Paul D. Fernhout wrote: > Arthur wrote: >>One theme that seems to run through discussions here is related to this >>issue. Is it the educators' mission to find just the right motivational >>buttons and push them just right ??? Or rather focus on responding >>appropriately to those who come to the learning process with some >>critical mass level of motivation??? >> >>It seems to be one of the fault lines, in some of the discussions here. > > You're right; this is very insightful.
Bad form to reply to myself, I know, but on reflection, I realize there is at least one other obvious alternative. One can also try to change the system to "lower the bar". So, here are some options, if you think of learning to program in Python like learning to jump over a high bar. 1. Motivate kids to want to try really hard and jump over that bar (perhaps using operant conditioning like training dolphins, perhaps just making the value of jumping over the bar so compellingly obvious like the value of driving in US society, or perhaps by wrapping the subject matter in something a kid will find more interesting like a game or contest or story or artwork). This is conventional schooling and even conventional homeschooling at its best -- and is based on *extrinsic* motivation. (*) 2. Leave a bar around, and wait however long it takes until a kid really wants to jump over a bar, and then make any help available to him or her they want right then (just in time learning). This is the "unschooling" approach, and it is also the approach of "free schools". 3. Compel or coerce the child to jump over the bar by whatever unpleasant means is acceptable -- threat of the police or parents, threat of withdrawal of privileges, using peer pressure and related threat of humiliation, or alluding to some long term failure to find a job and succeed in life out of school. This is conventional schooling (or even conventional homeschooling) at its worst. 4. Lower the bar. This is the technology developer point of view (the one I usually have). 5. And as I reflect more on it, here is a fifth options. You could also change the task of jumping the bar into something the kid wants to do from *intrinsic* motivation. This merges somewhat into point #1, except it builds the feedback into the process directly. So, for example, you could put up all sorts of numerical feedback about each jump and plot a kids increasing jump height against on a big graph so they can see their progress jump to jump (with no praise per jump needed, except maybe for effort or progress). (Hard to know how to do this in a programming IDE? Perhaps length of programs? Or how often you go between syntax errors?) Or, for a high tech approach to jump training, perhaps you put up a smoky fog with a laser border shining on it to show a target area to jump though and then laser illuminate the area the kid actually jumps through (perhaps without the bar being there at first), or some such thing. (For programming, this might be some fancy system to give you metrics about programs you write: like on complexity or simplicity or elegance -- which are hard to think of, especially as aesthetic evaluation of programs is perhaps hard to formalize.) So, you are changing the nature of the task into one where there is continuous feedback of some kind the kids intrinsically wants to excel at even if they don't like the original task in its own right. Great teachers in any setting tend to naturally think about their material in this fifth way, I would expect -- assuming they don't otherwise just convey enough excitement to get kids hooked on the subject matter in its own right out of intrinsic interest in, say, the feel of jumping well. In the case of our gardening education work, we could have written a "gardening curriculum" that kids had to study and answer multiple choice questions about, giving out gold stars (extrinsic motivation) for success. Or we could, as we did, make a virtual microworld where they could succeed or fail on their own, where motivation is *intrinsic* from seeing plants grow and harvesting the results, and which might then motivate them to read about gardening from other sources (books, peers, mentors, trial and error, the help system, etc.) in order to make their virtual plants grow better. Now, I think our garden simulator fails at being intrinsically motivating as much as we wanted it to be for various reasons (it's both too confusing from having too many features while also missing some other key features) but I think the *intrinsic* motivating approach was otherwise sound. As primarily a software developer, I think of options #4 and #5 as the ones I explore. :-) I think the fourth option of "lowering the bar" (as well as sometimes the fifth option of "changing the bar") is where I always get into disagreements with Kirby here. He maintains the bar is low enough and intrinsically interesting enough (that is, Python is adequate to use for kids to learn to program well). I maintain it would be nicer if it was even lower and more fun (and that Squeak shows some alternatives Python could perhaps benefit from). We are probably both right, and then it becomes a matter of politics in the sense of how to allocate time and money between curriculum and mentoring versus software development. Of course, since there is essentially no time or money beyond what we individually supply, Kirby mainly works on curricula and gives classes, and I mainly write software. :-) Which is probably just for the best. As Howard Thurman said: http://www.gurteen.com/gurteen/gurteen.nsf/id/X000670AA/ "Don't ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive." --Paul Fernhout (*) And if you are not careful, too much extrinsic motivation might create a "praise junkie". See: http://www.alfiekohn.org/parenting/gj.htm http://wik.ed.uiuc.edu/index.php/Praise http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12648314/ John Holt talks about how, ironically, children in progressive classrooms in affluent school districts (where praise is much given for various reasons) may actually live in fear of not getting praised in class, as much as a previous generation lived in fear of being whipped or spanked in class. Remember, the removal of continual praise is itself a form of punishment (deprivation). The short lesson for avoiding that is to praise in relation to effort or incremental progress ("You tried really hard!" or "You're getting smarter every day!"). From the last link: "Recent psychological study findings are quite straightforward and to the point — kids need praise to guide the development of such characteristics as self-control, self-discipline, frustration tolerance and perseverance. ... The results suggest that kids who are praised for effort and hard work begin to value learning opportunities, whereas children who are praised for their abilities value performance. The studies showed that praising a child for a personal characteristic such as intelligence (“Aren’t you smart. I can count on you for getting an A on your reports!”) can often backfire. The researchers noted that kids given praise that evaluates the child or their traits and abilities (known as person praise) were significantly more likely to display helpless reactions (cognitions, affects, and behaviors) when they were later challenged with more difficult tasks than children who received effort or strategy praise (“Wow, I like the way you looked at this problem from several angles and chose an unusual solution”)." Note that what is important here is not a kid getting the right *answer* -- it is a kid getting the right *attitude*. _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list Edu-sig@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
