from Michael Strong (990730.1750 PST)
As an educator interested in PCT, the notion that Fritz's work might "help" us to alter our reference signals does not seem strange to me at all. Perhaps I am misusing PCT concepts or language, but ever since reading Powers' _Living Control Systems_ four years ago, I have thought that a very important aspect of my work as an educator is to help students (or to create experiences which help students) to alter their reference signals.
For instance, one of the things that I do is to develop students' metacognitive reading skills by means of Socratic questioning. In PCT language, I see myself as creating an error signal between the students' initial (incorrect) understanding of a particular passage of text and specific textual clues which contradict that initial understanding. As they come to understand that their intial understanding of a textual passage was not accurate, they re-evaluate their initial standard of "coherent interpretation of the text." By means of doing this over and over again, I hope that they become (and by means of test scores this hope seems born out) much more careful readers than they were initially. It seems correct to me to say that they have changed their reference level with respect to what counts as "correct understanding" of the text. Although one can describe various metacognitive approaches to sophisticated conceptual reading as procedures, in order for those procedures!
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o be effective first one must change the students' understanding of their own understanding - e.g. their reference level of what it means "to understand" a textual passage. In Socratic terms, they must come to know that they don't know.
Again, this is not Fritz, and it may not be PCT, but when I read Fritz some years ago he did not seem alien at all with respect to the process of creating cognitive tensions which then must be resolved.
More pertinantly, Powers' PCT account seemed to map beautifully onto the process I was using to get students to hold themselves to a much higher level of conceptual coherence as they interpreted texts.
I now understand a number of different internal psychological processes as a matter of changing my reference signals - and I do thought experiments with respect to those reference signals as evidence of the existence of control systems which are analogous to the physical demonstration in which Powers' suggests that you hold your arm out straight in front of you and disturb it, and watch it return to the position defined by the reference signal you had set for it. In my view, I have many internal cognitive states which have been set to a particular reference signal, and with a certain amount of effort and training, I am able to alter those reference signals (presumably, of course, based ultimately on the demands of even higher level reference signals). The setting of these cognitive higher level reference signals constitutes the most interesting part of humanistic education.
I would be interested in knowing what the PCT community makes of this interpretation of PCT.
Michael Strong
Director of Middle School Programs
Heads Up! Montessori Schools
Palo Alto, CA
(650)424-1155
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