Thorndike’s Puzzle Boxes

 
Last week’s readings in the course I'm taking on learning theories were articles on Edward Thorndike who is best known for his experiments on animal intelligence. He created “puzzle boxes” in which a small animal would be placed and required to push a bar or pull a lever to escape the box and reach its food. Thorndike measured the time it took the animals to complete such tasks and generated “learning curves” which he used to illustrate rates of learning. These experiments were a benchmark in the development of behaviorism as a theory of learning, but in a Deweyan view of education such an approach will not offer an adequate picture of learning that serves our purposes for education within a democratic community.

In Democracy and Education (1916), Dewey distinguished between training and education with respect to the degree to which we can think of the learner and teacher as partnered with one another in working toward shared goals and having a shared interpretation of the social setting. For example, Dewey noted that we can train horses by controlling the stimuli inducing habitual or instinctual behavior to impose new habits more conducive to our ends, but he contrasted this process of training with education by noting that,

“the horse does not really share in the social use to which his action is put. Some one else uses the horse to secure a result which is advantageous by making it advantageous to the horse to perform the act—he gets food, etc. But the horse, presumably, does not get any new interest. He remains interested in food, not in the service he is rendering. He is not a partner in a shared activity. Were he to become a copartner, he would, in engaging in the conjoint activity, have the same interest in its accomplishment which others have. He would share their ideas and emotions.”

Dewey’s distinction applies to Thorndike’s work in the consideration that the kitten’s aim in Thorndike’s puzzle-box experiments was never to solve a puzzle. It was to get to the food. The Deweyan critique on such behavior oriented approaches does not center on the cat’s motivation (though motivation is certainly relevant). He is not holding out “learning for its own sake” as an ideal and accusing the cat of having insufficiently elevated motive. In an educational situation different learners may have a variety of motivations for participating. The problem for viewing the puzzle-box scenario as education is that the cat never interpreted the situation as puzzle-solving at all. The cat has been trained to solve puzzles but has not been educated to be a “puzzle solver.” Instead, it was manipulated to circumvent obstacles to food.

Thorndike provided evidence that learning took place, but the kitten ought not be thought of as achieving the educational goal of improving its performance in solving a puzzle. That would be absurd since the kitten, presumably, has no idea what a puzzle is. Since the situation had a very different meaning for the experimenters than it did for the kitten, the experiments were a matter of control rather than guidance. They were concerned with training rather than education.

In education and in contrast to training, the desired end is not just physical but also social. Education involves the development of a shared understanding of meaning within the particular educational context. An educative outcome is not reducible to a particular physical outcome since education also includes being part of a community of shared beliefs, intentions, ideas, attitudes, and desires. It involves what Dewey called, “the mental and emotional dispositions of behavior,” as well as the behavior itself. “Setting up conditions which stimulate certain visible and tangible ways of acting is the first step,” Dewey wrote, “Making the individual a sharer or partner in the associated activity so that he feels its success as his success, its failure as his failure, is the completing step.”

Merit Pay

Teachers I’ve discussed the issue with are generally willing to grant that in an ideal world, teachers who contribute more ought to be paid more, but they tend to oppose merit pay because of grave concerns for fairness. Education is a unique profession, they say, in that there is no way to accurately make an unbiased assessment of an individual teacher’s worth relative to other teachers in a given educational institution. I will argue that such teachers are right to oppose merit pay, but they are doing it for the wrong reason. Teachers tend to grant that merit pay is good in principle but ultimately bad in practice, but they should be arguing that merit pay would be bad in practice because it is bad in principle. 

In his 2012 State of the Union Address, President Obama outlined a plan for improving education in part by expanding an experimental program using merit pay to reward the best teachers. Though the leaders of the teacher unions aren’t fooled by the framing of the issue as one-sided rewards and recognize that paying one teacher more money also cashes out to paying other teachers less, they have reversed the unions’ historical position in opposing merit pay and have come out in support of Obama’s proposal with the caveat that there is a concern for fairness in implementation. Education is not at all unique with regard to the difficulty of accurately determining the value of an individual employee in an unbiased manner as many teachers often say. Employers in many other fields who are struggling to give a fair and accurate evaluation of their employees as well as employees dissatisfied with their employers’ appraisals of their work will tell you assessing employee performance is not at all clear-cut outside of education, either.

Ultimately, the union leaders’ concern for fairness to teachers is appropriate and laudable but mostly beside the point. If certain individual teachers are paid somewhat more or less than they should be because of a flawed system of assessing teacher performance (as all such systems necessarily are flawed to at least some extent), there may be good cause to try to improve the system in that regard, but the final test for the success of the program is not the degree to which it is fair to teachers. It is the degree to which it yields gains in teacher performance that result in gains for student education. I think we teachers have to admit that that is how such a system of educational reform should be judged. If merit pay is better for our students but the trade-off is that some teachers are unfairly paid a small percentage more or a less than they would otherwise be paid, then that is a trade-off we ought to be willing to accept. The salient issue is not fairness. We should oppose merit pay because there is much reason to think that merit pay will have a negative impact on teaching and learning.

In a recent speech, President Obama said, "Too many supporters of my party have resisted the idea of rewarding excellence in teaching with extra pay, even though we know it can make a difference in the classroom." On the contrary, what the research on motivation shows (I am referring to the research cited in Daniel Pink’s Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us) is that external reward systems quite often have the unintended consequence of destroying internal motivation. The President may be right that merit pay will make a difference, but not in the way he intends. To illustrate why, consider that the first time you pay your son to empty the dishwasher is probably the last time he will do it for free. Any internal motivation he may have had previously rooted in a sense of responsibility to participate in and contribute to the family of which he is a part has been undermined by the offer of an external reward. Merit pay is bad in principle because the principle on which it is based is an outdated model for how people are motivated to do their jobs well. 


Teaching is not like packing boxes on an assembly line or other such jobs where quotas, direct and continued oversight by management, and bonuses for faster work may be effective ways to incentivize employees, but merit pay is nevertheless based on the principle of incentives that was designed for such situations. Under this principle it is believed that for employees to be motivated to do their job, work must be tied to specific financial incentives. Otherwise, there would be no reason why employees wouldn’t slack off. The underlying assumption is that the work is not meaningful in itself.
 
For certain sorts of jobs that is an appropriate model of motivation, but that model fails miserably for work which is creative, collaborative, intellectually fulfilling, and intrinsically motivating--for work that is meaningful. In the business of packing boxes, employers need not worry about destroying intrinsic motivation by tying increased productivity to external rewards since there is nothing intrinsically motivating about packing boxes. There is no internal motivation to destroy; therefore, for such employment it is reasonable to apply the principle of motivation underlying merit pay.

But teaching is intrinsically motivating work. Intrinsic motivation rather than extrinsic monetary rewards is what drives the best teachers to do their best work. That is not to say that teachers will work for free. They won’t. Teachers work for annual salaries rather than hourly wages, commission, per unit pay, or other forms of compensation as do people in other fields who do intellectual work. The point of paying employees salaries in certain domains of business and for teachers in education is in large part to take money off the table. The idea is to settle on a fair salary and then for everyone to forget about pay and get to work. The idea is to avoid putting employees in the position to be constantly  calculating the financial benefits for individual tasks and hours put in. A salary lets salaried employees focus on doing high quality work rather than thinking about money for such creative employment where the distinction between high and low quality work is not determined by units produced or hours spent.

Are there teachers who are slackers and not fulfilled or otherwise intrinsically motivated? Sure. But, not only will merit pay destroy the internal motivation of the vast majority of teachers who find teaching intrinsically motivating, but it also will do nothing to improve the teaching of those unmotivated teachers. Note that unmotivated teachers will not be incentivized to become exemplary teachers by offering cash bonuses, and under the proposed merit pay program, they won’t be sufficiently punished by not getting additional merit pay for them to leave the profession. What needs to be done with such unmotivated teachers is to try to avoid hiring them in the first place, and failing that, get rid of them.

It is likely that there is some small minority of teachers who would work a little harder for a chance at a bonus, but any positive benefit for the education of students from such teachers would be far outweighed by the unintended negative consequences of merit pay. For example, proponents of merit pay fail to understand the nature of an educational institution where collaboration rather than competition is the norm. If we are to think that monetary incentives are what motivates teachers to perform as merit pay proponents implicitly hold, then where is the incentive for teachers to share their knowledge of best practices and the educational materials they create with other teachers? Where is the incentive for the perpetuation of the profession in experienced teachers training the next generation of student teachers? 


The problem is not merely that there would be no incentive to do such important work. The problem is that the incentives would be in the wrong direction. Under a system of merit pay, teachers will be transformed from collaborators to competitors. Rather than share what works with other teachers, educators would be incentivized under merit pay to protect best practices as though they were trade secrets.

Also, consider that we are only seeing the beginning with regard to cheating on standardized tests by teachers and administrators if a merit pay system is to be expanded. Just as businesses are learning more and more and with serious consequences how offering financial incentives to show short term success too often has the effect of producing such gains only at the expense of the long-term as well as the overall system. It is more than probable that we will likewise see all sorts of bad behavior that is unintentionally encouraged by a merit pay system. 


We teachers should repudiate merit pay for the same reasons that many businesses are moving away from the use of such incentives for certain types of work and not because it isn’t fair. (It is unlikely that we will find much sympathy in our concerns for fairness anyway.) We should repudiate merit pay because it won’t improve performance for creative work such as ours--in fact, it will destroy internal motivation and is therefore likely to decrease performance--and because it is likely to unintentionally encourage bad behavior.

Judging the Adequacy of a Learning Theory

(I was tempted to add a tag line to the title above such as, “...a Deweyan perspective,” but I aspire to a John Dewey and Richard Rorty informed perspective on everything I write here.)
 
I argued in the last post that accuracy as adequacy to reality is an unworkable notion for settling the choice between the various theories of learning currently available because “objective reality” doesn’t simply present us with a set of standards for what it means for a theory to be adequate to itself. Instead a theory can only be judged with regard to adequacy to particular human concerns, but since the purposes to which a theory either succeeds or fails to be adequate are implicit in or specified as part of all the theories of learning under consideration, accuracy as adequacy to our purposes won’t settle any disputes between such theories either. As in the Kuhnian description of scientific revolution where one paradigm for theory and practice in a given science eventually wins out over another, if there is to be a settled paradigm for thinking about learning theory, the winner won’t succeed because of better meeting some set of standards that are simply given. A paradigm becomes dominant only through persuasion about what the standards for a good theory ought to be and demonstration of the success the new paradigm has in meeting those new standards in the form of examples of what a solved problem looks like, and it only happens within a human social context. 

A particular difficulty of settling on a particular paradigm for a scientific theory of learning as compared to such settlement of opinion for other sciences is made clear when considering that before deciding between a Newtonian and an Einsteinian paradigm for the study of physics, we didn’t need to get consensus on the sort of community we ought to have. Nazis, Communists, Royalists, Papists, democrats, and others can all agree on a shared vision for what the physical sciences ought to do and what a solved problem in physics looks like. It is not so with education. The sort of learning theory that best guides the nurturing of Maoists or Islamic Fundamentalists is not likely to be the same one that fosters the best democratic citizens.  

Community life in Dewey’s democratic vision is not a matter of conformity of behavior but of shared interpretations of experiences. It is an egalitarian dialogue aimed at consensus rather than a dictatorial monologue demanding compliance. In a democracy, the shared goals which constitute the fabric of society are always themselves subject to the need for on-going renegotiation. Society in Dewey’s democratic utopian vision is not a fixed entity but rather a promising project. It is not aimed at adequacy to something pre-existing but the endeavor to bring something new and better into being. The goal of rearing children to eventually participate fully in such a democratic dialogue must be kept at the forefront of consideration of theories of learning. The question is not merely, “Does this theory work?” but also, “Work to what ends and by what means?” We must pay attention to both means and ends since there is always a continuity between them. A democracy which seeks to perpetuate itself through anti-democratic means undermines itself, so a learning theory aimed at democracy must be one which achieves its democratic ends through democratic means.

Dewey left it to better poets such as Whitman and Emerson (the latter he called the “Philosopher of Democracy”) to paint word pictures of democratic vistas. He did not, at least through direct argumentation, try to convince us that democracy is the sort of community we ought to want. His pragmatism cannot offer a philosophical grounding for democracy. He does not claim that a particular blend of individual freedom combined with human solidarity is somehow demanded by Nature as other philosophers have tried to demonstrate. Instead he admits that he knows of no other way of grounding our preference for democracy than in our commitment to the belief that the democratic social arrangement is our best hope for a good quality of life as well as our best hope for making life even better in the future. Taking for granted that what we want is democracy, Dewey pointed out that the democratic community itself is the end we need to keep in mind for education. With agreement that it is such a democratic vision for the future that we hope to achieve through education, that vision must inform our view of how the learner is viewed, what education is, what sort of learning a learning theory must account for if it is to be descriptive of education, and to which human purposes such a theory must be adequate.

First Day of School

Last night I attended my first class at Temple. I am taking a course on learning theories taught by Dr. David Timony.

In the first lecture of the course, Dr. Timony described what is meant by a “learning theory” and what such theories ought to be able to do. According to Dr. Timony, a learning theory should offer a perspective on what is meant by learning, explain why certain outcomes related to learning occur, and describe the “inner workings” of the learning process. Our goals as students are to compare and evaluate theories, to understand the role learning theories play in guiding educational practice, and to understand how to use learning theories to promote development of students.

According to our textbook, Cognitive Development and Learning in Instructional Contexts by James P. Byrnes, as quoted in Dr. Timony’s Unit I PowerPoint slides, we can understand and distinguish between learning theories based on their answers to the following:

“1. What is the nature of knowledge?

2. How do people acquire knowledge? Why does it grow?

3. What does it mean to be self-regulated?

4. How are memories stored and retrieved?

5. Is the theory compatible with what we know about the brain?

6. What are the instructional implications of this theory?”

I think these are interesting questions, and I expect this to be a very interesting course. Since I have a strong philosophical interest in the American pragmatist tradition, I wonder how John Dewey, the classical pragmatist who was particularly concerned with educational theory, would have answered such questions. I know Dewey almost solely through his most eminent modern proponent, Richard Rorty, but I have begun to read Dewey’s Democracy and Education to get a firsthand account of Dewey’s critiques on the available learning theories of his day, what theory or theories he defended, and where his thought may fit in or fail to fit in (perhaps in a good way) with the predominant theories today.

I sense some possible tension between my understanding of Dewey’s thought and Dr. Timony’s with regard to the nature of theory itself (the theory of theory?) when he writes, “By conducting experiments, we can see which theories provide more accurate answers to these questions; instruction should be based on the most accurate theories.” The pragmatism of Peirce, James, and Dewey anticipated Thomas Kuhn’s work on the way scientific theories function, and a Kuhnian and pragmatic notion of theory eschews the criterion “accuracy” when taken to be some sort of agreement with The-Way-Things-Really-Are irrespective of human purposes. The attempt to get consensus on a single coherent account of reality that best enables us to predict and control (Rorty’s pragmatic take on the scientific endeavor) is not a way of enabling us to step outside of our own skins to achieve a God’s-Eye-View through a set of descriptions which are independent of human needs and interests. Rather, that endeavor itself--finding such a view which is independent of human needs and interests--is only pursued because we humans have the needs and interests we have. Thus, for pragmatists, the concern for a theory is never accuracy taken to be adequacy to reality but rather accuracy taken as adequacy to some specifiable human purpose or purposes. In other words, we can test the accuracy of our predictions but the accuracy of our descriptions is an unintelligible concept. There are surely better and worse descriptions as some are more or less adequate to the purposes for which they were created, but unless someone can explicate a method for comparing a description of some aspect of reality with a bit of un-described reality for accuracy without tacitly smuggling in a set of "subjective" human needs and interests, the accuracy of a description as adequacy to "objective" reality remains a nonstarter.

When Dr. Timony writes, “At present, all theories provide our best guesses about inner workings; all have strengths and weaknesses. Given that instruction will only work if it is compatible with what we know about the mind, it is vital that theories are accurate,” I am concerned that he may be holding out a Platonic hope that somewhere “out there” waiting to be discovered is the one True Theory of Learning. Once we have it, we will presumably be able to make use of it to determine the best approaches for instruction under any circumstances, but since there are an incalculable number of particular knowledge sets that may need to be taught to any individual within any possible context, it seems quite implausible that we could ever expect a theory of learning to do that sort of heavy lifting. It is therefore likely that the sort of accuracy Dr. Timony is seeking as compatibility is not a concern for getting in touch with that one True theory but rather achieving coherence between the practices and beliefs of educators with regard to what works in the classroom, a theory that guides thinking about the learning process, and what science reveals about the brain--a goal that a Deweyan pragmatist can share. 


Based on several comments in his first lecture, I suspect that Dr. Timony would also share a Deweyan vision of the role of education and learning theories as existing to serve our democratic hopes. For example, Dr. Timony explained that he sees his role as an educator with regard to the question of fairness not as giving everyone the same thing but of giving everyone what they need. For Dr. Timony and for a Deweyan pragmatist, our duty is to one another rather than to a particular mathematically ideal allocation. Perhaps then another question ought to be added to the list of six important question relevant to learning theories cited above. Dewey is not just concerned with the perpetuation of society through education but also the question of what kind of society is worth perpetuating. So am I.

New Blog

I am a mathematics and statistics teacher at Haverford High School just beginning a graduate program in mathematics education at Temple University. I also teach introductory statistics as an adjunct instructor at St. Joseph's University. I am particularly interested in statistical reasoning. I am beginning a blog to record my thoughts on my courses at Temple, mathematics and statistics education, and education in general.