Adaptive Overreaction

Arianna's post considered the asset of overreaction as a result of poorly calculated risk.  If my perception of a risk is exaggerated beyond the actual reality of the threat, then my response may evoke a beneficial response.  This is in contrast to perceiving a risk and judging it to be relatively low, responding to that level of risk, and then having a response that is insufficient or ineffective.

At first I was thinking that overreaction does not actually exist.  People are just reacting according to their perceptions.  Some people may just a risk as low, while others judge that same threat as a high risk situation.  Therefore, the second individual may appear to be overreacting, when in reality, they are just reacting in accordance to their perception.  This may be true.  Or, maybe people learn overreaction as an adaptive behavior.

I tend to have a heightened response to perceived threats.  Some may consider this overreaction.  For example, when I calculate how many tasks I am responsible for in a week and weight that with the amount of finite time that I have, a common conclusion that I come to is: I should definitely panic.  This panic calls me to full alert, I make lists, I create plans, I start implementing those plans.  I cut out what is actually not necessary to do this week, or some things get cancelled and I get bonus time that I didn't account for.  And, inevitably, I get through the week.

It would be a great disappointment if I could not work him into another SE discussion.  Andy tends to have a very dampened response to perceived threats.  Or maybe, he does not perceive anything to be that threatening.  Because we live in the exact same house, it seems unreasonable that we would come to such divergent conclusions.  He has many demands and responsibilities and the same finite amount of time that I do, but the result is quite literally never panic.  In fact, the result might be that the Master's Tournament is a logical task to add to the list of responsibilities.

After 13 years of marriage to Andy, I believe what I may be experiencing is adaptive overreaction.  If part of my process in making sense of a mismatch between demands and time is delegating responsibilities to Andy, then I must try to evoke reaction within him that calls him to action, moves him away from watching Tiger revive a once-though dead career, and toward landscape beautification in preparation for hosting Easter celebrations.  In overreacting, I create a reaction that benefits my steps toward self regulation.  Relative to his natural inclination, reacting at all is likely an adaptive overreaction.  At any rate, the landscape looks lovely.

Categorization and Experiences

Kahneman's dichotomous framework in Shantanu's blog makes me think about how people start to categorize things, physically or abstractly, and how those categories in mind would influence their ways of perceiving the world. If a person only knows two kinds of color: white and black, then how would he or she think about the blue? Whenever a person encounters this problem, it seems to be assimilation or accommodation processes. But the underlying mechanisms remain to be mysterious. If that person accepts the new color as blue just because other people tell him that is the truth, is this a kind of fast thinking? In this way, probably many ideas or categories in our existing mind would be revised if we apply slow thinking in the assimilation or accommodation processes.

In the current educational context, much knowledge is learned through secondhand experiences in which ideas and concepts are assimilated or accommodated into thinking system. For slow thinkers, they might probably hold more sophisticated thinking system and it would take more time to fit a new situation into a suitable category or they may try to recreate categories in order to justify the new problems. But for fast thinkers, what are reasons that they wouldn't be willing to slow down and think other possibilities? Comparing first-hand experiences with secondhand experiences, I'm thinking about how they would shape people's thinking system differently. For self-efficacy which originates from first-hand successful experiences, does this account for slow thinking process if there is any link between them?

Asking what Mezirow would and trying to link it to Kahneman

Reading through last week's posts really made me ask some questions about how we may tend to use system 1 thinking to label things as worthy or unworthy of our attention even when we read for class in a controlled setting, with more time on our hands to practice System 2.  I think that we really need to look at our everyday lives as students rather than generalizing our experiences at a conference to our daily lives to really realize how we tend to brush off so many things just because they "seem irrelevant". I don't know about you guys, but sometimes, I've come across reading that I will say I have problems with, but often refuse to reconcile when certain strengths are unearthed by others in class, because I've made my evaluation using system 1 because "I don't like it" or it "lies outside the theory I read". Like Ziye said in her last post, abstract academic concepts render us with the option to use System 2 effectively. Why do we so often use System 1 then? The answer could lie in self-efficacy, or in something as simple as convenience.

 Something I'd like to bring in here, because I've been studying it extensively  is Mezirow's conception of true learning. I believe that the ways in which we have come to be 'reared' as students have made us look at existing academic systems in an instrumental manner. Habermas and Mezirow would label our reticence to accept the possible strengths in something we don't favor as instrumental reflection, because we look at systems we don't agree with, and try to break them down by hook or crook using strong words and broken arguments rather than understanding how to use them to transform and mold our own ideologies. Essentially, this can be pictured as pulling the trigger on something, shooting it till it dies, and waiting for it to be reborn as something deformed, molded to fit what we think. This type of reflection lies at the boundary between legality and legitimacy, and could lead to civil disobedience and the annihilation of civil order within a learning context.  In Habermas' opinion, the lifeworld, or context, is filled with "incalculable presuppositions" that need to be united through a bridging of social capital to incite true communicative learning.

The true conception that is imbued within academia (at least from my perspective) is that of transformation. Transformative learning is something that is rarely seen within the academic context, because we've been told that things are black and white, and that's how the system is.  The go-getters with instrumental opinions who refuse to budge get it all (as we were discussing last class), and those that dip their fingers into many ponds for the sake of social good are suddenly told it's quicksand, and are left to slowly sink to their scholarly demise. As academicians, don't we need to adopt this transformative approach to thrive and cram things into our minds, rather than an instrumental one to cram just what's needed to merely survive the semester, or even academia? We often have the tendency to say that we need to "survive", but the point is, we have the "privilege" and luxury to work hard and thrive, just like our undergraduate subjects and students who we often judge and call spoilt. The truth is, we're all in the same boat. We just don't want to thrive, because of how the system has reared us (much like cattle).

To conclude, I think that the links between systems 1 and 2, and instrumental and transformative patterns of thinking seems undeniable, and I'm wondering if there's any journal articles that talk about Kahneman's dichotomous framework that can be cited and linked to Mezirow's work.

The interaction between Slow Thinking and Fast thinking

Through our discussion in last class, I've been thinking about what is slow thinking and fast thinking. Are they domain specific or domain general? For academic learning, such as science and literacy, it would probably help people develop logical thinking which takes more time to generate deep thoughts on certain ideas. But for people engaging in art creation, do they have the same kinds of learning approaches? Because I'm considering the role of intuition which is always valued by many artists. In another words, I don't quite understand how we should distinguish these two different thinking systems and what their functions are in different learning contexts.

For the linkage with self-efficacy, I'm considering it as people's belief system which is formed by different thinking systems. As we discussed before, it is closely related to successful learning experiences. However, both slow thinking and fast thinking could create different levels or kinds of success. For example, a child could learn how to plant flower very quickly by following other peers or parents' behaviors. Is this based on fast thinking which might also increase their self-efficacy? And for college students who study sciences, they may experience more slow thinking to achieve success. How people's belief system would be changed based on different thinking systems according to different cognitive development stages or learning contexts?

Is self-efficacy fast or slow thinking?

At the end of the last class I was pretty convinced that what we call self-efficacy could be categorize in terms of slow thinking (system 2). But now that I am thinking more about it, I am not sure; I think I used the system 1 in my first opinion. I think that most of our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors associated with self-efficacy can be classified in system 1. But what could explain that? Based on the discussions in previous classes and my (limited) understanding of Kahneman’s work, my answer to that question is: our concrete experiences. In the first sessions we discussed about the relevance of the consequences of people’s behaviors in the formation of their self-efficacy, and why this form of learning is more effective than vicarious experience and verbal persuasion. 

So, when people behave in a particular way and, as consequence, they receive something that they expect (reinforcement), their self-efficacy is strengthened. But this experience also implies that people learn associations among events (this include emotions, behaviors, and thoughts) that take place during those experiences. As people are exposed to the same experiences because they become more self-efficacious, the learned associations among events are also be strengthened. Consequently, people’s future decision in similar context will be highly dominated by system 1. One of Kahneman’s examples could help me to illustrate what I am saying. If I ask you what the result is of 2 + 2? the answer comes to your mind immediately without think about it. In fact, you can “see” this math operation in your mind! But if I ask you what the result is of 345 X 56? The answer does not come to our minds immediately; most of us will use rules to find the solution. The first case happens not only because our memory capacity allows us to perform that kind of operation, but also because we have constantly been exposed to “2+2”, right? 

The availability cascade

What I gather from Kahneman in relation to self-efficacy is that we feel very efficacious for things we are actually rather bad at. That being said, I feel like this can be advantageous; if we knew how bad we were at decision making or risk calculation or probability, it would be crippling, and we might not try to accomplish anything. Although Kahneman points out some pitfalls, like Love Canal and the Alar scare, I’m not convinced that these were necessarily unwarranted overreactions. The availability cascade may have led to extreme responses but being adamant about not accepting toxic water and potentially harmful chemicals on your food seems rational to me. I think overreactions can serve a purpose to hold people accountable and enact change. Were these events not to have engaged the public so drastically, how much more might have the responsible parties tried to get away with? Should we wait for something more risky or detrimental to occur before demanding change? The cost of not reacting in these types of situations is potentially greater than overreacting. A false sense of efficacy for weighing the risk of an event or outcome seems evolutionarily necessary. Though we might be technically bad at weighing risks maybe that makes us good at other more important things, such as engaging in collective efficacy and demanding change before something bad has to happen. 

What lead to the self-contradiction

In the chapter “less is more”, the notion of conjunction fallacy reveals that people’s thinking structure is not logical and is easily being biased. From my perspective, the “less” refers to the information provided for an event, while “more” refers to the uncertainty of possibility and mental effort needed to draw a conclusion. People’s mind works much slower when processing abstract problems than dealing with those are concrete. Abstract problems, such as calculating possibility, is not suitable for people to think. Thus people tend to make them more crystallized such as analyzing them into selecting people in red clothes from the crowed, which is more understandable. When people confront with abstract questions, if they rely on intuition, they are more likely to make mistakes. That might could explain the one of the reason why people are self-contradicted in decision making. Compared with computers which are predetermined an overarching algorithm, people’s priority are changeable depending on present condition and scenario.

However, as the ultimate form of nationality, logic is just a tool. System one which basically depends on the intuition of mind, fits the needs of survive and the creature’s nature of “profit and avoid loss” of creature. It is faster, more effective but more likely to make wrong decision than lazy logical thinking. Intuition are suitable for events that we wouldn’t lose much if we make mistakes. The reason why people make decision off the top of one’s head is the wrong estimation of results and conceit of the decision maker.

It might be better if we do not make judgement when you don’t have enough evidence to support it. With limited clue provided, the possible assumption could be substantial, however, it means the possibility of making mistakes would be larger. It is noticeable in the decision making process. in most cases, we are usually under much urgency to draw out a conclusion and move on to the next step, employing information in mental account of system one. When deducting and making decisions, be on your guard, slow down and collect sufficient factual evidence. If people get impatient and try to speed things up, that will lead to self-contradiction when confronting similar cases.

Surviving the world of Academia

As I was looking over the posts, I saw here I and thinking about the book I thought a lot about fast and low thinking and its role in academia.

I spent the past week at AERA in Toronto and sat in on may sessions, from round tables to symposia and paper sessions. I chose topics I was interested in, and as such had a certain level of intrinsic motivation to listen and understand what people were saying (it was a place for slow thinking). I was consciously trying to understand what people were saying and piece it into my understandings and my research interest. Yet I also found that quite often system one stepped up. I would instinctively, judge a paper a low quality, boring, or uninteresting, without really processing why, sometimes I knew right away what was wrong, what I didn't like. But other times, I had to wait for system two to kick in before really parsing out what I viewed as problematic. It was those initial judgments, system one, that allowed me to survive the conference. I could not have mentally managed five days of session after session with system two working on overdrive. I had to cut some things out, mentally ignore some stuff so that I could focus on others. 

This made me think a lot about academia as a whole, we are surrounded by new papers, new ideas, presentations of new work, and yet, we cannot mentally, or at least I cannot mentally process and use all of that information. It is my system one that instinctively tells me to ignore something, that work isn't worth reading because they made questionable methods choices, etc. that allows me to survive in this world. However, in academia, it is also system one that boxes us in, allows us to stay in our worlds, and trust our work and understanding sometimes more than we should. It seems to me that the thing that allows us to survive intense mental stimulation is also our downfall.

More Fast and Slow Thinking...

I am enjoying Kahneman’s book, “Thinking Fast and Slow.” The Tom W question and the Linda Problem are two intriguing experiments. I learned about how people are quick to ignore base rates, personal doubts and the validity of the description and instead, make assumptions and rely on stereotypes. It is interesting how lazySystem 2 can be.  It often decides that applying knowledge takes too much effort!  System 1 thinking makes quick judgments, applies stereotypes and succumbs to fallacies. System 1 convinces System 2 that its information is not valuable and will take too much effort to confirm or apply further knowledge. System 2 is not impressively alert. It may “know” but does not always “apply.”  Knowing this about the two systems, how can educators encourage students to be aware of their own “lazy thinking?”  What are good activities to implement in a curriculum that encourages thinking slow?

“System 2 is therefore susceptible to the biasing influence of anchors that make some information easier to retrieve. System 2 has no control over the effect and no knowledge of it.”  My question is: WHY doesn’t System 2 have control over the effect?  I think that anchoring and priming effects are interestingly powerful. Priming effect influences thoughts and behavior through stimuli which we pay no attention to at all. Our thoughts and behaviors are influenced by our thoughts and behaviors of the moment. Interesting: We might be aware of the anchor, but often not aware of how it guides and constrains your thinking because you cannot imagine how you would have thought if the anchor had been different or absent.  It can be draining to use System 2 to maintain vigilance against anchoring, priming, and biases, but it is completely worth the effort to avoid System 1 thinking coming in and making a poor, rash judgment.  We should remind ourselves of times where we did exercises control over external influences and to ultimately trust in our own intuition.  

Problems with each system: System 1 will generate overconfident judgments because confidence is determined by the logic of the best story you can determine from the given evidence. Regression to the mean is difficult for System 2 to comprehend and requires intentionality to avoid error.  As an educator, how do we apply “taming the intuitive predictions” when we must rely on background information about students while working with them. How do we properly operate in System 2 to evaluate student needs? Persistent intentionality? Constant self-reflection?

Kahneman researched the perceived happiness of students who live in California compared to those who live in Michigan and Ohio. Although he showed that Californians enjoyed their climate while Midwesterners despised theirs, he concluded that climate was not an important determinant of well-being.  He found that there was no difference whatsoever between the life satisfaction of students in California and those in the Midwest. Simultaneously, he discovered that students in both regions shared the same mistaken view. These views were based on an error to an exaggerated belief that climate largely influenced happiness. This error, known as a focusing illusion, provides a sense of comfort. Focusing illusion can cause people to be incorrect about their present state of well-being as well as incorrectly judging the happiness of others. I am curious how focusing illusion occurs in the classroom. Which type of students does it most often effect?  Do teachers suffer from focusing on illusion?  

One last quote from Kahneman which I shall ponder this coming week: “The test of learning psychology is whether your understanding of situations you encounter has changed, not whether you have learned a new fact. You are more likely to learn something by finding surprises in your own behavior than by hearing surprising facts about people in general.” As an educator this next week, I will attempt to be more intentional to engage System 2 thinking and seek to find something which surprises me about my own behavior. 

Decoding Kahneman, academia and belongingness

We were discussing fast and slow thinking today in class based on our readings of Kahneman's book, and I think that what was highlighted in our discussions made me think about what we're doing in this class and how we formed evaluations of even the very environment we are sitting in. Michael raised the argument about what we perceive about this class being a function of fast thinking. I think that this was extremely pertinent, because it really helped me understand how the internet-infused framework used in this class is built towards generating self-efficacy that is intrinsically based. When we talked about students skipping blog posts and asked why some of us skip posts sometimes, it became evident to all of us in class that day that the reasons that one would take the liberty to be flexible in this class could be based on  'System 1' evaluations of Michael's instructional demeanor, the fact that we're assuming that everyone will get an 'A', and that there are other things to do that are more 'high stakes'. Again, this is all speculation, but it is pretty sound.

But, if you're someone that is researching this, and is using 'System 2' to analyze why we have these liberties in this class, it points to an extremely pertinent notion of building intrinsically guided self-efficacy and actually posting something that is personally pertinent to us, in order to embark on a journey towards creating a collective efficacy. Now let's go a bit further and ask, did we think about this class in this manner? Or was it just something we 'required' and 'had to do', based on our immediate evaluations of our program sheets and fleeting perceptions of Michael as a 'chilled out teacher'? Kahneman makes the point that we use fast thinking not as a function of intuition. This is a term that we sugar-coat our own thinking with to make ourselves feel better. The fact is that we are making decisions when we may not have the adequate funds of knowledge about something, because it's easier to do that and move on, being as ignorant as we were at the outset. Is ignorance really bliss though?

Another facet of our behavior that we discussed pertained to the notion of social belongingness. While Kahneman mainly talks about cognition, we decided to take this to the social dimension in order to evaluate the decisions that we make using fast thinking. When people talk about popular culture that they don't know of just to belong, they use fast thinking, and whether this works or not entirely depends on the group. You have to step back, gain more information, and see what you can do to feel a sense of belongingness. It's pretty evident that fast thinking can get you into a really embarrassing social situation.

Let's take this to the realm of academia to look at how we often just disagree with others simply because we 'abide by another school of thought'. Do we have adequate information about things outside our realm, or do we raise circular arguments just to 'belong' to a school of thought that we've had success with over the years? I think I have a tendency to do this myself, as do all of us. While belonging to a school of thought and doing anything to defend it is associated with collective efficacy, which some of us think is beneficial, using fast thinking to defend it is a risky game that can make one seem difficult and obstinate. Accruing adequate funds of knowledge and adopting a 'system 2' configuration about things we don't know as much might be the best way to deal with such situations by being the bigger person, and accepting that learning is lifelong. Such an approach might let us be less judgmental about the people around us. We discussed how today, sticking by a single school of thought makes you a 'go-getter'. If you favor many things by actually evaluating things, you're often considered a 'flip-flopper' in Michael's words. To be honest, I'd rather be a flip-flopper for the sake of being more knowledgable.

We often think that people that don't agree with us are 'wrong' and 'no good at what they do', based on fast thinking. Is this really the best way to figure out our social interactions, or are we throwing ourselves under the bus?

Is intrinsic motivation always a good thing?

Intrinsic motivation occurs when we act without any obvious external rewards. Individual simply enjoys an activity or see it as an opportunity to explore, learn, and actualize one’s potentials. People who are intrinsically motivated would pursue the activity for the pure enjoyment of it and engage in the behavior entirely from within rather than out of a desire to obtain external rewards such as money, prizes, praise, or reclame. Thus intrinsic motivation is usually considered as the best condition when people are doing things.

I wonder whether extrinsic motivation could lead to desired outcome which is beneficial to individual development. For example, a middle school student might be very intrinsically motivated to do exercise books and answer questions. The student won’t not gain any extrinsic rewards like desired high score or teacher’s praise. Suppose that what if the student just enjoys the process of figuring out questions and feeling safe when all answers aligns with the standard criteria. To some extent, it is just a tendency of mechanical operating and repeating in a learning context, which is more likely to lead to shallow processing thinking process. Life is complicated without an certain answers for any conundrum. The thinking habit of always seeking for the right answer could be benign to a sustainable thinking development, for individuals would confront struggling time with uncertainty and crisis. 

However, I wondered whether this learning style is indeed intrinsically motivated. For I experienced the above process during my middle school life, which could be very common at that certain age under that educational system (testing and enrolling). The ends in view were getting good grades and getting into a ideal educational institution. Nevertheless, I just realized that the process of answer questions correctly could authentically bring satisfying internal sense of achievement which drives me to move forward, which a fixed pattern (do exercises and check the correct answer). Admittedly, this might be a byproduct of the behavior (i.e. doing exercises), which was aiming at external rewards, getting good grades and then get enrolled. But take that single mode of “practicing” (it is could be learning but I would prefer to define it operational practicing), it could be intrinsically motivated thing, but it could rigidify individual’s mindset. I wonder it if the drawback of doing something which is intrinsically motivated when it is pondered on a cognitive perspective.

How personal and environmental factors interact with each other to form System 1 and System 2?

To describe the differences between System 1 and System 2, Kahneman (2011) put forward the cognitive illusion through examining impressions and beliefs. By the Muller-Lyer illusion example, he mentioned that even though people could view the lines as equal in length by measuring or previous experiences with this experiment, they still feel hard to resist the first illusion formed by visual signals. In this process, the System 1(automatic thinking) seems to be programmed by biological functioning; however, the System 2(logical thinking) needs human's effort to change attention or prior beliefs formed through non-examined observations. In this experiment, I am thinking how many illusions we may encounter in our life without careful re-examination and how people could develop more sophisticated thinking System 2 to better resolve problems and enhance lifelong well-being.

Through what Kahneman (2011) stated, experiencing cognitive dilemmas (cognitive illusions and beliefs through examination?) seems to be a facilitator in transformation from System1 to System2. However, what factors could promote people to avoid the trap of cognitive laziness and utilize diverse tools, such as language, to seek truth (examined beliefs) behind superficial phenomenon (cognitive illusion)? From social cognitive theory, I'm thinking that what kinds of interaction between personal (cognitive, affective and biological events) and environmental factors would generate System 1 and which may contain facilitators for System 2?  From Loretta and Johana's posts, I'm thinking how System 1 and System 2 would be developed differently in child-driven play and structured learning system due to different environmental factors (e.g., tasks, goals, communications). For example, without outside judgement, it tends to be more easy for kids to achieve success based on their self-set goals which might enhance their self-efficacy. In this sense, I would consider this positive belief would fall into System1. While for kids learning in structured educational system, they still have the opportunity to achieve success, but it relies upon external assessment and requirement.  Would this success still form System 1 and how does it exert influence on later functioning of System 2?

My thoughts on relating “Thinking Fast and Slow” to Self-Efficacy

I was reflecting on Loretta’s post about Thinking Fast and Slow and I am confused as to how to link the two systems of thinking to self-efficacy, as I can think of multiple examples for each that don’t necessarily fit with one another.
For example, I would initially argue that the use of fast thinking such as fight or flight responses demonstrates high efficacy in those actions. It reflects the idea that your “gut reaction” to stimuli is the action that you would best accomplish. If I’m being chased by a tiger, I have higher self-efficacy in running away from the tiger than I do in fighting it, so I’m more likely to run (even though both actions might ultimately be futile). I also relate the concept of fast thinking to actions of proficiency or familiarity in certain tasks, i.e. the idea that someone knows a place or an action “like the back of their hand” and doesn’t have to ponder what to do for long. Such fast thinking may also demonstrate a sense of false self-efficacy; as Loretta’s 9-year old child demonstrates, it may be possible to dedicate so much energy to slow thinking that, with a false sense of high self-efficacy in one’s spatial awareness, one can inappropriately use fast thinking to move impulsively and accidentally knock things over.
I’m not sure, however, of the relationship self-efficacy has to slow thinking, as I can see it going in both directions. Taking the time to deliberately think through a situation and “problem solve” could be due to an individual’s lack of confidence/low self-efficacy in their ability to make snap judgements, but it could also be due to a desire to find true understanding of the situation and a high self-efficacy to do so. I’m excited to explore these connections further in class.

Kahneman in the kitchen

Last week I mentioned that my boyfriend, Jed, is in vet school. One of the great perks about this is care for my dog, Honey, without having to set foot in another animal hospital again or pay another vet bill. In March 2018, I took her to our vet and was pretty determined that would be the last vet bill I’d pay. This week, the vet school offered free heartworm medication for a year if you had proof from your pet’s annual check up or a blood test that it was heartworm free. Unfortunately, Honey’s last heartworm test was too old to use but we decided Jed could probably draw her blood and do the test himself (urged by me, who didn’t want to find a vet in Ohio or pay for this). So, Tuesday night we found ourselves on the kitchen floor with the dog, ready to draw a little blood for the heartworm test. It is worth noting that the vet school doesn’t have first year students practice any skills on live animals, so until Tuesday night the only blood draw Jed had ever done was taking saline solution from a stuffed animal’s plastic vein. I felt confident in his skills though and restrained the dog while he located her vein. He was feeling less than efficacious about the task of drawing real blood from my real (and squirmy) dog, but his System 2 was focused and in control. He knew what the task demanded: find the vein, insert the needle, draw the blood, retract the needle, apply pressure to the vein. He had practiced countless times, albeit on a fake patient, and I’m happy to report that he executed all those steps perfectly. Except one thing, the actual last step which comes after applying pressure to the vein… transferring the blood from the syringe into a vile. And this is where System 1 barged in. Unfortunately, drawing saline solution from a stuffed animal never required that next step of doing anything with it, so the students usually emptied their syringes on the floor, at each other, or into the trash. And so, as soon as the blood was drawn and the needle was out of the dog, Jed automatically did just that. Drops of blood spattered us and the kitchen floor and we just kind of stared at each other for a few seconds before he responded to look on my face and said, “oh, oops… that’s what we always do.”

After we laughed for a minute and cleaned up the blood, we talked about how crucial it is to learn and practice skills authentically. Although I’m fairly sure he will never make that mistake again and it was a great learning experience, it made me think a lot about instances in the classroom where we teach skills out of context. We might think we have taught something fully when in reality we have not provided students with the “big picture” or given them the ability to apply what is taught to their own lives. I find myself pondering how we can replicate or at the very least relate real-world contexts in the classroom so that learning experiences transfer appropriately to real-world experiences. 

What is the role of slow and fast thinking in self-efficacy?

I found Loretta’s posting about play very interesting and very related with what we discussed in the previous class. From my reading, I understood that children are spending less time engaging in unstructured play (i.e., “self-directed, done with no outside reward, have some type of rules or structure, and have an element of imagination”) which, according to the paper, boosts the development of different areas, such as decision-making, teamwork, self-regulation (and self-efficacy, why not). Importantly, unstructured play also allows the child to learn about the process of discovery and learning while she engages in the activity. In this line, teachers’ goals that are not aligned with their students’ academic interest might constrain the opportunities in the classroom for the learners to explore their own interests and the experience of self-efficacy. When this mismatch occurs, students behave mainly to meet their teachers’ expectations (e.g., have good grades in the finals) instead of exploring and learn about what they feel self-efficacy for. Unfortunately, in this context it is more likely that learning becomes in something that is automatic and passive. Students’ goal is not to engage in the process of learning and discovery but behave according to their teachers’ rules. I wonder if this is related with what Kahneman called slow thinking.  

Self-Efficacy in Pediatric Physical Therapy

(Two disclosures: I am not writing about Thinking, Fast and Slow because I came across a study this week that I want to think about instead.  Secondly, I am not including references to all of the articles noted in this blog, but can provide them to you if you have a deep and burning interest in the topic.)

There is generally a paucity in literature regarding training physical therapy students in pediatric practice.  Of the articles that are published, the majority are lists of competencies and guidelines, with two articles about implementing those guidelines into a small cohort of students.  There is evidence of vast variability in contact hours within the context of pediatric PT education, with a range from 35-210 hours, and concerns from clinical instructors that students are coming to clinics with inadequate preparation.

Experiential learning is important in translating didactic learning experience into practical, clinical skill.  Having a framework of competencies and guidelines is beneficial to ensure the breadth and depth of content is included for accreditation standards, but these lists of knowledge areas do not make for skillful, entry-level practitioners.  There are a couple of articles available on experiential learning in pediatric PT education: one is a call for emphasis on experiential learning and at least one reports on experiences with a service-learning in pediatrics.  That was essentially the entirety of the body of knowledge on this topic...until January 2019.

There has been a call for scholarship in the realm of pediatric PT education, including tools to measure outcomes to allow for comparison across programs to move toward more consistency in training of future clinicians.  As luck would have it, Changes in Perceived Self-efficacy of Physical Therapy Students was published this past January, with this Self Efficacy Scale as their newly developed outcome measure.  While there are limitations to this study, this is a great and needed starting point for moving toward more rigorous exploration of pediatric PT training.  The psychometric properties of the Self Efficacy Scale are not yet known, but I appreciated that this is a domain-specific tool, focused on two aspects (communication and direct handling) of skill within a specific context.

Inspired, I am wondering about meaningful data that might contribute to the currently small body of knowledge.  I am assisting with the pediatric coursework in the OSU PT program this summer.  Would this scale have any utility in understanding a newly implemented change for this cohort: required clinical experience in pediatrics rather than elective experience?  Given the terminology confusion, does this scale measure self efficacy or some other related concept?

Initial thoughts on Thinking Fast & Slow...

Before reading “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” by Daniel Kahneman, I could have told you that it is much easier to recognize other people’s mistakes than our own. After having read through the first two parts of the book, I better understand WHY.  Kahneman does a thorough job explaining the differences between FAST thinking (System 1) and SLOW thinking (System 2): System 1 - Operates automatically and quickly with little or no effort and with no sense of voluntary control.  System 2 – Allocates attention to effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations.  Knowing that slow thinking is time consuming and tedious, the best I can do is to learn to recognize situations where mistakes are likely and try hard to avoid significant mistakes when the stakes are high.

Something I found interesting: Kahneman discusses in detail how cognitive effort and self-control are forms of mental work. Self-control and deliberate thought draw on the same limited budget of effort.  I have seen this phenomemonin my 9-year old, for most of his childhood.  He is a very intelligent child, who is always lost in thought and asks deep questions; yet has struggled with self-control and impulsivity.  For example, he will often be lost in thought as he’s observing something near him, and inadvertently knock over a glass of water by moving too quickly, or not considering the consequences of chosen actions before executing. This seems to be a classic example of my child's deliberate thought draining the resources necessary for him to execute self-control. Simultaneously, my 12-year old does not struggle with self-control. He loves to think, inquire and be challenged intellectually, but rarely daydreams.  Could the difference be related to a varied amount of mental effort each brain requires to ponder and process?  Kahneman’s book has taught me that anything which occupies one’s working memory reduces their ability to think. When people are engaged in a mental sprint, they become effectively blind. This happens to me quite often in a classroom full of students who are all demanding my attention simultaneously; or even at home with several young people desiring my attention while I’m trying to read, study, or plan lessons. I find it encouraging that Kahneman says, “Increased skill in a task leads to diminished demand for energy input.”  The more I teach, the less cognitive draining the planning will be.  Interestingly, highly intelligent individuals need less effort to solve same problems. Makes me jealous of those “highly intelligent individuals”!  ha ha

Reflecting on what I’ve read, trying to make connections to Self-Efficacy, I find myself wondering: How does each System influence self-efficacy?  According to Chapter 8, System 1 is quick to jump to conclusions by making intuitive judgments it knows nothing about. Could these quick assumptions lead a person to false self-efficacy? Looking forward to pursing the potential connections further. 

Analyzing what Pajares says a bit better, and talking about 'the system'

It really fascinates me to look at how the progression of the readings has led us to seek the answers that we need. Heated arguments regarding expectancy value theory, while valid, were clarified by a more detailed analysis of Pajares, which was really essential to understand why expectancy value theory is something that falls short on explaining how we self-regulate. While Bandura has an extremely process oriented outlook towards motivation and how it can paresis through pwrevious success and cultivate stronger efficacy, EVT talks about how interest, value and intrinsic importance are things that cultivate motivation. EVT often expounds that intrinsic motivation is the be all and end all of success. But, can we achieve mastery classrooms by saying that we need to work with already developed social cultural value systems that may form the basis of the drives contained within the EVT framework? Aren't such aspects better explained in a more process oriented, domain specific fashion?

In my personal opinion, self-efficacy flips EVT on its head in.order to help us understand how success is what drives motivation. Not an abstract conception of something like value or interest, because honestly, you can’t get in anyone’s head. I think it tells us to ask the correct questions and question our choices when we make mistakes, thus providing for a more specific background framework if you will, for the cultivation of self-regulation. While I'm not saying that 'mastery' is the be all and end all of things, what I do have to say that it is (sadly but truly) neglected in today's classrooms because we have turned into a 'grading society'. There needs to be a balance, like Bandura says there could be, but warns us to edge on the side of intrinsic motivation and mastery.

While the distinction between EVT and Bandura’s theory is murky, as Pajares says, I think that the main difference lies in how global EVT tends to be in its quest to explain how we evaluate ourselves. To each theorist their own, but I feel that when we talk about ‘mastery’, a careful understanding of what initial success looks like is extremely important. In a ‘grading society’, I think that we’re focusing more on what is expected os us than being learners. This links back to the 'anxiety' associated with education act we have created as a byproduct of society today. Michael said that a pendulum swings pretty fast though. It's true! It's time interval, by actual theory is 1s.  This is precisely why it’s so blatantly easy to throw around the term ‘mastery’ with such ease, and turn around and butcher it with grades and numbers.

The flip side is of course, also a possibility, with. us turning around and breaking the system, much like Habermas's notion of breaking down civil discourse in order to create new paradigms for the social good. While this may result from a more instrumental outlook towards reflection, I feel that it paves the way for higher self-efficacy and mastery experiences in varied domains, while giving us the freedom to still be happy about the extrinsic rewards that we are obsessed with in a 'grading society'. While this goes back to the notion of privilege, I think that we're missing the point by not looking at the possible benefits such a system could have because we are buried within the vicarious influence that society undeniably has on us.

Does a decrease in unstructured "play" affect self regulated learning?

The past few days, I have been thinking about opportunities for younger children to learn self-regulation skills… specifically, how this current generation of children are experiencing a completely different childhood than their parents and grandparents. In class this evening, I was considering appropriate expectations for younger children to set their own goals. I was pondering various developmental stages of students and appropriate ways teachers should integrate self-regulating skills into the curriculum, knowing how much to expect from their age/development stage of students. 

I recently read an article about the lack of opportunity for today’s children to engage in unstructured “play.” The article discussed the effect of a lack of unstructured playtime on children learning self-regulation skills.  To be defined as true “play” time, it must be self-directed, done with no outside reward, have some type of rules or structure, and have an element of imagination. According to the article, American children spend an average of 4-7 minutes a day on unstructured play. These numbers are unbelievable!  Over the past 40-50 years, there has been a shift in parental attitudes which have affected parental focus; specifically, the idea of uninhibited, unstructured “play” has become a negative concept that implies a large waste of a child’s time. I have observed the current generation of parents under heavy social pressure to structure children’s playtime and provide more and more adult-guided activities and competitive opportunities to “become the best.” Today’s parents often feel a burdensome responsibility for their children’s development and guilt over allowing their children to “waste time” exploring unstructured personal activities that lack a specific purpose.  Interestingly, research points to the opposite: A 2018 report from the American Academy of Pediatrics* confirms that “play” enhances creativity, imagination, dexterity, boldness, teamwork skills, stress-management skills, confidence, conflict resolutions skills, decision-making skills, problem-solving skills, and learning behavior.

I hypothesize that the increased focus away from unstructured play time has led to a decline in youngsters’ opportunities to experience self-regulated learning, resulting in lower self-efficacy in social and academic arenas. Unstructured “play” provides children the opportunity for problem-solving, collaboration and creativity require the executive functioning skills that are critical for adult success. Universities are seeing an increased number of students who lack coping skills for dealing with bumps in the road of life; presumably lacking self-efficacy and self-regulation skills needed to persevere through increased academic and social demands. 

Yes, educators should be intentional with activities, games, and purposeful modeling of self-regulated learning in their classroom… but I wonder how much of the issue stems from competitive societal pressures placed on parents to produce the “best, most successful” child in the school? 

            *https://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/142/3/e20182058#ref-128

Mastery and Privilege

I think our discussion of privilege and self-efficacy actually relates to our understanding of mastery-oriented education. The American education system prides itself on meritocratic ideals, using tools like testing as a seemingly unbiased measure of academic standard. People can assume that passing classes and acing tests means that a student has mastered the subject content, when it is entirely possible that they have instead mastered the classroom system. Privilege may be a factor in what allows this distinction to be overlooked.

For example, each class has a set of requirements, such as attendance, participation, assignment completion, and test-taking. At the most basic level, it is possible to pass a class by completing these objectives without truly mastering or fully understanding the topics and their implications, thus passing by way of performance goal orientation. This follows an efficiency model, as it can take less effort to simply regurgitate the information that the teacher expects rather than wrestling with the concepts and critically evaluating them. Therefore, this method is often rewarded not only in the academic realm, but also in real-world situations. Efficiency allows for conservation of time and resources that can thus promote productivity for other projects, a mindset and practice highly encouraged in capitalism.

In this case, the external rewards increase an individual’s self-efficacy in mastering the efficiency system, thus achieving success. However, these rewards are disproportionately given when privilege comes into play. Those who are underprivileged in some way and who follow the efficiency method may be deemed as “lazy” and “cutting corners” as opposed to “prolific” and “vigorous”. These people more often may have to prove true content mastery to receive the same perceived merit as their privileged counterparts and thus the same reward. They may also feel less efficacious in their mastery, as they are more often questioned and scrutinized in their fields of expertise.

Especially in light of the recent indictments surrounding money laundering and college admissions, this discussion of privilege, self-efficacy, and mastery needs to be taken further.

It's a Big Environment Out There

Idea 1:
I am working on a systematic review looking at developmental assessments of cognitive and motor skills for young children born with congenital heart disease (CHD).  It is known that developmental delay is more common in this population compared with typically developing peers without CHD, but researchers are working to understand what factors are associated with variability in developmental trajectory and how to maximize development potential for this population of children.

In the reading that I am doing for this review, I have been impressed that the most prominent predictors for developmental outcome for this group of children are mostly unrelated to their heart condition.  Maternal education, overall socioeconomic status, publicly funded health insurance, growth and oral feeding skills (which are more related to the health of the child in many cases) are associated most with the cognitive, language and motor development of children with CHD.  By and large, number of surgical procedures, intraoperative strategies, birth history, and heart anatomy are not significantly correlated with developmental skills.

Idea 2:
A kiddo is 7 months old, has been hospitalized nearly 3 of those 7 months, does not take oral feeds, was born prematurely and with other risk factors, and has hypotonia.  He not only is at risk for delay, but has established global developmental delay already.  He has had a difficult time receiving support services due to social challenges, as well as repeated hospitalizations.  Health concerns continue to trump developmental concerns.

Idea 3:
I think about resource access often when I think about the children to whom we have provided foster care and have been reunified with family members.  We get to know these children.  I can't help but to set some goals for what I would like to work on while we are caring for them.  We see progress and potential, but it requires concerted effort, time, and resources.  We also recognize the desire to parent coming from biological families, but appreciate the desperate situation that they are often living in.  The limitation of resources does not afford them the luxury many times to do more than "good enough" to get by.  That is not a judgement of their person, but a reality of poverty or unsupported mental health disorders or broken family structure or whatever the case may be.  Although we have always felt confident that the children were going to a safer situation than the one they were removed from, it was always clear that the environment was a starkly different one from our home environment.

Resolution:
I was impressed by: (1) Arianna's post about knowing what children can actually do, and (2) Lin's comment about self-regulation being a trait or skill or both.  If an environment is such that children are unable to use their skills, build upon them, and continue a strong developmental trajectory, what are we supposed to assess and intervene upon?  If I evaluate the child with CHD or the child with repeated hospitalizations or the child living in a challenging social situation and they are found to have motor delays, should my intervention be aimed more directly upon that child or the environment and the parent?  Are the caregivers even able to handle having one more someone talk to them about anything because they are just so beyond their capacity to self regulate their current situation that having a PT in the mix does virtually nothing but make more chaos? Mastering a motor skill in the midst of a bigger environment is far more than the right dosing of my therapy intervention.  I have always known and respected this.  However, I am becoming more and more convinced that that bigger environment plays a bigger role than I may have ever considered in the past.

How to perceive relations between Individual, Education and Society under 'Self regulated learning' and 'Self-efficacy'

Based on my current understanding, I feel like self-regulated learning is a learning process that requires much effort to control one's own behavior in order to meet external requirements and standards. Even though it mentions lots of utilization of meta-cognition and self-awareness of both tasks and selves, the whole process of self-regulated learning still seems to focus on evaluating oneself so as to fulfill a role in society. However, self-efficacy is part of individuals' belief system which is mainly cultivated by successful experiences in specific domain. Similar to what Lin talks in her post, does the learning success caused by self-regulated learning really promote individuals' self-efficacy? Since considering one's belief system development, there might be many possible ways. In one direction, it might be influenced by external environments and the other direction it might be developed through using one's agency fully to shape external environments. I'm thinking that the possible role of human's agency in these two concepts. Do people could utilize their agency in adapting into existing educational and social system? 

For my parents' generation, most people would seek a permanent job and stay in a city for a life long time. But nowadays, people start moving from one city to another and change their jobs more frequently than the past generation. I'm thinking that how social structure would be affected by this increasing growth of human's fluidity no matter physically or psychologically. What functions of education shall be re-shaped by increasingly transparency of information? In the past, schools might probably the major place to acquire knowledge and information as well as function as a role to maintain existing social structure. However, with the development of information technology, people could obtain knowledge in a more effective way and they may play a role in re-shaping social structure. Thus, relating to individuals' agency and social development, what the role of education should be in the future? Does self-regulated learning meet people's or society's needs from the perspective of transformative learning? Or in what way, it differentiate from self-efficacy in the aspects of individuals' agency, educational purpose and social development?