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Learning – Scientists, Processors and Rats

What magic needs to occur for someone to go from ignorance to knowledge? We often assume that this happens by a process of instruction. We assume that if a person listens attentively enough to someone who is teaching, they will learn. If that doesn’t work, then you repeat the information, perhaps in a different format. And so on, until they get it.

To complicate things further, sometimes people can retain information and repeat it back, but with no understanding of what they have learnt. Why? What is actually happening in this process called ‘learning’?

What if you can’t reliably make learning to happen in another person by telling them what they should learn? In that case, we might need to reconsider the whole way schools are organised. Perhaps, rather than assuming children are not trying hard enough, maybe schools aren’t designed well enough to enable young humans to learn.

Schools weren’t based on learning theory. No one designed them to maximise learning, and governments didn’t do research to find out how children learnt before rolling out universal schooling. Teacher-led instruction from textbooks was efficient, easy to standardise and relatively inexpensive. It became the norm due to convenience.

Ivan Pavlov, a Russian working at the turn of the twentieth century, is one of the most famous names in psychology, despite actually being a physiologist. He discovered by accident that he could train a dog to salivate when a bell was rung, because the bell had been previously rung when it was fed. The dog learnt that the bell meant food and salivated even when no food was available. This wasn’t something the dog did intentionally; salivation is an automatic response to particular circumstances. That’s known as ‘classical conditioning’.

the basis of behaviourism. The most fundamental principle is that you can change behaviour through the deliberate manipulation of external events.

the experimenters, rather than the animals, controlled what learning should take place.

Psychologists were quick to see how this could be applied to children. In 1920, John B. Watson demonstrated classical conditioning on Little Albert, a nine-month-old baby. He did this by clanging an iron pipe and showing him a rat at the same time. Little Albert learnt to cry when he saw rats.

It wouldn’t get through a modern ethics committee, particularly since they didn’t decondition him afterwards. No one knows what happened to Little Albert but, by 1928, Watson was writing manuals on using behavioural principles to bring up children. He considered that there were only three unconditioned emotions: fear, rage and love. Everything else was learnt by behaviourist principles and therefore parents needed to be careful to condition their child in the right way.

Watson’s advice hasn’t dated well; in particular, his recommendation to interact with your children in a detached, business-like fashion. He did, however, start off a fashion for routine and habit-forming parenting which still continues today. Get the parent’s behaviour right, was his message. The child will learn the correct behavioural associations, and all will be well.

All the schools I have visited have used behaviourist principles. They use rewards and punishments to control children’s behaviour. Typical school rewards are grades, teacher approval, school prizes and good school reports. School punishments include bad grades, disapproval, being put on report, detentions and suspensions.

This works, on its own terms, for many children. Success is when there is a change in a child’s behaviour: perhaps they remember to hand in their homework after being given a detention for forgetting. The result of this apparent success is that many schools and teachers forget that it misses something out.

That something is the experience of the child themselves.

It doesn’t matter, from a behaviourist perspective, what the child thinks. A child might be complying with school requirements and yet feeling furious and resentful. When they are younger, many of them put up with it; as they get older, more of them start to show us how they feel.

The other problem is the child who doesn’t respond to behavioural strategies. There’s an assumption that the child can change, and if we just apply enough pressure, they will. So, if a child doesn’t respond to lunchtime detention, they are given an after-school detention. If they don’t respond to that, they are suspended for a day. If a day doesn’t work, let’s try a week. The onus is on the child to change, and the punishment increases until they do, or until they are permanently excluded from school.

Behaviourism assumes that the child can do the task … if only they would try hard enough.

They can’t comply, but it’s not necessarily for lack of trying.

By the 1960s, many psychologists were frustrated with the limits of behaviourism. It seemed like an overly simplistic way to understand complex human beings. Along came people like Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky, who were interested in how people thought, not just how they behaved. Behaviourism argues that humans learn in response to environmental stimuli; cognitive psychologists acknowledged that, in between the environment and behaviour, there was a thinking human being.

The question was, how could you measure their learning?

Studying thoughts is tricky. Unlike with behavioural change, which can be seen, you can’t ask a rat how its thinking has changed. Measuring a change in someone’s thoughts usually involves having to ask them or test them.

Psychologists solved this problem in two ways. The first way was through close observations of children learning naturally. Piaget watched his nephew and daughter as they grew and developed an understanding of the world. The other approach was experimental, devising paradigms to look at how well people learnt in controlled situations, or tests to work out what children knew.

Both of these methods are still used today. Psychologists around the world design experiments in order to work out how people learn, with some methodologies not unlike those used for the rats and the pigeons. These types of experiments frequently involve people learning useless information. It’s common for studies on memory, for example, to study people memorising lists, or abstract patterns. This is to avoid the thorny problem of people already knowing the information they are meant to be learning. However, it means that learning is taken out of context and is often devoid of any meaning for the learner. The assumption is that the same factors will come into play when remembering meaningful information.

In order to do experiments on the processes of learning, psychologists had to ignore many of the things which made learning interesting, and also ignore a lot of what people were learning.

Cognitive experiments on learning and memory are designed to focus on a particular question and, in order to do that, they simplify the situation down to the absolute basics. They strip learning of context, in order to understand the underlying processes. Which is useful if that’s your aim. But just as with behaviourism, when these theories are applied in education, there’s a tendency to ignore just how simplified the experiments were. Children can’t be stripped down to underlying processes.

Recently, a particular type of cognitive theory of learning has had a resurgence in education. Educationalists and cognitive scientists such as E.D. Hirsch and Daniel Willingham argue that we should directly apply cognitive models of memory to education and schools. They have the ear of government, and so these theories have led to widespread curriculum change in the UK and the USA.

It’s easy to see why they have had such success. The model of learning they promote sounds so simple and adapts so well to the school model. Willingham sees learning as information committed to long-term memory. This model suggests that we have two forms of memory. Working memory is short-term, is limited in capacity and cannot be greatly expanded by training. We use our working memory when we repeat a phone number to ourselves, punch it into the phone and then immediately forget it.

Our long-term memories, by contrast, can hold vast stores of information, but we can only bring small amounts up to our working memory at a time. Training does not significantly expand our working memory. What is possible is expanding what an ‘item’ in our working memory might be.

Here’s an example to illustrate what this means:

Here’s a set of letters; give yourself a few moments to look at them, then turn the page and see how many you can write down:

F I E N P D K M W P A Q B J O I

Typically, you’ll have remembered between five and eight. That’s a normal span for working memory.

Now try this one:

The enormous turnip jumped over the hedge.

How many letters did you remember here? If you got the whole sentence, it was 35.

And now try this one:

Jfd dscxdwers njeyy aqwqew ecxs ggnn okjko

Also 35 letters, but I’d be surprised if you got all of them. Why the difference?

In the ‘enormous turnip’ example, our brain combines the letters into words, and so we only need to remember the words rather than the individual letters. The meaning makes it easier to remember as well. Our expertise in reading changes how much information we can hold in our working memories. Words act as chunks of letters. In the final example, we don’t have any meaningful combinations and so we are back to the individual letters being the basic piece of information – and we’re stuck with our limited working memory.

There’s good evidence that people who have more information stored in their long-term memory are more expert than those who have less. Advocates of applying this model to education are fond of talking about experts – in particular, chess experts. Studies of chess players have found that expert chess players can remember the positions of pieces on a chessboard far better than novices — but only when the pieces are in meaningful positions (i.e., positions that might arise during a game). If the pieces are randomly arranged, the novices and experts both have similar trouble remembering the positions. In a real chess game, background knowledge and expertise mean that experts have an advantage over novices, because they can clump what they see into meaningful chunks – just like you did with those words on the previous page. This enables them to manipulate large quantities of information, unlike the unfortunate novice who has to remember the position of each individual chess piece.

The difference between experts and novices isn’t their working memory. In this model, the difference is simply the amount of information stored in their long-term memory.

In schools, those who advocate for this model suggest that the purpose of education should be to get as much information as possible into the long-term memory of children. The evidence, after all, shows that the difference between experts and novices is their long-term memory stores. They argue that, just like the chess players, having large stores of background information will enable children to manipulate more information in their working memory and to think like experts. Once the knowledge is there, so the theory goes, then creativity and higher-level thinking is possible.

These theories underpin the philosophy of several schools which have recently opened in the USA and UK. In the UK, Michaela Community School in west London is an example. Children at schools like Michaela are drilled in every lesson. They repeat material again and again, and are rigorously tested on it every day. For homework, they self-quiz. They follow along with what the teacher says in their books, are compelled to read over 10,000 words a day, and can be called on at any time to keep them focused on the lesson and to avoid the temptation to drift off into a daydream. Every moment of their day is controlled. It’s a lot like a memory laboratory, no distractions allowed.

It all makes perfect sense if you see education as an extended memory experiment. We know that information is forgotten over time and, in order to keep it in memory, it has to be repeated. At schools like these, that’s how the system works. It’s built on cognitive science, as they are fond of saying.

There are a few quibbles with this approach, which even those of us who lack the massive amount of background knowledge necessary to be designated an ‘expert’ might have noticed.

Remember the chess players? They are highly expert and have enormous amounts of background knowledge about chess. The theory says that this is why they are expert, and if we could teach children lots of background knowledge, they would become experts, too.

Except that the way to learn to play chess is to do it. It’s a process of playing, testing strategies, learning from others, perhaps reading books or websites. It’s never a question of sitting in a classroom learning lots of chess facts and strategies and waiting for the day in the future when you will be deemed expert enough to actually start to play chess. The endpoint for those expert chess players might be lots of chess configurations in their long-term memory, but most of those they will have worked out as they played. They will make sense to them because they deeply understand the structure of the game of chess. The information might not even be available to them verbally, but be coded in a different part of their memory (this is called implicit learning, and we use it when we learn how to do things like ride a bicycle, or swim, which we may not be able to explain verbally even when we can do it).

In addition, very few people are obliged to play chess. It’s not on the school curriculum. Those who become experts in playing chess are those who have chosen to put in the years of practice required. They are experts because they love playing chess and because people around them played chess with them. Their chess-playing has a purpose and context.

Proponents of the knowledge-based approach to education say that children cannot be experts and think creatively until they have the necessary background knowledge.

They separate learning and doing. Outside the memory lab, there is no evidence that this is the best way to learn.

Like behaviourism, this sort of cognitivism is one level of explanation. It’s about how information storage might work in the brain – but that’s it. It doesn’t tell us anything about the context of learning, about how culture interacts with learning, or how people learn from each other.

In fact, cross-cultural studies have found that one of the things which schooled children do better than those who do not attend school is remembering lists of unrelated information. Schooled children learn how to remember things, even when they don’t make sense. It’s a skill that is only useful in a school context, where children are tested on information which they may not understand and didn’t choose to learn.

These theories of learning can’t tell us why one person is fascinated by algebra, while another loves history. They can’t even tell us why one person finds something easy while another works terribly hard and never gets above a ‘C’. They can’t tell us why Paul McCartney has music in his head.

To these cognitive scientists and educationalists, people are basically information processing units. Input goes in, they encode it, and then they can output it at a later date. Schools designed on this model focus on making the encoding as effective as possible, in the belief that that is what really matters. So, yes, approaches like this are based on cognitive science, but what their advocates don’t say is that the cognitive science they are referring to is based on experiments, which strip the context from real life. And what is learning, without context?

It’s memorising a list of random words.

There is something a bit odd about both behavioural and these particular cognitive theories, and it bothers me. They don’t actually seem to be about humans. It’s as if people’s learning is detached from their personalities and lives, and their memory store exists as a separate hard drive into which we can plug information through drills and repetition.

Luckily, not all cognitive scientists focus on pigeons and memorising lists. Some observe children learning with wonder at their capabilities and capacity for reflection. One of these is Alison Gopnik, an American developmental psychologist and philosopher. Rather than trying to teach children information and testing them on their retention, Gopnik designs experiments to show what young children already know, and how this knowledge interacts with their experiences.

For example, it turns out that, faced with two adults giving them contradictory information, children as young as three or four make logical choices about who to believe. They tend to believe their parent over a stranger, but they also take account of how confidently things are said. They’re more likely to believe someone who expresses their ideas with conviction than someone who sounds tentative.

And here’s where this research starts to get really interesting. Because it turns out that instructing young children can actually stop them learning. Elizabeth Bonawitz (a research psychologist who collaborated with Alison Gopnik) and her research group looked head on at the difference between exploratory learning and instruction. They used a toy which did several different things. Adults offered the toy to a child, and for half the children they told them explicitly how one part of the toy worked. For the other half, they ‘accidently on purpose’ showed the child how one part worked but gave no instruction. The children who weren’t instructed explored the toy and discovered all the other things it could do. The children who were instructed played with that toy in the way they were shown. The instruction seemed to stop them from looking for other possibilities. Other studies have found the same thing. When children are told how something works, they imitate. When they aren’t told, they explore. And in the second case, they learn more.

Of course, if you see the point of education as the acquisition of a particular body of knowledge, this doesn’t matter. Imitation is useful. Exploration and discovery aren’t on the cards until the children become ‘experts’. But if you’re concerned about children losing their joy in learning as they go through school, perhaps this offers one clue as to how that might be happening.

Gopnik’s writings are full of the children themselves. For her, children are never passive recipients; they bring their own prior knowledge and experience to every situation. From very early on, children actively try to understand what others are doing and why they are doing it, and adjust their behaviour accordingly. They are always active participants in their learning.

To Gopnik, schooling represents only one type of learning, and it’s not one that is superior to other forms. She suggests that other forms of social learning are both deeper evolutionarily and more sophisticated. From her perspective, Western middle-class parents are immersed in a parenting culture which focuses on moulding children to create a particular outcome (a mindset which Gopnik characterises as the ‘carpentry’ approach to parenting). This fits well with school culture, which has similar aims. This isn’t the only way to approach parenting, just as schooling isn’t the only way to approach learning. Young children are not schooled, and yet they learn. For most of human history, children were not schooled, and yet they became functioning adults and learnt how to live in their society.

Gopnik’s theory of learning and child development is sometimes called the ‘theory-theory’ because she argues that children construct their own theories about the world and use probabilistic reasoning to deduct likely answers. Fundamental to the approach is the idea that the child’s own perspective interacts with what they are experiencing, and that learning is always an active process. Studies show how young children learn through observation and listening, make predictions and test hypotheses. This science of learning bears a lot of resemblance to what we see in self-directed children. It’s not any less scientific because the children aren’t being asked to memorise lists.

When we see learning as an interaction between the child themselves, their pre-existing knowledge and their environment, then it becomes clear why each child’s learning trajectory can be so different, and how two children can learn such different things from the same experience.

In Western societies, this period of exploratory social learning is short-lived. Children are quickly channelled into school and formal learning, which is perceived to be more advanced and more important than informal learning. They are actively prevented from continuing to learn through exploratory play, as the focus in schools and parents shifts to literacy and numeracy. However, in some other countries, children do not all attend school and thus we can get some idea as to how children learn when they are not channelled in this way.

Studies in Guatemala by Barbara Rogoff and colleagues have shown that children who aren’t formally educated remain in a state of ‘alert awareness’ for longer than children who go to school. They learnt through observation and imitation more effectively than a control group of schooled American children, who waited to be shown how to do something before paying attention.

Many cross-cultural psychologists argue that we should view school as a cultural phenomenon. Schools teach culturally specific skills, which are then tested in culturally specific tests. People’s thinking and learning is always closely related to their cultural experience. We could see cognition and learning as something which develops as people learn how to live in their culture, rather than as something separate which can be abstracted and tested.

It’s about as far from the information processing model of cognitive science as it is possible to get.

Schools are carefully constructed learning environments which aim to deliver a particular type of learning. As such they take learning out of the context of life. Schooling involves an adult delivering specific actions towards a group of children with the aim of the children learning a particular set of knowledge or skills. This knowledge can in theory be used later but, right now, it’s being learnt because the school chooses to teach it, rather than because a child needs to know it now in order to live their lives. The school, not the child, decides what is important.

Take the example of reading. Schools decide that children need to learn to read around the age of five. They teach reading as a technical skill. The child learns to read words such as ‘cat’ and ‘hat’ so that, in the future, they will be able to read books. Most of them don’t learn to read through reading books of their choice, and they don’t learn to read because they want to understand the books. The skill of reading is separated from its purpose.

This separation of learning from purpose is not based on science. Nowhere do the studies show that people learn best when what they are learning is not meaningful for them.

Harriet Pattison, Senior Lecturer in Early Childhood Studies at Liverpool Hope University, has done extensive research on how children learn to read informally. She introduced me to a way of seeing learning to read as a cultural process rather than a cognitive one: ‘So you’d think of it more like learning to cook, because you’re helping your mum in the kitchen. You’re learning to read because you’re doing it as a family practice rather than because you’re making cognitive connections between sounds and symbols and so on, the way it’s thought about in mainstream phonics practice.’

This is the idea of communities of practice, first proposed by cognitive anthropologist Jean Lave and educational theorist Etienne Wenger in 1991. Communities of practice are where people come together with a collective purpose, or to do something together. Through their interactions with each other, they learn, and they share information and experiences. The learning is embedded in the practice, so literacy is embedded in the family reading together for various purposes.

Much of the learning that goes on outside school can be seen through the lens of a community of practice. Children learn through doing, and their learning is enmeshed with its purpose. The two are never separated.

In the institution of school, the child’s culture and internal world hardly matter unless they interfere with the instructional process. In fact, many early schools, particularly in America and Australia, were deliberately developed in order to wipe out indigenous cultures. School introduces a specific set of culturally specific standardised outcomes and prioritises them above all else.

Learning by immersion is messy. You can’t really tell how it’s going for quite a long time; no one brings out lists of vocabulary; there’s no logical order. You might learn how to say, ‘Where can I find the Wi-Fi password?’ before you can say, ‘What’s your name?’ You learn what is around you. If you go to a park, you learn how to say ‘slide’ and ‘playground’ right there. You use whatever you learn as soon as you can, because you need it. If you wait to be an expert before you start speaking the new language, the odds are that you will never speak.

Language learning is a fantastic way to gain insight into how we learn in the real world, because speaking French in France is a real-life assessment. It’s useful, flexible and meaningful. It’s not so easy to see if someone truly understands Maths, or History, or English Literature. Instead, we take test results to be a marker of someone’s ability. But passing standardised tests in French indicates very little about your actual ability to communicate in France.

Her French is suited to her environment and her needs. Even if she never becomes able to pass a French exam, her French is useful and meaningful.

Learning like this isn’t neat or predictable, just like young human beings. When French is learnt in order to pass an exam, then it is no longer primarily a way to communicate. Instead, it is reduced to a set of tasks necessary for the exam

As theories of learning become more sophisticated, the question of why keeps coming up. Why do we do what we do, and why do we choose to learn, or not? Traditionally, human cultures have answered this question through communities of practice. We do what we do, because it is how we live our lives. We learn through doing, because those are the skills we need in order to live well.

Schools answer this question by creating a set of circumstances which they hope will give children reasons to learn. They need to do this because the social learning environment – a community – is sapped by dissociating learning from context. In Chapter 3, I’ll look at the psychological theories behind why we do what we do.

The question of why we do things (or don’t do things) is fundamental to what it means to be human. That’s why education is not as simple as designing the right curriculum and watching the children learn. That might work for the rats running through their mazes, but human learning is far more complex. For humans, meaning and context are an integral part of why and what they learn. We ignore this at our peril.

Further Reading

Birbalsingh, Katharine (editor) – Battle Hymn of the Tiger Teachers, The Michaela Way, John Catt Publishers (2017)

Gopnik, Alison – The Gardener and the Carpenter – What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us about the Relationship between Parents and Children, Vintage (2017)

Pattison, Harriet – Rethinking Learning to Read, Educational Heretics Press (2016)

Rogoff, Barbara – The Cultural Nature of Human Development, OUP USA (2003)

Wenger, Etienne – Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity, Cambridge University Press (2000)

Willingham, Daniel – Why Students Don’t Like School: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions about How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom, Jossey-Bass (2010)

Motivation – Stars, Stickers and Smiley Faces

In both cases, he was rewarded for doing an activity he enjoyed with the best of motives. The adults who came with ‘treasure’ thought they were making it more fun. The computer programme assumed that children needed to be rewarded in order to do maths. The result, however, was that he lost the original joy. He didn’t want to carry on. This seems like it doesn’t make sense. From a behavioural perspective, surely rewards are encouraging?

As far back as 1973, psychologists showed that when they rewarded children for doing an activity (drawing with felt-tip pens) which they already enjoyed, they were subsequently less motivated to do the same activity when compared with children who were never rewarded. This is only one out of many studies showing that rewards can undermine motivation. It’s been shown that rewards can reduce helpful behaviour in toddlers and reduce puzzle-playing in college students. In fact, it seems that a really good way to stop people from enjoying something is to reward them for doing it.

When scientists talk about working memory, and retention of information, and forgetting curves, they often forget that, in the real world, why you do something matters. In the memory lab, the participants are motivated enough by the £10 reward to stay attentive. But if you’re going to translate that to a classroom of unpaid children, you can’t afford to ignore motivation.

Schools tend to manage motivation with behavioural techniques. They often assume that children must first be extrinsically motivated and then, as time goes on, they will develop intrinsic motivation. They reward children for doing what they want, and punish them when they don’t comply. However, the finding that rewards can damage motivation means that this approach is doomed to failure over the long term. The more you try to motivate children with rewards, the less intrinsically motivated they will be. Which isn’t really what you want to achieve with education.

Intrinsic motivation is doing something because you really enjoy it. Not all rewards undermine intrinsic motivation. Verbal rewards don’t have the same effect as tangible rewards, so saying ‘Thank you’ isn’t damaging in the same way as giving children sweets for good behaviour. And unexpected rewards are less damaging than expected rewards. It seems that rewards which people experience as ‘controlling’ are those which affect intrinsic motivation. And that, of course, will depend on the child. One child may feel controlled while another simply feels encouraged.

Note: Organisms feel less stressed when they can control the rewards they can get than when those rewards are given to them for nothing

The studies on this date back to 1949, when Harry Harlow, a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin, set up a lab for studying learning in primates. As part of a study, they placed a mechanical puzzle in the cages of rhesus monkeys. Then, before they had had a chance to start implementing their planned rewards programme, the monkeys started playing with the puzzle by themselves. They kept playing and got better at solving the puzzles.

The way that animal behaviour was understood at the time didn’t allow for this. This suggested that the main drives that powered behaviour were biological drives (such as hunger) or extrinsic motivations such as rewards or punishments. The monkeys were not being rewarded in any way for solving the puzzles – and yet they did, and continued to do so. Harlow’s great insight was to propose that solving the puzzles was its own reward for the monkeys – they enjoyed it, and so they did it more. He proposed a third drive influencing behaviour: intrinsic motivation.

Harlow then added in an extrinsic reward – the monkeys got raisins for completing the puzzles. He predicted that this would lead to them performing better and completing more puzzles. To his surprise, that wasn’t what he found. In fact, the monkeys who were rewarded made more errors, and solved the puzzles less frequently. It seemed like intrinsic motivation was vulnerable to external circumstances.

It took until 1969 for Edward Deci, a social psychologist, to investigate these ideas in humans. Using a task which most people find enjoyable for itself – a wooden puzzle cube – he found that when people were paid for completing the puzzle, it had an effect on their later motivation to play with it. Those who were paid stopped playing when they were no longer paid – whereas those who were never paid, kept going.

I’d recommend those puzzle cubes if you want to try out something intrinsically motivating. They are easy to find online. They are indeed lots of fun. If I leave them out on our coffee table, anyone who comes into our house starts fiddling and making shapes. My children have been known to fight over who gets to play with it next. I haven’t experimented with rewarding them to do so, although sometimes it is tempting to see if it might reduce the number of arguments.

Their research on intrinsic motivation led Deci and Ryan, a clinical and research psychologist, to come up with Self-Determination Theory, which they describe as being ‘concerned with the social conditions that facilitate or hinder human flourishing’. Self-determination theory is not just about intrinsic motivation, it’s about how to facilitate higher-quality motivation and wellbeing.

It was Gina Riley who introduced me to self-determination theory. Riley is a professor in special education at Hunter College and she home-educated her son, who is now an adult and graduated from college last year. When we talked, she described to me the moment that changed her life.

‘This goes back twenty or so years … I was a student writing my Master’s thesis and I saw an article in the New York Times about intrinsic motivation. I had a three-year-old at the time; I was a young mum. I saw this article about Deci and Ryan and I thought, This is how I want to live my life! This is so amazing. If I were to shape a life, this is what it would be. I knew I was on an alternative path with my toddler, just following his interests. When he was five, I made the decision to home-school because I could see his natural intrinsic motivation and curiosity about the world. I didn’t want to ruin it.’

Riley explained to me how she understands self-determination theory. ‘Deci and Ryan define intrinsic motivation as something that comes out of curiosity, that comes out of interest, that comes from within. This is the opposite of extrinsic motivation which comes from somewhere else. One of the most interesting parts of self-determination theory is their sub-theory which is “cognitive evaluation theory”. Cognitive evaluation theory describes the environmental tenets in which someone can facilitate intrinsic motivation in others. You can’t force it; you can only facilitate it.’

Intrinsic motivation cannot be manipulated using behavioural strategies. In fact, these are likely to damage it.

This has serious implications for the way in which most schools currently work. Schools reward children for their academic performance. If Deci and Ryan are right, in the process they may be destroying their intrinsic motivation for academic pursuits. A reliance on external rewards traps schools in an eternal loop. The more they use external rewards, the less people enjoy learning. And the less people enjoy learning, the more schools have to rely on external motivation.

Just like with that maths programme, once you’re doing it for stars or grades, the learning becomes secondary. You might as well get your mother to do it. Or copy your friend’s answers in the break. Whereas, if you’re learning for your own purposes, it would make no sense at all to get someone else to do it for you. In a very real sense, you would be cheating yourself. If you don’t want to do it, you can just stop.

Parents and schools are so immersed in behaviourism that sometimes it can be hard to think of alternatives – if you don’t give stickers and praise, then what do you do? Cognitive evaluation theory suggests what needs to be in place in order to facilitate intrinsic motivation. Riley told me how she brings this into her classroom, where she trains teachers who will work in the public school system.

‘The way you can facilitate it [intrinsic motivation] according to cognitive self-evaluation theory is by using the realm of competence, the realm of autonomy and the realm of relatedness. I talk to my students about competence; how to increase or facilitate competence in your students. We talk about things like making sure that our students really know their intrinsic strengths; what they are good at. Not rewarding or saying, “Good job …” but saying, “Oh my gosh, you are really a good writer …” not as a compliment but as genuine.

‘We talk about competence also as having students see small successes, that all helps. And those small successes are becoming bigger successes, and then success you are really able to see … “Hey, I’m good at this, I’m competent in what I’m doing and I’m good at it.” And you have to be careful because you can’t get too extrinsic about it, it’s about helping children or teens really see their authentic strengths.’

A word about autonomy: ‘autonomy’ is a person’s ability to choose their actions, based on their own values and interest. An autonomous child has (age-appropriate) governance over their own lives. Psychologists sometimes talk about agency, which is a related but slightly different idea. Agency is the knowledge that you can make decisions with consequences. Young children experiment with agency when they drop their plate and see it fall, or hit a pot and make a noise, but they are only autonomous when their environment provides them with the space freely to explore and to use their agency to learn. Autonomy is therefore both about the person (who needs to feel that they have the power to change things) and their environment (which needs to give them the opportunity to do so).

This means that parents and educators can either nurture or stifle autonomy, sometimes in unexpected ways. When a person’s preferences align with the opportunities in their environment, they will feel more autonomous. A very structured and apparently controlling environment may feel freeing for someone who does not want to be making day-to-day decisions, and who knows they can choose to leave if they want to. Hours of unstructured play in the forest can be wonderfully freeing for a child who loves making dens and dams. Another child will find the forest frustratingly limited in scope because they would prefer to be reading books, painting, or taking part in organised activities. For them, being in the forest is a very different experience and they will not feel autonomous unless they are able to leave when they choose.

Attempts to manipulate behaviour will inevitably affect autonomy. Under this, I include both rewards and punishments, since these are attempts to change behaviour in line with someone else’s values and interests. Emotional pressure will also harm a child’s abilities to make autonomous choices. Using shame to control children’s behaviour is so widespread that we may not even notice it. Techniques such as writing a child’s name on a board or making them sit outside the classroom use the gaze of others to create shame – and therefore to push the children to make choices based on trying to avoid that shameful feeling.

Riley sees these three realms as fundamental to self-directed education for both home-educated children and those in self-directed schools. Autonomy, which Deci is careful to distinguish from independence or individualism, can be facilitated by a parent making ‘autonomy-supportive’ responses; competence can be fostered by helping children recognise their strengths; and relatedness – well, Riley clearly feels that this is at the heart of self-directed education.

‘The last one, which I love because I come from attachment theory, is a sense of relatedness – and that’s really having someone who has your back, no matter what. That, of course, facilitates intrinsic motivation, because if you feel someone has your back, no matter what, then you can make all these choices without fearing mistakes. It’s unconditional autonomy support. That freedom of being unconditionally accepted, unconditionally related to – it doesn’t have to be a parent, it could be a teacher or someone else.’

If learning is intrinsically rewarding, then adding external motivators will make it less likely that people will want to continue once there are no more rewards. For example, when they finish school and can decide for themselves whether to go on reading books or not.

It’s not as simple as extrinsic motivators being detrimental while intrinsic motivation is good. Deci and Ryan have suggested that there is a spectrum of quality of motivation. The highest-quality motivation comes when we are intrinsically motivated, and the lowest when we are not motivated at all, which they call ‘amotivation’. In the middle, however, there are different types of regulation. The more a person feels controlled from outside themselves, the lower the quality of their motivation (and therefore engagement).

Alongside amotivation is ‘external regulation’ – this is when someone is made to do something by the threat of punishment or disaster. Motivating statements such as ‘If you don’t do, this then I’ll punish you’ fall into this category. The person feels they are being forced to do something. Next along the scale is ‘introjected regulation’. This involves doing something so that others don’t think badly of you; for example, thinking you need to perform well at school because everyone expects it. We then start to move along to less damaging forms of regulation: ‘identified regulation’ where a person values an activity because they feel the goals are worthwhile; and ‘integrated regulation’, where someone is doing something because it fits with their sense of themselves and the person they feel they are.

Figure 3.1 – Different types of regulation and their effect on motivation

Figure 3.1 is my interpretation of Deci and Ryan’s theory in the context of parenting and education. The attitude of the adults around children makes a huge difference to how they feel about what they do. And the quality of their motivation affects how engaged they are, which then affects their learning.

Of course, regulation can be mixed. Lucky people might do something they enjoy, but which is also aligned with their values. Unlucky people might be doing something they feel forced to do, and they feel guilty about it when they don’t do it.

The important thing about this theory is that it’s not enough to make children do something and to assume that they will learn. Children can be made to go through the motions, absolutely, but the quality of their motivation (and therefore their learning) will be affected by how they feel about what they are doing.

The joy often disappears when we have no choice. It’s the same with walks in the forest, cooking a meal or learning a foreign language. When it’s chosen, it is rewarding; when it’s compulsory, it is tedious and time-consuming.

This is something that Kevin Currie-Knight is acutely aware of. He’s an ex-secondary school teacher, who now trains teachers at East Carolina College of Education. When thinking about how to plan his classes for his trainees, he was chewing on the puzzle of motivation. He was thinking particularly of video games. Video games are difficult, often repetitive and it can take hours and hours to get good at a particular game. And yet video games are an area where motivation is not a problem. In fact, for many people, the problem is that children are too motivated to play video games. If only, they say, they could put that motivation into school.

‘So what researchers noticed,’ observed Kevin Currie-Knight, ‘is that video game manufacturers seem to have cracked the code that educators have been trying to crack for hundreds of years, which is how do you get kids to stay so motivated to learn this thing that they will repeatedly and voluntarily have failure after failure. We’re trying to do this … how do you do this?’

For Currie-Knight, it boiled down to three things – video games combined learning, practice and evaluation in rapid succession, whereas schools separate out those things. Children can freely choose to play or not play video games, whereas at school they have no choice. And finally, children only play video games if they are interested. When they are no longer interested, they stop. They are autonomous.

He decided to experiment with his college students, to see if he could change their experience of his course by changing those parameters. The course is a compulsory one, and students have to pass it in order to become teachers, which put him at an immediate disadvantage as compared to video games. However, he decided to do what he could.

‘So, I started dipping my toe very gradually in my own teaching. Instead of assigning tests and a teacher-assigned project with parameters, why don’t I give them choices for a project? So, I started with six different ways you can do your project, and that worked well but, at some point, I was like, “Why am I limiting them to six? Why don’t I just tell them – the only parameter for this project is to demonstrate to me somehow that you have got the main points of this unit … that’s it!”

‘And it just got better. I wasn’t expecting that; I thought at some point it would go really badly. I imagined that students would low-ball their projects, just pick whatever the easiest thing is. What I found was almost the opposite … I mean, there’s not an objective way for me to measure this, but my experience was they turned in projects that were bigger, longer. One student who is an art education major decided that she was going to do a painting that represents all of the themes in a particular relationship, and then she wrote about a page-long description about what each of the elements is and why it’s there, and how that reflects what we did in the course. I don’t think that anyone would ever have put in that amount of time.’

Motivation soared, and so did performance, even within the restrictions of a compulsory course.

Currie-Knight’s experiments have raised some concerns from his colleagues that his students might have gaps in their knowledge. After all, he’s letting them choose what they do. Surely it would be better just to teach them the curriculum?

‘My concern with that question is that I think it’s a very jaundiced view of how learning works,’ Currie-Knight says. ‘The idea is just like with K-12 [the publically supported education system from Kindergarten to twelfth grade in the States] that you fill kids with all the knowledge that you think they’re going to need once they go out because, once they go out, if they have gaps in their knowledge, they’re not going to be able to remedy those gaps.

‘So, there are several problems with that. The first is that it’s just not the world we live in any more. In 1935, if I missed something and I went out into the world and I couldn’t find the resource somewhere, like in the library or from a friend, I would be in trouble. But nowadays, that’s not as much of a concern.

‘The second problem is that there seems to be an assumption within that question that suggests: if you teach it, students will come out knowing it. It’s assumed that if we teach the same syllabus, people will come out knowing the same things. There’s a fair amount of research that shows that students do an astonishing amount of forgetting. So when people say, “Your students are going to have gaps in their knowledge,” my response is, “So are all the others.”

Currie-Knight isn’t the first person to be surprised by the behaviour of his students. Cathy N. Davidson, who was then Vice-Provost for Interdisciplinary Studies at Duke University, described in her book what she called a huge ‘educational experiment’ with the first-year students at Duke in 2003. Every student was given a free iPod, with no conditions. They asked students to think of ideas for learning applications and pitch their ideas to staff. That was it. At the time, there were no educational apps at all for the iPod and, of course, no iPhones or iPads. Later, they said that any student in any year could have a free iPod if they could convince their professor to use a learning app in their class.

The press coverage was scathing. iPods were seen as frivolous entertainment, not as learning devices. And then the ideas from the students started coming. The first podcasts were broadcast, iPods were used to share ideas between students and to give and receive feedback; iPods were used to aid medical diagnosis, and to practise musical performance. It was beyond anything that anyone had expected.

It was more than an exciting educational project for students, however. This had implications for how iPods and similar devices were seen. What had previously been perceived as a sophisticated entertainment device suddenly became something with the potential to open up access to learning for people across the world.

Motivation was not a problem here. These students were given more autonomy than in any other course, and they came alive with ideas and learning. There was no curriculum, and everyone could join in, not just the computer scientists and engineers. There was no reward for those first-year students at all – they already had their iPods.

We all know how this story ended. Thousands of educational apps are used every day on iPad and iPhones all over the world.

No assessments, no assignments, no tests, nothing keeping them on task. From a behavioural perspective, they shouldn’t have bothered – what was the point? And yet they did. They came up with ideas and applications which transformed education and technology.

🔮 The Cosmos

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