# Control of reinforcement, education

**URL:** <http://discourse.iapct.org/t/control-of-reinforcement-education/2994>\
**Category:** CSG1998\
**Created:** [October 18, 1998, 9:11am UTC](http://discourse.iapct.org/t/control-of-reinforcement-education/2994 "1998-10-18T09:11:18Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Chris\_Cherpas](http://discourse.iapct.org/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/c/a3d4f5/32.png) [@Chris\_Cherpas](http://discourse.iapct.org/u/Chris_Cherpas)\
**Post date:** [October 18, 1998, 9:11am UTC](http://discourse.iapct.org/t/control-of-reinforcement-education/2994/1 "1998-10-18T09:11:18Z")

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[From Chris Cherpas (981018.0200 PT)]

Chris Cherpas (981016.2340 PT)--

> > ...asked if it's more probable to go to the beach and  
> > see women or tanned women, kids say tanned women...

Bruce Gregory (981017.0825 EDT)--

> My experience is that the mistake is often ours and not  
> the students. We assume that if we present the students  
> with an abstract representation that they can manipulate  
> and repeat back to us, we have done our part and they  
> will do their part by "internalizing" the model and  
> "applying" it to new and unfamiliar situations. Great  
> idea, but we have a mountain of evidence that  
> it never happens.

I couldn't agree with you more. Besides Tversky and  
the whole gang of decision theorists who look for  
deviations from the rational/normative models by  
asking a few trick questions and publishing what are  
perfectly reasonable answers (given interpretations  
which are not the official ones, but are not unwarranted  
either) as "biases," I get pretty annoyed with the reverence,  
particularly in the education community, for Piaget.  
If you follow Piaget (instead of, say, Fischbein), kids  
should be clueless about probability until they're just  
about ready to start having sex (maybe there's an  
evolutionary argument here I've overlooked...). Although  
people like Hugh Petrie or Gary Cziko seem to be able to  
interpret Piaget's notions about learning appropriately,  
I'm not too sure about the rest of the world, including  
Jean himself.

It turns out that the kinds of tutorials and practice  
exercises that would counter these supposed biases can  
actually be effective because of their general properties.  
For example, in the case above, involving supposed violations  
of monotonicity, it is pretty easy to set up classic  
colored-balls-in-urns problems which represent inclusive  
subsets of the sample spaces in Euler (Venn-ish) diagrams  
and work through some basic properties of measurement that  
you'd want to get to anyway. And, to boot, if some  
sneaky standard test item is tossed at them which plays  
these kinds of games, they will think twice about getting  
duped by the evil experimenter syndrome.

One more cheap shot at Piaget: some good insight about  
the relationship between mathematical structures/algebras  
and psychology, but before going overboard, at least  
study your Bourbaki a little more closely to get the  
math right before building a theory of psych on algebraic  
structures. And one not so cheap: one can't say one is  
evaluating an educational practice, qua education, unless  
one is at least converging towards being able to say  
something to the effect that doing X, instead of Y, in  
the First Grade works better for doing Z in the Eighth  
Grade...and one will never get to that level of  
analysis unless one has controlled a longitudinal,  
multi-year, individualized instructional process,  
not just asked a few questions every year or so and  
publish the group averages.

Best regards,  
cc, a different kind of evil experimenter