Book Review

Action Versus Contemplation: Why An Ancient Debate Still Matters

Jennifer Summit and Blakely Vermeule
University of Chicago Press, 2018

I found this a very valuable discussion of the various forms this ancient dialectic has taken, from ancient Greece to the modern era of industry and knowledge work.

The authors use a touch of philosophy and history to some small degree but mostly selected literature to illustrate how we have come to see the active life and the life of contemplation.  Their conclusion is one I find myself agreeing strongly with, that the split between the life of action and the life of contemplation turns out to be artificial and historically contingent rather than something we can (as we typically seem to do) confidently take sides on.  Each of us has within us, "two contrary states of the soul" that each serve us in different ways.  Our need to make sense of these contrary motivational states pushes us ever toward telling moral stories that emphasize one or the other in different cultural environments. 

The argument mostly takes the form of examples where what seems to be reasons supporting one path or the other turn out to be better supporting some difficult balance of action and contemplation.  Herman Melville and George Eliot feature in particular.  The authors take pains to prepare the reader that they will not be comfortable with this conclusion, they will want to take sides, and it is opposing this deep temptation rather than defending a particular way of life that is the motivation for their book. 

Among the forms that the dialectic takes in this book are: the moral tale of the prudent industrious ant vs. the pleasure seeking grasshopper, skill vs. knowledge, theory vs. practice,  worldly engagement vs. otherworldly reflection, goal-oriented action vs. more broadly construed action, frenzied busyness vs. idleness, stress and relaxation, work and leisure, and ultimately they focus in on the modern University and its deeply entrenched division of sciences and humanities.  Taking the history and purposes of the modern college education into account, the authors make their final bid for reconciliation of the divided states of the soul.

At the very least the point is well taken here that we cannot afford to see our reflective nature as mere "idle navel gazing" nor can we afford to lose our goal orientation and love of efficiency.  We need to take the contrary motivational states that drive us to action and to reflection collectively as vital aspects of ourselves.  Though there are some intriguing and valuable examples such as trans-disciplinary studies and examples from art and fiction, just how to accomplish that reconciliation for ourselves is left mostly as an exercise for the reader.   

My related book list on Amazon

My review on Amazon

Book Review:  Ungifted by Scott Barry Kaufman

Todd I. Stark  5/29/2013

Link to review on Amazon

Intelligence turns out to be a difficult topic, for reasons that aren’t at all obvious at first. Our understanding of mental ability has been captured in several independent threads of research that are surprisingly oblivious of each other for the most part.  Our stereotypes of the gifted and the ungifted often miss the details of what is going on.  The study of individual differences in general, while useful, doesn’t just de-emphasize, but actually systematically misses some of the most important things going on when people become exceptionally successful contributors.  

The author of Ungifted is well situated to make an important contribution to our understanding of intelligence.  He has made a deep academic study of a wide span of existing research programs, he has worked directly in collaboration with many of the leading researchers in several related fields and he has passionately engaged these ideas since childhood when he became  painfully aware of the academic sorting process for giftedness, and he himself is a wonderful example of many of the principles that emerge in his new book.  This is not another book that just starts out with a vague progressive vision of education and ability that everyone is a potential “genius” and then fills it in with wishful thinking.  No, this is a book that dives very deeply and realistically into the literature of psychometrics, heritability, cognitive neuroscience, and expertise.  It looks closely at patterns from the span of phenomena of human differences, including savantism, prodigy, autism, schizophrenia, personality, g factor, motivation, and creativity.

Ungifted is so compelling, rich, and significant a book for me that most of it was well worn by the end of the first day it arrived. What makes this book so rich is the unique combination of personal passion, strong but not intrusive scholarship, deep domain expertise, clear analysis, and all tied together with an original new and constructive perspective. Hard to ask for more than that from a non-fiction book. Every chapter is a stimulating lesson in an important topic that brings together a broad range of data, ever heading toward the book’s conclusion, nothing less than a complete rethinking of human intellectual ability, consistent with considerable evidence gathered along the way.

The most impressive and distinctive aspect of the author's thinking is his consistent and effective use of perspective-taking. In each case where a controversy is identified, each side is explored with great depth and sympathy to understand what its advocates understand that those on the other side seem to miss. It isn't difficult to do that for the side of an argument we agree with but it is an impressive achievement to do it for different sides and then to synthesize the perspectives into an overlapping understanding. This ability is particularly relevant to topics like IQ, giftedness, and learning disabilities, where sharp controversy shapes conversations at every turn.

Ungifted is about how we conceive of mental ability in general. Some people manage to accomplish much more with their mind than others do. There’s no escaping that basic observation, nor the fact that it has immense significance for political and educational thinking. What is the difference that makes a difference? The answers we get depend on the kinds of questions we ask.

Ungifted is in part the story of how the important questions have changed over time and why. There seem to be two tragic errors that we’ve fallen into historically. For one, we’ve often ignored the differences between us and tried to force everyone into cookie-cutter educational molds that well serve only a minority of the people they are intended to serve. Most of us appreciate this personal plight, as does the author in his "subjective" voice and personal experience throughout the book.

The other tragic error is ironically the reverse. In trying to appreciate the differences between people we’ve taken the opposite extreme of becoming obsessed with stable, predictive individual differences. We test ourselves and compare ourselves with each other and we look for the numbers that tell us who deserves what because we assume we are identifying potential. The author appreciates the motives and sometimes successes of this approach when done well, but the focus of Ungifted is on how we can do better.

It is the tragedy of our obsession with individual differences that Ungifted in the author's "objective" voice most eloquently addresses. We assume that testing people against each other will tell us how to best teach each person by identifying what makes people different. Ungifted describes in great detail and punctuated by the author’s own personal life story why that well-intended approach has failed us time and time again.

It isn’t simply as many politically motivated accounts would have it, that IQ has no meaning, or is too culture bound, or just measures test taking ability. IQ and similar kinds of tests when given and interpreted intelligently provide a useful and well-validated way of identifying the lion’s share of variation in human intellectual ability across a wide range of situations and this has some very real correlations with meaningful life outcomes. The problem is not that the tests are useless but that they have come to be misconstrued as if they measure a single stable ability that resides in each person and predicts what that person is capable of accomplishing. People who do well in IQ tests do tend to be smart people in general. But so are many people who do more poorly in IQ tests, and doing well in IQ tests doesn’t provide any guarantee that we also have persistence, motivation, or other qualities so important to making the best of our abilities.

A number of theorists have made useful additions to the body of well validated tests, but these are still tests of static abilities and they don't solve the most basic problem identified in Ungifted. The reasons the individual differences approach has failed us in the broad global sense that we have tried to apply it are that while effectively explaining variation between people in the same population, it has not taken broader environments into account, it has not taken the course of development into account, and it has not taken the dynamic differences into account that make the most difference in human lives over time.

A number of fundamental misunderstandings of heritability, genetics, development, and psychometric research have been exploited, often through politically motivated movements, to obscure the larger vision of intellectual ability. Ungifted makes a serious bid to help correct these fundamental misunderstandings.

Do some people have more of a critical trait or traits from the start, or do some people learn more from their experience, and in either case how much can we influence our abilities over the course of our life? The traditional dialectic of nature vs. nurture seems to have its own unavoidable groove in our thinking that we rarely manage to escape. Yet as long as we have been studying human ability scientifically, there has been evidence that the dichotomy is inadequate. 21st century research has given us some useful insights into the specifics. Ungifted summarizes the most important lessons from a wide range of data about human abilities, and the author is particularly careful to distinguish his subjective passion for the subject (which is often in evidence) from his more detached coverage of the data in the various fields.

Ungifted starts out with a concise summary of principles of the 21st century picture of development, setting the background for the rest of the book. The concept of traits is explored, and the patterns by which they develop.

Then we have a tour of the ways we have tried to measure human mental ability and our reasonable motivations for the various testing innovations over time. From the measurement of ability, we then see how measurement slides into the sorting of people into categories for practical purposes and the allocation of finite educational resources. We see the well-motivated practical reasons for labeling people, but we also get a sense of the often tragic real world limitations of that way of thinking.

We are introduced in an understandable but expert way to the real strengths and weaknesses of IQ testing, and to the best available model of how its scales map to specific cognitive abilities. This prepares us to begin to understand the different ways that "giftedness" has been defined and measured and why we are still so far behind where we need to be to cultivate the best in every individual. We also are given enough background to begin to appreciate the unique challenges of being different, whether perceived as higher or lower in ability than others around us. Ungifted artfully blends a sympathetic understanding of the needs of researchers and testers with those of teachers, and the diverse individuals just striving to do their best.

Then we are introduced to the core concept that distinguishes this developmental reframing of human mental ability, the concept of engagement. Engagement brings together the factors that distinguish the learnable, experiential aspects of intelligence from those that seem particularly stable. Engagement is the hinge that swings the big door to individual potential. Engagement is built on a number of factors that are particularly malleable and context-dependent, so it is of particular interest to the way education is done. Once we have a sense of what engagement is about, we take a fresh look at human abilities in terms of what is known about their development over time. The role of engagement over time in development begins to become clearer as we tour through the critical concepts of intelligence, creativity, talent, and expertise, and begin to see how they each relate to development over time. At the end, the key points learned along the way are summarized to give the outline of a new theory of intelligence.

For me the theory of intelligence introduced here is distinguished by two critical characteristics: (1) it emphasizes what happens in the individual over time rather than differences between people, and in so doing draws on different kinds of data, and (2) it is synthetic in spirit, emphasizing multiple ways of achieving the same outcomes by drawing on different resources, rather than looking for additional ways of distinguishing the abilities of different people. These two characteristics make this theory very different from most of the alternatives that are intended to address some of the same gaps in our intelligence models, alternatives such as “multiple intelligences,” “emotional intelligence,” and so on. Rather than just identifying more things that we think might be missed by IQ testing, and turning them into new sources of labeling and categorizing, the personal developmental theory of intelligence assumes that there are many different components to be identified, but places them into an overarching biological framework where ability is developed over time by identifying, selecting, modifying, and constructing niches suited to the thriving of the individual.

Several important shifts of emphasis emerge:

1.      Away from reliance on studying stable individual  differences and toward the details of person-centered development

We have focused primarily on measuring stable individual differences, whether “general intelligence” or other kinds of “intelligence” or personality in order to support research and allocate finite educational resources.  What this approach misses is the details of development within each individual over time.  It turns out that these two approaches, individual differences and person-centered, are not just different but produce incompatible results.  So this is a very important source of new information about how mental ability arises.  It is common for authors to point out that nature and nurture are an archaic dichotomy and that it is the interaction that matters, but the details are generally left vague.  There’s a need for specific research programs that focus on the development of ability over time.  The developmental approach is not just a detail, it is a separate source of crucial empirical data.

2.      Away from viewing the positive manifold of abilities on tests (“g”)  as a single ability in each person, and toward understanding its value in conveniently capturing most of the variation an array of mental abilities that collectively underlie many different kinds of tests.    

3.      Away from seeing intelligence as a number or even a trait, and toward seeing it as the adaptive fit between the individual and their environment by finding, selecting, shaping, and creating niches they can thrive in.

4.      Away from focusing on cognitive skills in isolation, and toward consideration of the motivations, strategies, and experience that turn those skills into practical abilities over time.

5.      Away from the focus on being able to measure abilities that represent potential in a brief test, and toward finding the best way to engage and cultivate each person.  Active engagement with the world and ability are inseparably intertwined in a mutual feedback process over time.

6.      Away from focus solely on controlled cognitive processes underlying reasoning, and toward better understanding of the role of both controlled and spontaneous processes in intelligence.  Being smart involves flexible use both controlled and spontaneous mental processes, and using the right resources when needed, rather than relying on one to the exclusion of the other.

7.      Away from fixed rules about how long it should take to become good at something or what special levels of ability provide thresholds, and toward seeing our “readiness for engagement” as a better indicator of potential.

8.  Away from seeing intelligence and expertise as independent (and one inborn and the other learned), and toward seeing the overlaps between them as cognitive abilities,personality, and motivation support the acquisition of expertise, and cognitive expertise is part of what shows up in testing for ability.  One of the most remarkable findings in the book that links intelligence and expertise is that chunking in memory, a key aspect of organizing knowledge in memory involved in expertise, activates the brain structures involved in fluid reasoning, a central component measured by tests.  

The resulting view of intelligence doesn’t see everyone as equal by any means, it seems unavoidable that some people will not be able to excel at some things relative to other people.  Stable individual differences do not somehow disappear because we shift emphasis to the person and their development.  However we do begin to see the real value of changing the nature of education to focus on the fit between people and niches rather than selecting people for special treatment via brief tests and subjective judgments of merit.  Several practical working examples of programs that successfully accomplish this change are described in the book.

I place this book alongside two others in a trilogy that for me represents a broad understanding of the nature of mental ability as it is best envisioned at the current time.

1. "Surpassing Ourselves" is about how outstanding performers learn differently.  It shows expertise as a distinctive way of learning rather than just an endpoint of domain specialization. By comparing the same person over time as they develop, rather than just comparing novices with experts, we get an understanding of the process by which people become smarter.  This is very similar to the shift made with intelligence in Ungifted, but applied specifically to expertise and shows again how the shift to a process perspective captures additional important information.  Surpassing ourselves also introduces  the reinvestment perspective, which looks at the growth of ability in terms of becoming more efficient over time and then reinvesting the saved time and energy in new learning, which seems to be a big part of how people who ultimately become exceptional learn differently from those who do not.
http://www.amazon.com/Surpassing-Ourselves-Inquiry-Implications-Expertise/dp/0812692055/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1369837497&sr=1-1&keywords=surpassing+ourselves

2. "Outsmarting IQ" is about learnable intelligence.  It shows how experience, stable cognitive abilities, and strategies work together to navigate realms of knowledge and let us apply our knowledge.  It gives a good account of the role of strategies, including learnable strategies and cognitive expertise, in trading off between cognitive abilities in order to make the best of our existing stable cognitive abilities. 
http://www.amazon.com/Outsmarting-IQ-Learnable-Intelligence-ebook/dp/B001D1Y8Z8/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1369837528&sr=1-1&keywords=outsmarting+iq

3. "Ungifted" combines the intrapersonal process perspective with a developmental model and an overall hierarchical model of cognitive abilities, consistent with the other two books in this list and yet going way beyond them to explain in much greater detail where “IQ” and other tests scores come from and what they tell us, and how stable cognitive abilities, expertise, creativity, and personality all interact to produce intelligence. 
http://www.amazon.com/Ungifted-Intelligence-Redefined-ebook/dp/B00B3M3UME/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1369837581&sr=1-1&keywords=ungifted+intelligence+redefined

Update 5/29/13 1PM:  Link to abbreviated GoodReads version of review:

Ungifted: Intelligence Redefined by Scott Barry Kaufman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars




View all my reviews

Review of "Surpassing Ourselves" - A profound vision of a problem solving culture

My recent review of Carl Berieter and Marlene Scardamalia's wonderful 1993 book "Surpassing Ourselves" on Amazon. 

It is about how the underlying concept of expertise needs to be rescued from our inaccurate commonsense epistemology and  from the negative connotations of speciallization and elitism and instead applied more broadly to processes and groups to make our education and culture in general become more supportive of better thinking and problem solving.  It builds from the individual psychology of ability, creativity, and wisdom to the application of the same principles to groups and culture.

http://www.amazon.com/review/R35GNAAFEFWRF1/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm

This is a remarkable book: deep in its insights, prophetic in its foresight, and profound in its implications. The most amazing thing is that this book was published in 1993, the same year the first commercial browser became available. That was long before science writers had popularized the research on expertise and long before most people had any idea what sort of thing a "social network" might be. Yet this book captures some of the most promising ideas of the modern information age, such as the use of technology to facilitate knowledge-building communities and the possibility of a wider problem solving culture. Having only the relatively limited technology examples of the time to draw from by today's standards, such as desktop computers with local databases, the authors express their vision in terms of concepts and processes rather than getting caught up in the details of technology. That turns out to be what makes this book most useful I think, because it makes the arguments very general.

A lot of my enjoyment of this book is admittedly because I had come to many of the same conclusions independently and felt reassured to see the same ideas expressed so eloquently. I do think they get a lot right here and that their core concepts have only become more plausible and more important over time since the book was written.

The driving themes of this book all revolve around a single idea: an expanded concept of expertise. I think this is a bigger leap of faith for most people than is at first obvious. Expertise has come to have very strong connotations in popular culture with specialization and elitism, which is exactly the opposite of the message in this book. The book is about how everyone can benefit from what we know about expertise, and how necessary it is to have schools and a broader culture suited to solving increasingly complex and difficult problems. It is not at all about specialization or elitism.

The disconnect between the expanded concept of expertise and the popular is not just about the politics and economics of specialization. It is also about how the research on expertise is interpreted. For practical reasons, most expertise research has focused on the difference between novices and high performers in a given domain and how much time and deliberate practice is required to make that journey. The authors recognize that body of work and draw from it, but they also recognize, critically, that there are other ways to look at expertise. We can also compare experienced high performers with experienced low performers. And we can compare novices who later become high performers with novices who later become experienced low performers.

The authors expand and elaborate on the concept of expertise in several ways:

1. Think of expertise not as an end state of ability but as an ongoing process of knowledge acquisition at increasingly high levels of performance rather than as an end state of high performing relative to other people.

2. Think of the expertise process as being a cycle of learning at one level until it requires less cognitive effort, and then reinvesting the surplus cognitive effort in reformulating the questions and addressing them at a higher level of difficulty and complexity, always working at the edge of our current ability.

3. Think of experts as people who actively engage in the process of expertise rather than as high performers, so we have expert (or "expert-like") learners even when they are novices.

4. Think of expertise as something that is done by groups as well as individuals.

5. Think of creativity as a particular kind of expertise, where we take greater leaps and risks in working at the edge of our competence and in building and drawing on our knowledge of what options are most promising.

6. Think of wisdom as another particular kind of expertise, drawing on our knowledge of human beings and what sorts of things are most promising in human lives.

The result is a vision of individual ability, education, and culture that is profoundly progressive in what it takes on, nothing less than creating the conditions for every student and citizen to either become or participate constructively with expert learners, to everyone's benefit, resulting in a broader culture of problem solving rather than one of stagnant political and philosophical stances. This is a 1993 vision for the challenges that beset us today, asking us to make better use of technology we already have available at this point, even though we did not at the time the book was written.

The authors recognize that even in 1993, most of these ideas were known and accepted by many educators, but they were very rarely put into practice effectively. The authors theorize that this is because of how self-sustaining the usual educational systems and in comparison how much constant vigilance and effort is required on the part of teachers and administrators to maintain a different sort of environment, what they call a "second order environment" that sustains the process of expertise for both individuals and groups.

One valuable prototype for second order environments is the research community, in which shared objectives and various intrinsic social rewards drive the team members to work together to increasingly more knowledge of their subject and tacking increasingly more difficult problems.

Compare this self-sustaining, actively learning expertise process with the simple use of technology to connect people to share knowledge. The difference is profound. Simply using technology to connect more people has some limited value, but it is a long way from the expertise process. The authors predicted this long before the "Personal Learning Network" became a promising but so often unimpressive reality. The gap between connecting people and knowledge bases, and people actually striving to make increasingly better use of available resources can be huge, and that is what the authors of "Surpassing Ourselves" identified in 1993, the way we use the technology and the way we communicate is critical as well, we can't just connect ourselves and our databases and expect to use all that potential effectively without facilitating and maintaining the process of expertise.

Does the term "expertise" itself limit our ability to make better use of these ideas because of its negative connotations? The authors point out how terms like "excellence" and "quality" have often been used for essentially the same idea, but those have their own misleading or easily abused connotations and limitations as well, and they lack the depth of individual psychological research found in the expertise literature. In the end, what we call it doesn't matter so much as whether we understand how it happens and how to create the conditions for supporting it.

Further Reading:

The books of David N. Perkins offer various proposals with a very similar and consistent vision to the one in "Surpassing Ourselves." "Outsmarting IQ" for example offers an expanded vision of individual expertise that in some ways builds on that of "Surpassing Ourselves" by providing a model of expertise as the process of navigating intersecting realms of knowledge, using the principles of far transfer to generalize expertise among domains and identifying some of the conditions for acquiring it. "Smart Schools" suggests a way to transform education along these lines. "Making Learning Whole" looks in more detail at the common process of expert learning at all levels of ability.
Outsmarting IQ: The Emerging Science of Learnable Intelligence
Smart Schools
Making Learning Whole: How Seven Principles of Teaching Can Transform Education

In "Rethinking Expertise," Harry Collins looks more specifically at the social dimension of knowledge underlying the group process of expertise.
Rethinking Expertise

In "Dialogue Gap," Peter Nixon elaborates on what is distinct about the sort of communication that brings out the different knowledge of each individual and in so doing facilitates what "Surpassing Ourselves" considers the group process of expertise, as opposed to simply arguing or conversing on a less constructive level.
Dialogue Gap: Why Communication Isnt Enough and What We Can Do About It, Fast

Maria Konnikova's "Mastermind" explores the role of a specific critical factor in individual process of expertise allowing us to work continually at the edge of our current ability. This is the ability to focus attention in a particular way in order to actively engage our thinking rather than just passively observe the same things in the same way. "Surpassing Ourselves" describes this only in the abstract as actively engaging higher levels of problems, but the concept of mindfulness offers a possible way of modeling the process in more detail.
Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes

Book Review: David Perkins' must-read brilliant map of human thinking ability and its improvement

Review of David Perkins’ “Outsmarting IQ: The Emerging Science of Learnable Intelligence,” 1995, Free Press.

Link to review on Amazon --> http://www.amazon.com/review/R3AYGZV7G7AUTO/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm

Profound Thinking By Example

This is the single best book I’ve come across on the potential for improving human thinking ability. I give it my highest recommendation; I think it should be read by everyone interested in problem solving, decision making, and human abilities in general. It is amazingly broad in its coverage of data, profoundly deep in its treatment of specific lines of relevant evidence, and ingenious in its vision of the future.

What impressed me most about this book is that the author, David Perkins, demonstrates the power of deep reflective thinking by his own example in the organization and treatment of evidence throughout this book, in his critical treatment of his own evidence and ideas, in his creative original ideas, and in his effective consolidation and filtering of massive amounts of research. Showing how asking the right questions can help us understand seemingly contradictory data about intelligence, Perkins gives an engaging plausibility proof for the kind of reflective intelligence he argues for in this book.

The Concept of Realms of Thinking

To give away the ending, the book culminates in a model of problem solving ability based on the metaphor of a map. Human thinking ability results from learning our way around. Navigation is fundamental to all sorts of human thinking. Perkins suggests that all intelligent human thinking results from navigation of various kinds, which can be thought of in terms of levels of realms. Perkins organizes the realms in an overall map or “mindscape” from the lowest level of specific contexts of thinking to the highest level dealing with thinking itself.

In learning to solve problems we not only learn our way around physical realms geographically, but we learn our way around specific contexts we find ourselves in such as the realm of buying a house or the realm of choosing a career. We learn our way around different situations like resolving conflicts or making purchases in general. We learn our way around professional fields like law, physics, and mathematics, and areas of technical expertise such as probability and statistics, game theory, and business. We learn our way around the use of tools. We learn our way around various basic kinds of challenges like problem solving, decision making, planning, and learning. Finally, at Perkins’ top level, which he calls thinking dispositions, and we learn our way around thinking itself in terms of the qualities and attitudes that make it more or less effective.

Perhaps the central thrust of this book is that in organizing human problem solving areas into navigational realms, Perkins is not just providing a training map for learning problem solving skills a million different areas, he is also making a case for the learning the critical skills of navigation itself.

Perkins’ realms are very similar to the traditional concept of domains of expertise, but different in one critically important way: realms emphasize the central skills of navigation rather than just the use of repetition or rote memorization or even just the use of deliberate practice. The concept of realms makes it more explicit that all areas of ability that we learn share some commonality in terms of key skills and attitudes we need for navigation itself.

It is learning to be a better navigator; in all realms of human thinking and not just certain subset of them; that is the central message of Perkins’ book. This is encapsulated in his concept of “reflective intelligence.” Reflective intelligence is the aspect of intelligence that can be most improved for the greatest effect across the range of all realms of thinking. Perkins reviews a number of different attempts to improve human thinking and makes various suggestions based on their results regarding specific kinds of changes that can be made to educational curricula in order to teach children to be better navigators in all areas.

Getting Perspective on Intelligence through 3 Dimensions

In giving away Perkins’ final model, I’ve skipped over two very important and interesting aspects: his argument for the model he uses and for the prospect of learnable intelligence through better navigation, and his predictions for important areas of the evolution of learnable intelligence.

The bulk of Outsmarting Intelligence deals tightly with the subject of the title, the legacy of how intelligence has been envisioned and researched so far. Perkins deals in equally deep, reflective, careful, and often fascinating manner with: (1) the evidence for a single common problem solving ability from psychometric data, (2) the evidence showing us how novices think differently from experts, and (3) the evidence showing us what happens when we try to learn general skills and rules for solving problems in general and how computers solve problems.

From these three bodies of evidence, Perkins derives three corresponding dimensions of human intelligence: (1) a neural intelligence dimension which respects what psychometric data gets right and is most closely associated with what we typically assume IQ tests are measuring, (2) an experiential intelligence dimension which respects what expertise research data gets right, and (3) a reflective intelligence dimension which respects what we have learned about metacognition and from the various programs that have tried to teach thinking skills in general.

Neural intelligence, Perkins concludes, is a real dimension of human ability and very important in some situations especially, but it is simply the wrong target for attempts at improvement for various reasons.

Experiential intelligence represents most of our actual problem solving abilities in practice.
Faced with novel and complex situations where we have no relevant experience, our neural intelligence gives us our best chance at solving the challenges presented. But once we have been acquiring experience in an area, a difference in expertise will make people better problem solvers in that area than will a difference in general intelligence.

So experiential intelligence and neural intelligence work together to make us the generally good problem solvers that we are in most situations: neural intelligence helps us deal with novelty and complexity, and experiential intelligence helps us acquire the knowledge and skills we need to deal with specific domains.

So the obvious question is: what role does reflective intelligence play and why does Perkins consider it so important?

The Significance of Reflective Intelligence

Perkins reviews various lines of research into the wide variety of situations where otherwise powerful problem solving abilities seem to fail us in systematic ways. He looks at social psychological effects, cognitive shortcuts, and so on, similar to other reviews of blind spots in human thinking by many other authors except that Perkins attempts to characterize these foibles specifically in terms of side effects of our experiential intelligence.

Perkins suggests that the human mind is mostly akin to a pattern seeker and pattern-driven problem solving engine and as a result its weaknesses are also those we would expect from a pattern-driven process. The human mind often tends to be hasty, narrow, fuzzy, and sprawling.
HASTY. The goal of a pattern seeking intelligence is to find the right response that most closely matches the current situation rather than making an exhaustive search. As a result, our experiential intelligence tends to mislead us to jump to hasty conclusions when the situation is an unusual variation of a known situation.

NARROW. As a result of efficiently seeking patterns we have already seen, the domain-specificity of expertise tends to make us think in narrow ways when we think we have grasped the situation rather than to broaden our thinking.

FUZZY. Part of the power of pattern-matching is that we can so often generalize the lessons from one situation to another similar one. In situations where the appearance is very similar but the underlying principles are different, again our pattern matching effectiveness leads to mistakes: we overgenerallize from our experience.

SPRAWLING. When a pattern-seeking process does not have a single clear path to follow, as often happens in very complex situations, it will tend to follow one path after another and keep switching back and forth rather than working toward an overall goal.

Experiential intelligence, Perkins concludes, is an elegant system for long-term moderate success. When situations are new to us or complex, we get help from our neural intelligence and we have also learned various tricks for getting around our weaknesses, and these are largely accounted for in reflective intelligence. Reflective intelligence represents realms where we think about our own thinking in order to avoid settling on hasty conclusions, to broaden our thinking beyond the initial scope we assumed, to use precision to distinguish similar looking but different things, and to stay on track when notice we are sprawling.

This explains why reflective intelligence is so important to us in tricky situations where we have inadequate experience and where experience misleads us. But it also helps explain, in Perkins’ view, why reflective intelligence is so important for us to learn to be better thinkers in general. Neural intelligence does not replace experiential intelligence, it tends to reinforce it.

When we don’t have experience, neural intelligence helps us grasp the situation, but when we do have experience, we tend to use our neural intelligence to reinforce what our experience already tells us. That’s one big reason why genius is not simply high IQ. That’s why reflective intelligence is so important, it is the tool we use to remind us of the weak points in our own thinking and help us compensate for them regardless of our experience and general intelligence. The abilities and traits we need in order to overcome our blind spots are learnable. A large and crucial aspect of intelligence is learnable.

Existing Approaches: How they Compare

There are various approaches to teaching reflective intelligence, and Perkins reviews the best known and the best studied among them such as Project Intelligence, Reuven Feuerstein’s Instrumental Enrichment, Edward de Bono’s CORT, and Matthew Lipman’s Philosophy for Children, and others, reviewing their approaches and their results and comparing and contrasting them in order to get a sense of what it takes to enhance reflective intelligence.

One of the things that distinguishes Perkins as a deep reflective thinker himself is that he anticipates, researches, and deals fairly with opposition to his arguments. The very idea of learnable intelligence has in the past come under attack from several angles such as past failures of various programs which tried to teach improved thinking, the implications of expertise and psychometric research data, the apparent weakness of general methods for problem solving, and the challenge of transfer between learning domains. Perkins addresses each of these concerns in turn, resulting in a very persuasive case for the very real improvability of intelligence through changes in education.

The Future of Learnable Intelligence

Toward the end of the book, Perkins reveals the ingenuity of his vision through his discussion of several areas for the future evolution of reflective intelligence: areas which ended up being (remarkable for a book written in 1995) accurate predictions of areas that have since become central areas of interest for science and human improvement in general:

1. Intelligence can become distributed -- good thinking depends upon artifacts to offload the limitations of our attention and memory, and we can use our symbol systems and tools to help us keep track of things we could not track individually. This is a wonderful general description of how we are attempting to use computer networks to help us manage complexity (as opposed to some of the more superficial books in recent years which imply that networks somehow replace rather than enhance individual thinking).

2. Intelligence can embrace complexity -- through information visualization tools, effective use of classification, tagging, and finding things by meaning, consolidation, filtering, the mathematical tools for finding large scale patterns in complex phenomena, and by eliminating narrow information silos, we can use our intelligence to solve increasingly complex problems.

3. Intelligence can be dialectical -- this means raising the level of thinking from lower level more concrete concerns to higher order patterns by recognizing the properties specific to complex systems. Perkins offers Peter Senge’s “The Fifth Discipline” and Murray Gell-Mann’s “The Quark and the Jaguar” as exemplifying ways of understanding dialectical intelligence.

Perkins covers a massive amount of data about intelligence and problem solving, summarizes it effectively, and applies it to a practical, powerfully supported, and exceptionally understandable approach to improving human life by teaching ourselves to be more intelligent. Thinking well in general is an unnatural act but we can learn to do it. All that is left is for us to overcome the ideological and political barriers. This book would make a wonderful, gentle manifesto for that grand effort.

Are we taking knowledge and expertise for granted?

On the New York Times Opinion page, Steven Pinker weighs in on the Internet optimists vs. pessimists issue. He appreciates the value of intellectual depth but he doesn't think the brain is nearly "plastic" enough to be reshaped fundamentally by the tools we use, he doesn't believe there are general abilities that are affected by experience. "Experience does not revamp the basic information-processing capacities of the brain" he insists. He also points out that "the effects of experience are highly specific to the experiences themselves."

In making these claims, Pinker reminds us that he joined Leda Cosmides and John Tooby enthusiastically as one of the founders of the most extreme version of cognitive evolutionary psychology (CEP), the "modular brain" theory. We know that the brain has all sorts of very specific speciallizations, but the notion of opaque independent functional modules is far from universally accepted. Books that have included intelligent, scholarly critiques of CEP or stress the importance of non-modular aspects of brain function include Kenan Malik, David Buller, Merlin Donald, Terrence Deacon, Terrence Sejnowski, and Jeffrey Schwartz. The contrast between Deacon and Pinker on the role of language in the evolution of the mind is particularly interesting.

My point is not at all to "debunk" CEP by presenting people who offer other kinds of theory, since I think CEP is a viable concept that probably gets some things right regarding the evolution of the mind. My point is that it seems too radical to claim that the mind and brain are simply and entirely modular in the way they would have to be for Pinker's statements above to be completely true. Pinker wants us to believe that the brain is modular and that experience cannot affect general abilities, yet he can't help using the term "deep reflection." It is difficult to imagine how such a thing as "deep reflection" even makes sense in the modular independent architeture Pinker is insisting protects our intellectual functions from the potentially deleterious effects of experience.

Pinker even explicitly acknowledges the work it takes to develop intellectual depth:

It’s not as if habits of deep reflection, thorough research and rigorous reasoning ever came naturally to people. They must be acquired in special institutions, which we call universities, and maintained with constant upkeep, which we call analysis, criticism and debate.

If it takes so much work to develop intellectual depth, how is it reasonable to then also argue that our thinking can't be affected by experience, or by activities that detract from this developmental process?

Yes, he is right the brain has limits to how much it is reshaped by experience, but I think he significantly overstates the case. The issue is regarding specifics, not the general principle of neuroplasticity. What specific effects do specific activities have on our mind and brain over specific kinds of time period?

Pinker may very well be right that the web is not itself deteriorating our reflective thinking ability the way Nicholas Carr argues it is. Carr perhaps goes over the top when he says that his failing ability to concentrate is specifically due to his use of the web. However Pinker goes too far when he implies that the idea is simply silly in principle. It remains an empirical question, not just a conceptual one, unless we're replacing cognitive neuroscience with Pinkerist modularism.

Pinker also misses a much more important point, that our attitude toward technology affects the way it shapes our daily life. He assumes that those university activities he takes for granted will continue to be valued just because he himself takes their value for granted. The university was not always there, and there is no reason to assume it will always be there if we stop arguing for its value.

Pinker's ironic conclusion:

And to encourage intellectual depth, don’t rail at PowerPoint or Google. It’s not as if habits of deep reflection, thorough research and rigorous reasoning ever came naturally to people. They must be acquired in special institutions, which we call universities, and maintained with constant upkeep, which we call analysis, criticism and debate. They are not granted by propping a heavy encyclopedia on your lap, nor are they taken away by efficient access to information on the Internet.

The new media have caught on for a reason. Knowledge is increasing exponentially; human brainpower and waking hours are not. Fortunately, the Internet and information technologies are helping us manage, search and retrieve our collective intellectual output at different scales, from Twitter and previews to e-books and online encyclopedias. Far from making us stupid, these technologies are the only things that will keep us smart.

Is it really our knowledge that is increasing exponentially, or is it available information?

That fact that Pinker seems to conflate the two is exactly the question begging that most fundamentally ignores the most central aspect of modern culture critique, are we gaining more knowledge because we are exposed to more information?

Against the cultural critics, the smart among us have always managed to take responsibility for their own minds and organize the available information and think deeply enough to create meaningful individual knowledge from it.

Against Pinker and the others who think cultural critics are just "panicking," the fact that some smart people always manage to cultivate knowledge in spite of the challenges offered by new tools doesn't mean that everyone else will automatically inherit that ability.

If we assume that simply having access to a lot of information will make us smart (this is not an exaggeration, it is literally how many Internet optimists think), we will end up missing the real issue.

The real issue is not whether the Internet fries your brain, there is no really good evidence so far that it does. The real issue is whether we recognize and continue to appreciate the work it takes to cultivate knowledge and expertise or whether we take these things for granted.


Update: Nicholas Carr responds to Pinker on his own RoughType blog.

Update: Commentary by Nick Bilton with some useful references, argues sensibly that each form of media has its potential unique value - http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/11/in-defense-of-computers-the-internet-and-our-brains/?ref=technology

Update 6/15: Some of the reviewers do more thougthfully reflect on bigger picture issues and ask somewhat deeper questions than just the alarmist one of whether the Internet is "frying our brains." See this review in New Republic by Todd Gitlin: "The Uses of Half-Truths."

Also: Nicholas Carr and Douglas Rushkoff respond to Pinker on EDGE.

Shirky vs. Carr: Battle for the future mind

The Wall Streeet Journal online is playing off two authors of recent books with opposing premises:



Clay Shirky with his optimistic view of how the Internet is making us smarter by giving us more freedom to expand our minds, as discussed in his book, Cognitive Surplus



Nicholas Carr with his more pessimistic take on how the Internet is making us think more shallowly, from his book, The Shallows


As both a fanatical book reader and a collaboration technology specialist, I appreciate both views so this is a fascinating dialectic for me. So far I give the edge to Carr for realism and depth based on the articles, but I haven't read both books yet and of course I have my own bias as well.

Both authors share the common understanding that the way we read shapes the way we think, but they take away different lessons from that. I am reading Carr and he seems to have a good handle on the tradeoffs between the high velocity high diversity web tech reading mode and the undistracted reflective book reading mode. I haven't read Shirky, I don't know how realistic he is about the tradeoffs. His article seems a bit Panglossian.

Since I create web tech for clients for a living, I realize how powerful this technology is, but I am also often in a position to see how it affects their thinking. My biggest challenges in helping people think together using portals and knowledge management tech involve getting them to think about the content in a useful way rather than just clicking on things and making hasty choices. My objective in a good portal site is to encourage people to ask the right questions to the solve real problems faced by the team. Just putting links up on a page is helpful, but it makes a real difference to the outcome to have a structure that guides thinking.

Shirky seems to assume that greater cognitive freedom will automatically be used well because cognitive surplus will somehow make people want to be responsible for their own understanding.

Carr takes the view that media are not just neutral tools that can be used for better or worse, they actually impose a particular way of thinking and interacting upon us. So the freedom Shirky prizes has unspoken structure to it that we take for granted. I think this has a very strong basis in scientific theory as well, from a variety of fields. The symbolic mind did not arise out of nowhere as part of the modern brain macro structure. We know from modern neuroscience research that the brain is far more plastic than we previously assumed, and we know that abstract symbolic thinking involved distinct changes in the brain. It is entirely plausible that over time the nature of each type of media has shaped the brain in different ways. Every step had its tradeoffs.

Our assumption that in every age the tradeoff was always purely for the best ... that's the definition of a Panglossian view.

Maybe it's just my own bias as a book lover, but so far I think Carr has a more realistic view of the tradeoffs involved and understands better real advantages and disadvantages of the different kinds of media.

In one sense, the power of web tech is very obvious. Authors often find me talking about their books and contact me to start a dialog. That's a pleasure I rarely had when writing in a more traditional format. I am exposed to far more interesting material on the web than I could ever manage to gather up in a bookstore. But then I do have to isolate myself for a while from the distractions in order to really dig into a good book and engage the mind of its author and think deeply about their points.

Those are the tradeoffs for me, and if Carr is right, future generations won't have both options.

I'm looking forward to reviewing the Carr book when I'm done.

Update 6/5: Jonah Lehrer had this excellent NYT review of Carr which so far I largely agree with: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/06/books/review/Lehrer-t.html

Update 6/6: Wen Stephenson on Bostom.Com with another good review:
http://www.boston.com/ae/books/articles/2010/06/06/the_internet_ate_my_brain/?page=full

Update 6/10: Carr's own blog "RoughType" has a list of reviews as well: http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2010/06/reviews.php and there's a wonderful conversation between Nicholas Carr, Jonah Lehrer and others on Jonah Lehrer's blog "Frontal Cortex" at http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2010/06/the_shallows.php

Update 6/20: Jonah Lehrer reviews Clay Shirky:
http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2010/06/cognitive_surplus.php

Updated Book Review: David Shenk's "The Genius in All of Us"

Review of "The Genius in All of Us," by David Shenk, Doubleday, 2010.

An effective deconstruction of hereditary talent, and clues for a new model of exceptional ability

Link to the review on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/review/R3DGLT1WYK6QRG/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm

It is easy to like or dislike this book from a casual reading based on how you feel about the premise: that everyone has the potential for genius, and that heredity is not destiny in any sense. This sounds at first like a liberal political statement, but Shenk's treatment is far more nuanced than that characterization would imply.

In brief, Shenk's book is a very good deconstruction of hereditary talent, a competent but one-sided (or upon reflection I'll say very selectively focused) review of supporting research in several fields, and an interesting but abbreviated practical introduction to the interactionist (gene X environment) paradigm of development.

Just to be clear, this book is not about the psychometric definition of genius in terms of how far down the bell curve one is on Raven's Progressive Matrices or standardized tests of any sort. Nor is it about clever calculating tricks or precocious abilities, although it does do a very nice job putting those into a larger perspective. This book is more centrally about the expansive and inclusive sense of genius meaning people that accomplish something truly special and significant, and the potential that any given person may be able to get to that point. Somehow. And that's where the nuance is needed and appropriate.

Ok, I didn't like this book all that much when I first read it, and I at first gave it a mediocre 3 star rating on Amazon. I felt it did a great job deconstructing the concept of hereditary talent, but I strongly criticized it for leaving a gap where we need a better theory of where talent comes from and what it is, since obviously we don't all become true geniuses. Even among the folks who appear to have the seeds of genius in them from early on, most don't become genius adults in the broader sense.

In my original review I said this was a one-sided review of the evidence for the interactionist model. I do think it's a very selective review, but one-sided implies that he deliberately ignores contradictory evidence. He doesn't do that. He just doesn't talk about the evidence that led to the model Shenk says is obsolete, that genes are akin to blueprints. That is, the evidence that different variations of allele sometimes have strikingly specific effects in a seemingly "normal" range of environments. The case for the model of heredity that Shenk is deconstructing is not entirely ignored, but it is glossed over in order to make his case for the interactionist model. I think that is why hereditarians like Galton, Spearman, and Charles Murray get so apparently shorted in this book, Shenk focuses entirely on what they get wrong and glosses over the things they may get right.

I suspect that we do inherit "predispositions" in some form under a very wide range of conditions, even if the underlying mechanism is more complex than we previously assumed. Even if changes in environments do alter the expression of genes, something like inheritance of traits clearly does happen in a wide range of "normal" environments, and we can't just ignore that completely because of additional complexity and things that change at the extremes. That's why I say this is a very selective review. But no, it isn't really one-sided, the selectiveness is appropriate for a deconstruction, although it does mark this as a deconstruction rather than a scholarly review.

The more important problem is that the model of talent that arises from this book is not particularly easy to understand. The author is strongly against thinking of genes as predispositions, and rather offers the perspective that genes are akin to "settings." So it would be easy to conclude that the author is saying that we have the ability to make anyone a genius just by tweaking a few settings. He isn't. Or, if you read it as I did upon my first reading, you might hear the author saying that "anyone can be a genius, but talent is complicated process, we don't know what is happening at each step, and so we don't know how to help people get there, but we know it's possible." That's perhaps a little closer to the truth, but it didn't seem very helpful to me.

The reason I updated this review and why I'm now expressing more appreciation for David Shenk's accomplishment here is that while the "settings" model of genes doesn't quite convey the message, I did find upon close reading and careful reflection that the author captured a lot with his examples and case studies of individuals. The thing that is missing is some way of tying together how people manage to select and shape environments for themselves to accomplish great things, in spite of all the cultural, social, and physical constraints that tend to make environmental factors very hard to change for most of us. Shenk assiduously avoids attributing "predispositions" to genes, but then speculates that epigenetic factors may predispose us to things like musical ability. If non-genes can do this, why not genes? He just seems a little *too* intent on crushing hereditary talent in some places.

Geniuses don't just see things differently (although that is sometimes also going on), they don't just have unique abilities (although sometimes they do) geniuses are most distinct in that they manage to carve their own niche, exploiting their own uniqueness in a process where they are driven to mastery and are amazingly persistent, even where the goal seems way out of reach. This runs contrary to our popular wisdom that it makes sense to work toward small easily attained goals in most things. What we think of as really deep talent actually requires really deep faith in the long term process and the motivation to keep going. Shenk captures the significance of motivation, but I had to look very closely to see the patterns for it. It requires willingness to do things that others may find bizarre and to learn freely from what is available. The author illustrates this but seems to have a hard time really tying it all together, at least he did on my first reading. I've come to think of it in terms of niche construction, which to me really captures what exceptional people do that brings out and shapes their unique gene x environment combination in a targeted way. My reversal in the rating reflects my feeling that capturing this idea is more important than giving it a catchy name, which is really what the author is missing.

We don't know exactly how to take advantage of the dynamic nature of heredity and development, although the study of achievement and expertise reviewed by Shenk gives us many tantalizing clues to go on. And if knowing that the potential is there inspires the faith to keep going, then more and more of us will eventually learn to become better and better at using our minds, constructing our own niches from our own individuality, and the promise of "The Genius in All of Us" will eventually begin to be realized. There is a lot in this book that will repay careful reading and re-reading, as I discovered by doing exactly that.

Related Reading:

See also this classic manifesto of genetic interactionism: The Triple Helix: Gene, Organism, and Environment(Lewontin R (1998/2000) Triple Helix: Gene, Organism, Environment. Cambridge, MA, Harvard)

This superb earlier popular introduction to the emerging model Shenk offers: The Agile Gene: How Nature Turns on Nurture(Ridley, The Agile Gene)

This similar treatment of trait development in interactionist terms, but focused on personality: The Temperamental Thread: How Genes, Culture, Time and Luck make Us Who We Are(kagan, temperamental thread)

This alternative and original interactionist account of how personality develops: No Two Alike: Human Nature and Human Individuality (Judith rich harris no two alike)

This interesting challenge to some widely help assumptions about influence: Stranger in the Nest: Do Parents Really Shape Their Child's Personality, Intelligence, or Character?(Stranger in the Nest, D. Cohen)

This little known treasure by an old friend that offers its own unique challenges about human uniqueness and what it means: rebellion: physics to personal will (Brody, Rebellion)

This on the classic view from the perspective of behavior genetics: Genetics and Experience: The Interplay between Nature and Nurture (Individual Differences and Development)(Plomin, Genetics and Experience)

This on the fascinating broader biological implications of interactionism from a gene perspective, how the genes of organisms construct niches even beyond the organism itself: The Extended Organism: The Physiology of Animal-Built Structures(Turner, The Extended Organism)

And finally this wonderful broad account of biology and the role of heredity that appreciates the complexities of gene function in a demanding but uniquely engaging way: The Logic of Life(The logic of life, francois jacob)

Book Review: The Architecture of Learning by Kevin Washburn

Link to review on Amazon

There's a fair amount that we know about learning, and we often place great importance on teaching, but we seem to take for granted the way teaching and learning are related. It is not at all obvious how teaching leads to learning (assuming that it does!) or what is the best way to create an environment for learning. We do have a lot of relevant evidence, but it is rare to see it put together in a useful way.

That's why this is such a wonderful book, the kind that not only teaches you something useful but uses its own principles as an example to do so. The Architecture of Learning illustrates in simple but detailed terms what it takes to get from raw experience to practical skills and knowledge and then provides you with tools to do the same.

Successfully applying his own teaching insights to the structure of this book, Washburn leads you on a journey to personal understanding of the learning process chapter by chapter by first introducing the core processes needed for learning and then progressively deepening and expanding the discussions and examples and using them in different ways and relating them to previous experience.

Many theories of learning emphasize how it builds on previous learning. This book illustrates the process with specific examples and analogies that bring it to life. Most interestingly to me, in the process Washburn effectively links his general learning model with the concept of expertise and its emphasis on the difference between the way experts and novices represent knowledge. He expands on the expertise model by not only acknowledging the critical value of deliberate extended practice, but also describing what is happening prior to effective practice and following effective practice that makes it effective and allows it to transfer to real applications.

By simplifying the process and making particular stages clear, Washburn helps instructors understand the prerequisites for making practice successful (often neglected!), and what they need to do to make it useful outside of educational settings (rarely accomplished!).

The strong point of this book is the way it synthesizes and consolidates major theories of learning in a useful practical way ... The composite model used here describes 4 essential interacting and iterative processes required for learning: (1) accumulating "reference experiences" upon which further learning can be based, (2) labelling and sorting our experience, (3) relating new ideas to past experiences to create deeper understanding, (4) applying what we know in increasingly broader and more realistic contexts.

Each of these subprocesses produces different kinds of outcomes used in the overall learning process. (1) Experience produces reference experiences. (2) Labelling and sorting produce sequences of key points that help us comprehend. (3) Relating ideas generates the understanding we need in order to usefully practice and apply new skills and ideas. (4) Rehearsing the application of new skills and ideas with feedback makes learning available for real situations.

The meat of The Architecture of Learning is then the blueprints that make use of this model. Learning new skills requires somewhat different focus on these different processes than subject matter content, even though the same basic proceses still apply. The blueprints provide a general framework for designing instruction so that the essential learning processes are all engaged, with the proper focus for the type of subject matter. For example, skills require more rehearsal and less relating to past experience than non-skill content, but relating to past experience is still needed at various points to produce the intermediate outcomes needed to prepare for effective rehearsal. This is all taken into consideration by the useful general blueprints in Architecture of Learning.

My biggest concern reading this book was trying to come up with a good strategy for sizing the units of material that this approach would apply to. Breaking some material into 16 or so instructional segments as done in these blueprints would obviously be excessive, although the exercise of doing so might still be useful for an instructor for its own sake. There's a lot of room for judgment here in just how to take a curriculum and divide it up into units that can be structured using these patterns.

Perhaps the most exciting chapters for me are the ones on creative and critical thinking. I really like the way this book makes it clear that various thinking skills are used together with content to deepen learning. I think that's one of the biggest missing pieces in the way learning is often represented. People realize they're missing something in learning, but they seem to look for the missing piece in strange places like "unconscious" learning rather than looking more closely at the constituent skills we use to process ideas. There's a lot of room for thought here, and a very useful general approach for thinking about designing effective instructional experiences.

Minds, Brains, and Learning: A foundational book on brain science and education

Review of: Minds, Brains, and Learning, by James P. Byrnes

Link on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Minds-Brains-Learning-Understanding-Neuroscientific/dp/1572306521/ref=cm_cr-mr-title

Nearly a decade after its publication, this book remains for me one of the very best basic resources for those who want to understand how we learn in terms of brain function, and in general the educational relevance of neuroscience.

Brain science remains a potentially important source for expanding and revising our psychological theories of learning. On the other hand, a lot of enthusiastic authors have made excessive claims in recent years about brain science research providing us with new ways of thinking about learning, and most of these claims are hype, many falling into the category of popular "neuromyth" as they become more widely accepted.

It was once the case that talking about human life in terms of brain function would immmediately inspire resistance. We don't like to think of ourselves in mechanical terms. The popular enthusiasm of the past two decades around brain science in popular books has reversed this bias in some ways, now "brain-based" has become a common marketing term. Basing principles on brain science is more than just throwing a few technical terms around and quoting from press releases for recent research.

Byrnes' wonderful book sets out to give the foundation of the major research programs relevant to both neuroscience and education, point out the important ideas they test, evaluate how those tests have fared, and come to balanced conclusions about the results. This is a far cry from the typical popular "brain-based" book which gives you a bums rush tour or neuroanatomy, a highly selective review of certain research, and then a wildly speculative theory followed by the author's personal favorite principles (which in many cases I think these authors would have promoted even without their "brain-based" research).

This is one of the few books that actually does look closely at brain science as a source of information about educational principles and comes to useful conclusions about what we know and what we still need to find out.

Some highlights:

1. Brain research by itself cannot support particular instructional practices, although it can support particular psychological theories which can in turn be used to design more effective forms of instruction.

2. Although we know that complex stimulus environments in early life alter brain structure, we still have no idea how to make good use of this to childrens' advantage. Common claims for special benefits of exposing infants to music, physical activity, and so on have not yet been supported by reliable evidence.

3. The synaptic basis of learning is largely irrelevant to particular modes of instruction. Principles of instruction are better based on psyhological principles such as deliberate practice and creating elaborate multicoded representations, which are stil consistent with neuroscience but not dependent upon its details.

If you have an interest in education and want to understand the real fundamentals of how neuroscience data relates to educational practices, I think this book should be one of your stepping stones.

The wisdom of crowds vs. the distribution of expertise

Jason Flom has a very good brief post on 10 principles for the future of learning:

http://www.eduratireview.com/2009/07/10-principles-for-future-of-learning.html

This is a good post that I'm not so much criticizing as using a springboard to illustrate a trend that I see with current epistemological thinking in popular culture: we are moving toward seeing collectively derived sources as authorities in preference to individuals, or we assume that we are moving away from reliance on authority sources. It seems as if a lot of people are viewing this as an unambiguously good thing. I'm not so sure. Culture is changing rapidly, but the evolved properties of the human nervous system don't necessarily change at the same rate, and I think there is no doubt that we do have stable social cognitive features that characterize us even when we switch technologies radically.

To me there is a classic dilemma regarding authority: we rely on it for accurate knowledge (because expertise is not evenly distributed!) and we can also be manipulated by it and rely on it too much. The currently popular philosophy of knowledge seems to be that we are sociallizing knowledge and that our intelligence and expertise are becoming a collective web of some sort. This abstract is certainly interesting and provocative, but really it is unlikely to be true at least in the near future.

The important features of individual minds don't scale to networks of humans (as far as I know!). Individual expertise and intelligence does not appear as a property of human social networks (again, AFAIK). Also, groups are subject to fallacies just as individuals are (this one I think is pretty well established in social psychology). Those fallacies just follow a different pattern.

Collective editing is not neccessarily self-correcting, it can amplify mistakes under various conditions.So we can't just make that dilemma of authority go away by saying that we are collectively the new authority source or that there is no more need for authoritative sources or pretending that social networks are themselves experts or that expertise is becoming more evenly distributed. It clearly is not.

As of right now, there are still a few people who know much more than nearly all others about each domain. I don't say that lightly. It's a fundamental scaling that results from the effort required to achieve true expertise in any domain. It's a result of expertise research, not political or social philosophy.

So I feel as if there is a serious but very common epistemological flaw of confusing wide dissemination of information with even distribution of expertise. The misused term "knowledge" seems to be used in this service, since we often carelessly use it to mean both information and expertise. Of course we should make use of collective sources like Wikipedia, but we should not make the further glib assumption that these can replace individual expertise.

That's why we really do need some of those criteria for making limited use of collectively derived sources. They don't neccessarily provide us with the best information for all uses, and our natural temptation is to just transfer credibility to them. We need to not only make better use of collectively derived sources but also transfer proportionately our critical thinking normative principles from individual authority to those collective sources and learn new principles for evaluating them.

Sometimes the crowd is wrong. And most of the time the crowd gets the least common denominator most right. That's probably good enough for a high school project, but not for serious scholarship. In my opinion. Thinking remains a property of individual minds, facilitated by the social network but not (God help us) replaced by it.

kind regards,

Todd

Book Review: NurtureShock by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman

Amazon review link.

The recent easy availability of science news has been a mixed blessing. On the one hand, we get the breaking news every time someone publishes anything even remotely interesting. On the other hand, it is even harder to perceive the consensus in scientific fields. We get the feeling of things changing and new data coming in, but not a good sense of the overall patterns and how they affect existing theories, because the process of consensus building in science happens over decades, not weeks.

The scientific consensus on child development and parenting has been gradually but insistently shifting over the past decade or so. The overall picture can't easily be seen from individual news stories, so books like NurtureShock which give some insight into the big picture are very important. NurtureShock to me represents the second huge bombshell in child development theory applicable to the average person. The first was presented in Judith Rich Harris' The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do, Revised and Updated, which argued persuasively and shockingly that most differences in parenting made little difference to long term outcomes in their children's lives. Harris insisted that children instead were mostly raised by socialization in their peer groups. NurtureShock doesn't argue the Nurture Assumption viewpoint at all (in fact it is largely consistent with Harris in most respects), but it focuses instead on the areas where parents really might be able make a difference.

What is the emerging new consensus according to NutureShock? The term is intended to reflect the shock that new parents feel when the fountain of natural wisdom about caring for children that they expect to serve them just doesn't appear. Our instincts are to love and care for our children, not to automatically know the right things to do. So we often turn to child development research. What does that tell us?

NurtureShock tells us that some of our commonsense is actually right afterall, and that some of the popular assumptions made about children are wildly off the mark. In particular, two big "myths" are identified. First, children are not just small adults, and we can't just apply the same principles to them that we apply to adults. Second, there are no supertraits that confer only good things: emotional intelligence, intelligence, gratitude, happiness, self-esteem, honesty, fairness, and so on can all have their dark side as well as their positive side. Negative elements can and do co-exist with high levels of positive traits.

For example, measured analytic intelligence (IQ) appears stable in adults, but changes in fits and spurts during childhood. This has significant implications for the use of childhood standardized testing to predict later ability.

Praising adults usually helps encourage them (as long as they believe it is sincere), but in children the effect is more often paradoxical. Children praised too much or for the wrong things actually end up worse off as a result.

Similarly, the once-trendy and still popular obsession with self-esteem turned out to have very little evidential support, and bullies often turn out to have very high self-esteem. Emotional intelligence is also not the panacea that some of its proponents originally suggested. Criminals appear to have a higher, not lower, level of emotional intelligence than the general population, and they use that ability to manipulate others. Popular kids in school use their skills at empathy not so much to be sympathetic, but to play social games that improve their status.

Even insisting on honesty is a mixed bag. Kids seem to learn to lie as a natural part of developing their thinking and social skills, it is related to intelligence. But you can't just ignore it because it is part of development, or it will become a habitual pattern for dealing with difficult social situations. Parents have to learn when and how to encourage honesty. Kids faced with the constant threat of punishment lie more to protect themselves rather than less, and they learn better to evade getting caught. They are generally more motivated to be honest to please parents than to avoid punishment.

The best thing about this book is that it doesn't just promote or adhere to a standard socio-political agenda for child raising the way many books do. This isn't just rehashed progressive or conservative childrearing strategies, it reinforces some of the best elements of each of the different models. We see that threats and punishment are a particularly ineffective way of dealing with dishonesty, but setting limits and enforcing rules is crucial to helping teens know they are cared for.

We find that, perhaps unsurprisingly, teens are particularly prone to boredom and often act out as a result, and that there is not too much we can do about it. They don't respond to small or moderate rewards, but then respond in an exaggerated way to large rewards. This extreme-based decision making pattern in teens varies greatly between individuals but in many leads to the distinctive kind of risk-taking judgment that teens often exhibit. Unfortunately, there's not much in the way of advice here, just perhaps a little understanding.

Among the most important findings in this book are those dealing with thinking skills, especially metacognition and "executive function" skills. Both educational research and brain science seem to be reinforcing the importance of helping children learn the skills for teaching themselves, controlling their own attention and motivation, and evaluating their own performance. Some of these skills are general, but many are specific to particular subjects, so teaching thinking skills cannot be separated from teaching subject matter, as was sometimes mistakenly done in the past. This is a very difficult topic, not one amenable to many easy heuristics, but it is crucial to education.

This is a very important book, rich with research examples and also practical examples from the authors. It will make you think twice about some of your instincts and some of the things you've accepted from popular belief, and that will in turn help make you a more flexible and skilled parent or teacher.

Problem Solving as a Skill

Problem Solving as a Skill

What do you think of when someone uses the term “problem solving?” It’s a very common term for a very common activity. It is so common that we take it for granted. This tendency to take problem solving ability for granted is embedded in various ways in culture, which unfortunately reinforces counter-productive assumptions and attitudes and takes away from our results.

As individuals we tend to believe that we are already good at solving problems, regardless of our actual ability. On the one hand, this is in part because we associate problem solving with thinking, and we assume that thinking is a matter of intelligence. So if we are smart, we must be good thinkers, and good problem solvers. Clearly the large number of very smart people who make surprisingly stupid mistakes quite often argues against that simplistic view.

Conversely, if we don’t consider ourselves smart, we assume we aren’t good thinkers and we don’t bother trying to solve problems better. In that case we often like to say that “common sense” is what is needed. And of course we assume we are loaded with that as well. I would argue that being stupid doesn’t necessarily make us good problem solvers either. So what does make one person better than another at solving problems?

I suggest that we should question every aspect of the common viewpoint that problem solving is just thinking in general and thinking in general is just a matter of being smart. I claim that problem solving is not just thinking in general, it is a very specific kind of thinking that has focus and purpose, and requires us to learn certain specific kinds of skills in order to do it well.

So I claim that thinking is not simply intelligence in action; rather clear thinking consists largely of learnable skills for selecting and using resources. The concept of intelligence is closely associated with problem solving. The driving reason for defining intelligence the way we do is to try to measure the ability to solve problems in general. We aren’t completely wrong in this endeavor, intelligence as commonly measured does play a role in helping us select and use our tools, but it is not itself the tool, and intelligence doesn’t automatically impart the skills for using the tools. Intelligence in important, but we need more.

We all have the basic tools for problem solving, but it takes more skill to use them well than just “common sense” or intelligence. Individual differences are resources for problem solving in different ways. The responsibility for learning to use these resources effectively is in each of us.

In other words, effective problem solving in contemporary situations is not just a natural result of being clever, it is the result of learning and practicing the right skills and habits and learning to use whatever gifts we do have.

Common factors among smart people, such as a self-image of intelligence and a perceived need to protect our reputation can actually prevent us from recognizing our weaknesses. These psychological needs also prevent us from admitting when we make mistakes. They serve as serious obstacles to improving ourselves. There are a number of significant and well-documented obstacles to accurate self-perception that tend to prevent us from being the best problem solvers we can be.

Consider some of these general observations that have often been noted about intelligent people:

· The smarter you are the easier and more tempting it is to use your intelligence to defend your current viewpoint rather than explore the problem further.
· It is easier and more tempting to use intelligence to criticize an idea than to find ways to make it work.
· We tend to use intelligence to operate on information as it is presented to us rather than to envision different alternatives and contexts.
· Intelligence is associated with quick thinking and so intelligent people tend to feel they have to come to closure quickly on a problem to demonstrate their intelligence.
· Intelligence is more closely associated with cleverness than with wisdom.
· The more eloquent you are, the smarter people will assume you are, and the more highly they will tend to regard your arguments.
· We tend to assume that more intelligent people are more likely to be right than less intelligent people.

These kinds of factors are the reason why intelligence so often becomes a trap rather than the aid to problem solving that it should be in theory.

The folks who already consider intelligence and education to be overrated qualities may think themselves immune from this problem. Not so. It is our attitude toward intelligence that is the problem, not intelligence itself. We tend to have similar attitudes toward common sense if we disdain intelligence. Our criteria for what we consider cleverness or eloquence may change in different cultures but we still tend to defend our current viewpoint, criticize ideas, operate on information as presented to us, be more interested in cleverness than wisdom, consider eloquent arguments more highly than less eloquent ones, and assume that clever people are more likely to be right.

The self-image obstacle to better problem solving is made worse by the tradition in education to assume that problem solving is just a matter of using our intelligence, our expertise, and our knowledge in a straightforward way. Schools teach facts and encourage students to accumulate domain-specific knowledge and then test these things in convenient ways through question and answer tests and puzzle solving exercises. I am not arguing against the admirable goals of literacy, factual knowledge, or domain expertise. I am arguing for something else in addition that has generally been neglected; general problem solving skills.

We tend to make a big deal about tests because that seems to be the only way that we can be sure that people are meeting the objectives that we set for performance. Yet tests have limited value since the tests we use for the sake of convenience and standardization rarely if ever measure real world problem solving ability. Even when we do a good job at testing, we generally are at a loss as to what to do when people do poorly. Should we throw money at the problem? Should we change what we teach? Should we change how we are teaching it? Should we change who is teaching it? Is it something about the students themselves?

By testing knowledge, on the one hand, and intelligence on the other, we believe we are truly testing the ability of students to solve problems. So when one set of students seems to be better thinkers than another when tested on realistic problems, we assume they must be exposed to better knowledge or they must be more intelligent. What else could be the difference? What could the students and teachers who are better thinkers and problem solvers be doing differently?

Intelligence, domain expertise and knowledge are certainly useful resources for solving problems but they are not the essence of problem solving ability. How can I say this? What else is left? In short, two things: thinking skills and active learning.

My claim is that effective problem solving is in part the result of a collection of learned skills that do not depend on genius, which do not rely heavily on expertise or knowledge in formal domains like mathematics and science, and which are not just common sense. Domain-specific knowledge and puzzle solving skills in particular subjects are obviously important for specialists in those domains, but real problems also require us to do a lot of upfront work to:
· identify perceptions of the problem,
· place the problem into context,
· clarify the real objectives,
· deal with various kinds of obstacles from people, processes, and things,
· and in general to structure the problem and the information in a way that focuses our problem solving efforts and brings our best abilities to bear.

The other aspect of effective problem solving is active learning: an ongoing process of systematically seeking and accumulating experience that improves your problem solving.

To do these things consistently and well, we have to know a lot about our own pervasive biases and weaknesses as well as our strengths, and this is where we find deep blind spots in human nature.

I suggest that effective problem solving is built from a foundation of domain-general thinking skills for organizing information, directing our attention to the right things, and in general selecting and using the resources we have to their best effect. This means knowing how the human mind works, how human beings are motivated, and how to use this knowledge most effectively to build on our existing strengths and compensate for our weaknesses.

I want to emphasize again that this doesn’t replace domain-specific expertise, knowledge, or intelligence, but it makes better use of these things. So far we have generally put so little emphasis on these thinking skills that we have left an enormous gap between our potential problem solving abilities and our actual ones. That is the gap that I think education most needs to address.