Understanding and Learning

John Rueter

April 11, 2002

Abstract:

Introduction

The attempt to understand life, or any part of it, is a stress. A student's desire to put the pieces together so that they make sense is the driving force in learning, or rather, intrinsic motivation should be the pressure that pushes learning along. Many times this is at odds with how courses are constructed, the key features of a course in the students' minds may be the assignments, exams and grades. These are extrinsic motivators. The faculty have a different view of the course that includes that value of all the concepts and tools for a student in the discipline or a citizen in our society. The problem is how to construct a course such that the work and evaluation process is aligned with intrinsic motivating factors.

Defining "Understanding"

In my courses I spend a good deal of effort attempting to get the students to "understand" how to solve problems. My working definition of "understanding" is based my definition on the work by David Perkins (1998). He gives many different useful ways to describe parts of understanding.

"understanding is the ability to think and act flexibly with what one knows."

"more like learning to improvise jazz or hold a good conversation or rock climb than learning the multiplication tables"

"to gauge a person's understanding at a given time, ask the person to do something that puts the understanding to work - explaing, solving a problem, building an argument, constructin a product."

"The performance view of understanding favors incremental learning and fosters incremental learners."

"Performances require attention, practice, refinement."

"Learning for understanding occurs principally through reflective engagement"

"New understanding performances are built on previous understandings and new information provided by the instructional setting."

"Learning a body of knowledge and know-how for understanding typically requires a chaing of understanding performances of increasing challenge and variety."

"Learning for understanding often involves a conflict with older reprertoires of understanding performances and their associated ideas and images."

Along with these phrases, I present the cycle of understanding which starts with sensing that there is a problem and ends with action. A student who truly "understands" the material would need no prompting, they wouldn't even need the context of the course or the classroom to be aware of problems that they might want to address.

Table 1: Cycle of Understanding

1. Be aware of your environment and be able to sense that there is a problem.

2. Be able to define a problem that is worth addressing. Determine why this is valuable and what you would like to accomplish. Identify a stopping rule for when you will stop working on this problem.

3. Identify what concepts you know are related and what tools might be employed.

4. Determine what additional information or tools might be necessary. This can be throught trial and error at a solution or it might be by setting a particular problem solving strategy.

5. Monitor how new information changes the dimensions of the problem or approach needed.

6. Attempt a solution of all or part of the problem.

7. Evaluate your progress and determine the next steps. This may be to return to previous steps or even to abandon the problem all together.

8. Act on your results. This may be to continue to work on the problem or to stop and present what you know. It may even be to take action to help solve the problem.

The Cycle of Understanding or similar self-directed processes are very important for students to understanding of the range of the course material or discipline. As each student senses and acts, they are responding to stresses that push them to incorporate more information into their framework. Small problems and the resultant activity of understanding are crucial for constructing and revising each student's version of the information.

Scientific Method as one example of the understanding process

With very little fudging, the scientific method can be mapped onto the more general cycle of understanding. In a science course, the cycle of understanding might not have to be presented independently. Students who appreciate the potential iterative nature of the scientific method should easily transfer that to self-monitoring on other problems even if they don't contain a specific hypothesis.

The "mindquake" hypothesis

My working hypothesis is that the resolution of many small problems sets up the conditions necessary for a few larger learning advances and the even rarer (but necessary) learning breakthroughs. This process of learning through continual stress with reorganizing events of different scales is parallel to the self organized criticallity that can be seen in sandpiles or has been proposed to eplain the Gutenberg-Richter law for earthquake strength and frequency (Bak 1996). This is not meant to be mechanistic at the level of brain activity, but rather to be instructive on the type of learning environment that we need to impose on our students that forces them to organize their own understand around events that have a wide range of frequencies.

Faculty designed activities that promote the understanding process

This working hypothesis suggests that we should create a sets of opportunities for our students that work on many small portions of information. The dilema is that these opportunities need to be interesting enough to engage the students will little prompting or imposition of extrinsic values (grades), but yet repetitive. This means that the instructor needs to constantly challenge the students with new variations of simple problems with some more difficult problems interspersed and the occasional rare involved problem. This hypothesis also suggests that these problems need to be both interesting in their own right and address the students' values. Below I suggest three factors that should be considered:

1. Faculty enthusiasm and expertise are the most powerful things we have going for us. Research shows that faculty enthusiasm for the course is one of the most powerful motivating factors for students. Faculty should be encouraged to bring their enthusiasm for their research into the classroom as often as possible. This can be facilitated by course design and pedagogical training that helps faculty use their individual expertise in a scaffolded approach that uses a type of "progressive disclosure" to build the problem for students as they are ready to work on its increasingly sophisticated aspects.

2. We need to explicitly address our social values even in science classes. Inorder to take advantage of student motivation, faculty need to connect the course to students' values. These values could range from the desire for new learning in a pure sense or to understand current environmental and social problems. Courses that are considered irrelevant, except as their role in curricular requirements will have trouble tapping into the intrinsic motivation necessary for the understanding cycle.

3. There are significant threats to student attention and energy. Students have busy lives and many demands on their time. Some institutions are actually recruiting students with busy lives and many other institutions are striving to make the student experience fit in with their daily obligations. While access is a laudible goal on its face, if students don't have the attention, energy and time to react to intrinsic motivation then the understanding cycle is severely compromised. Current research is starting to reveal how distance and distributed education strategies are allowing students to demote the priority of learning activity and many students report that they do their homework late at night. Is the latest rush to eliminate and denigrate "seat time" metrics really serving our students?

 

Conclusions

"Understanding" (as used here) is the broad ability to work with many different types of information and tools in a self-motivated and self-monitored manner. Understanding allows students to operate in the disciplinary domain, using concepts and tools fluently without prompting. The continual pressure to understand small and large problems can lead the students to organize their own understanding of the material. The range of scale of these problems is crucial for challenging students in way that they are required to occasionally reorganize their mental structure of the concepts. It follows from my argument that if understanding is the goal; then faculty and institutions need to focus attention on conditions that lead to intrinsic motivation and provide ample time for student actions that result from that motivation. These activities include using faculty experise and motivation to its fullest, bring values into the classroom and avoiding the temptation to use teaching technologies that demote the primacy of learning.

References

Bak, Per.1996. How Nature Works: The science of self -organized criticality. Springer-Verlag.

Perkins, David. 1998. What is Understanding? In: Teaching for Understanding. Martha Stone Wiske, Editor. Jossey-Bass.