Course Reading Annotations

This page shows my annotations of the readings for the course.

1. Woolfolk, A. (2007). Behavioral views of learning (Chapter 6). Educational Psychology (pp. 204-245). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Main arguments: Woolfolk presents the arguments of behaviorists, who argue that only overt, observable behavior should be used to form explanations of learning. The four learning processes are thus contiguity, or forming associations between things often presented together, classical conditioning, or previously neutral stimuli becoming connected to an involuntary response through contiguity with a second stimulus, operant conditioning, or increases or decreases in voluntary behavior as a result of its antecedents and consequences, and observational learning, or learning by watching others, retaining what they do, and reproducing it..

Later in the chapter, Woolfolk makes arguments about how applied behavior analysis can be used to increase positive behavior in the classroom, including use of frequent behavior to reinforce infrequent behavior (the Premack Principle) reinforcing successive approximations (shaping), and requiring students to practice the correct response after an incorrect one (positive practice). Examples are also given for how applied behavior analysis might be used in the classroom to decrease negative behavior. Generally, Woolfolk claims applied behavior analysis can be used through a general process of identifying a behavior of interest, implementing a plan that involves antecedents or consequences, and monitoring progress. (I will note that the line between argument and description is fuzzy here.)

Support for argument: The process of classical conditioning has been supported through the famous experiments of Pavlov and his dog: the dog learned to salivate in response to a bell alone, after the bell was repeatedly presented at the same time as meat powders. It is also common for people to have involuntary responses to seemingly neutral stimuli -- e.g., pace quickening at the sight of a doctor -- and this is cited as evidence for classical conditioning. Skinner's experiments with training mice and pigeons via the provision of reinforcement and punishment is cited as evidence for operant conditioning. Bandura's experiments, and the general observable consequences of social influence are cited as evidence for observational learning. For the most part, the specific ideas of how to implement applied behavior analysis are not supported with evidence, but there are exceptions, such as the studies cited related to severe behavior problems on pp. 227-228.

Response: Many of the examples given within the chapter relate to using behavior analysis for classroom management. The behaviors in question relate mostly to general ideas of being on-task or off-task. I didn't see many examples that related to specific subject areas (e.g., writing complete sentences, or accurately executing a multiplication algorithm). Even making errors in mathematics problems is described as carelessness (p. 215), which is a general behavior. Can behavior analysis be applied to these specific behaviors as well as more general ones? Do behaviorists see any correspondence between the behavior and the reward? That is, do they believe the same reinforcer could be used to increase the frequency of a multitude of different behaviors?

2. Skinner, B. F. (1978). Why I Am Not a Cognitive Psychologist. Reflections of Behaviorism and Society (Chapter 8). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Main Argument: Skinner's main claim is that there is no evidence for the existence of an internal mental life within humans, and even if there were, such a mental life would afford us little in explaining behavior or learning.

Support for the Argument: Some of the support Skinner provides is as follows:

Cognitive psychologists claim that people make associations (e.g., between the sight of a lemon and the taste of a lemon), when in reality the associations all exist outside the individual.
Many cognitive-related terms really refer to behaviors. For example, statements like "society lost its will" refer to the fact that some kind of behavior stopped. As another example, social scientist will claim emotional causes for things, such as frustration causing people to commit crimes, but the frustration actually occurs alongside things like unemployment -- an external condition that leads people to commit crimes.
Cognitive psychologists attribute to preference behaviors whose controlling conditions are hard to see, but choices and decisions are behaviors.
We do not make internal copies of the world; rather, our bodies act directly upon the physical world. Support: Skinner notes that the theories of mental representations would likely require us to make representations of representations, on and on recursively, and that making mental representations would be "a waste of time" (p. 105).
Information processing metaphors of knowledge representation, organization, retrieval, and so on, can be reformulated in terms of behavior and contingencies, as evidenced by a series of direct parallels between descriptions of various forms of knowledge processing and descriptions of external behavior.
Rules are cultural constructions meant to help others circumvent the process of learning from behavioral contingencies. They are not internal representations of contingencies shape our behavior. Indeed, often times people follow "rules" without knowing what they are, such as when children learn language.

Response: From reading this chapter as well a some other related work (including the textbook chapter from annotation 1 above), I concede that one might be able to come up with a behavioral explanation for most -- maybe even all -- behavior. I am less convinced, however, that the cognitive models do not possess any utility for researchers (and humans, in general), if only for the purpose of making sense of things in day-to-day life.

3. Woolfolk, A. (2007). Cognitive views of learning (Chapter 7). Educational Psychology (pp. 246-283). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Main Arguments and Support: The author begins the chapter by providing and overview of cognitive perspectives on learning. The main points of discussion include:

Cognitivists emphasize the importance of knowledge in learning. What a person already knows forms the foundation for learning new information.
Knowing is defined as remembering information across time and achieving it as needed.
Memory is conceptualized as having three parts: Sensory memory, which briefly holds everything we perceive, working memory, which is the "workbench" where we make sense of new information, and long-term memory, were already-held information is stored and organized. Working memory has significant limitations in the amount of information it can hold, whereas long-term memory is virtually unlimited.
Knowledge is categorized into three types: Declarative knowledge, which are facts, procedural knowledge, which is knowledge of how to do something, and conditional knowledge, which is knowledge of when to apply declarative and procedural knowledge.
Knowledge is organized into relationships. Collections of related knowledge are called schemas and are used as templates for processing information.
New knowledge that is connected to something already known when it is learned is generally better remembered and more easily retrieved in the future. Elaboration is a process of connecting new knowledge to old knowledge.
New knowledge is also better remembered when it is organized (connected to itself rather than learned as isolated bits). New knowledge is also associated with the context in which it was learned, so revisiting a context can help with retrieval.
Metacognition is explicit attention one's own thinking processes via planning, monitoring, and evaluating.
Procedural knowledge is attained through stages: First, each step is processed separately, then students begin to "chunk" parts of the process, and finally the whole process is connected.

The author goes on to use this information about the cognitive perspective to argue for the effectiveness of some teaching strategies:

Teachers should make learning meaningful for students. If new information is connected to what they already know, they'll remember it better.
Teachers should use visual images and illustrations along with verbal information. Because text and images are processed separately, use of both promotes students making connections without over-taxing working memory.
Using mnemonics can help students associate unknown information with known information.
Teachers should provide prerequisite knowledge and provide practice with feedback when students are acquiring procedural knowledge, as this lessens the load on working memory and promotes associations.

Response: The part of the cognitive perspective that appeals to me the most is its attention to organization of knowledge. Focusing on the way that people organize knowledge thematically explains why you might teach astrophysics differently to a PhD student with a physics degree than to, say, a fiction author. They have different knowledge bases, so you approach them differently. A behaviorist would say, I suppose, that they would also approach these people differently because they have different histories that build different contingencies, but I find that theory to have less traction when it comes to designing instruction.

4. Woolfolk, A. (2007). Complex cognitive processes (Chapter 8). Educational Psychology (pp. 284-327). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Main Arguments and Support: The authors elaborate on some of the cognitive processes described in Chapter 7, and use them to support four main arguments about effective teaching:

Teaching should be attentive to students' differing backgrounds. There is a lot of varied research evidence that shows that learning is most effective when it is connected to prior knowledge, so teachers should become aware of the knowledge different children bring to the table. This can be accomplished both by talking to families and encouraging multiple strategies and opinions to be expressed in class.
Students need support in attending to essential features of ideas, categories, and so on. There is a large base of evidence suggesting that students tend to attend to surface features of problems and situations, which can hinder them from attending to deeper features that allow for more transfer of knowledge to new situations. Teachers can help students attend to essential features by encouraging comparison (often of examples and non-examples), providing advance organizers that highlight essential features, and directly teaching conditional knowledge.
It is important to explicitly teach general learning strategies. Students often rely on memorization strategies because they don't know what else to do. Teaching other learning strategies such as summarizing, note-taking, and explicitly attending to headers in texts can help students gain general skills that lead to better learning. This is especially important given the difficulty that students have in transferring knowledge; these strategies are easier to transfer than more specific kinds of knowledge.

Response: The most interesting sections of this chapter, in my opinion, were on promoting attention to defining attributes and helping students move beyond surface features. I have found consideration of examples and non-examples quite effective in my own learning, though I have never thought about whether or when doing this to construct a definition (inductive reasoning) or to understand a pre-stated definition (deductive reasoning) might be advantageous. I'd be interested in looking into that question more. That kind of change in instructional sequence is the kind of adaptation to curricular materials I'd like to enable via digital delivery of the curriculum materials to teachers.

5. Bronfenbrenner, U. (1994). Ecological models of human development. In International Encyclopedia of Education (pp. 37-43). Oxford: Elsevier.

Main Arguments and Support: This article presents the basic tenets of the ecological model for human development proposed by the author. There are three key arguments in the article, articulated and supported as follows:

Human development takes place through interactions between the developing individual and the proximal environment (call proximal processes), with the power of the process influenced by characteristics of the individual and characteristics of the environment. Support: As an example, Bronfenbrenner cites a study showing that quality mother-child interaction (a proximal process) is consistently associated with lower number of behavior problems, but that the size of the effect is dependent on the child's birthweight (a characteristic of the person) and the family's SES (a characteristic of the environment.
Proximal processes tend to buffer the negative effects of poorer environments, but also compound the positive effects of better environments. Support: The same study mentioned above shows that quality mother-child interaction puts children from low SES backgrounds on more even ground with children from high SES backgrounds (when it comes to behavior problems. This is contrasted with another study that showed that higher levels of parental monitoring were consistently associated with higher GPAs, but the effect was stronger for students living with both biological parents and with mothers that had education beyond high school.
There are five levels of systems in which human development occurs, and each can influence development: microsystems, mesosystems, exosystems, macrosystems, and chronosystems. Support: Bronfenbrenner gives an example of a study situated at each level of microsystem.

At the end of the article, Bronfenbrenner also mentions that the idea of proximal processes affecting genetic heritability has also been proposed, but does not have much support yet.

Response: I'm most intrigued by the second argument. Let's look at the first half first: negative effects of environments can be tempered by attention to proximal processes. That idea seems to directly combat the problem of "rising tides," or the complaint that good-for-all approaches raise everyone up and don't close achievement gaps. Tempering the effects of poor environments seems to level the playing field. Then again, now we can consider the second half: positive effects of environments are increased by proximal processes. Now we're widening gaps. What's the solution? Do we only promote advantageous processes in less advantaged environments? What are the ethics of that?

6. Yi, C., Hayashi, A., & Tobin, J. (2007). Lessons from China and Japan for Preschool Practice in the United States. Educational Perspectives, 40(1), 7-12.

Main Argument and Support: The authors of this piece argue that the differences in preschool practices in China and Japan, as compared to the United States, are interesting food for thought that challenge some widely-held American assumptions about appropriate educational experiences for young children. As evidence, they offer six preschool episodes, three from China and three from Japan, along with the teachers' commentary about why they handled the episodes as they did. The episodes were as follows:

A Chinese preschool teacher invites children to offer critical comments to a classmmate about his storytelling. The children give and receive this feedback undefensively, challenging the American assumption that children's self esteem must be carefully protected.
A Chinese preschool teacher downplayed a playground conflict rather than carefully airing and attending to children's feelings. The teacher felt that most conflicts drop away through this kind of approach, reflecting a cultural norm of minimizing conflict and focusing on harmonious relationships. This challenges the American assumption that we must get to the emotional root of all conflicts.
A Chinese preschool classroom allowed imaginative play with guns, with the teacher explaining that children will not have access to real guns as adults, so the play is just emulating the police, who play a positive role in society. This challenges the American assumption that gun play necessarily inappropriate use of real guns later, and highlights the broader societal influences on this assumption.
A Japanese preschool teacher framed intervening in a conflict among children as robbing those children of the chance to learn social negotiation skills, challenging the American assumption that the teacher should serve as mediator.
Japanese teachers allow older preschoolers to help in caring for younger preschoolers, saying that this helps children develop empathy. This challenges the American norm of separating children by age.
Japanese preschool classrooms have few toys, and teachers see this as encouraging social interaction and fostering imagination. This is in contrast to the American assumption that more resources are usually better.

Response: I do not know much about early childhood learning, but I found this article very interesting and the perspective useful. I would be interested to see the results of a study asking American teachers how they might take up the ideas and adapt their own practices.

7. COGNITIVE SECTIONS OF: Greeno, J., Collins, A., & Resnick, L. (1996). Cognition and Learning. In D. Berliner & R. Calfee (Eds.). Handbook of Educational Psychology (pp. 15-46). New York: Simon and Schuster Macmillan.

Main Arguments and Support: The overall argument of this article is that the three major perspectives on cognition and learning (behaviorist, cognitive, and situated) all have differing assumptions about the nature of learning and motivation that in turn lead to different design principles for learning environments, curricula, and assessments. This week, the assignment was to read the cognitive sections. The authors argue that five design principles stem from the cognitive perspective. Those design principles, and the evidence provided to support them, as as follows:

Learning environments should allow for the construction of understanding from existing knowledge. Support: The authors describe this as a basic assumption of constructivism, an influential cognitive learning theory. They point out that research on concrete manipulative materials, as well as digital environments, has focused on how to support students in using representations to support inquiry, rather than on constructing representations for their own sake.
Curricular sequences should begin with something within students' reach and gradually progress in a ways that pushes students conceptual growth. Support: The authors point out that an important cognitive theorist, Jerome Bruner, claimed that any topic worth teaching could be taught to any age student in an intellectually honest way, which aligns with the view that effective learning can happen with attention to what the student currently knows. Cognitively-based research has also focused on directly addressing the misconceptions of students, supporting a view of starting with something within students' reach.
Curricula should attend to helping students to generalize problem solving strategies. Support: The influence of another major cognitive theorist, Piaget, led to some curricula that taught processes rather than particular pieces of content.
Assessments should involve extended projects, not only short-answer questions. Support: The authors point out that the work on developing ways to objectively assess writing has led cognitive researchers to explore performance assessments.
Assessments should acknowledge "varieties of excellence." Support: The authors point out that attending to how individual learners construct knowledge necessarily means that there will be a variety of ways to respond to a task. Thus, if a constructivist view is to be honored, assessments must allow and value a variety of responses.

Response: It was interesting to note that cognitive design principles have been taken up in a number of learning environments and curricula that I am familiar with, I have seen very few assessments that seem to align with the cognitive view as stated in this article. This article gave me a new way to talk and think about some of the issues brought up by a heavy focus on standardized assessments in this country.

8. SITUATED SECTIONS OF: Greeno, J., Collins, A., & Resnick, L. (1996). Cognition and Learning. In D. Berliner & R. Calfee (Eds.). Handbook of Educational Psychology (pp. 15-46). New York: Simon and Schuster Macmillan.

Main Arguments and Support: As mentioned in annotation #7, the overall argument of this article is that the three major perspectives on cognition and learning (behaviorist, cognitive, and situated) all have differing assumptions about the nature of learning and motivation that in turn lead to different design principles for learning environments, curricula, and assessments. This week, the assignment was to read the situated sections. The authors argue that seven design principles stem from the situated perspective. Those design principles, and the evidence provided to support them, as as follows:

Learning environments should involve participation in social practices of inquiry and discourse. Support: Greeno and colleagues argue that an important part of learning concepts is applying the knowledge in discourse within the discipline. Formulating questions and positions are important disciplinary practices. The authors demonstrate the efficacy of this design principle by citing existing examples of its use. Several mathematics learning environments, such as the fifth-grade classroom described by Lampert, successfully use discourse to promote thinking about processes and ideas rather than focusing on end results, especially in mathematics. One example in science is the Itakura method, which encourages students to make multiple predictions about experiments. Jigsaw is another technique, used in many disciplines, that facilitates active communication among students.
Learning environments should support development of positive identities for students as capable and confident learners. Support: Students bring different knowledge and skills to the classroom, and value different knowledge and practices based on their social histories and cultural backgrounds. Schools should be set up to take advantage of diverse styles and contributions. Greeno and colleagues point to several examples of such environments, including the Algebra Project.
Curricula should be organized with attention to development of disciplinary practices of discourse and participation. Support: Disciplines have distinct patterns of discourse and forms of representation. Greeno and colleagues argue that many school mathematics experiences do not provide practice with practices such as formulating and debating definitions of mathematical concepts, so we cannot expect them to acquire facility with these practices. Schoenfeld's course of problem solving is given as an example of an environment where students are required to develop standards for adequate argumentation. The Algebra Project, where students develop their own mathematical notation, is another example of an environment that follows this design principle.
Curricula should provide opportunities to engage in solving realistic problems. Support: Most school work is organized around particular scholarly topics, rather than around problems. A few curricula, such as the Jasper Project and the Middle School Mathematics Through Applications Project, center learning around problems, providing opportunities for students to acquire knowledge and skills in a context in which they might be used. Greeno and colleagues point out the challenges associated with this kind of curriculum, in particular, balancing the problem-centered approach with the need to cover some comprehensive set of knowledge in relation to a domain.
Assessments should focus on participation in inquiry and social practices of learning. Support: Greeno and colleagues argue that if curriculum is organized around the development of discourse and inquiry, assessments also need to be centered on those things. They cite portfolios and observations as possible manners of conducting such assessments.
Students should participate in assessment design and conducting assessments. Support: Participating in assessment processes can help students develop their own standards for success and a sense of identity and responsibility, which are essential for the situated view of learning.
Assessments should be situated within a system that supports meaningful assessment of progress. Support: Greeno and colleagues point out that assessment is a critical component of education practice, and we must change it if meaningful overall change is to take place. They argue that support communities will be needed to help develop standards of evaluation and quality of work.

Response: I found these sections quite interesting because I had never associated the development of discourse practices or problem-based learning with situated perspectives. I had thought of these things as simply promoting a different kind of thinking -- one that was more conceptually than procedurally oriented. Now that it has been pointed out to me, it seems obvious that a situated perspective makes sense for problem-based learning and discourse. I had often conflated situated cognition and distributed cognition (and they are related, certainly), but now I think I have a way to think about the differences. Situated cognition has to do with the connections of knowledge to context. These connections can be made via distribution of cognition across people and artifacts, but need not be.

9. Brown, J., Collins, A., & Duguid, P. (1989). Situated Cognition and the Culture of Learning. Educational Researcher, 18(1), 32-42.

Main Arguments and Support: Brown, Collins, and Duguid argue for a change in schooling to reflect a cognitive apprenticeship model, which acknowledges that learning and knowledge are intimately connected to the contexts in which they are acquired and applied. The apprenticeship model, they argue, makes explicit the fact that knowledge is connected to action, and the "cognitive" label makes it clear that the physical skills associated with a traditional apprenticeship are connected to more generalized knowledge. The authors use two sub-arguments to demonstrate the need for this new model of schooling:

First, they argue that all knowledge and learning is situated, or dependent on the context of its acquisition and use. Support: Brown and colleagues point out that language would be full of ambiguity if it weren't for context. Context is, for example, how we make sense of which of multiple meanings of a word is intended. They point out that this situatedness the same for all concepts. Concepts are like tools -- one can acquire a tool but not be able to use it, rendering it useless. Moreover, different communities use different tools differently -- one can only understand a tool with reference to the community that uses it. In everyday life, people naturally use their contexts/environments to help with problem solving, as when a Weight Watchers patient found 3/4 of 2/3 cup of cottage cheese by physically partitioning it.
Second, they argue that typical schooling attempts to remove learning from the culture where it was developed (to generalize it), but this really just situates it in an inauthentic school culture. Support: Typical schooling focuses on concepts (knowling), and treats them as though they are separate from activity (doing). For example, vocabulary is taught from definitions, leading to much slower learning than natural language acquisition, with limited success in helping students accurately use the vocabulary in context. Students are shown the tools of a discipline but use them in the school culture rather than in an authentic culture of the discipline. Students become dependent on features of the classroom context (e.g., they assume that early problems in a problem set will be easy), contributing to their inability to apply the knowledge outside the classroom.

Response: I am particularly interested in finding ways to better foster mathematical thinking rather than rote mathematical skills, so I enjoyed the two examples of cognitive apprenticeship given in this article (from Schoenfeld and Lampert). I'm left with the same questions I have about any educational intervention that represents a big change to traditional schooling: How do we support teachers in implementing it? What features of the larger school context make this difficult? In particular, I would expect teachers to express concern about the amount of time it would take to teach via a cognitive apprenticeship model, and whether use of this model would leave their students unprepared for standardized tests. I am not saying this is a reason not to suggest cognitive apprenticeship as a model or encourage its use. The focus on context on knowledge use just made me think about the broader context of school from the teachers' perspective.

10. Resnick, L. (1987). Learning in School and Out. Educational Researcher, 16(9), 13-20+54.

Main Arguments and Support: Resnick makes two main arguments:

School learning is different from out-of-school learning. Support: Resnick makes four comparisons in support of this claim. First, School learning and performance is largely individual, e.g., in homework and on tests. By contrast, work and personal learning and performance takes place within social systems, such as when Navy member navigate a ship out of a harbor via four individuals with four roles. Second, school learning devalues use of tools, as shown by the fact that students often can't use tools such as calculators on tests. By contrast, tools are consistently used in cognitive activity outside of work, such as when navigators use compasses. Third, school learning focuses on symbol manipulation (sometimes to the detriment of meaning), whereas learning outside of school is contextualized, as in Scribner's studies of dairy workers. Lastly, school learning is generalized (on the theory that skills will transfer, though typically they don't), whereas outside of school, learning is situation-specific.
If the goal of schooling is to prepare kids for the workforce and active citizenry, then it needs to be reorganized. Support: Resnick makes two key points in support of this argument. First, she claims that schooling and training are not adequately preparing students for jobs because the general skills taught in school don't easily transfer to work settings. Apprenticeship style training is becoming less and less common, due to factors such as the expense of giving students access to equipment and the less visible nature of a lot of professional work (e.g., less of a diagnostician's work can be seen than a tailor's). Second, she says that a key skill that should be taught in school is the ability to adapt to new problems and circumstances, and we don't know enough about how to foster that. Three key features of learning experiences that foster adaptivity seem to be use of shared intellectual work, elements of apprenticeship, and focusing on specific content and not general abilities.

Response: I think Resnick sets forth a strong argument in the article assuming one buys the premise that the purpose of schooling is to prepare students for jobs -- and more generally, the responsibilities of adulthood. However, I question that premise. In particular, I don't think it makes sense to consider elementary school a place to prepare students for the workforce. Resnick uses examples from elementary school at some points in her article (e.g., kids figuring out how much more money they need to buy an ice cream cone), which tells me that she did not intended to discuss only secondary school. I do think that elementary schooling could benefit from some of reforms that Resnick suggests -- helping students to become adaptive, for example -- but I do not think her rationale applied uniformly to all levels of schooling.

11. MOTIVATION SECTIONS OF: Greeno, J., Collins, A., & Resnick, L. (1996). Cognition and Learning. In D. Berliner & R. Calfee (Eds.). Handbook of Educational Psychology (pp. 15-46). New York: Simon and Schuster Macmillan.

Main Arguments and Support: The authors make arguments about the meaning of motivation in each of the three major perspectives on learning (behaviorist, cognitive, and situated), relating it specifically to models for learning. The arguments are:

In behaviorism, motivation to learn is extrinsic. It is primarily associated with use of external incentives. According to behaviorists, learners acquire new skills as rewards and punishments are associated with particular behaviors. The effects of particular rewards, however, are subject to how those rewards related to individuals' internal goals. Support: The authors cite research from behaviorists that focused on external rewards for motivation, including studies about the influence of basic biological needs, Skinner's (1958) work with the "programmed instruction" model of schooling, and Anderson et al.'s (1985) application of Skinner's work to create adaptive tutors.
In the cognitive perspective, motivation to learn is intrinsic. It is not dependent on external rewards, but rather associated with the stimulation of learners' intrinsic interest in a topic. Intrinsic interest, in turn, is theorized to be stimulated by presenting learners with situations that run contrary to their current organization of knowledge. Support: The authors cite the work of Piaget and Papert as exemplifying this view of motivation. They also cite Malone's (1981) framework for intrinsic motivation (made up of three elements: challenge, fantasy, and curiosity) and point out that cognitive researchers have demonstrated that if learners are extrinsically rewarded for a behavior, they will no longer engage in that behavior for intrinsic reasons.
In the situated perspective, motivation is closely related to engagement with a community. Learners are motivated to learn when doing so helps them contribute to the goals of the community, meet interpersonal commitments, or build their identities as community members. Support: The authors cite several bodies of work from situated theorists that illustrate this perspective on motivation, including learning environments focused on communities of practice (such as the Algebra Project), studies of the role of jocks and burnouts in school cultures, and studies of patterns of exclusion for students in underrepresented groups.

Response: The most interesting aspects of this section of this paper, in my opinion, were the excerpts that related the three theories of motivation to each other. For example, the work showing that use of external rewards can dilute the power of intrinsic rewards was intriguing. I'm curious about the implication of this. On one hand, this result suggests that the ubiquitous external rewards in schools are problematic, as they could decrease intrinsic interest. On the other hand, elimination of external rewards will only be helpful if one assumes that there will be intrinsic interest present and ready to replace it. Cognitive theorists claim that all learners are naturally curious, but I am skeptical that is so in relation to all school learning for all students.

12. Dweck, C. S. (1999). Caution -- Praise Can Be Dangerous. American Educator, 23(1), 4-9.

Main Argument and Support: Dweck argues that praising students for their intelligence (particularly after completing easy tasks) can have detrimental effects, and we must instead focus on praising students for their efforts. This, she argues, will help to make them more resilient in the face of challenging and therefore make them better learners throughout their schooling. Support: As support for her argument, Dweck cites the following research results:

In a laboratory-based study, students praised for intelligence were more likely to choose an easy follow-up task, and students praised for effort chose a harder one.
After working on a harder follow-up task, the students praised for their intelligence said they didn't like the task, but the students praised for effort did like it and wanted to take the materials home to practice.
Then after working on an easy task again, the students who were praised for their intelligence performed poorly, while the students praised for their effort did well. This is particularly striking, as at the start of the study, the two groups performed similarly on a task of the same difficulty.
When asked to report their scores on the difficult task to another student (whom they would never meet), the students praised for their intelligence exaggerated their scores. The students praised for effort did not do so.
Students praised for their intelligence described intelligence as an innate, unchanging trait. Students praised for their effort described intelligence as a trait that can be developed.
Lastly, students praised for their intelligence also saw making an effort is a sign of dumbness.

Response: This was a nice follow-up read after reviewing the motivation sections of the Greeno, Collins, and Resnick piece. It addressed, in part, the issue I raise above about the detrimental effects of external rewards and how we can address that problem. Removing external rewards in their entirety in favor of relying on intrinsic motivation seems problematic because it assumes that all students will have intrinsic motivation for everything. Dweck offers a solution that seems much more tractable: don't remove the rewards entirely -- in this case, don't stop praising entirely -- but rather be careful to praise in particular ways. The effort-praise seems a particularly powerful alternative to me because it actually seems to build intrinsic motivation, rather than removing it.

13. Stipek, D. (2002). Profiles of Motivational Problems. In Motivation to Learn: From Theory to Practice (pp. 1-7). Boston: Allyn & Bacon.

Main Argument and Support: Stipek describes five patterns of behavior that she argues illustrate typical motivational problems in school-aged children. She does not provide any evidence for these profiles, but does say that further information will be given later in the book. The five profiles are as follows:

Defensive Dick thinks failure is inevitable, but does not want to give people the chance to attribute his failure to lack of ability. Thus, he uses various forms of avoidance behavior to construct alternative explanations for his failure.
Hopeless Hannah believes herself to be incompetent, and therefore does not see the point in attempting classwork. She attributes any minor successes to guessing or luck to maintain her belied that she is incapable of learning.
Safe Sally maintains a near-perfect academic record by avoiding challenges. She is a competent student but does not push herself outside of her self-made boundaries.
Satisfied Sam is fine with his mediocre academic record and does not see the point in putting in more than the absolute minimum amount of effort. He has passions and pursues them, but does not see them as connected to his academic life.
Anxious Amy illustrates competence on homework assignments, but freezes up during classes and on tests. She claims no aptitude for the subjects that make her anxious, despite evidence to the contrary.

Response: Although these are caricatures (as the author admits), I have worked with children in the past that fit these profiles. Anxious Amy, in particular, is one that I have seen many times. I do not think it is a coincidence that the author uses mathematics as the example of the subject that is anxiety-provoking for Amy. This makes me wonder if all of these profiles are things that students carry with them into every class, or if the profiles tend to change depending on the school subject, teacher, and so on.

14. Steele, C., & Aronson, J. (1995). Sterotype Threat and the Intellectual Test Performance of African Americans. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 69(5), 797-811.

Main Arguments and Support: Steele and Aronson argue that students who are members of groups for which there is a pervasive and negative stereotype experience a phenomenon called stereotype threat. Stereotype threat is a sense of pressure or fear that one will fulfill or confirm the stereotype about one's group. This leads to anxiety and other effects that in turn lead to lower performance on tests. Steele and Aronson argue that stereotype threat explains why, even when they have equal resources and preparation, often minority students underperform on standardized tests relative to their White peers.

As evidence for this argument, Steel and Aronson share the results of a series of four experiments:

In Study 1, participants (a mix of Black and White students) took a test, prior to which they were told that either (1) the test was diagnostic of their ability, (2) the test was not diagnostic of their ability, or (3) the test was not diagnostic of their ability but would be a challenge. Condition (1) was presumed to activate stereotype threat, as Black students would not want to confirm a stereotype of Black students as underachievers or lazy. Overall, White students performed better than Black students and stereotype-threatened students performed better than non-stereotype-threatened students, but there was only a marginal effect of interaction between these two variables. Thus, the overall pattern of results supported the hypothesis that stereotype threat could be affecting Black students' performance, but the result did not reach statistical significance.
In Study 2, the authors removed the challenge condition and added measures of anxiety and time to answer the questions on the test. In this study, the expected interaction between race and condition was significant: Black students in the stereotype-threatened condition performed worse than the other three groups. The authors interpret this as indicating the possibility of stereotype threat explaining the result.
In Study 3, the researchers aimed to show more direct evidence that stereotype threat was responsible for the depressed performance of Black students in Study 2. Although they told participants they would take a test, the dependent measures in this case were not a test but rather measures of the salience of Black-associated concepts (e.g., rap music) and stereotype-associated ideas (e.g., laziness), as well as measures of disassociating with a Black identity and self-handicapping. As in Study 2, there was a significant race x treatment effect. Black students in the threatened condition were more likely to have the stereotype threat activated, disassociate with Black identity, and self-handicap. The authors point out that they have now demonstrated connection of their stereotype threat condition with depressed test performance and with activation of stereotype threat, but need one more experiment to connect these two dependent variables to each other.
In Study 4, researchers manipulated activation of stereotype threat by asking treatment students to report their race (and not asking control students to do so). As would be expected by the theory of stereotype threat, Black students in the treatment condition performed worse (on the test that served as the dependent measure) than did the other three groups.

Response: I read this article many years ago as a master's student and enjoyed revisiting it again. As a novice methodologist, upon this reading I particularly enjoyed tracing the development of logic across the four studies. One question I have is whether or not the methodology could be adjusted for any potentially stereotype threatened group.

15. Ryan, R. M. & Deci, E. L. (2000). Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivations: Classic Definitions and New Directions. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 25, 54-67.

Main Arguments and Support: Citing relevant literature, Ryan and Deci make five arguments, which as as follows:

Motivation is not unitary. Support: Ryan and Deci argue that people can have the same amount of motivation, but with different orientations. They point to literature on extrinsic and intrinsic motivation to highlight this.
Intrinsic motivation is not absolute relative to a person or to a task, but rather varies according to the interaction between a person and task. Support: Ryan and Deci point out that any two people may not find the same task intrinsically motivating, and any two tasks might not both be intrinsically motivating to the same person.
Humans are naturally intrinsically motivated, but that motivation is only expressed under certain conditions. Support: Ryan and Deci explain that this phenomenon has been widely studied and has lead to at least two popular theories: Self-Determination Theory (SDT) and Cognitive Evaluation Theory (CET). CET says that intrinsic motivation is maintained and enhanced when people feel competent and autonomous, with autonomy being particularly important.
Extrinsic motivation is not unitary, but rather varies along a continuum of autonomy. Support: Ryan and Deci cite research supporting a subcomponent of ECT called Organismic Integration theory. The theory says, for example, that an extrinsic reward of avoiding someone else's negative assessments is less autonomous than an extrinsic reward of perceiving the value of a task to supporting a one's career goal.
We should be supporting school students in developing internally-regulated extrinsic motivation. Support: Ryan and Deci's support for this argument is two-fold. First, they cite several studying showing that higher levels of self-regulation in learning lead to beneficial effects, including greater enjoyments of school, positive coping styles, greater engagement, and better-quality learning. Second, they cite research showing that three particular manipulable factors, relatedness, competence, and autonomy, could help move motivation toward more self-regulation. Thus, helping kids to become more self-regulated in their motivation is both possible and beneficial.

Response: I found the following quote from early in the article particularly thought-provoking: "Frankly speaking, because many of the tasks that educators want their students to perform are not inherently interesting or enjoyable, knowing how to promote more active and volitional (versus passive and controlling) forms of extrinsic motivation becomes an essential strategy for successful teaching" (Ryan & Deci, 2000, p. 55). My first reaction upon reading this was that it was a flawed argument. Should we just accept that the tasks students do in school are not inherently interesting, and work within that limitation? Or should we instead work on making the tasks interesting? I believe that one of the problems with a lot of mathematics education is that it focuses too much on the most direct and straightforward, and therefore the least interesting, aspects of mathematics. A change to more interesting problems (that are, admittedly, more difficult to implement in instructional contexts) generally has positive effects in classrooms. Thus, I felt like Ryan and Deci were, perhaps, trying to solve the wrong problem. I was surprised, however, to find myself persuaded that both viewpoints -- theirs and mine -- have a role in my general way about thinking about mathematics education. For example, I do believe that we should be more clear in telling kids the ways that early math connects to later math, letting them know how one skill supports a later one. This sets up one of Ryan and Deci's categories of extrinsic motivation -- regulation through identification -- that is much closer to intrinsic motivation than the kinds of extrinsic rewards I'm used to thinking about. In short, I was struck by how much the introduction of a continuum of extrinsic motivation changed my mind about the idea.

16. Labaree, D. F. (2003). The Peculiar Problems of Preparing Educational Researchers. Educational Researchers, 32(4), 13-22.

Main Argument and Support: Labaree argues that faculty of schools of education face particular challenges when it comes to training former K-12 teachers to become educational researchers. He points out four particular clashes of worldview to support his argument:

First, the work of teaching is normative, with the moral imperative as doing the very best you can to help a student; in contrast, research is analytical, with the moral imperative as doing the the very best you can to understand a problem. This can feel morally suspect to teachers.
Second, teaching places importance on personal relationships, whereas academia places importance on ideas. This sometimes leads teachers to feel that their person-centered skills are being discounted.
Third, teaching is focused on particulars, while research is focused on generalizations and theory building. Because of the isolated nature of teaching, teachers can be suspicious of any general theories and believe that each context is entirely unique.
Lastly, teaching make sense of phenomena via personal experience, whereas researchers use theory. Teachers tend to let personal experience trump theoretical arguments.

Labaree argues further that education faculty should purposefully address these cultural divides, helping to sell teachers on the value of the researcher perspective, thereby narrowing the teacher-researcher gap.

Response: I found this piece quite interesting. I am not a former teacher, and I have for years found that my perspective is different than the former teachers with whom I work. This article put words to some worldview contrasts I have experienced in the past. In particular, as a curriculum developer, I often engaged with long conversations with my former-teacher colleagues who felt strongly that their personal experiences should sway the way content was presented.

17. Pinker, S. (2014). Why Academics Stink at Writing. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved on 10 October 2017 from http://www.chronicle.com/article/Why-Academics-Writing-Stinks/148989/.

Main arguments and support: Pinker argues that there are three key reasons why academics are poor writers. The reasons, and Pinker's support for them, are as follows:

Academics are self conscious. Support: Academic writing is full of metadiscourse, descriptions of the researchers' particular social world, apologies, hedging, unnecessary quotation marks, and metaconcepts.
Academics have difficulty imagining what it is like to not know what they know. Support: Academic writing is full of jargon and abbreviations. People with high levels of expertise, like academics, also chunk information and do not realize that others may not chunk things in the same way. They also think, and therefore write, about things in a functional as opposed to descriptive way.
There are few incentives for writing well. Support: Self-improvement of writing takes a great deal of effort, but journals do not use clarity as a criterion for acceptance. Graduate programs do not teach writing.

Response: I see a lot of truth in Pinker's reasoning. It's the last argument that I find particularly problematic. In my experience, not only is there no reward for clear writing, there is a reward -- in the form of publication or funding -- for overly technical and jargon-laden writing. In some contexts, I have been encouraged to write with more technical vocabulary and complex sentences. Where does that leave us? How do we change the norm?