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Friday, October 13, 20061160751900
Learning Evolved, Part I: Darwinism-Cognitivism
Students are social animals that think. What else does one need to know?
Evolutionary Psychology is a cousin to that other great movement, the Cognitive Revolution. Both desire to explore how one , and are unhappy with vague or mentalist answers. Bruning described the Cognitivists as believing “Unlike the associationist-behavioral view, which focused on environmental influences on behavior or "conditions of learning. Cognitive psychology seeks to understand the mind's structures and processes” (1995). Similarly, Evolutionary Psychology was founded in reaction to the “general-purpose, content-independent” (Tooby & Cosmides, 1992, 41). As the old paradigms are now in their “last throes” (Carmen, 2006), it is time that Evolutionary Psychology and Cognitive Psychology be combined to give educators the best possible guide.
Evolutionary Psychologists and Cognitive Psychologists agree that human mind is composed of modules of domain-specific applications. Humans possess “modules” that are pre-existing mental processes that allow context-specific learning and whose differing operations make us unique (Pintrich and Garcia, 1994, 125) . As Smirnov, Arrow, Kennet, and Orbell put it, “The idea that human cognitive architecture consists, in substantial part, of functionally specific information processing modules is standard in evolutionary psychology and in cognitive neuroscience more broadly” (2006). In other words, “the mind/brain consists of many modules/organs/intelligences, each of which operates according to its own rules in relative autonomy from the others” (Garnder, 2003). Medical tests show that various modules of the mind are related to specific regions of the brain (Jung-Beeman et al 2004; Gilbert, Regier, Kay, & Ivry 2005). From the everyday, such as talking (Buller, 2005; Pinker, 2002) and judging attractiveness in others (Olson & Marshuetz), to pro-social activities such as voting (Fowles, Baker, & Dawes, 2006) , to the more abstract areas such as political orientation (Alford and Hibbing 2004, Alford, Funk, and Hibbing 2005; Morris et al 2003), how our species evolved influences how we act and what we do.
Thus, I propose a theory of motivation rooted in exploiting student's neural-cognitive modules. I will outline methods of motivation that are adapted to small group and large group interactions and defend them with new research. Just as it is sad and foolish for researchers to ignore the importance of teaching (Halpern, 2002, 5), teachers must improve their methods by utilizing the latest research. I will argue as follows: For students to be motivated, they would have had to practice motivation for hours. It is unlikely that students have put in this practice, so teachers must use indirect mechanisms for creating motivation. Framing and group competition are two such mechanisms teachers such should. Framing is straight-forward and hangs on the known predilection to avoid losses more avidly than seeking gains. Group competition relies on altruism and altruistic punishment. These are not merely broad categories that contradict each other (as are, say, Csikszentmihalyi, 1996), but quantitatively defined qualities that are seen in laboratory conditions.
We know what expertise requires: "endless hours of practice" (Ridley, 2003, 260). Practice separates the talented from the incompetent (Gardner, 1998, 28) and sustained effort separates critical thinkers from the naive (Reiter, 1994, 302) . It takes around ten years to become really good at something (Ross, 2006), whether the activity is academic publishing (Kiewra, 1994) or even showing emotions (Crawford, 2006). Learning how to be motivated is no less a skill than writing articles or overcoming the flat effect, but many teachers ignore this lesson when they assume that students can just turn motivation on. Merely telling students to be motivated cannot possibly work, any more than one can just tell someone to be good at any other talent domain. Additionally, relying exclusively on motivation may be unfair, as many learners may be genetically predisposed to depression, novelty-seeking, and other conditions that detract from purposeful practice (Caspi et al, 2003; Hammock & Young, 2005). Therefore, I propose a subversive style of motivation that bypasses a conscious desire to excel at the material and instead achieves results. As one might trick a geographer into caring about literature by mapping literary lands (Cooper-Clark, 1996, 172) or subvert a student into thinking by contradicting established beliefs (Ruiz, 1996, 159), students should manipulate the environment to make students act as if they were truly motivated.
Learning Evolved, a companion series to Classroom Democracy
1. Darwinism-Cognitivism
2. Social Motivation
3. Coalitionary Education
4. Bibliography
10:05 Posted in UNL / College Teaching | Permalink | Comments (2) | Email this
Comments
I will respond substantively later this evening but first, on a tangential note, here is a Freeman Dyson piece you might want to read
http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?id=14236&ch=biotech
Posted by: mark safranski | Friday, October 13, 2006
Mark,
I am in the middle of a helping with a big conference (15 hour days blah blah blah) so I'm light on the blogging (I haven't even posted on Dreaming 5GW [1] recently), so I am not able to properly comment on the Dyson piece. For now a comment on just one paragraph:
"Now, after some three billion years, the Darwinian era is over. The epoch of species competition came to an end about 10 thousand years ago when a single species, Homo sapiens, began to dominate and reorganize the biosphere. Since that time, cultural evolution has replaced biological evolution as the driving force of change. Cultural evolution is not Darwinian. Cultures spread by horizontal transfer of ideas more than by genetic inheritance. Cultural evolution is running a thousand times faster than Darwinian evolution, taking us into a new era of cultural interdependence that we call globalization. And now, in the last 30 years, Homo sapiens has revived the ancient pre-Darwinian practice of horizontal gene transfer, moving genes easily from microbes to plants and animals, blurring the boundaries between species. We are moving rapidly into the post-Darwinian era, when species will no longer exist, and the evolution of life will again be communal."
I'm not sure that Dyson's words are as smart as they appear.
Whether cultural evolution is darwinian depends on your level of analysis: at the level of memes culture is darwinian, but at the level of humans it is lamarckian. (Gould was similarly half-right [2])
Likewise, Darwin was a believer in group selection within a species. But as there are genetic differences between groups, only some linguistic jujitsu allows one to pretend that such group selection and genetic selection among humans has ended [3]
Likewise, DNA transfer is not new, as human DNA is substantially viral. [4]
As far as we know, only two mammals ever evolved before the dawn of man that engaged in coalitionary warfare: chimps and wolves. One of the first acts of our human ancestors, the third species of coalitionary mammals warriors, was to create a fourth: dogs. We have been altering the ecosystem for a long time. (Catholicgauze has talked about a similar topic: the desertification of the great plains by stone-age paleo-indians [5])
[1] http://www.fifthgeneration.phaticcommunion.com/
[2] http://tdaxp.blogspirit.com/archive/2006/09/08/where-does-war-come-from.html
[3] http://tdaxp.blogspirit.com/archive/2006/09/09/synthesizing-stephen-j-gould-s-beloved-punctuated-equilibriu.html
[4] http://tdaxp.blogspirit.com/archive/2006/06/17/leftist-censorship-and-the-nature-of-modularity.html
[5] http://catholicgauze.blogspot.com/2006/02/take-away-my-home-so-buffalo-may-roam.html
Posted by: Dan tdaxp | Friday, October 13, 2006