, in their 1983 reviewof instructional psychology, have outlinedsome of the concepts and research fromcognitive psychology that are relevant tothe psychology of instruction. Actually,some of these have been touched on by BillMcKeachie this morning. But they includecognitive strategies, problem solving, theidea of schema and schemata, knowledgecompilation and automatization,automaticity of cognitive processes, amongothers. In studies of intellectual processesand individual differences, one might men-tion the approaches that have been labeledby Glaser, Sternberg, Pellegrino, andothers as cognitive correlates, cognitivecomponents, cognitive content, and cogni-tive training. Notions of expert systems,procedural knowledge, conceptual

In the vast majority of right handers, speech is almost entirely confined to the lefthemisphere.

Right hemisphere processes add emotional and humorous overtones importantfor understanding the full meaning of oral and written communication.

The two hemispheres differ in their perceptual roles but both sides are involvedin the creation and appreciation of art and music.

Both hemispheres are involved in thinking, logic, and reasoning.

The right hemisphere seems to play a special role in emotion. If students are emo-tionally engaged, both sides of the brain will participate in the educational processregardless of subject matter.

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knowledge, elementary and executiveprocesses, attention, memory storage, con-scious versus unconscious processing, areall central ideas and foci of investigationsin current cognitive psychology, and inmany cases, educational research. .

There is a growing body of neuro-science research bearing directly uponsome of the foregoing ideas. Much of themost interesting; process-oriented andmeasurement sophisticated research herehas come from the neuroscience subdis-cipline of psychophysiology. For example,Peter Lang has integrated someneurophysiological conceptions with cogni-tive psychology notions of text comprehen-sion and imagery, examiting his ideasthrough studies employing real time,elestrophysiological measures of corticalprocesses as well as peripheral andautonomic functions. He has beengenerating some star ing findings relat-ing these biological processes to imageryand to comprehension.

Other relevant research has shownbrain indicators and brain processes thatare related to such cognitive functions asanticipation, memory load, mental effort,decision processes, hypostatization (a littlephilosophic term--the translation of theabstract into the concrete), the role of com-plexity in visual representations, and soon. In all of the foregoing the rapiddevelopment of microcomputers in educa-tion, and particularly the anticipateddevelopment of the artificial intelligencecomputer, will greatly facilits.te the impactof such neuroscience research on learningand instruction. These rapidly evolving,agile little machines can provide a power-ful mediating link for the real time inter-action of brain and cognition in education.I'm very positive about the inroads of com-puters in education. Consider the much-awaited fully functioning artificialintelligence computer, the so called fifthgeneration computer, the thinkingmachine--Herb Simon thinks we'll have it,a fully functioning thinking machine. The

implications of such a computer arefabulous for interacting with brain educa-tion. I think that such computers if theyare developed are really going to unlockthe human brain, in many regards, be-cause much of our.brain power seems to belocked up. Books have been wonderful andhave helped a lot, but I think that the com-puter, if it is used in the interactive sense,will make an enormous contribution to un-locking our brain power.

One of the problems with relating thebrain science revolution to the computerscience revolution, these two greatdevelopments that I think are going tohave a monumental impact on education,is that often there is no interaction be-tween these two developments in educa-tional contexts. Computer scientists oftentalk as if they're talking about the brainwhen they are talking about computers.Computer scientists anti cognitive scien-tists generally are not integrating theirwork with brain science work, and thathas been a problem in my judgment. Ul-timately we must bring these two together.We can't let artificial intelligence lose itsroots in real intelligence. But hopefullythe study of the computer will help us tounderstand our own mental processes.Some brain scientists are not sanguineabout that possibility and think that muchof cognitive science is on the wrong track.The human does not think like a computerthey say; the computer is based on oneform of logic and only a part of our think-ing may follow the same kinds of logic, sowe maybe on a dead end if we put all of oureggs into the artificial intelligence basket.

Ono very important aspect of educa-tional research is that of individual dif-ferences and it is to this topic that I'd liketo turn. A most productive tradition ineducational research has been that of dif-ferential psychology and the study of in-dividual differences and their educationalsequelae, including research on measure-ment and prediction, the role of individualdifferences in learning and cognition, in

ATI or aptitude by treatment interactionmodels, and so forth. I think the area of in-dividual differences may provide oneentree for biological thinking into educa-tion. The right/left hemisphere concepthas got a lot of potential too. I think it hasyet to be fully realized. There are otherpossibilities. You might have heard of thework on brain growth spurts, the idea thatthe brain grows in spurts and plateaus andthat you can link that up to the growth ofmind. I don't feel that scientifically thatlinkage has led very far to date.

So, how are we going to connect thebrain to education? Well, I have my ownlittle scheme for doing that and it is basedon individual differences and that long richtradition of aptitudes which goes back tothe turn of the century. We know a lotabout aptitudes; we know a lot aboutmeasurement. It is probably one of thecrowning glories of psychology. It is some-times said that one of the few things thatpsychologists genuinely created was theIQ concept. But everybody steals fromeverybody else. I was in a symposium oncognitive science a few years ago atBerkeley and Lyle Bourne, a leading cog-nitive psychologist, was wrestling withhow to define cognitive science. What is it?He had a little chart up on the board, andhe had pictures, a diagram, arrows, con-nectir linguistics, anthropology, psychol-ogy, computer science, etc., all these thingscoming together to form the new cognitivescience. There was much discussion andfinally he said, "I don't know what cogni-tive science is. hill can tell you for sure isthat a cognitive scientist is somebodywho's willing to steal ideas from anyone!"

Biological Aptitudes

Well, we have this wonderful long his-tory of research on aptitudes and so I'mgoing to use that. The entree that I'mgoing to propose of brain se --,oe intoeducation will be based on I callbiological aptitudes. What I mean by that,

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biological aptitudes, are individual dif-ferences that have biological reference andmeasurement and that have predictivepower for educationally relevant behaviorand pr ychologically relevant behavior.

I'm going to run through a few can-didates for biological aptitudes and I'll saya few words about each one as I go along.The basic idea is this: I believe you canmeasure biological and physiologicalprocesses of the nervous system and treatthem as individual differences, get reli-able measures of them; and then find howthose measures predict or account foreducational phenomenon. Now this is sortof looking ahead. This is probably not stuffthat you're going to immediately institutein your research, let alone the schools andcolleges. I think the main thin, is to getthe ideas out and see if you might come 14owith ways in which you could institute oruse these ideas.

Brain evoked responsim is one of thehottest topics these days in brain science.You can evoke a brain wave changethrough a specific stimulus. I won't go intothe details, but you begin by establishinga person's brain wave baseline. A stimulusis presented, maybe a tone, and what hap-pens is, you evoke a specific response. Nowthis response might look like any old ran-dom shape to some of you but believe me,there are dozens upon dozens of re-searchers whose whole lives are focused onsuch things. So you have evoked thatphenomena and the wave returns tobaseline. That is a very interesting se-quence. As I say, it has become the focusof a great adventure in neuroscience as towhat all of these different aspects of brainevoked responses indicate. Some researchsuggests that aspects of this may be corre-lated with intelligence (I am going to spenda few minutes on tha.t) and with decisionprocesses; it may even be associated withschema revision, with the revisions of cog-nitive schema.

Another piece of research comparedthe evoked potentials of bright people, with

IQ's ranging from 142, 120, 125, 136, to lowIQ individuals, with 85 and similar scores.They noticed a great difference betweenthe two. The low IQ ones were smooth, butthe high IQ's were jaggedy. Hendricksonand Hendrickson, British investigators,about six or seven years ago reported thisanalysis. They laid a piece of string fromthe beginning to the end of the wave andthey measured how much string it took tocover that brain wave. (This sophisticatedinstrument they called the string test.)Then they would stretch the string out andthey would correlate the length of thestring with Weed intelligence. It was cor-related about .7 in their first study. Nowthat's a startling fording. In the scientifichistory of the 20th century, psychologistshave been searching for a kind of holy grail,a connection between the mind and thebody. People in Eastern philosophies havehad their own ways of relating mind tobody, but in the Western materialist worldwe have had trouble relating mind to body.It is hard to find correlations betweenpsychological phenomena and biologicalphenomena. Here is one that just leapsright off the page at you. Well, they fol-lowed up. They did a replication using adifferent sample, different intelligencetest, and have continued to report a highcorrelation. One was as high as .80+ in onestudy. Now this is still highly controver-sial research. Some people claim that theyhave not been able to get these results. Ithas not been replicated enough as far asI'm concerned, but if this holds up at all, itis a most interesting finding. What it sug-gests is that whatever underlies the shapeof the evoked potential might be a sort ofbiological aptitude for intelligence. Nowkeep in mind this can take maybe 10minutes to test in the laboratory. The in-dividuals had a headphone set on and apure tone and it elicited this. Now you canelicit evoked potentials using linguisticStimuli such as words, or naier

So, some people have said, "Wow!Maybe we have here a kind of universal

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index of intelligence." Other people havesaid, "This is the beginning of a true at-tempt to measure biological intelligence."It's still quite controversial but it is inter-esting nevertheless.

(Response to a question.) True.Hendrickson and Hendrickson havedeveloped a biochemical theory that theysay accounts for the jaggediness and it hassomething to do with error transmission inthe central nervous system. I think theyare assuming that biochemistry is some-how or other more basic. Their kind ofreductionistic view is more basic than thepsychology side of things. But I don't thinkthey have dealt with the issue as towhether learning and experience couldhave an impact on that; it probably could.The brain has some plasticity to it andearly experiences can change the brain.We're familiar with the work of Krech andCrutchfield at Berkeley where they en-vironmentally stimulated rats. Theystimulated some of the rats and othersthey did not stimulate and analyzed brainbiochemistry. The stimulated rats lived incages with all sorts of stuff hanging fromthe walls, a kind of enriched life of thelaboratory rat, upscale yuppie rats with allsorts of stuff. The other ones were livingin a very impoverished situation, as I recallit. At any rate, what the researchers foundwas that the environmental stimulationhad an impact on brain biochemistry. Soit is interactive in my view; the environ-ment influences the brain, the brain in-fluences the environment. What we havehere in the human IQ work is a fascinat-ing relationship that may or may not holdup. One big question to be addressed is,what causes what? That also assumes asort of a billiard ball causality model.Some people aren't happy, includingmyself, with strict billiard ball causality:A hits B hits C hits D, and that's how it allworks. Causality may be more parallel innature. Some physicists are talkie' abouttime warps, or time going backwards, andall this kind of crazy stuff. The whole field

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of quantum mechanics kind of ties in withthat, so causality is no longer, in my judg-ment, a straightforward billiard ball kindof thing. Who knows what's causing this?

(Response to a question.) One of theproblems in an intellective assessment isthe biasing effect of language. Is it pos-sible to get a nonverbal estimate of humanintellective functioning and a universal in-telligence index? Ideally you can measurethe evoked potential in China, in Brooklyn,in Bozeman, all over the place. You can doit with infants, with the aged. In time wemay have telemetry so you won't even haveto hard-wire connect the electrodes (willthat be 1984?). We'll get to that later inthis presentation, I hope.

Back to the evoked potential briefly.I'll just mention that there are other thingsabout this wave form that EmanuelDonchin at the University of Illinois hasshown, a brilliant 20 year line of researchon this phenomenon. He is particularlyconcerned with the so called P300 com-ponent but he has linked to an amazingarray of cognitive and psychologicalphenomena. Aspects of decision processesseem to be reflected in certain parametersof this wave. He has claimed, I believe,that certain aspects of schema and therevision of schemata may be reflected here.So we maybe getting into some of the brainbases of such powerful cognitive ideas asschema and schema revision. How doesthe brain indicate revision of schemas?That's an interesting question.

You have all seen drawings of a lit aincell; presumably everything takes placehere or in some aggregate of these. One ofthe interesting contemporary battles iswhether learning, memory, and such aresomehow or other "located" within theunit, the single unit analysis they call it,the single cell, or whether it's related towhole aggregates of cells. This argumentrages back and forth. E. Roy John, a lead -ing investizator, reported recently a studyof rats in which he tested a very simpleresponse, a little memory. He got the rat

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to learn something very simple but hefound that vast areas of the rat brain wereactivated by that learning. So Johnbelieves that the brain is vastly involved ineven simple memories. That is one view.Another view is that there are single cellsin the brain specifically concerned withparticular attributes of the environment,particular stimuli. And so that argumentrages on.

If you check any textbook on the brain,you look at pictures of various brains, saya rat, cat, sheep, and human brain, and;ou'll notice the amazing similarity be-tween the sheep and the human brain. (I'llleave you to draw your own conclusions onthat one.) One of the crucial things aboutthe brain and intelligence and evolutionand so on is the relationship of the size ofthe brain to the body in an evolutionarysense. I mean the elephant has a biggerbrain than we have but it is not that sharp.There is even some question about theirmemory!

Some brain theorists have identifiedvarious developmental areas of the humanbrain. The bottom inner area is oftenreferred to as the reptilian brain, the oldbrain, the savage brain. The upper outerarea is the thinking brain, the new brain.One fascinating theory is that in the courseof evolution we still have within us our his-tory; so we have within us our old reptileor savage brain. The continued presenceof violence in the human condition is theassertion of the old brain which we aretrying to keep the lid on through thedevelopment of the more recent new brain.This new brain is trying to keep the lid onthe old brain, but the latter keeps reassert-ing itself in human affairs. So some peoplehave argued that maybe we're in a kind ofevolutionary race in which we've got todevelop cognition and cognitive power,logic, reason, and so on in the new brain togain control over savage emotions or wewill blow Gurselves inw 8"crco-^. 1-,-teresting theory.

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Orienting Response/Defensive Reflex

Back to my biological aptitudes again.I'll whip through these and try to get to thetype T personality.

Another aptitude is the "orientingresponse or defensive reflex." I don't havetoo much to say about that, but the Rus-sians make a great deal of the orientingresponse (OR) and the defensive reflex(DR).

The orienting response seems to be thefirst reaction to a change in stimulation; itis highly connected to attention which issomething that Bill talked about thismorning as a major cognitive psychologytopic the days. It may be related to dis-criminative ability and it is indexed in aphysiological change. It is measurable inthe body; we often use heart rate as anindex. We've tested hundreds of people.Let me give you an example of heart ratechange. If you're sitting in a room, quietand relaxed, doing nothing, and you heara scratching at the door, a whole host ofthings will happen in your body that youwon't be aware of. The Russians say thatblood will flow to the brain, out of theperiphery into the brain, because you aregetting ready to process information;something's happening. One interestingthing is your heart rate will typically slowdown briefly. You may get a decelerationof heart rate just briefly and then it willpick up again. These are what might becalled attributes of the orienting response.It is as though the whcle organism is get-ting ready to process information. As Isaid, the Russians make a lot out of that.They say that if you are defective in the ORyou may have trouble with subsequent cog-nitive development. Maybe it's reflectingsome discriminative capacity. There aresubstantial individual differences in theorienting response. Some people showvery strong orienting responses and othersweak or no orienting responses to the samechange in stimulation. If it reileci,r3 any-thing like discriminative ability, it means

that if you are defective in the OR, youmight have trouble making discrimina-tions, so one would attempt to shape thatorienting response.

Concerning the defensive reflex, let'ssay that that scratching continues andseems to be getting louder and then youbegin seeing these long green fingernailscoming through the door; it's going tochange you right away. Your blood will gorushing out to the periphery, etc. A defen-sive reflex has occurred.

Well, there are various psychologicalphenomena that might be connected to theOR and DR attention, discriminativeability,intelligence. One of the mostprovocative studies has found a correlationbetween the magnitude of the orientingresponse and human intelligence. Nowthis piece of research by Herb Kimmelneeds to be replicated in my view, but itfound some interesting things. Hereported a correlation between intelligenceand strength of the orienting responseusing a very simple measure of the OR. (Anumber of these measures are very simple;you can hook them up to your computerand measure them while people are learn-ing things.) He then shaped the orientingresponse using a particular shaping proce-dure. He strengthened the orientingresponse in low intelligence people and hefound later that their intelligence hadchanged, improved, as well! That is a veryprovocative finding and desperately, Ithink, needs to be repeated by somebody.

The defensive reflex seems to be re-lated to anxiety. Some research thatJenny Alexander and I did was to comparepeople who showed an OR with those whoshowed a DR to the same stimulus. Thosewho had the defensive reflex to thosestimuli as opposed to the orienting reflexwere more anxious people.

Autonomic Lability

Another biological aptitude isautonomic lability. I won't say much about

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that but it has to do with how labile aperson's autonomic nervous system is.Some people have very labile autonomicnervous systems. Labile means kind ofreactive; very reactive nervous system.There are measures of autonomic labilityin the literature. One of the things that itis related to, and this I think has enormousrelevance to education you will all agree, isresistance to drowsiness undermonotonous conditions. Star autonomiclability!

Biological Cycles

A biological cycle is not a two-wheeleddevice that a biologist rides to school everyday. Rather it is a biological rhythm. Abiological rhythm is a change in one's biol-ogy over time. We're familiar with themenstrual cycle for example, a well-knownbiological cycle. Very little research hasbeen done on connecting biological cyclesto education. It is a huge research areajust awaiting somebody's attention.

You can measure biological cycles witha simple oral thermometer and tempera-ture changes across the course of the dayin certain systematic ways. But what is itrelated to? Research shows it is related toattention; it may be related to efficiency oflearning, but that still awaits more re-search.

One of the interesting things is the ideaof larks versus owls. The morning peopleversus the night people, or what JeanShepherd, that peripatetic commentatoron the American scene, once characterizedas the night people versus the creepingmeatballere. I have no idea what he meantby that, and I'm sure he didn't either. Buthe was talking about biological cycles in asense. Some people peak in the morning;other people lend to peak later in the day.Well, we typically organize public school-ing, K-12, around morning people. If larkspeak at about midday, that means they arerising up to their peak and then they arebeginning a slow decline from the peak.

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That almost correlates with the school day.But the owls, they're just beginning to gethot by around early to mid-afternoon andthen they are sent home! The currentschool day does not seem to be the way togo for them. They should go home andstudy hard while they're still at their peakbut they probably don't. They go andwatch TV or do something else non-cur-ricular. In adult education, there are lotsof implications from this. It has to do withthe scheduling of learning and instruction.

Electrocortical Coherence

The next biological aptitude iselectrocortical coherence, which I'll justmention briefly. You can put electrodes ondifferent parts of the head and correlatethem to see where they are correlated.How coherent is the electrocortical data orreaction that you get? When you get highcoherence, that is, high correlation amongthese measurements from different place-ments, this seems to be related to some im-portant things. For example,mathematics ability has been related tothis coherence measure. Creativity, con-cept learning--these are important cogni-tive ideas and they seem to be connected inwith this coherence index to some extent,although replication and extension of theavailable research is needed.

Augmenting/Reducing Senso:7 Style

In 1967 a brilliant book appearedcalled Individuality in Pain and Sufferingwritten by Asenath Petrie, an Israelipsychologist. She talked about how thereseemed to be augmenting people andreducing people. Now this is not a dietplan or anything like that! It refers to thefact 'chat some people when they're stimu-lated seem to augment the strength of thestimulation inside in the brain somehow.So, ifI presented to you a 100 decibel soundright now and you wore an 0-grae.ter,your perception of that 100 decibel sound

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would be that it was louder than anotherperson who was a reducer. It has nothingto do with the objective attributes of thestimulus. It is something inside the headbone between the ears.

Some people are augmenters; some arereducers. Petrie was interested in that be-cause her lifelong interest, or one of herlifelong interests, had been., in pain, anenormously important human problem.Pain researchers will tell you some peoplehave tremendous resistance to pain andother people can't stand any pain. Whatis the basis of that? Well, research now in-dicates that it's a central process that is inthe brain and it is actually a kind of style.It's almost like a learning style or a cogni-tive style. You can array people in termsof it. There are tests of it and you can pullout people who are the augmenters andthose who are the reducers, and they willreact differently in pain situations. It alsois related to the ability to endure a sensorydeprivation situation where you don't geta lot of stimulation and so on.

Nervous System Typologies

This is an enormously rich area. Itreally develops out of Russian and EasternEuropean psychology. When you ask aRussian or Polish psychologist what theymean by individual differences, they willtypically talk nervous system types ratherthan intelligence or aptitude tests. Theyhave a tradition of embedding individualdifferences in nervous system processes orin what they call properties of the nervoussystem. They believe that you can dimen-sionalize the nervous system and measuredimensions of nervous reaction. You canconstruct tests of these dimensions andyou can use these tests in education, in in-dustry, and in all sorts of situations. Thistwo volume set of books that I co-editedwith a fellow who's tae head of the Psychol-ogy Department at the University of War-saw, and one who is a professor at theUniversity of Southampton, England, is

the latest word on this topic. It appearedin 1985 and 1986 and in it we had the lead-ing writers around the world, from Russia,the East European countries, and else-where, on this topic. It is fascinating, it isrich; it is quite different from the way wethink about individual differences. Theirbelief is that you can, if you look at in-dividual differences more in terms of theway the brain works, get around a wholelot of the problems that are associated withthe way we do our individual differenceswork.

In the West we have so many problemsin individual differences research such asbiased tests. They're biased in favor of oneethnic group against another; they favormen against women or women againstmen; this, that, and the other thing.Researchers on nervous system typesmight say: "Let's get past these and getinto the meat of where information isprocessed." Now it is very important tokeep in mind that the brain is where every-thing of psychological importance goes on.Learning does not go on an overhead, on ablackboard, in a book, or on a computerscreen. It goes on in the brain. The brainis the common denominator. We ignore itat our peril, and they are trying not to ig-nore it. So they have found all sorts of con-nections with emotion, motivation,perception. They talk about three basicdimensions in the central nervous system.They call them strength, balance, mobility.I don't have time to go into all of the dif-ferences and nuances there, but if youwant you can take down the informationon these two books afterwards. Strengthof the nervous system, balance, mobility--these in various combinations, theybelieve, account for much of the richness ofhuman personality and human motiva-tion. They are actually taking these in-dividual differences into account in worksituations, in schools, in prisons, in a widerange of situations. And there are inter-eating tests and measures. They eventried to develop some questionnaire

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measures. Jan Strelav, the fellow fromPoland who was a co-editor of the books,has developed a personality test that hethinks measures some of those dimen-sions.

Type T Personality

What I would like to turn to now is thetype T personality as my final biologicalaptitude. I could go on all afternoon andoutline more about these biological ap-titudes. One interesting question is, whatglues these things together? What are theunderlying processes that connect these?I'm afraid I don't have enough time todayfor that fascinating discussion. What Iwould like to do in the time remaining isgo to the thing I've done most of my re-search on and which I call the type T per-sonality.

There is a system in the brain calledthe arousal system. There is more thanone arousal system. The arousal systemthat I'm going to refer to is the reticular ac-tivating system of the brain (I have ahandout ifyou want; it's a 1986 PsychologyToday article.) There seem to be in-dividual differences in reactivity of thissystem. Some people are highly arousable;some people are not very arousable; andother people are in the middle somewhere.That's my starting point.

I should point out I'm not married tothe arousal theory in the brain. There isone thing about brain sciences that I'velearned over the years. Never get weddedto anything too closely. There was once awell-known psychologist who developed atheory and got so wedded to it that when itstarted to be disproved in the literature hetook out a knife and ran the knife into hisheart and killed himself. I've learned fromthat; never take your theories too serious-ly! It is in the nature of theories, sadly,often to be disproved. So I'm not weddedto the arousal idea; in, fact there may beother biochemical processes that we mayfind are ultimately accounting for the typeT personality. But, I believe, there is this

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dimension of arousability in the nervoussystem.

I believe there is a strong genetic fac-tor here. In fact, where the type T per;sonality is concerned, evidence suggeststhat there is significant heritability. Idon't like to put a percentage figure onheritability estimates, but if I was forcedup against the wall and a gun was at myhead, I'd say probably anywhere from 40 to60% heritability of the type T personality.My guess is that somehow or other it is con-nected with this arousal dimension. KidsI believe start off in life as being at one endof the scale o7 at the other or somewherealong in the middle. I further believe thatfor efficient processing of information weattempt to modulate arousal into some in-termediate range. This is basically an oldidea in psychology. It goes all the way backin some degree to the Yerkes Dodson Lawof 1905. It is not exactly the same thing asthe Yerkes Dodson Law, but the basic ideais that the relationship of arousal as I justdescribed it and performance, were I todiagram it, looks kind of like an invertedU curve. That relates arousal to effectiveperformance, effective psychologicalfunctioning Now this is an abstract curve.It may not fit any particular person. Theaverage, ideal curve looks something likethat. So what that says is that there arelow arousable kids in terms of this arousalsystem in the brain, high arousable kids,and other kids in between. This inventedU function suggests that these kids whoare low arousal persons will not performvery well. On the other hand, if you are ahigh arousal person, you also will not per-form very well. But if you start off life righthere in the middle, then you will be per-forming at maximum performance. So Ibelieve that there is a sort of evolutionari-ly based process of attempting to modulateour arousal more towards the middle rangefrom either end. If you are a low arousalperson, therefore, you will try to increaseyour arousal.

I think the early environment can fine

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tune the arousal system; nutrition, allsorts of things, can impact on it and in-fluence your arousal level. But it you're toolow for effective performance, I think thatyou will attempt to modulate your arousalto increase it. You will be an arousalseeker. On the other hand, if you start offlife as a high arousal person, you are toohigh in arousal for effective performance.So you will attempt to modulate yourarousal down. You will be an arousalavoider. I think that has survival andevolutionary significance. We need toprocess information effectively. Out therein the jungle, if you don't process informa-tion effectively, it has life or death conse-quences. You are eaten. Now, in thehuman jungle, it is more subtle. But if youdon't process information effectively, youcould end up on the bone heap of thehuman condition. Problems, lots ofproblems, personal problems. This, thatand the other, whG knows what?

So I think that we try to modulate ourarousal into this intermediate range for ef-fective functioning. I have liberalized thevertical axis from just simple performanceto effective psycholf,gical functioning. Sothe people at one end, the low arousal end,I call "type T personalities," and the peopleup high I call "small t's." T stands forthrills. It also stands for transmutationalthinking. (I'll get to that in a moment.)Thrills I think is what lies behind much ofthe stimulation seeking that these type Tpeople do. It is not as if you suddenly be-come a type T, like you fall off a cliff andyou're a type T or anything like that. It isa continuum. You can have more or less ofthese qualities and show more or less ofthese behaviors. These people in the mid-dle I call the invulnerables or the sur-vivors. Those are people who, no matterwhat you do to them, just truck right onthrough. They are the people who can takegood education, bad education, noisy con-ditions, quiet conditions, nice beautifulpristine structured home life versus a to-tally disastrous home life, and they sur-

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vive. They're the invulnerables. Thosepeople don't need me so I don't do researchon those people. I'm not certain thesepeople at the two ends need me either, bythe way, but I just won't leave them alone.

So, these seem to be quite differentpeople. I don't have enough time to go intoall of the differences but they differ on anamazing array of things. The big T--we'llcall them the big T and the small t--the bigT tend to be more impulsive, more creative,more delinquent. They think differently,these big T and the small t. They have dif-ferent artistic preferences; they have a dif-ferent sex life; they're just different on allsorts of things. It astounds me. It seemsthat the more things I throw at the type Tpersonality concept, the more things I findfalling out into two piles.

Someone asked, have we compared it tothe Jungian system? We have just done astudy in which we gave the Myers Briggsand type T measures to a large sample, butwe didn't find very much. I can send you acopy of the paper we wrote up called TheJungian Classification System and theType T Personality.

Anyway, on sex, for example, the big Ttypes like more sex, more novelty in sex.Big T's marry big T's. Assortative matingis the technical term. We have done a lotof research on that and we've found thatthey tend to marry each other. If you think

High Arousal Value(Big T's Prefer)UncertaintyUnpredictabilityHigh RiskNoveltyMuch VarietyComplexityAmbiguityFlexibilityLow StructureHigh IntensityHigh Conflict

Low Arousal Value(Little t's Prefer)CertaintyPredictabilityLow RiskFamiliarityLittle VarietySimplicityClarityRigidityHigh StructureLow IntensityLow Conflict

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about it, thatmakes a lot of sense. Do youreally want to have a big T married upwith a small t? One wants a lot of varietyand stimulation all the time, and the otherone is strictly missionary position. It's nota match made in heaven. There are justdifferences all over the place on this. Whatthen motivates these two groups different-ly? The big T are seeking stimulation andthe small t are trying to reduce theirarousal. So here is a compilation of ideasthat I believe reflect arousal values.

Things on the left column, I believe,have high arousal value. I owe an enor-mous debt of gratitude to the late Dan Ber-lyne, who did brilliant work on the natureof stimulation and how it is related tophysiological processes. Well, the thingson the left I classify as having high arousalvalue. If you want to increase yourarousal, you will seek these thingsuncer-tainty, unpredictability, novelty, variety,risk, high intensity, complexity, low struc-ture, ambiguity, flexibility, and conflict.So the things on the left, I believe, are thethings that motivate, by and large, the bigT personality. The things on the rightwould motivate more the small t--cer-titude, predictability, familiarity. Lowrisk, low intensity, simplicity, a lot ofstructure. These small t's like things to beneatly organized in nice packages and welllaid out. They may show rigidity, theytend not to thrive on conflict. These twopanels are enormously important for mytype T theory because you can use these tospin out all sorts of things. You can usethem to spin out ideas about instruction.If you have a big T person, these ideasshould inform the way you deal with thatperson because this is what motivates. Ifyou have a small t person who tends toavoid stimulation, and does not take risks,these things should inform you.

We have taken these factors and con-structed measures of all sorts of things.For example, we do a lot of research oncrime and violence. So we developed ameasure of the arousal value of crimes, just

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spinning off of these basic ideas. We cangive a crime arousal score; we then try toconnect that to the arousal needs or thesetype T qualities of the perpetrator. Youcan use it to apply to media. We've donestudies of advertising, of television, of thearts, even of theatre design, of live perfor-mances, of all sorts of things. You can usethis as the basis for a rating scale for al-most anything you can think of. For ideas.How certain is an idea; for example, howmany loose ends are there, how open endedis it, or how structured?

Type T and Education

How would you go from here to educa-tion? Just thinking of these things, youcan see why the big T tends to be creative.If you are not willing to expose yourself tothe unknown, the uncertain, the unpre-dictable, you have almost no chance ofdoing creative work, great creative work.As Jacob Bronowsky described in his greattelevision series The Ascent of Man, thegreat theoretical physicists of the 20th cen-tury, Fermi, Bohr, Einstein, lived theirlives on the edge of uncertainty. Well, thatis my definition of creativity. If you'regoing to do great creative work, you've 60tto be willing to expose yourself to the tin-known, to uncertainty. Therefore, it is notsurprising that big T personalities shouldbe more creative.

I happen to believe that most of thegreat creative people in history are big Tpersonalities. They were standing at thejuncture of the momentous changes in his-tory, in any field, because they were will-ing to risk; they were willing to engage the

unknown. If you avoid the unknown, ifyou want everything certain, then you willnot change history because you will abideby the existing structure and the existingrules. There is an important lesson herefor American education. I don't know howimpressed ycu are with American educa-tion, but I think that we have been on aplateau that's gone on long enough. Con-

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temporary science and technology, havedone fabulous things, but our educationalsystem has not changed enough. I thinkcreative risk taking, informed risk takingis something we miss in education of alllevels, and we need more of an emphasison that. I happen to believe that isAmerica's great strength by the way, ourwillingness to take creative risks.

(Response to a question.) Criminal an-tisocial individualsyou're talking aboutthe DSM III label--the antisocial per-sonality. I call those the T minus. Thismay encompass delinquents, criminals,drinking and driving, unlimited drug ex-perimentation, all sorts of things which Ibelieve are tied in with the T minusquality. The T plus is associated with posi-tive, constructive growth and creativedevelopment.

(Response to a question.) I'm glad youasked that. I think that is a problem withour understanding of stress. People seemto think that high intensity is stressful. Itdepends on who you are. Where are youcoming from in terms of your stress? Somepeople love that kind of thing. They thriveon it. But we have, in the last few years,developed an idea that many of these kindsof things are stressful. I ask the question:"Stressful for whom and under what con-ditions?" For example, a type T in a verystructured situation - -that is stress. Or asmall t in a highly ambiguous situation- -that is stress. So when you get people inthe work place and they are a big T per-sonality, and they find themselves workingon an assembly line in Detroit, that'sstress. They are probably the people whoare going to throw the wrench into theCadillac carburetor. There has alwaysbeen a problem with sabotage in Detroit,and it may be a big T responding to the un-pleasant stress of the repetitive work. Onthe other hand, some people love repetitivework. They like clarity and they likethings being laid out in a neat structuredway. They like the old familiar ways; theylike tradition and all of that; and that is

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a

great. They won't be stressed under thoseconditions but if you take those people andput them into an open ended, ambiguous,ever changing situation, they would justget stressed out. So that is my theory ofstress. It is like an adaptive educationmodel, that in the work place and in anykind of situation self-knowledge is enor-mously important and you should play toyour strengths. If you are a stimulationseeking type T, don't get yourself into asmall t job. If you're a small t person, don'tget yourself into a big T job.

(Response to a question.) My guess isthat schools are more designed for thepeople toward the small t end of the con-tinuum or in the intermediate range.More so, perhaps, in private educationwhere you can select people, versus publiceducation where you have to takeeverybody who comes through the door. Ithink you are more likely to select thesekind of people: the studious, on -task- -youknow, the ideal student using this model.If that is true, it has some interesting im-plications. It would suggest you're going toget more creativity in public educationthan you typically will in private educa-tion. You should get more conformity, youshould get less delinquency in the privatesystem than in the public. But I think theschools typically tend to play to the smallert. Now for the kids in the middle, it doesn'tmatter. As I said, they're the invul-nerables, they can survive anything. Ibelieve the small t will do well in the tradi-tional self-contained classroom with all thestructure; think of the traditional library,that's built for a small t personality. Butwe know there are big T's; they areeverywhere. They are the ones who like tostudy with the radio on or lying around onthe floor. There is nothing wrong with thatin terms of this theory.

Here are some of the things that I'vebroken out in terms of instructional proce-dures. These can be adapted for any agelearner. Inductive instruction is ideal forthe big T-- discovery procedures, fast pace,

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variable pace. Now again, we obviouslyare not going to restructure education thisway at this time. But I've always believedthat schooling changes mainly throughsimple ideas rather than trying to engineergreat, huge .procedures into education.You know the old R & D Centers back inthe 60's: the dream was that you couldtake basic research and engineer itthrough into reality and change Americaneducation. It was all a great, huge, "BigEducation" effort. I don't think that's theway education really changes. I think youchange people's attitudes and outlooks,you change teachers' ideas, parent ideas,and so on. Piaget came along; he observedsome kids and drew some profound con-clusions from those observations. Hechanged education. People read his ideasand they said: Gee, that's great, I can usethat idea in my teaching, or I can use thathere, there, or elsewhere.

The engineering approach to educationis bankrupt. It is not the way to go. I thinkbasically we just have to change people'sattitudes and cognitions about how kidsthink and how they behave. But we can-not rigidly adapt. If I put this into anadaptive education model or aptitude bytreatment interaction, it would be veryhard to get any school system to go alongwith a rigid system like that. But hopeful-ly you could change the teachers' attitudesand they could try to adapt to each, to thebig T and the small t child.

Computers will offer a lot here becausethe computer is a wonderful individualiza-tion tool. Diane Gamsky and I have donesome interesting work with the computerand the type T personality. We find thatso far there seems to be a notable sex dif-ference. Big T females seem to love com-puters, much more than small t females.The big T females are really turned on bycomputers; they want to spend a lot of timewith it. A computer has so many options.Big T's like options. They like degrees offreedom, they like elbow room, they havestrong independence of judgement. We

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found that this whole system works beauti-fully for females on a computer, not formales. So far we find that big T males don'tseem to be so interested in computers. Itseems they would rather be out engagingin sports, or thrill sports, or adventures ofone sort or another.

The learning environment can beadapted; computer based instruction canbe adapted. So can teacher characteris-tics; type T teachers for type T kids basi-cally. You wP,nt a lively, dramatic,engaging teacher for big T's and a some-what more structured teacher for thesmall t.

So, these people down at this end wherewe've done most of our research on the bigT phenomenon tend to be more delinquent,they tend to be more creative, they tend tothink differently. I won't go into much ofthe delinquency research but we havedone a number of studies on that and viefind that the type T consistently is a factor.

Type T and Creativity

Where creativity is concerned, we'vedone a lot of research. We find the big T isrelated +0 creativity. The big T seems tothink differently than the small t, and I'llgive you a flavor of that. I call it trans-mutative thinking or transformationalthinking. The big T seems to have a high-ly flexible form of thinking. Things seemto be related in the cognitions of the big Tand they seem to be perhaps dissociated orunrelated in the cognitions of the small t.For example, we took Arthur Jensen'stests, the ones that a number of years agohe used to measure what he called level Iand level II intelligence. His level I waspresumably some kind of simple associa-tive intelligence or associative learningand level II was more conceptual. For levelI he used the digit span task and for levelII he used Raven's Progressive Matrices.So we used his tests, ones that he providedto us. We found that among the big T per-sons in our sell-pie; these tests were hicrh-

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ly correlated, .7 in the study we did.Among the small t's, they were totally un-correlated, .1. That was pretty startling asit showed a powerful moderating effect ofthe type T dimension. It suggested thatthings seem to go together more in themental life, if you will, of the big T. Andthings seem to be more separate in themental life of the small t. So we followedup on that. We have done studies wherewe looked at difference between pictorialversus linguistic processing; that is theprocessing of pictures versus words. Wefound the same thing: the processing ofpictures and words is significantly corre-lated among big T's, and totally uncorre-lated among small t's. So this dimensionseems to be associated with some sort ofbasic thinking processes.

Now if you think about the creativityfindings of earlier research that we didwith the big T, this kind of fits with that.Presumably, a creative person is somebodyin whom mental processes are interre-lated. It is the idea of metaphorical think-ing, analogical thinking. These people cansee relationships; they have many entrypoints to solving a problem. They are morelikely, therefore, to be creative, to come upwith creative solutions. In the small t per-son, everything seems to be processed insome separate way, almost as if thesethings are dissociated one from the other.(By the way, I happen to believe that thesepeople at this small t end have a greaterlikelihood of schizophrenia. I won't go intothat, but that might tie in with certain" .eories of the thought processes ofschizophrenics too.) So big T's have thistransmutative thinking I believe thatthey can transform one conception ofreality into another conception of realitywithwth ease and flexibility.

But what is great creative science,great creative art? It's taking a reality,processing it, and coming up with a wholenew conception. That's what Einstein did.In Einstein's wonderful year, 1905, hechanged our whole conception of the

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universe; a sort of orgy of type T in oneyear.

(Response to a question.) That wouldfit. He's acting more like a mystic than ascientist. His whole life is going on in thistransmutational matrix, if you will. Thinkof many of the great discoveries: Watsonand Crick's discovery of DNA structure forexample; they were at a dead end with thetheory. They couldn't wrap it up until theyput the thing together in a double helicalstructure, a physical model. Rememberthat? They looked at it and all of a suddenit was like the "oho" experience. They said,"That's it." They had taken the abstract,hypostatized it into the concrete, and thatwas the solution. So they were able totransform one reality, one cognitive repre-sentation, into another cognitive repre-sentation, and that revealed the solution.They then were able to go back from thedouble helical physical model to theabstract level and write their mathematicsand that was the end of the greatest dis-covery in modern science.

I think much of scientific discovery andcreative art is similar. Take Picasso . . .

Picasso saw the same world that otherpeople saw. When that went through histransformational matrix, it came out total-ly different, a whole new conception ofreality. That, to my mind, is creativity andthese big T people tend to have that. Asidefrom their seeking the unknown and theuncertain, which helps underwrite theircreativity, they also think differently.

T Plus and T Minus

Also, there is T plus and T minus. I'mgoing to have to wrap up now, so I don'thave time to go into that in any greatdetail. T plus, T minus, primarily mental,primarily physical. I talk. about hovipeople can seek stimulation primarilymentally. I call them the 1' mental andthat is evidenced in great creative scienceand art, it's evidenced in entrepreneur-ship, financial risk taking, and so forth.

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Now you cannot perfectly sort out themental from the physical, the mind fromthe body. I mean, it's a wonderful old ques-tion, but we don't have any precise ways ofsorting out mental from physical. Somepeople say sex is physical; essentially it'snot. Any good sex therapist will tell you alot of it is going on between the ears. So,you can't really sort these out perfectly, butyou can talk, I think, about some peoplewho are primarily mental stimulationseekers, mental T; others who are primari-ly physical. Evel Knievel is primaAly aphysical. Now it's rather interestingIhappen to believe that in the process of get-ting older there may be some shift moreinto the cognitive. Evel Knievel has givenup being a daredevil. He's left that nowand he's become an artist. He's going intoentrepreneurship, too. He's linked up withMuhammad Ali, and the two of them haveformed a corporation. They are producingcommercial products. Many of theastronauts, a tremendous physical rush,have become more mental. For example,Alan Bean is en artist in Houston. EdgarMitchell is a pursuer of the psychic in SanFrancisco. So that's the mental. FrancisCrick, the co-discoverer of DNA structure,seems to be a classic type T. He's oftenchanging his area. He's left DNA; he's leftmolecular biology; now he studies dreams.He says, "We've got to know why wedream." We've been dreaming forhundreds of years; what's the point of itall? So he is studying dreams.

Rasputin was a T minus. He was seek-ing his stimulation, and so on, in basicallymental ways. He had low physicality andhe was evil. He was trying to control theRussian court through psychologicalmachinations. So he is my example of a Tminus mental. The classic T minus men-tal would be the disembodied brain in thejar in science-fiction that is controlling theevil empire. You know, the jar, the brainpulsating, and everything. That would bea T minus mental with very littlephysicality.. Bonnie and Clyde, tremen-

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dous physical stimulation seekers, off thescale type T. Fast cars, rapid shoot-outs.They'd go into a dusty southern town athigh noon when the streets were full ofpeople, hold up a bank and there would beshoot-outs and fast automobile chases.You might :remember at the end of their T-careers when Bonnie and Clyde were final-ly caught, they'd been taking these risksand thumbing their fingers under theauthorities' noses. The cops could not stopshooting them when they got them. Thesheriff had to grab some of his deputies'guns and say, "Stop shooting, they'redead." I surmise the cops hated these risktaking kind of people . . . .

(Response to a question) We use testsor interviews to assess this. I go aroundthe country sometimes and meet withpeople who seem to be great type T's. Ispent a weekend with Rocky Aoki in NewYork City recently. Rocky is the founder ofthe Benihana restaurant chain. Rocky isan off-the-scale type T. He's also an im-migrant, and I haven't gotten to that yet,but I believe immigrants tend to be typeT. It often involves risk taking to leave theold ways and go to a new country. Further-more, there is research evidence support-ing that, that immigrants tend to be moretype T than the stay-at-homes. Therefore,immigration policy becomes enormouslyimportant in this country. In a moment I'llget to my argument that this is a type Tnation and that it is both our strength andour weakness. Well, back to Rocky. Rockywas a Japanese immigrant with littlemoney who started the now very success-ful Benihana restaurant chain. He startedhis entrepreneurship in the U.S. with apush-cart in the Bronx' He's got some 50plus restaurants in the U.S.; he's nowbranched out into Benihana frozen foods.But Rocky is more than a mental T asshown in his creative risk-takingentrepreneurship. He's an off the scalephysical T. He has ballooned non-stopfrom Japan to the United States, crossingthe Pacific Ocean. I mean, how many

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people do that? He was the first. He wasonce one of the world's top offshore power-boat racers. One of his best friends isbusinessman/publisher Malcolm Forbes,who seems to have many of the samequalities (strong T mental and T physical).Remember Malcolm Forbes motorcyclingacross Russia, hot air ballooning in dif-ferent countries? So here is Rocky Aoki.It's hard for me to give him tests, saying,"Now would you like to sit down? Here's a15 item questionnaire." It's just very hardto do. So what I did instead was spend acouple of days with him. I would interviewhim in a very informal way. I find thatsometimes you just cannot give tests tosome people. It turns them off. Collegefreshpersons often seem to be easier to testthan some older students.

Anyway, I use all of these approachesto assessment. I've used physiologicaltests. We just completed a study usingwhat we call the sweat bottle test. Nowthat's a very usable instrument. It takesbut a few minutes to administer, and is atough analogue for GSR, a classic arousalmeasure. I don't have time to go into itnow, but I can give you references if youstay or if you ask me later. The sweat bot-tle test has been written up in journals likePsychophysiology. We have used it inmany different settings: prisons, schools,work places--here and there and else-where. People can be trained to ad-minister it to themselves as well.

Well, here's a model of the creativeside, the T positive side. All of these thingsfor years have been identified as being as-sociated vij.th the creative personality.Frank Barron has been one of the leadingresearchers in this area. You mightremember some of his books such asArtistsin the Making. There, and by others in-cluding our own work research, creativepeople have been shown to have high ener-gy, preference for complexity, variety of in-terests, divergent thinking,nonconformity, risk taking, curiosity. Inour research these are all attributes of the

type T personality. I believe further thatthere are brain bases for it. Therefore, iftrue, that explicity embeds creativity inthe central nervous system.

Conclusion

Well, let me wrap it up with the grandscheme. I believe that America is a type Tnation and we need to understand thatquality if we are ever to survive into thecenturies ahead. I told you that I woulduse a simple approach. I'd take a straightforward idea like type T and try to accountfor everything. So now I'm attempting toaccount for everything: history, survival,all of those big ticket items. Crank theclock back a few hundred years to thepeople who discovered this country. Theyhad to be type T. If you set out from Lis-bon, Portugal on a 40 foot wooden bark, onthe Atlantic Ocean and all you knew is thatyou were heading west, you might even falloff because they didn't know for sure.. .youhad to be a type T. . .risk taking, stimula-tion seeking, adventurous, excitementseeking kind of person. You had to thriveon the unknown, the uncertain. There-fore, I think we were founded by type T per-sons. Not everybody was a type T andthere were varying degrees of it, but I thinkthat that was a powerful part of our origin.I earlier mentioned the genetic role. Sotype T comes rolling down through the cen-turies under some genetic influence. Inaddition, I think we've created a system oflaws and government that is conducive totype T behavior. Type T's like freedom,lots of elbow room, they show inde-pendence of judgement, they like a lot ofchoice. We have created a system of lawsthat is probably more conducive to inde-pendence and freedom than most othercountries in the world today; there is a lotof degrees of choice. If! am right, that saysa lot about how we need to govern thiscountry. If we tie up the people too much,in too many rules and regulations, wedestroy the very thing that made this

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country great.A final word on immigrants. We are

significantly a nation of immigrants, his-torically. Wave upon wave of immigrantshave come to these shores. I think im-migrants keep that type T flame alive. Iwas delighted to read a note in ScienceMagazine recently on immigrantentrepreneurs. Some demographer haddone an analysis of entrepreneurship inAmerica and it turned out that much of theentrepreneurial vitality can be laid at thedoorstep of immigrants. So, that againreinforces the whole theory.

If I'm right, that relative to many othercountries, e can be reasonably thought ofas a type T nation, then it means that wewill be enormously creativethe Ttremendous creative energy on the onehandand we will be enormously violentand destructive on the other hand; the Tnegative. These arise from the samesource. I think everybody will agree withthe T minus side of it. Wherever you go,people say, "What a violent country."Rosemary Gartner co-authored an impor-tant book recently called Crime andViolence in Cross-National Perspective.She traced crime statistics around theworld for the last 75 y:ars or so, and indeedwe are right on the top of the charts! It is,however harder to get data on how creativewe are, but I have taken a look at the NobelPrize as one index of a kind of nationalcreativity, if you will. It's probably as goodas any other. Our analysis indicates that

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the United States almost owns the NobelPrize! It shocked even me. What we didwas an analysis over 75 years, of the award,in three 25-year periods. In the last 25years, almost 45% of all people receivingthe Nobel Prize were American. Russiawas less than 20%; Japan, as I recall, wasless than 10%. There was no country evenin shooting range of the United States. Infact, if you take a look at the curves, youwould predict that within perhaps 10 yearsthe United States might account for 50%or more of pers.-- -eceiving the NobelPrizes. Yr- propose all sorts ofhypotheses as to why that is true, but evencontrolling for population, that is an out-standing figure.

So what we have to do, in my judge-ment, is rucrease this type T quality. Thisis our great strength and this is our greatweakness. We have to inculcate creative,hezItl,y risk `icing. We have to inculcatepositive stimulation seeking, the T posi-tive, and at the same time hopefully we willbe diminishing some of the T minus.Education has, I think, 8 tremenclens roleto play in all of this. The next century isgoing to be the second grtst Age of Ex-ploration. I have no doubt about that. Weare exploding into outer space and intoinner space - -the mind. For the type T per-sonality, that is their natural venue.These are the kind of people who thrive inthat sort of milieu of invention and dis-covery and exploration, and we need to en-courage that development.

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TECHNOLOGY AND ADULT COGNITION

The topic of this paper, "Technologyand Adult Cognition," is an appropriatedescription of the current state of researchin instructional technology. Past use andresearch focused on the external variablesof media and their effect on learning, whilethe more current questions deal with theinternal processing of informationreceived from the media. What I wouldlike to present in this paper are trends inmedia research which led up to this cur-rent stai1.3, describe current trends, andfinally propose future directions of re-search with the latest interactive technol-ogy.

In order to address the topic, however,one must first have a cl3ar understandingof the terms, technology and cognition, asthey are being presented here. The useand definition of terms are consistent withthose in the Educational Technology: AGlossary of Terms (1977). Technology isdefined as the hardware and software usedin instruction. Technology, however,takes on a broader definition in the field toinclude the process of designing anddeveloping instruction. In an effort to nar-row the scope of the topic as it, relates toadult cognition, I choose to focus more onthe hardware and software aspects ofmedia. Media are defined, therefore, asthe "physical tools of instructional technol-ogy." In other words, media include print,audio, video, film, slides, computersoftware, etc. The term cognition has beenwell defined by the preceding authors andis used here to mean the mental processes

Barbara Grabowski is Associate Professor ofInstructicasal Design, Development, and Evaluationat Syracuse University.

Barbara Grabowski

through which an individual obtainsknowledge and understanding.

Past Media Research

In an effort to define a future researchagenda, the first step is to critically reviewtrends of research in the past. The mediaresearch history is long, the number ofstudies, vast. Although there are many re-searchers who have attempted to drawconclusions about this research, most oftheir conclusions were the same. Theyfound that the questions asked were thewrong ones, the methodology flawed, andthe results insignificant, along with onemajor problem being the lack of a unifyingconceptual framework (Bovy, 1981; Clark,1983; Clark and Snow, 1975; Fleming andLevie, 1978; Hannafin, 1985; Levie, 1987;Salomon and Clark, 1987; Salomon andGardner, 1984; Schramm, 1977; Shlechter,1986; Torkelson, 1987). In reviewing thislist of researchers, it is most notable thatthese problems are still being discussedeven in 1987. This is important becauseone still finds media comparison studiesbeing conducted and reported in the litera-ture even today. I would like to summarizesome of the points of these researchers, notto prolong the discussion, but to use themto point to current trends and the promisefor the future.

Much of this early research is sum-marized by a keystone report by Jamison,Suppes and Wells (1974). In their review,media comparison studies were syn-thesized using a technique Clark andSalomon (1987) call a "box score approach"to determine the most effective medium.The effectiveness of television was beingcompared to the traditional classroom.

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Slides were compared to television, film,computers, etc. Few differences werefound, with most of the studies resulting inno significant differences. Where sig-nificance was actually found, researchersconcluded, mostly incorrectly, that it wasthe medium that made the difference,when in actuality, upon closer investiga-tion, those results came from the instruc-tional strategies used such as betterorganized material, prompting, repeatedexposure, cuing strategies, interactions,advance organizers and not the technologyitself (Bovy, 1981). When these other vari-ables were held constant except for the:medium, few differences were found. Theconclusion is that, in fact, media are "merevehicles" for the delivery of instruction(Clark and Salomon, 1987). Many re-searchers are now proposing that any ob-jective can be taught with just about anymedium (Bovy, 1981).

Other important and more currentreviews of media research have been con-ducted by Kulik and several colleagues andare worth notini :sere (Kulik, Kulik, andCohen, 1979, 1980; Cohen, Ebling, andKulik, 1981; Kulik, Bangert, and Williams,1983). Primarily, these studies syn-thesized research using the more advancedstatistical techniques of meta-analysie.Results reported by these researchersshowed some positive trends toward theuse of computers. These results, however,are currently being challenged as alsobeing confounded in an ongoing discussionin the literature by Kulik and Clark (1983).

The results of several decades of mediaresearch clearly indicate that learning wasnot c zu xi by the medium but by othervariables not yet defined. I turn now tocurrent research trends.

Current Media Research

What is interesting, historically, is thatthere were researchers who were propos-ing that understanding learning frommedia was more complicated than simply

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studying gross media comparisons, al-though they were largely ignored (Torkel-son, 1987). They suggested that learninginvolved an interaction between the in-dividual and the stimulus material. Cog-nitive functioning was beginning, eventhen, to play a part in the investigation ofthe effectiveness of media.

In three excellent articles, Clark andSalomon (1987), Torkelson (1987), andBovy (1981) summarize the impact ofcog-nitive psychology on the changing focus ofinstructional media research. They tracethe most significant beginnings with theevolution of three important theories:Goodman's symbol system theory (1968),Olson's theory of instructionmeans (1976),and Salomon's media attributes theory(1979), and further discuss the implicationof information processing theories onlearning from media and resulting re-search. What I will do is highlight some ofthose trends, and refer you to these sum-maries for the detail.

Briefly, Goodman suggested that asymbol was anything that could be used ina referential way, and therefore, symbolswere the important variables to inves-tigate in research rather than the mediumwhich carried the symbols. The core of thetheory centered around the notationalvalues of the symbols. A symbol's nota-tional value was determined by its directcorrespondence to its referent. In otherwords, a symbol could have only one inter-pretation, as with musical notations, ormany interpretations as with the symbolsused in pictoral representation. Resear-chers were beginning to see the sig-nificance of the many interpretations ofone picture by various individuals viewingit, thereby impacting on the variability oflearning.

Olson's theory of instructional meansalso considered the individual, but in a dif-ferent way. He contends that knowledgestructure and the skills for interpretingsymbols combine to yield understanding.As a learner observes a picture, knowledge

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is conveyed, as well as skills for interpret-ing the picture. Without skills in the sym-bol system, no knowledge can be gained.His theory provides the basis for much ofthe visual literacy research of the seventiesand eighties.

Salomon (1979) in his media attributestheory, combined the work of Goodman'ssymbol systems and Olson's theory of in-structional means in an important way.Salomon based his theory on two assump-tions: a) both the media and the humanmind employ symbols to represent, store,and manipulate information; and b) someof the symbol systems employed in cogni-tion are the symbol systems employed bymedia (Salomon and Clark, p. 468).

In evaluating or conducting researchusing this theory, one must closelyevaluate the actual use of the symbol sys-tems available with the various tech-noLgies. Tin differences in effectivenessbetween media, therefore; may be inter-preted in the use of symbol systems uniqueto a particular medium. Using televisionsimply as a means for delivering a personspeaking should result in no difference ineffectiveness than direct delivery, as wasseen in many of the cases reported in earlyresearch. However, results may be dif-ferent if the symbol systems such as zoom-ing, cuts, fades, etc. are employed.

Another import:ant contribution ofSalomon's theory, which builds on hissecond assumption, deals with the use ofsymbols systems to develop cognitivestrategies within the learners themselves.Some very positive results have been ob-tained in an often quoted study of zoomingtechniques by Salomon (1979). He foundthat Israeli children developed visualskills after being introduced to televisionfor the first time. More research isdefinitely needed which investigates thetraining of higher cognitive processesusing various symbol systems ofthe media.

From this, Salomon recommendedstudying the effects of media attributes oncognitive processes. What he was propos-

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ing in his approach was to identify uniqueattributes and combination of attributes ofthe various media, and to vary those todetermine their effects. This approach hasreceived much support, but unfortunatelyin all of my reading I have found little syn-thesis of results of systematically inves-tigating those media attributes. One of theproblems, as I see it, is that those media at-tributes have not been clearly defined.Most of the references to them are only"such as" examples.

Other Cognitive Processing Theories

Another body of research in the area ofcognition as it impacts on technology dealswith the levels of information processing.As was described in a a earlier paper, informmation processing usually refers to thevarious stages or transformations infor-mation passes through prior to storage inthe long term memory. These stages in-clude short term sensory storage, shortterm memory, working memory, and longterm memory. Currently, Salomon's use ofsymbol systems to aid in the processing ofinformation is being challenged. What issuggested is that the use of symbols sys-tems which match cognitive processing ac-tually may supplant active cognitiveprocessing and, thereby, impair learning(Bovy, 1981). Future research needs toconsider, therefore, the use of media at-tributes at the various levels of informa-tion processing, especially if matchingcognitive processes may have a mathe-mathanic effect on learning at the deeperlevels of thinking.

Future Research

What was learned then, from thesedecades of research? The trend, fortunate-ly, has moved away from conducting grossmedia comparison studies and toward theinvestigation of the effect of symbol sys-tems used by the media on cognitiveprocessing and vice versa. Salomon

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(1979), therefore, suggests four areas ofpotential research:

-what and how people learn frommedia;

-what functions people attribute tomedia and the gratifications the mediaoffer them;

-how adult's varying aptitudes interactwith alternative media; and

-how the symbol systems of the mediainteract with the cognitive functions oftheir users.

With the development of the new tech-nologies, specifically computer based in-teractive -video, I believe that we have atour fingertips a very powerful tool for con-ducting research in adult cognition. Iwould like to address this area next. As aresearch tool for investigating symbol sys-tems/media attributes and their, effect oncognitive processes, the combination of in-teractive video and the computer is ideal.This powerful combination of media al-most guarantees that the research ques-tions generated will no longer be mediacomparison studies. A closer look at thenew technology is warranted to under-stand why this is so.

Computer-based interactive video con-tains the capabilities of all of the othermedia, except for print. Since films,videotapes, and slide-tape programs can bestored on disc, visual images in the form oftext, motion, stills, plus audio can be ac-cessed. Treatments are, therefore,designed around the media attributesavailable rather than film, slides, ortelevision. The computer combined withthe videodisc adds a le 41 of interactivitynever before available with a singlemedium.

Besides the media attributes commonto the individual media, additional at-tributes are available and can be put undergreater control of the learner. For ex-ample, the learner can control fading inand out of a computer-generated graphicoverlay onto a realistic image from thevideodisc. Simplifying information in the

36

instruction is at the direction of the stu-dents, and only if they need it. Learnerscan call up alternative representations ofthe same information, such as visual,auditory, or text-based descriptions forfurther clarification. Attentio a focusingdevices can be automatically added if thestudent misses a concept or an idea. Theimportant point here is the attention givento the learner as an individual interactingwith the learning material and the designof learning material which more closelymatches individual cognitive processingstrategies.

The adaptive capability of the interac-tive video and the computer also offer ex-citing potential in the investigation ofquestions relating to modalities of learningand cognitive schema. With the data col-lection power of the computer to gather in-formation regarding student responses,response times, response patterns, andstore massive data bases of informationthat can be drawn upon relationally, anexpert's structure of knowledge on a topiccan be stored while a typology of how alearner approaches a task can be recordedand investigated. This exciting area iscommonly known as intelligent computerassisted instruction or ICAI. For directioin this area we look to cognitive schematheory. With this technology, research canprogress beyond just investigation of in-dividual differences. Intra-individual dif-ferences proposed by Kyllonen, Lohmanand Snow (1984), who suggest that an in-dividual does not have just one cognitivestyle or process, but rather has manywhich change over time and over tasks, canbe explored,

Conducting research in these areaswill yield few important results unless it isconducted within a unifying conceptualframework to direct both the definition andthe interpretation of the research studies.Following the guidance provided bySalomon's attributes theory, I believe thatit will be important to define this concep-tual framework around the media at-

44

tributes available within the computer-based interactive video medium. Given,also, the current state of research in media,this agenda should investigate the inter-section of these media attributes with tw-)other important variables: individual dif-ferences in terms of cognitive processing,and content type. Significant research onthe interactions of these variables wouldcontribute to an understanding of how in-itividuals learn and how instruction shouldbe designed. A very important next step isto specifically identify the relevant vari-ables which would fall under each categoryand is the next task in my own research.

References

Association for Educational Communica-tions and Technology (1977). Educa-tional technology: A glossary of terms,1. Washington, D.C.: AECT.

Bovy, R. (1981). Successful instructionalmethods: A cognitive informationprocessing approach. EducationalCommunications and TechnologyJournal, 29(4), 203-217.

Clark, R. E. (1983). Reconsidering re-search on learning from media. Reviewof Educational Research, 53(4), 445-460.

Clark, R. E. & Salomon, G. (1987). Mediain teaching. In M. C. Whittrock (Ed.),Third handbook of research on teach-ing. New York: Macmillan.

Clark, R. E. & Snow, R. E. (1975). Alter-native designs for instructional tech-nology research. AV CommunicationReview, 23(4), 373-394.

Cohen, P., Ebling, B. & Kulik, J. (1981). Ameta-analysis of outcome studies ofvisual based instruction. EducationalCommunication and Technology Jour-nal, 29(1), 26-36.

Fleming, M. L. & Levie, H. (1978). Instruc-tional message design. EnglewoodCliffs, NJ: Educational TechnologyPublications.

Goodman, N. (1968). Languages of art. In-dianapolis, IN: Hackett.

Hannafin, M. J. (1985). Empirical issuesin the study of interactive video.Educational Communication andTechnology Journal, 33, 235-237.

Jamison, D., Suppes, P., and Wells, S.(1974). The effectiveness of alternativeinstructional media: A survey. Reviewof Educational Research, 44, 1-68.

Kulik, C. Kulik, J & Cohen, P. (1980). In-structional technology and collegeteaching. Teaching ofPsychology, 7(4),199-205.

Kulik, J., Bangert, R. & Williams, G.( 1983). Effects of computer-basedteaching on secondary school students.Journal of Educational Psychology,75(1), 19-26.

Kulik, J., Kulik, C. & Cohen, P. (1979).Research on audio-tutorial instruction:A meta-analysis of comparativestudies. Research in Higher Educa-tion, 11(4), 321-341.

Kyllonen, P. C., Lohman, D. F. & Snow, R.E. (1984). Effects of aptitudes,strategy training, and task facets onspatial task performance. Journal ofEducational Psychology, 76(1), 130-145.

Levie, W. H. (1987). Research on pictures:A guide to the literature. In D. M. Wil-lows & H. A. Houghton (Eds.), Thepsychology of illustration, Vol. 1: Basicresearch. New York: Springer-Verlag.

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Olton, D. (1976). Toward a theory of in-structional means. EducationalPsychologist, A2, 14-35.

Salomon, G. (1979). Interaction of media,cognition end learning. San Francisco:Jossey Bass.

Salomon, G. & Gardner, H. (1984). Thecomputer as educator: Lessons learnedfrom television research. CambridgeMA: Harvard University GraduateSchool of Education.

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Schramm, W. (1977). Big media: Littlemedia. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.

Shlechter, T. M. (1986). An examination ofthe research evidence for computer-based instruction in military training-technical report 722. Alexandria, VA:U.S. Army Research Institute for theBehavioral and Social Sciences.

Torkelson, G. M. (2987). Theoretical basesfor research in media. Canadian Jour-nal of Educational Communication,16(1), 3-9.

46

ENHANCING COGNITIVE SKILLS

An important practical question forcognitive and educational psychologists iswhether or not cognitive skills can be en-hanced by various kinds of instruction(see, for example, Baron & Sternberg,1987). This question has become increas-ingly important in recent years as manyuniversities (including Mmtana StateUniversity) have taken steps to implementor to revise a general core curriculum forall students. Typically, a core program in-cludes several basic skills courses such aswriting, speech, and mathematics. Someuniversitiesnotably all of those in theCali' rnia State University System - -arenow also requiring that all students take acourse in critical thinking. There areprobably several good reasons why therehas been a tendency to require such acourse. One reason is that many peoplehave observed that college students oftendo not seem to acquire basic critical think-ing skills as an inevitable result of a tradi-tional university education. And there areprobably many more adults who haven...sver attended college who alsodemonstrate grossly deficient criticalthinking skills. I have even observed thisdeficiency in the speeches and memorandaof a few university administrators, espe-cially when they fail to appreciate my owninsightful analysis of a situation.

I will begin by briefly describing themain chili acteristics of a thinking-skillscourse that I have been teaching at Mon-

- tana State University. Then I will discusssome recent issues concerning the poten-tial effectiveness of such courses. These is-sues stem from a consideration of the

Richard Block is Professor of Psychology at MontanaState University.

Richard A. Block

differences between the thinking ofnovices and experts on any particular sub-ject. Finally, because I hope that at leastsome of you are interested in doing evalua-tive research, I will discuss advantagesand disadvantages of different approachesto research on the effects of thinking-skillstraining.

Thinking Skills Course

For the past 13 years or so, I havetaught an upper-division course on cogni-tive processes. As the field of cognitivescience has matured, my course has in-cluded more and more direct instruction inpractical thinking skills. Eventually, thispractical training was simply occupyingtoo much of the course, and I thought thatthis instruction could easily be offered in aseparate course.

Several years ago, we decided to teachsuch a separate thinking-skills course.The first year, Shannon Taylor, who isfrom Business Management, was also in-volved in designing and teaching thecourse. The course is now a core cur-riculum course in the Social Sciences. It isnot, however, required for all MSU stu-dents, as such a course would be in theCalifornia State University system.

In deciding what content to include ina beginning-level thinking-skills course, Inaturally considered five major categoriesof cognitive skills. These five categories,then, formed the focus of the course:hypothesis formation and evaluation,judgment and decision making, problemsolving, reasoning, and memory. I expectthat this selection might gradually changens my teaching of general thinking skillsevolves. T.7ov,ever, these basic emphases of

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the course have not changed much over thepast several years.

I do not provide any direct training inother areas of cognitive psychology, thosewhich seem less amenable to enhance-ment. These. include skills involved in at-tention and perception, among others. Atthe present time, very little of the kind ofappropriate applied work has been done inthese other areas.

Cognitive Strategies

My general approach is to review verybriefly cognitive research on any topic,especially research that concerns commonpitfalls in thinking. Then I introduce thestudents to various strategies to guidethinking, I illustrate the situations inwhich certain strategies may be useful,and I provide examples and extensivepractice in the use of these strategies.

Let me give you some examples. I at-tempt to enhance my students' reasoningskills by introducing them to a specificstrategy involving Venn diagrams. I teachthem a wide range of problem-solvingheuristics, such as heuristics of simplifica-tion, working backward, and means-endanalysis. I introduce them to a decision-making strategy involving decision trees.Because I cannot assume that all studentshave the same amount of knowledge in anyparticular domain, I try to generate ex-amples from the shared experiences of allof our students, mostly involving everydaysituations. I will have more to say aboutthe issue of teaching thinking skills andthe problem of domain-specific knowledgelater.

Managerial Strategy

Some research -- notably that of Schoen-feld (1979), a mathematics professor--sug-gests that students who are taughtcognitive strategies may not be able to usethem effectively. They seem to lack themetacognitive skills needed to organize

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their use of the strategies. In earlier times,the difficulty might have been seen tocause a failure of the instruction to "trans-fer" into the everyday realm. One possiblesolution to the problem is to accompany theinstruction in cognitive strategies with ageneral metacognitive planwhat Schoen-feld calls a "managerial strategy," andwhat others call "executive control." 11

diagram of such a managerial strategyresembles a flow-chart depicting the majorsteps required from an initial analysis of aproblem situation to the evaluation of atentative solution. Recursive loops are ex-plicitly built in to depict and circumventthe many dead-ends that even en ,--:pertmight encounter. In the past, I have usual-ly taught Schoenfeld's diagram, hismanagerial strategy; but on occasion Ihare also suggested that students con-str act their own overall plan, then com-pare it with one like Schoenfeld's.

Ecological Relevance

Another possible way of solving the"transfer" problem is to use many differentkinds of everyday examples to illustratethe wide range of potential use of cognitivestrategies. One generalization from somepast research is that using abstract, puz-zle-like problems with little "real-world"relevance seems contraindicated. Some ofthe previous attempts to teach generalthinking skills were probably doomed tofailure from the start because of the lack ofecological relevance of the exercises andexamples.

I do not think that a thinking-skillscourse should merely attempt to improveperformance on standard intelligence, ap-titude, or even critical-thinking tests.Those kinds of tests often contain ratherartificial items with little or no ecologicalvalidity. However, in my course I do useexamples from standardized tests like theGraduate Record Examination, since testslike these are indeed very ecologicallyrelevant for some of my students. Al-

4

though it is not a major goal, I would hopethat my students might do better on suchtests than they would without any think-ing-skills instruction.

Writing and Thinking

Much recent work suggests that thereis an intimate link between the develop-ment of skills needed to write clear ex-pository prose and the development ofeffective thinking skills. This is what un-derlies the notion of "writing across thecurriculum," which has been adopted hereat MSU. Whenever possible I have tried toincorporate short writing assignments inmy course. I think that this may be espe-cially important whenever some moreabstract or mathematical strategy or tech-nique is taught, such as Bayes' theorem.In general, though, having to write adescription of various techniques, variousstages in problem solving, or various typesof decisions probably brings students to adeeper understanding of the interrelation-ships among the components involved.Thus, writing assignments are an essen-tial aspect of my thinking-skills course.

Thinking and Domain-SpecificKnowledge

Some recent research on the cognitiveprocesses of experts and the developmentof expert systems has become cited withgreater frequency by cognitive scientists.This evidence seems to suggest that any at-tempt to teach general thinking skills islikely to fail. For example, Resnick (1983a)argued that cognitive performancedepends intimately on knowledge relatedto a specific task, not merely "disembodiedprocesses of thinking" (p. 478). This claimseems quite appropriate in the light ofwhat is known about cognitive processes.However, in a subsequent letter Resnick(1983b) asserted that specific knowledgeaffects the form of a person's reasoning andthat "if reasoning can be taught, it can

probably only be done in the context ofspecific domains of knowledge" (p. 1006).

Ina recent review article, Glaser (1984)suggested similarly that "thinking isgreatly influenced by experience with newinformation" (p. 98). He argued that abroad spectrul a of thinking skills might bemore effectively enhanced while providingeducation in content-specific domains ofknowledge than by teaching special think-ing-skills courses or programs. In short,both Resnick and Glaser have argued thatthe available evidence suggests that it isfutile to try to teach general thinking skillsoutside the context of domain-specificknowledge and training.

In a published comment of mine, I ar-gued that there is actually very littleevidence that thinking is not able to be en-hanced by thinking-skills courses orprograms (Block, 1985). Instead, themeager evidence that is available suggeststhat general thinking-skills courses orprograms might have a substantial, posi-tive effect that will be transferable into avariety of content-specific domains. Whatwe desperately need at the present time isadditional evidence that there are ways ofteaching general thinking skills which willproduce a long-lasting enhancement ofstudents ability to think effectively- -andto do so in a wide variety of contexts andsituations. Until we are able to providethat sort of evidence, the arguments of Res-nick, Glaser, and others will necessari berecognized as somewhat valid. I think thatwe need much more evidence before we caneven Legin to understand the complexrelationships between general thinking -skills training, domain-specific knowledge,and transfer of training. And we certainlyshould not prematurely close the books ongeneral thinking-skills courses.

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Assessing Thinking-Skills Courses

Unfortunately, much of the crucialevidence that we need is extremely dif-ficult to obtain. Let us take a critical look

at the assessment of thinking skills. As Iargued earlier, it is essential that we as-sess the progress made in enhancing criti-cal thinking skills of our students. Thedevelopment of thinking-skills courses,whether designed for college students ornon-college adults, must be accompaniedby the use of appropriate evaluation tech-niques.

Subjective Techniques

Generally speaking, assessment caneither be subjective or objective. The sub-jective techniques are interesting, but notvery convincing to most people because ofbiases, demand characteristics, and so on.Subjective assessment can be obtainedfrom the professor, the students, or both.It would be surprising indeed if the profes-sor were not enthusiastic about the effectsof the course, and I evaluate my thinking-skills course positively. My students,ttsough, are also very positive. In additionto using a more traditional course evalua-tion f-mm, i have asked my students: "Doyou feel that you aro better thinker as aresult of having taken this course?" Near-ly all s.3, "yes," and they cite such changesas: '1 have loarne:/ to look in depth atproblems," "I think things through," "Ihave learnerl 'Adore ways to solve problemsand a more creative way of thinking," andsoon. A positive attitude is imporLoit, andmy students seem to have one.

Objective Technique;

Final Examination. Naturally, a skep-tic will remain skeptical, so we need to usesome objective kinds of measres. Butwhat? We could compare the performanceof students on tt final course exam withthat of a matched control group. However,if the exam contains items on which stu-dents received direct instruction, no onewould be terribly surprised if their perfor-mance was better.

Performance in other courses. We42

could also look at a student's overall gradepoint average in the years following thecourse. Unfortunately, at many univer-sities critical-thinking skills might tend tobe punished rather than rewarded, espe-cially if the student challenges aprofessor's thinking on some topic. Fur-ther, we cannot control differences in thedifficulty level of courses which studentselect to take.

Intelligence or critical-thinking tests.Another proposed way of assessing im-provements in thinking is to see whetheror not intelligence or critical-thinking testscores increase. Evidence indicates that,in fact, IQ scores do increase slightly as aresult of some kinds of intensive problem-solving or thinking-skills programs (seeSternberg & Detterman, 1983). However,there is the lingering question of whetheror not these improvements are merely theresult of training in test itemswhat iscalled "teaching for the test"--rather thantruly general enhancements of thinkingskills.

Piagetian tasks. Much the same couldbe said about the apparent progression ofsome thinking-skills students from con-crete operational thought into formaloperational thought. Although this mightreflect a broadly applicable enhancementof thinking skills, wo again do not know towhat extent the teaching program hastaught students simply to perform well onthe Piagetian tasks.

Think 'g Skills ar' Knowledge. s

The major problem with all of these as-MMOTP sechniques is that one never

-,,xtent to which the thinking"11. z, have been taught are restricted

nerality to those that are required tom well on the test. There are a few

W =s around this problem, though.First, one could explicitly teach only a

subs& 'f the skills- -those necessary to per-form N, on about half of the item types

on the criterion test--and not teach anothersubset of skills--those necessary to performwell on another half of the item types onthe test. Then one could see the extent towhich thinking skills necessary to performwell on the latter subset of test-item typesare either the same as or are transferablefrom the skills that were explicitly taught.The main drawback to this type of think-ing-skills instruction is that it is still"teaching for the test"--even if only forabout half of the item types on the test.Few instructors and even fewer studentswould find this kind of instruction satisfy-ing.

There is another alternative, however.Rather than assess performance on acriterion test solely in terms of the numberof correct responses, one could use multi-variate statistical techniques, such ascluster analysis and factor analysis, to ex-plore changes in the underlying structureof cognitive skills and knowledge.

One excellent example of this kind oftechnique is the work of Schoenfeld andHerrmann (1982). They were interestei indifferences between expert and novicemathematical problem solvers, specificallyin the perception of problems and in theunderlying "knowledge structures."Rather than testing their subjects onmathematical problems and scoring per-formance in term of correct or incorrectanswers, they asked subjects simply tocategorize a number of mathematicalproblems. Subjects sorted the problemsinto different piles on the basis of theirsimilarity. A cluster analysis revealedthat mathematical novices tended to class-ify problems on the basis of "surface struc-ture." However, both mathematicsprofessors and students who had taken anintensive 18-day course on problem-solv-ing strategies tended to classify the testproblems according to principles relevantto problem solution--what might be calleda "deep structure" of mathematicsproblems.

I think that Schoenfeld andHerrmann's research exhibits a powerfulmethod for assessing changes in thinkingskills in such a way that alternative ex-planations for the expected enhancementsare ruled out. In addition, their researchis a good example of the kind of work thatis urgently needed on the relationship be-tween general thinking skills and domain-specific knowledge.

Other recent research suggests thatthe kinds of problem-solving strategiesthat are used by novices differ from thoseused by experts. For example, noviceswork backward and use means-endanalysis more often that experts do. Ex-perts often are able to use a general rule orschema to simply and effortlessly work for-ward. This kind of qualitative differencebetween the cognitive processes of novicesand experts is certainly interesting.However, I am not so sure that it suggestsany ways of helping people make the tran-sition from novices to experts.

Someone once said that the way to im-prove your problem-solving skills is tosolve a lot of problems. There are certain-ly many people who have become expertthinkers and problem solvers without anyexplicit cognitive-skills training. Perhapsthe role of the cognitive psychologist, then,should be a bit more modest--that of speed-ing the transition from novice to expert,and making it a bit less painful.When I came to MSU and learned what

the official slogan of the University here is,I was rather appalled. Most universitieshave a nice, esoteric Latin slogan on theirofficial seal. Well, we don't. But now thatI think about it, perhaps it's not such a badslogan after all: "Education for Efficien-cy." What I have been trying to do in mycourse can be thought of as enhancing theefficiency of thinking skills, in much thesame sense that experts in a particulardomain are able to perform more efficient-'y than novices.

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References

Baron, J. B., & Sternberg, R. J. (Eds.).(1987). Teaching thinking skills:Theory and practice. New York:Freeman.

Block, R. A. (1985). Education old think-ing skills reconsidered [Comment].American Psychologist, 40, 474-475.

Glaser, R.(1984). Education and thinking:The role of knowledge. AmericanPsychologist, 39, 93-104.

Resnick, L. B. (1983a). Mathematics andscience learning: A new conception.Science, 220, 477478.

Resnick, L. B. (1983b). Math and scienceeducation [Letter]. Science, 221,1006,1008.

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Schoenfeld, A. H. (1979). Can heuristics betaught? In J. Lochhead & J. Clemente(Eds.), Cognitive process instruction:Research on teaching thinking skills(pp. 315-338). Philadelphia, PA:Franklin Institute Press.

Schoenfeld, A. H., & Herrmann, D. J.( 1982). Problem perception andknowledge structure in expert andnovice mathematical problem solvers.Journal of Experimental Psychology:Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 8,484-494.

Sternberg, R. J., & Detterman, D. K.(Eds.). (1979). Human intelligence:Perspectives on its theory and measure-ment. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

5 2

HOW WE SOLVE PROBLEMS

There are at least four areas of cogni-tion that my colleagues and I have beenworking on over the past five years: (a)problem solving in a specific contentdomain, (b) automaticity in verbal process-ing, (c) training in drawing inferences, and(d) the moderating influence of field de-pendence-independence on aptitude-achievement relationships. I will brieflysummarize a research investigation repre-senting each of these areas, then suggestpossible extensions into adult Iopulations.

Phyllis Karns was a member of thenursing faculty when she entered our doc-toral program. She noted that profes-sional nursing associations were assumingthat baccalaureate degree nurses were bet-ter problem solvers than associate degreenurses. The baccalaureate degree nursepresumably has had more theory, morecontent, and greater exposure to oppor-tunities to develop problem solving skillsrelevant to nnrsing wan the associate de-gree nurse, who has been regarded as lit-tle more than a technician. The researchquestion she attempted to answer was: Dobaccalaureate degree prepared nurses dif-fer from associate degree prepared nursesin problem solving performance asmeasured by a latent image branchingsimulation of a patient managementproblem?

Twenty-four associate degree nursesand 31 baccalaureate degree nurses fromselected Wyoming hospitals completed thesimulation instrument, which features anovel situation calling for two nursingdiagnoses, construct validity evidence, and

Charles Moon is Associate Professor of EducationalFoundations and Instructional Technology at theUniversity of Wyoming.

45

Charles E. Moon

an objective scoring procedure. A hierar-chical multiple regression analysis wasconducted, statistically controlling for age,years of health related work experienc'prior to nursing, years of nursing, years ofhigher education, and area of hospitalwork. Educational preparation con-tributed significantly to the explainedvariance in problem solving performanceafter partialing out the covariates, withbaccalaureate prepared nurses scoringhigher on the average than associateprepared nurses. Approximately 8% of thevariance in problem solving performancewas accounted for by educational prepara-tion, with the effects of the covariatesremoved from both problem solving andeducational preparation.

In addition, a content analysis of the"problem space" and pathways taken bythe subjects revealed that 59% of the bac-calaureate prepared nurses and 41% of theassociate prepared nurses took the most ef-ficient pathway to the correct diagnoses.

While critical cues were useu in the for-mulation of tentative hypotheses by mostsubjects, there was evidence of prematureclosure on the part of many subjects rela-tive to final diagnoses.

In an investigation of the effects offamiliar vs. unfamiliar stimulus words andpractice on automaticity in verbal process-ing, Richard Hall used a single task/dualtask paradigm, presenting verbal decodingtasks both orally and visually with readinglevel as a covariate and reaction time thedependent variable. The limited process-ing capacity of attention and the efficacy ofautomaticity in expert problem solversprovided the theoretical basis for thisstudy.

53.

The subjects were thirty 6th and 7th-grade University School students forwhom reading scores on the StanfordAchievement Test were available. Eachsubject's reaction time was measured inmiliseconds at each level of the inde-pendent variables, so that there wererepeated measures on familiar/unfamiliarword conditions, single task/dual condi-tions, and practice trials, for each of orallypresented and visually presented verbaldecoding tasks. Order of treatments wasrandomized over subjects. Treatment im-plementation and reaction time weremanaged by a computer program writtenspecifically for this experiment.

The analyses of covariance, with read-ing level as the covariate, of reaction timeproduced the same pattern of results forthe oral and visual decoding tasks. Therewas a significant practice effect,familiarity effect, and single task effect foreach type of task. That is, reaction timedecreased over practice trials, from un-familiar to familiar conditions, and fromdual task to single task conditions. Whenreading level is partialed from both reac-tion time and each within-subjects vari-able, single/dual task accounted for 25% ofthe RT variance, familiarity/unfamiliarity32% of the RT variance, and practice 34%of the RT variance for the visuallypresented tasks. The corresponding effectsizes for the orally presented tasks were12% for single/dual, 21% for familiar/un-familiar, and 28% for practice. A seren-dipitous finding was a significant practiceby familiarity by single/dual interactionfor oral and a familiarity by single/dual in-tetaction for visual. While we chose to in-terpret these interactions as limitations togeneralizability of the main effects, theymay have implications for theory-basedaptitude-treatment interaction research.

Hoping to increase the verbal abilitiesand mathematical problem solvingabilities of adult basic education students,Charlotte Farr designed an experimentthat contrasted learning vocabulary from

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context and inferential reasoning withtraditional approaches to teachingvocabulary acquisition. She based her in-vestigation on a well-substantiatedrelationship between verbal and mathe-matics abilities and on a part ofSternb erg's triarchic theory of intelligence.

Forty students were pretested on re-searcher-constructed measures of verbalabilities and mathematics problem solvingabilities, 21 of these students receivedtraining in making inferences withanalogies and neologisms, and the remain-ing 19 students received the conventionalinstructional sequence. Following eightweeks of application of the randomly as-signed treatment conditions, the studentswere post tested with parallel-forms of theverbal and mathematics measures. High,middle, and low reading achievementlevels were identified and built into thedesign to increase control and sensitivityof the statistical tests.

A 2 by 3 multivariate analysis ofcovariance revealed no significant dif-ference between treatment conditions.However, there was a positive linearrelationship between reading ability andvocabulary acquisition via correctly com-pleting analogies and neologisms for bothtreatment groups. High ability readerstended to use a more analytic approachand low ability readers a more lwlistic ap-proach. In addition, high ability readerstended to use an exhaustive strategy andlow ability readers an associative one.

In another study, Farr investigatedfield dependence/independence, a cogni-tive style construct, in relation to achieve-ment and aptitude among adult basiceducation students. Sixty students in anABE/GED program were measured withthe Group Embedded Figures Test to as-sess FDI and the Test of Adult BasicEducation to assess vocabulary, referenc-ing, facts, main ideas, and inferencing.Later, these sttdentc were measured withthe Test of General Educational Develop-ment to assess achievement in mathe-

4

matics, writing, reading, social studies,and natural science. FDI was found to berelated to both mathematics and readingachievement, as well as inferencing.Canonical correlation analysis was used totease out the relationships between theTABE scales on the one hand and GEFTand the GED scales on the other. About58% of the variance was shared by the firstcanonical variates.

Possible extensions of these studies toresearch on adult populations are:1. developing problem solving tests based

on simulations in other professionalcontent areas such as engineering,teaching, and law;

2. examining automaticity in adults, witha theoretical framework that includessubstantive and credible interactioninvolving familiarity and single/dualtask variables with novice and expertproblem solvers;

3. appraising the effects of metacognitivetraining on verbal and mathematicalproblem solving abilities;

4. making training programs designed to

increase intellectual functioningmore potent by prolonging as well asintensifying the treatment, andproviding a distinct contrast with acontrol;

5. describing and controlling populationsand samples of adults in terms ofsalient characteristics and consistentparticipation in research studies;

6. sing field dependence/independence totest for interactions with instruction-al methods in affecting cognitive out-comes;

7. combining qualitative researchmethods with quantitative researchmethods in investigating a set of re-search problems;

8. using research to improve theory, andtheory to improve research;

9. developing novel ways of collectingdata, including using the personalcomputer in more flexible ap-proaches; and

10. aggregating existing results in aphilosophy of meta-analysis, andreplicate, replicate, REPLICATE!

FROM RESEARCH TO PRACTICE:THE PRACTITIONER'S PERSPECTIVE

The challenge to the practitioner is totake the research that is presented to us atvarious conferences like this and othersand attempt to modify practices in the fieldbecause of that exposure. The results aresometimes very exciting and sometimesvery frustrating. Research has, however,influenced practice and helped teacherssolve day-to-day problems.

One of the goals of this conference is toencourage research in adult cognition butalso to insure that the research that is dis-seminated is used. It is helpful, then, toexamine some of the ways the research isactually being used by practitioners as ameans to bridge the gap between researchand practice.

Professor McKeachie spoke on the im-portance of motivation and the adultlearner. To illustr "-,e that point, let us con-sider the case of the English Second Lan-gi.',ge (ESL) students enrolled inpost-secondary vocational education.These students frequently do not have thebasic skills necessary to be successful inthe post-secondary vocational educationalprograms that they are attempting. An ex-ample that we can cite is in the health re-lated and office related training programs.The ESL students generally have the skillsto do the manipulative part of the programbut not the needed basic skills to do thereading, and to understand the specificvocabulary and the basic concepts. Thestudent is thus unsuccessful in the cur-riculum. The obvious solution is to removethe student from the vocational cur-riculum and place him or her in a basic

JoAnne EricItsc is Director of Educational f.;rvicesat Havre, Montana Public Schools.

Joanne Erickson

skills program to improve reading, writing,and math skills. That is reasonableenough from our perspective. From thepoint of view of educators, that is obvious-ly what should be done. However, thatdoesn't work for the students because itfails to recognize an important point thatProfessor McKeachie talked about yester-day: basic skill development is not whatthe student is motivated to do. The stu-dent is obviously motivated to obtain skillsthat will get them a job; they fail to sea theconnection between the basic skills theymust obtain and being successful in thevocational curriculum. Without themotivation to continue, they drop out.Research has helped the teachers solvethis problem. Recognizing the importanceof learner motivation, basic skill and voca-tional skill programs are being integratedso that the motivational needs of the stu-dent are kept in mind. Hopefully thisawareness and subsequent programmaticmodifications wi: help us retain studentsand provide them with both the basic andvocational skills they need for employ-ment.

A second problem that practitioners inthe field of adult !earning are strugengwith is teaching writing skills to adults.There is new emphasis in every arena forteaching writing. In adult basic educationthe emphasis is fueled because of the writ-ing component of the GED test.

Some of the research on teaching writ-ing to adults says, quite simply, the way toteach adults to write is to have them write;in other words, practice. The problem ofteaching writing to adults exemplifiesanothtr ofthe key components of adult cog-nition: that of perception. It is pretty hard

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to teach a student to write when their per-ception is, "I cannot write." They've neverbeen successful as writers because anywriting they have done lacked critical com-ponents that are important such as spell-ing, grammar, and punctuation. But,research now indicates that we should as-sign the students writing, have themwrite, and do not correct the grammar,punctuation, or spelling for a long timeuntil they become practiced writers anduntil, in fact, they feel very comfortableabout writing.

Practitioners are now using this re-search and finding quite remarkable suc-cess. Teachers are finding that by usingthe practice of uncorrezted writing, thosestudents who have the perception of "I can-not write; I just can't do that," are alteringthat perception and are then starting tofeel confident about their writing abilities.WILm they start to become successful andget positive feedback about their ideas,(the content rather than the structure), theinstructors can move on to work withstructure. In fact, one teacher reported tome that the results are far better than everexpected. I'm hearir.g that from manyother sources. So, here is a situation whereresearch has been applied to solveproblems.

The variety of prior knowledge that theadult learner brings into the learning set-ting has great importance to the prac-titioner. It is the challenge of the teacherto devise a program that is appropriate forthe individual needs of each learner. Oneof our urograms in the state did quite aninvolved research study on entrance test-ing (Placement testing) tools. Years ago,before we had anything that was normedto adults, they used instruments like theCalifornia Achievement Test (CAT test).When the Test of Adult Basic Education(TABE) test hit the market, it was the testof choice for most adult educators as a diag-nostic tool.

However, some of the teachers in thisprogram felt that their analysis of student

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achievement based on classroom perfor-mance and on teacher devised testing didnot correlate very well with results on theTABE test. Tlecause of this discrepancy,they weren't very comfortable using theTABE test to devise individualizedprograms for their students. This par-ticular project started looking at differentstandardized tests for adults and thentried to compare the various standardizedtests against criterion referenced tests tosee which standardized tests might bemore reflective of their own assessments ofentry level knowledge. In fact, in this par-ticular setting practitioners have nowstopped using the TABE and are using theABLE (Adult Basic Learning Evaluationwhich is produced by Psychological Cor-poration), because they find that it is acloser match to their own measurements ofprior knowledge and can better diagnoseexisting skills and needs of the adultlearners they serve.

Yesterday Dr. Farley talked aboutbrain functioning and personality. charac-teristics and it brought to mind anotherstudy that one of my colleagues is doing onlearning styles and personality styles thatwas motivated by the current research inthis area. This particular practitioneruses two different instruments; one that isprimarily academic and relates to learningstyles, and another that is more related topersonality style. The objective of theteacher involved in this study is to enhancemetacognition; i.e., to try to help adultlearners understand how they learn. Be-cause of greater awareness of their owncognitive processes, they should learn bet-ter. This teacher also attempts to adjusther teaching style so she can maximize stu-dent success with their own learning style.Adjustment of her teaching style is not themain objective so she is willing to acceptsome incompatibility. Her major objectiveis to help students learn to learn, helpthem to be more aware themselves of theirown learning styles and how they can usethis to become more successful students

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and more active learners. The research onmetacognition has certainly enriched ourunderstanding of how our adult learnerslearn and has helped teachers improvetheir teaching and learners improve theirlearning.

Technology is another area where prac-titioners are using research to improvepractice. A recent pilot project in our stateevolved out of a study done at WashingtonState University regarding the barriers toAdult learning in rural settings. Billings,the largest city in Montana and the largestadult education program, undertook aproject to deliver GED education via publicbroadcast television. Students interestedin participating in the project phoned infrom rural communities to the BillingsAdult Learning Center and were given thetimes the programs were to be aired. Theypaid a small fee of $13 for related books andmaterials. These isolated learners werethen able to participate in basic educationlessons by turning on their television setseach day. There was no live audio or visualinteraction.

Two hundred and sixty-seven peopleenrolled in this particular opportunity tostudy for the GED via satellite TV in theirhomes. People in 22 different rural com-munities in southeastern Montana wereinvolved. None of these sites had any otherkind of access to adult basic educationcenters providing organized instruction.Of these 267 individuals, 39 actually com-pleted the C;',ID in this first year.

Here are some of the questions thatneed to be answered regarding this project.Is 39 out of 267 to be considered successfulor not? What was learned by the other par-ticipants who did not complete the GED?Was there learning there that actually ful-filled these students' goals? The stated ob-jective was to complete the GED, but werethere other objectives that were fulfilledwith this particular program?

There is a need to evaluate how peoplefelt about the use of the technology forbasic education. One of the things that the

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project is attempting to do is to identify avolunteer within some of these 22 sites toassist and to encourage the students andthus hopefully to improve goal attainment.They also are attempting to get students tonetwork with other students within thec22 communities. These measures are tocompensate for the lack of interactive op-portunities with the technology beingused. Currently, the only interactive op-portunity students have is to send theirworkbooks to the Billings center for correc-tion. This still does not provide them withany live interactive opportunities for feed-back and encouragement.

The learning center involved iu thispilot program feels that the program wasa success. Mey were able to determinethat the 267 people that participated es-timated that their books were passed to anaverage of four other people. In otherwords, one person bought a set of books,and four others in addition to themselvesused these materials. The actualmeasured impact of the project was toprovide basic skill education to some de-gree to 1335 adult learners. That is pret-ty remarkable when you consider the ruralnature of the area involved in this study.The actual outcomes for the people in-volved need to be identified but the resultsof this project provide these adulteducators with encouragement to continueto examine the research on technology andadult learners and also the research onovercoming barriers to education for theadults they want to be able to serve.

While these are a few examps of suc-cessful application of research to practice,it cannot be taken for granted thatteachers will put the research that we nowhave and are currently attempting todevelop into practice. Adult educationteachers in our state, as well as elsewhere,are attempting to react to an enormouspopulation growth. They are reelingunder sheer numbers of students to serve,struggling to devise individualizedprograms for every student, to nrovide

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needed counseling and support servicesand, in general, are reacting to day-to-dayproblems as they arise. They rarely havethe luxury of time to oramine the currentresearch and plan how that research canbe applied in their classes. Additionally,not all teachers have the skills necessaryto implement the research and some willnot automatically accept the results of re-search.

Including the teacher in the develop-ment, testing, and implementation of re-1: $ earch is critical to develop a wideracceptance and use of educational re-search. Research should be designed in away that it is useful to teachers in order toinsure that it will be used. Furthermore,teachers need support in learning complexnew teaching behaviors. I would en-courage teachers to develop a "self-helpcommunity" or what Bruce Joyce refers toas "coaching teams" when they attend a re-

search conference. These team memberscould then support each other in acquiringnew skills, adapting the research to fittheir unique situations, assisting in ob-serving and recording results, evaluatingsuccess, and providing technical feedbackto one other. While the primary goal of thisconference is to encourage research, thatobjective is for naught if the valuable find-ings that are a result of the research areignored by the audience for whom they areultimately designed--the practitioner. It isencouraging to note that researchers ofadult education recognize the need tobridge the gap between research and prac-tice and consider the practitioners thatmust implement the findings of their re-search as adult learners themselves. In-volving teachers in the planning stages ofresearch as is being done here should in-itiate greater understanding and accep-tance of reeeareh findings.

,rf1111.7.01,

DOING RESEARCH IN ADULT LEARNING

An Interrogator Panel

Panelists: Wilbert McKeachie, Frank Farley, Barbara GrabowskiInterrogator: Gary Conti

Conti: For several years now we inadult education have used the term"andragogy," which we got from MalcolmKnowles, to talk about the teaching andlearning of adults. Knowles has suggestedthat there are several characteristics thatmake adult learners different. (1) Theytend to move from a state of dependency tobeing self-directing human beings. (2They learn according to the social roles andduties they are facing. (3) They havetremendous reservoirs of experience whichaffect their learning. (4/ They seek im-mediate application of things they learn.If these traits are so, how do we tie the con-cepts and research ideas from cognitivesciences to these elements? Or should weeven be looking at these characteristics?

McKeachie: You should be looking atthem. Malcolm has not done any researchon them, as far as I know. I don't thinkthese principles are absolutely true. I donot have the experience with older adultsthat many of you have had, but increasing-ly we are getting larger numbers of olderstudents in our classes. This was especial-ly true when I taught Psychology of Aging.There is a great deal of truth in what Mal-colm says, but the notion that all adultslearn in this same way is hard to accept. Ifind, for exampi e, that some adult learnersare very intellectually curious and not allthat concernel about immediate applica-tion. They are able to think about applica-tions because they do have all that built-inexperience. That helps me as a teacher be-cause they can make ap &cations frommaterial I present. But my conclusion is

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these are topics that need to be inves-tigated rather than assumptions thatshould be taken for granted.

One of my areas of research is anxiety,and I feel that is °he of the major things in-hibiting self-direction in learning. Thereis a kind of challenge versus retreatareaction to uncertainties - -in which adultlearners become anxious about the learn-ing situation. They are likely to ask formore and more directions; yet the task isone of trying to help them develop enoughconfidence so that they can begin to dothings on their own and develop some self-corrective learning skills. That is an areathat can be studied. One of the things thatwe found is that anxious students tend tolack some of the skills in learning that leadto success. As a result they have goodreason to be anxious because, even thoughthey spend a lot of time studying, theystudy by reading and rereading sodmemorizing. If you teach them some studyskills, that tends to reduce their anxiety.We can get a bit of change on a measurethat is called "Need for Cognition" which isa type of self-directed learning. As I recall,we didn't get nearly as much change as Ihad hoped for, but at least it is a topic forfurther research.

Grabowski: I would agree that theyare important areas to be look ad at, espe-cially that whole area of prior knowledge.Adults come to the classroom with welldeveloped cognitive schema. What doesthat have to say for how you should treatthem? How do you adapt to what theyknow? Or should you adapt to what they

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know? Certainly these prior schema do af-fect how they learn.

Farley: I would say: work out ways tomeasure these four principles and get onwith research about them.

Conti: Do you haw. any other insightson how we could measure some of theseconcepts?

Grabowski: One of the things that isinteresting about independent learning isthe need for working in a group and the in-dependent learning environment of com-puter- assisted instruction. That doesn'tcontribute to measurement but it isanother question. How does working alonerelate to the principles of andragogy?

Farley: In terms of measures, thereare all sort of things you could look at. Weseem 'co be stuck on self-directed learning.The other topics seem to be less difficult tomeasure to me, such as prior knowledge or;prior experience. But you could look atthings like locus of control and intrinsicmotivation concepts. There is a rich fertilearea of theory in intrinsic motivation. Deci(that's not Washington D.C. but EdwardDeci) has done very productive and usefulresearch on intrinsic motivation. I thinkthat would be worth looking at. There aremeasures in that area.

There is also attribution. What havebeen the success experiences of adultlearners coming to learning and what aretheir expectations. If I had to name thebiggest, most important psychological con-cept that I could lay on adult education, itwould be motivation. People aren'tmachines and you can't fine tune them. Idon't like the term, knowledge engineer-ing; in fact, I find it quite an unpalatableterm. I don't think you engineerknowledge. So motivt on is one of the bigareas to focus on. That really is capturedin many of the points that you mentioned.There are lots of measures in the field ofm6tivationmeasures like intrinsicmotivation, locus of control, attribution,attributional styles--that can be very use-ful in research with an adult learner. If

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you read any of Bernard Weiner's mostrecent works and check out his referencesyou will find all sorts of things that willlead you to good measures. There is awonderful book called Personality Tests InPrint which is very useful. Also there isthe Mental Measurements Yearbook and soon.

Conti: Here is a more specific questionfrom the audience: How will I recognize anexpert when I see one? What are thecharacteristics that differentiate an expertfrom a novi,* thinker?

MeHeaehie: Clearly there are expertsin different fields. The earliest studieswere on chess players. The hypothesis wasthat the expert would be looking a. lot moremoves ahead. It turns out they don't lookfurther ahead than ordinary chess players,but the big difference is that they see theboard as a pattern. And that is why theycan play a lot of blindfold games at thesame time. It doesn't mean that they havebetter memory for chess boards generally;they have better memory for chess prt-terns that are real playing patterns. If youscattered chess pieces around randomly,they can't remember them any better thananybody else can. So, it is experience ingetting at the thing as a whole. Theproblem with the expert/novice difference,is that such studies do not necessarily tellyou Inw to get there except to have a lot ofexperience at it. There is a Dutchpsychologist named Dellshov, who has aterm that I like. He calls it the "zone ofprobablisity." What he says is that foranyone tackling a problem or a set ofproblems, there are some problems thataren't problems for that person because hehas done them so many times he can dothem automatically. Now two and twoisn't a problem for you; four just pm intoyour head. If you're an automobilemechanic and you deal with a certain kindof car, there are certain things that youjust know what to do. You don't have tothink about it. It's automatized; you seethe problem right away aid you know the

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answer. He says above that zone there isa zone where you don't know the answerand there may be several different ways toapproach the problem. For some kinds ofproblems there may even be several dif-ferent answers that would be good. Then,he suys, above that is a zone where thereis no way you know how to tackle theproblem. It is no longer a problem becauseit is unsolvable for you. He says the dif-ference between the expert and the noviceis that in this domain of expertise, whetherit's teaching or chess or physics or whathave you, the novice has very little that heor she can do automatically, A range ofprobablisity, and a big range of problemsthat are just beyond capability. For ex-ample, a calculus problem; if you only havearithmetic you probably wouldn't be ableto solve it no matter what you do.

Grabowski: From a practicalperspective, the researchers at ConcordiaUniversity are developing "expert" sys-tems, and their strategy is to try to extractinformation from people that they call ex-perts. What they do is select five in-dividuals who are leaders in a particularfield. Then they try to extract this infor-mation and put it into relationships or con-cepts created on large maps. These fiveexperts try to create the schema. At thatpoint then the knowledge engineer's job isto extract the information.

Farley: I'd like to mention that DavidBerliner has been doing research on the ex-pert teacher. He has an article called, "InSearch of the Expert Pedagogue." He isone of the only people I know of who's look-ing exclusively at classroom teaching andexpert versus novice differences in class-room teaching.

McKeachie: Berliner showed, for ex-ample, that if you show an experiencedteacher a picture of a classroom, they pickup things that a student teacher or non-ex-perienced teacher doesn't pick up. Theysee the classroom and what's going on in amore patterned, and actually moredetailed way, than the students do. So in

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some ways it's like the chess experts.Conti: Another question we have is:

To what extent are critical thinkingmodels gender oriented? I guess we couldinclude our "big T little t" theories here too.

Grabowski: There is much researchbeing done on gender. I have lookedthrough the titles of the last AERA con-ference and there were a quite a few paperson gender differences.

Farley: It is an interesting questionbecause it might imply that there areprofound differences in thinking at-tributable to gender. I don't know if thatwould be true or not. Clearly there's a btof interest in gender differences. Carol Gil-ligan has raised the whole issue of concep-tions of moral development, and cognitivedevelopment generally, from a genderperspective. She has found some sig-nificant differences there. But, I must saythat my own sense of it is that there areprobably more individual differences incognitive processes within the gender thanthere are between. That is just my guess.I can't see that in an evolutionary perspec-tive there would be any reason to showsharp differences in gender in such thinly:as thinking and cognition.

Grabowski: You have to be careful ofthe tests that you use when you are look-ing at gender. One of the things that Gil-ligan h..s done in her writing is to say don'tlook at the results alone but look at whodesigned the tests and materials they wereusing.

Farley: The tests may not be goodoperationalizations of the theories. Thethem ies may be gender specific but thefindings may sho' ao difference becausethe tests aren't sensitive to the theory.

McKeachie: I say the same thingabout "type t" so let nee give Frank a chanceto get his ire up.

It seems to me we go through trends.When I was in school the authoritarianpersonality was popular. Then I did re-search on need achievements. Morerecently people have been entranced with

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the Myers-Briggs, Frank was indicatingyesterday that there 5e-I't all that much toleft brain/right brain, hut people are stillinterested in the idea. Actualbr I have astudent working on the Myers-Briggs. Ithink all of these are ways of trying to pickup some key individual differences (includ-ing field dependent/independent that weheard about this morning). They are allgood starts in getting teachers to thinkabout the fact that students are not ahomogeneous mass. So, it is useful to havesome kind of system, usually adichotomous one, whether it's t plushminus, or entraversion/introversion, ormale/female. But this is only a very grossstart. if you get more differentiations, it isprobably better. But the danger is youbegin to think. "Okay, I've got these per-sons classified. He's left brain, she's rightbrain; I've got to teach this one this wayand this one this may; and then I've got theproblem solved." 12 .ople tend to gettrapped into thinking they've get theanswer once they've got the person typedby the particular learning style, or per-sonality chara teristics, or motive, orgender, or whatever it is. As Frank said,the big thing is that within any of thesecategories you've got wide ranges of peopleand a lot of overlapping. So it's good tostart off thinking, "I've got these kinds."But then 'you need to go 71eyond that to say,"Okay, I'll try this became this is a womanor this is a maq," or try this becausethis is a type t plus or a type t minus," orwhat have you. But then to see how itworks and to change your strategy onceyou tried it. It gives you a start on strategybut you should not get trapped into the no-tion that that.', all you have to do.

Farley: I agree totally. We have tostart somewhere; humans differ. Ineducation, we can't treat every kid dif-ferently in a full manner; we have to group.To paraphrase an MSU symbol, "Educa-tion for efficiency," we might call it educa-tion with efficiency in the sense thatultimately, I hope, it would be education

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for understanding. But we have to startsomewhere. The value of studying in-dividual differences and dimensionalisinghuman behavior is to use this information.We need information about the person.We have to have some sense of the person,and that is all that I think these things aredoing.

You said when you were in school ex-traversion was the big thing. Ext reversionstill is a big thing. In fact, I think one ofthe crowning glories of seventy-five yearsof personality research has been the iden-tification of a relatively finite set of rela-tively reliable dimensions along whichpeople can be reasonabt; reliably located.That is really one of the grand accomplish-ments of psychology. We have had manyother things that have gone by thewayside. I am reminded of a famous APAp. sidenV al address entitled "The Riseand Fall of the Laws of Learning," by oneWilbert J. Molteachie. For a long time wethonght we had the laws of learning. Iremember taking dames where we talkedof the 7aws of learning, Weli, where ar3 thelaws of learning? They're gone and BillMcKeachie wrote the epitaph and the obitfor them. New we have vignition and cog-nitive psychology and we'll see how far thatgoes. Hopefully all of these things add alittle bit to knowledge.

In terms of individual differences, Ithink we have shown substantial, cumula-tive development over the last seventy-fiveyearn We are more sophisticated inmeasurement; we have been able to con-nect these individual differences to biologi-cal attributes to some extent. In thehistory of science that's an enormous ac-complishment because ultimately psychol-ogy can not be treated in isolation;education can not be isolated. All of thesethings are part of the whole and full ac-counting of human behavior and thinking.We do have fads and things come and go,but there is cumul:nive progress.

Melipaehle: I think what is impor-tant is to ..o research on these things. I'm

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an individual difference psychologist too. Iwork with. anxiety. As I worked with it, Istarted out thinking all I have to do is geta general test of anxiety. Then I found outthat there are anxious students who havegood study skills and they are differentfrom anxious students who don't have goadstudy skills. There are differences be-tween people who aro anxious in testingsituations and those who are anxious inthe learning situation. You find out that ifyou do research you're not as likely to gettrapped into ever simplified notions. So Ithink that any area such as .eld inde-pendence/field dependence or leftbrain/right brain has led to good research.But some people have kind of picked themup and have run off with them. Well, thesame thing happened with Skinner. Skin-ner himself is really a brilliant man, andas you talk to him you know he can reallyhandle things. But you talk to his disciplesand it's quite different!

Farley: An important thing is thatoae does-a't willy-nilly select measures todo this and that, and run correlations, andthink that's the end of it. There should bea theoretiPal background that is powerful,and you should have some sense that youare going somewhere with it. I wouldpropose more time be spent thinking aboutthe design of the research than is spentcarrying out the research. We need moreelegant studies and less just throwing abunch of variables together and doingmulti-variate and factor analyses or some-thing like that. Spend more time thinldngabout what the question is that you have,and what is the most efficient design to getthere, and then do it. Often you'll find thatyou get powerful, profoand answerswithout some enormous number crunch-ing operation. My hero in psychology isDonald Head whose whole life was spentwith simple, elegant, beautiful experi-ments, and that ma4 turned around thehistory of psychology in many areas. Hiswhole thing was to think of the cleanest,neatest, most elegant study. Unfortunate-

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ly computers have seduced us somewhatinto a number crunching science.

McKeachie: That's ideal, but I don'tknow that it is re . _istic for all of us. It'sfine if people go out and do studies withouta lot of thinking about it if they think aboutit afterwards. I read an article last nightthat was sent to me by the Journal ofEducational Psychology. There was reallynothing wrong with the whole thing. Ithad a good review of the literature, a goodhypothesis, a good design, but the discus-sion and conclusions did not show anythought at all. I think the plus part is thatresearch never c les out the way youthink it will. You throw in some thingsthat you thought might work and theycome out differently. Then you thinkabout it and come up with good concep-tualization. I think of research as a heuris-tic device for getting you to think aboutwhy things are more complicated or dif-ferent than the way you thought they werewhen you started. Thinking at the frontend is good, as Frank said, but I think it'salso important to think at the back end.

Farley: I think the problem, or thestatement of the question, is crucial.Research isn't very hard to do. Research isjust a way of trying to find out informationabout things. There are all sorts of formsof research; for example Journalism is aform of research. But the question is thecrucial thing; so is problem finding. Manyof the greatest scientists in the hard scien-ces really focused on that side of things;they were more concerned about findingthe big issue. Again, I mention JacobBurnowski's television series. Burnowski,himself a great scientist, put on a seriescalled "Descent of Man" in which he madethis point over and over again. He said oneof the things we know of the great scien-tists is that they have a sense of what thecrucial problem is.

Many people are out there doing re-search on this or that trivial thing. Thething is to focus in on what you think arethe big ticket issues it adult education.

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What are 'te really important things?Don't lose tr way with trivial stuff. Youcan have the most elegant design with themaximum fancy-dancy, multi-variatestatistics, and it still means nothing be-cause you're not dealing with an importantproblem. Jack Casells has talked aboutthis in art. He called it problem finding inart and has done studies of it. Working inthe Chicago Art Institute he has found thatthe artists there who had a sense of whatthe problems were in art were the ones wholater became the grert artists. Theyweren't so hung up on technique and allthat sort of stuff, but they had a sense ofwhat were the areas that had not been ex-plored in the field of art.

Another issue that we can associatewith this is we don't have a science of dis-covery. We really only have a science ofverification. We work out all the statisticsfor verifying whether we found a sig-Jficant difference; we don't have a sciencefor identifying the important problem. Tome, the way we get into research is crucialbecause, once you're in there, the game ispretty much over.

Conti: Here are a series of que.tionsfrom the audience. What are the big ques-tions we adult educators should be askingrelated to cognitive science? Should we beusing the naturalistic paradigm or themore rationalistic paradigm? Should weconcentrate on a few things or a variety ofdesigns?

McKeachie: Ther a danger rightnow that cognitive psychology could gettrapped into focusing on more and moreand getting less and less. After a while re-search in an area can get to be boring be-cause you're into such esoteric littleaspects ofyour theory that it doesn't relateto anythirq. So there is an important con-tribution that educational researchers canmake to cognitive psycho )gy: ;Ty to keepa bridge 3--"ween reality and thelaboratory s. lion.

I don't agice with Frank that studiesusing reaction time are irrelevant. I think

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the measurement of reaction time enablesus to tap into the stream of consciousnessin ways that we could not before. It is clearthat reaction time studies are not going tobe things that you are going to want to doin adult education most of the time. Weneed knowledge abrut processes peopleuse in real adult learning situations andnotjust in. psychology or education courses.We need to know about areas that involvedifferent styles of thinking and differentrelationshis between the knowledgestructures and application.

Farley: I did not use the word, ir-relevant, as I recall, but I'll just say thatreaction time was around in 1895; it's beenaround for almost a hundred years. I amnot convinced that A is a tool of choice forrtiodern cognitive rsychology although Irealize a lot of people use it. B again, Ithink we have grand ideas and .'re test-ing them with very trivial methodology.

McKeachie: It is not trivial; it is real-ly very precise methodology.

Farley: There is a need to be precisebut what does it tell us about the com-plexities of the brain? Reaction time wasgreat at the turn of the century, but I thinkwe have wonderful ways of tapping in onthe stream of consciousness. For example,real time verbal utterances can be recordedby a computer, and you can introducevarious manipulations of a cognitivescience or a cognitive psychology type, andso on. But it would be real time stuff thatcould be recorded or could be interactedwith in a computer situation. That wouldbe my dream of getting into the stream ofconsciousness, rather than by askingsomething and measuring a reaction timewith a simple one word response.

One area of research in adult educationthat is quite relevant is the idea of theautonomous 'Ammer. That's air importantconcept in cognitive psychology andmotivation. There is S01113 literature incognitive psychology from that area thatwould be relevant to adult education--theindependent, autonomous learner.

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McKeachie: One of the things I'm in-terested in that I think would be relevantin adult education is thinking and learningto learn. We know from the research on in-telligence over the life span that there aredifferences in terms of people and how dif-ferent intellectual skills continue to growor drop off. We also note from the researchwith the older learners that these skillscan be recaptured. But I don't think wehave done very much in terms of trying tobe precise about what kinds of learningskills adult learners bring to learningsituations in addition to their generalknowle age. What kinds of ways we canhelp them to gain skills in getting informa-tion? For example, if you're trairungpeople to be mechanics or computeroperators they are probably going to haveto get a lot of information from printedmaterials. We have developed somestrategies that are good for reading a his-tory assignment or a psychology assign-ment, but most people reading aninstructional manual don't just read itstraight through. I read from my manualfor my Macintosh every once in awhile. Iforget how to do something and I try goback and find it, but they never seem tohave it the way I'm looking for it. Theremust be some special kind of strategiesthat are important in different kinds of oc-casion oriented education. This is one partof adult education that is probably dif-ferent than reading a standard socialscience reading assignment. Sternberg isjust getting started on trying to trainpeople to be more intelligent. He hasn'treally shown that he can do it yet, but Ithink he will. That is a good approach butthere's a lot of work to do before it can beput into practice. A lot of research isneeded.

Conti: A lot of the questions are com-ing from the practitioners. Given that,where do they start in terms of looking atthe literature and doing things in the class-ro^rn that can be effective with the peoplethey work with?

Farley: Many of, the things I men-tioned are probably a bit more in the fu-ture. It is going to be hard to implementmany of these things. I think a computerlearning environment will be helpful be-cause computers can take into accountbiological changes and psychophysiologi-cal signals. I could go on all day about thetechnologies that are developing and, Ithink, that are going to change educationradically. Educators are not getting readyfor them. For example, a bunch of com-puter companies in the Silicone Valley hadgotten together and were doing a thing onconsciousness. They asked me to come andtalk about the brain. One company had acomputer with the little headband thattransmitted brain waves into the com-puter, into their whole apparatus. Youcould watch your brain wave on the screenwhile you were doing all sorts of stuff. Nowthat is a strange experience! As you arelearning, you see how your brain waves arechanging and perhaps correlate with emo-tion, with reason, with problem solving,and all that sort of stuff. Some of thesepeop'e have a goal in mind. They want toset up private, alternative educational sys-tems that are computer based and arebrain based, that will be an almost "1984full-service system" in which kids or adultswill be plugging their biological systemsinto the computer. I've been v. Irking onthat idea for some time. You can plug intothe inachino till sorts of biological signals.The best example of telemetry that I knowof is, when Armstrong stepped on the moonthe Houston Space Center knew his heartrate as soon as his foot hit the dust. Thatwas a long time ago. Telemetry has come along way and now we can telemeter awhole host of signals off the body, out of thebrain. We are now finding ways to recorddeep processes in the brain. These can betelemetered into -eceiving devices with nowire. NASA has u device, a little hat thatyou put on. When pilots take off in planes,they can telemeter various biological sig-nals to tell if, at certain rates of accelera-

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tion or deceleration, you get changes in thebiological processes. The idea is that youwant to know if someone is about to col-lapse and go into unconsciousness. At anyrate that's off into the future, but I haveabsolutely no doubt whatsoever that it iscoming- -the putting together of brainscience and cognitive science and com-puter science.

The immediate thing that I think willrevolutionize adult education will be in-creasing computer mediation. Adultshave access to computers now and willhave increasing access. The computers aregoing to be much more intelligent; theprogramming is going to be better. Brainscience has been off working away on thesekinds of things and hasn't really interfacedmuch with educational computer science.But, it's coming.

The immediate implications are noteasy to spell out. There are physiologicalmeasures that one can use in one's re-search. I'll just give you a flavor of one weuse. My favorite used to be the salivationtest, but I haven't used it for maybe fiveyears. It actually isn't that bad, it's just abit messy. I won't go into the boring detailsbut it measured a salivary r 7.)onse.There is some evidence that salivaryresponse is correlated with arousal in thecentral nervous aystem. What I am usingthese days is something that we call thesweat bottle test. The sweat bottle test isvery simple to use. You are all familiarwith the GSR (galvanic skin response); itgoes back to the thirties. As a measure ofanxiety, it has some validity. The sweat-ing of the palm of the hand can be an in-dicator of an anxiety feeling or an arousalchange. Robert Strahan, psycho-physiologist at Iowa State University,designed a very neat little gizmo, the sweatbottle test. You take a bottle of pure dis-tilled water and control the amount, let'ssay 30 cc. You put it on the palm of thehand, and let the person up end it. Youhold it like that fora certain period of time,let's say five seconds, then you tip it back

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and stopper it. It's an interesting techni-que. Strahan validated it againstmeasures of skin resistance, or polygraphmeasures of skin resistance.

To use the sweat bottle you put twoelectrodes into it and measure the resis-tance of the water. If the person has beenanxious and perspiring, it will change theion balance in the water which is directlycorrelated with change in resistance of thewater. So you have a measure of sys-tematic change. I'll give you an example ofa difficult experiment to do. We did at ex-periment with a live theatrical productionin which we were interested in arousal ofthe performers at different locations in theproduction. So we set up a laboratory be-hind the set, and every time someone weatout on the stage, we did a sweat bottle. Atthe end of the production we might havehad fifteen bottles for each player. I won'tgo into the details of this study, but in theaudience we had experts and novices, torate different qualities of performance.We then plotted the quality of performanceagainst changes in arousal across thecourse of the production. That was a dif-ficult situation to do research becausethese people were not in the mood. Theywere nervous waiting to go out there andwe say, "Come on you've got to do the bot-tle before you go out there."

The first time I ever used it I was work-ing with a group of prisoners and thisgreat, big, huge murderer comes in. Thisis before I trained people to use this them-selves, so I would be holding the person'shand. That's alright when you're workingwith kids, but this great big guy. . ..I said:"Now I want to hold your hand and I'mgoing to put this water on it with this bot-tle." This guy looked at me and looked atthe bottle and then (this is serendipity) Isuddenly thought, "I don't think I'll do itthis way." I said: "Why don't you take thebottle?" So I changed the technique. Butthat's the sweat bottle technique.

By the way, you can use all sorts ofmachines to measure the resistance of the

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water. Limnology Departments at univer-sities have little machines into which youactually poor the water and then you canpress the buttons and get more informa-tion out of that water than you care toknow about, including the resistance of thewater. Anyway that is a very usable,straight forward index of arousal.

There are hardly any adult studiesdone in this area at all. The power of it isthat you can begin perhaps to detectbiological factors in adult learners that arerelated to some of their learning problemsor their learning successes or to individutdifferences.

Another avenue is to get question-naires that have themselves bee; _eliablycorrelated with physiological indexes. Onethat I would suggest is a test developed byRobert Thayer, The Thayer Checklist.Thayer has validated that againstphysiological measures. Obviously it isnot as good as using the physiologicalmeasure but, sometimes you just can't usea physiological test. (Robert Thayer is inthe Psychology Department at CaliforniaState University, Long Beach.)

Adult educators also could look at brainhemisphere differences. There are leftdominance/right dominance indicators. Ifever there's virgin territory, it is biologiccycles just waiting for someone in eduLion to do research on it. The measure of"iological rhythms is really very simple. Inave mentioned oral thermometers, for ex-ample. Again I have to convince peoplethat it is relevant. Everybody talks abouthow they're studying the mind; as soon asyou start using the word brain, they thinkbrain research is great. But when youstart talking about 3.. AT you are going to ac-tually measure bra processes, they don'tlike it anymore. They say: "What is bodytemperature, sweat bottles, all these dif-ferent things?' They don't see those asrelevant. But when you are working at thepsychophysiological level, they arerelevant.

Conti: Several of the questions deal61

with "big T and little t." Looking at yourcharacteristics of the "little t," I amreminded of many teachers that I've metat all levels of education. What would at-tract more "big T" teachers into the field?

Farley: I think you could use somekind of a system of rick and benefit. Makeeducation entrepreneurial in some form.

Audience Member: Look at theuniversity professor. It's not so clear thatuniversity/college professors are "little t's."In the national survey of people that areteaching in higher education, universityand college faculty members tend to rankamong the highest of all occupations inpreference for complexity and that's one ofthe things that's over on your "big T" side.

Farley: I would agree with that at thecollege level at any rate.

Conti: Another series of questionsdeals with environmental factors. Arethere environmental factors that you feelare particularly related to cognition andcognitive development in adult learners?

Farley: Actually, it is interesting thatif you raise the heat in a room, the evidencesuggests that, at a certain level oftempera-tur e, you get a drop in performance.Humidity is a big factor, by the way. Itmay not be so much a factor in learning butit is highly correlated with absenteeism inthe work place or in schools.

McKeachie: I think one of the en-vironmental factors, if you think aboutclassroom learning, is the one that Bar-bara Grabowski has been stressing. Can Iset up group learning? A lot of our class-rooms are just bowls, and we can still dopairing fairly well, but are they conduciveto other seating arrangements and doesthis affect learning?

Grabowski: There has been a lot ofresearch on seating arrangements andarea of action, but I don't recall the peoplewho were doing that.

Farley: Round tablt.0 are definitelybetter than square. There's a lot on physi-cal er vironment, such as the affect offluorescent lights and humidity. The

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evidence is that the humidity increases thetransmission of micro-organisms from oneperson to another. So you have to watch itwhen you're in a humid room. It increasescolds and it increases all sorts of thingsthat increase absenteeism in the workplace or in any environment. Another bigissue these days is electrification. The factthat you're surrounded by high power linesand all that sort of stuff. What are the ef-fects?

Grabowski: One of the things yousaid yesterday that was really interestingis time of day. If a person is much more ef-fective in the afternoon than in the morn-ing, how do you schedule yourinstructional activities around the time?

Farley: To know when you're most ef-ficient would be good for the self-learner,an adult that's doing a lot of learning onone's own. It's effective time managementin education.

McKeachie: I suspect all these physi-cal things are probably less important thanthe psychological part of it. I'm talkingabout distance education and so forth. Ithink the evidence on Sesame Street isthat it down% teach your kids much unlessthe kids to /lc about it with other kids, theirparents or something like that. So if you'redealing with individual learners in co..respondence study or distance learning, itseems to me that one of the things you'vegot to worry about is the kind of social sup-ports you have for -2e learner. If you'redoing the open university bit, how can youconstruct situations for people either to in-teract with other learners or to get theirown family involved in their learning sothat they don't intrude when a learnerwants to be studying but instead are inter-ested in supporting the learning?

Farley: One issue that probablydoesn't receive much attention in adulteducation is the whole cooperative versusindividualistic kind of approach. Somepeople have focused on public schooling, K-12, but I don't see why it couldn't be trans-lated into the adult education realm.

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Might adults work baler in some coopera-tive type :earning arrangement; Johnsonand Johnson did a meta-analysis of theavailable literature on the cooperative,competitive and individualistic learningand found that by and large cooperativelearning was more effective than competi-tive learning or individualized learning.An article of faith in American educationfor some time has been that individualizedlearning is the ideal and if you do it you'rereally taking into account individual dif-ferences. Johnson and Johnson haveraised a red flag on that and said maybethere's some impediment there and undercertain circumstances cooperative learn-ing is better. It's an interesting idea, andit would be important to pursue that ideain adult education and see to what extenta cooperative learning model is more effec-tive than other types.

Conti: Several questions have beenraised about metacognition. Is it aseparate field from cognition or not? Justhow does it fit in?

McKeachie: Metacognition, to me, issimply thinking about thinking. Thus, itis a subcategory of cognition. The degreethat you are able to think about your ownlearning and decision making, that ismetacognition. It is closely related to aconcept called executive processes whichinvolves planning your activities, choosinga strategy, deciding to do one thing -atherthan another.

Conti: A final question. In discus-sions such as this, the topic of the self-con-cept comes up quite often. It has beenmentioned by all of you. Are there somespecific ways of relating adult's self-con-cept to cognitive research?

McKeachie: We have a questionnairewe use called Motivated Strategies forlearning. We cry to get at how muchlearners are intrinsically oriented, howrelevant is this course to their particulargoals, what is their expectancy of successand other such topics relating to self ef-ficacy. It is cognitive in the sense that the

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self is a cognition, just like any other con-cept. To study what changes cognitionsabout one's self is something like studyinghow we el..nge concepts like masa energy,or other things. The problem is that theself is a concept with a high value attachedso a lot of emotion enters in here.

Farley: An important aspect of thewhole topic is the sense of competence. Ifpeople have a sense of competence they aregoing to have a sense of self-confidence.One of the factors in developing a sense ofcompetency is the linkage between effortand outcome. If what you do has an im-pact, then you're going to have a sense ofself-confidence. But if what you do doesn'tseem to have any impact on anything, if itdoesn't help you move ahead with whatyou want to ei), then you are not going todevelop much of a sense of competence andyou will hay e a lousy sense of self-cor.fidance. So I think the crucial thing is thelinkage between effort and outcome. Ifyou

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put effort into something, you I, ve tobelieve it will have an impact. You have towork with people who have a self-esteemproblem to show them that what they dodoes make a difference. One of the crucialThings is the steps between; that is, youwant to show them that it often takes anumber of steps to get to an outcome. Anumber of steps are often necessary andmust be worked through to get to a desiredoutcome. This can help individualsdevelop a sense of competence and lead toa positive self-image.

An important aspect of this is risktaking. As I talked about yesterday, ahealthy sense of risk taking is important.If you are going to grow as a person, youare going to have to take risks. If you wantto be a stagnant person, you can sit aroundavoiding risks. I define risk as engaging insomething with an uncertain outcome.Education needs to promote creative risktaking in order to help people grow.

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