Education and Reference Signals

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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[From Bruce Gregory (990802.1210 EDT)]

Michael Strong (990730.1750 PST)

As they come to understand that their initial 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 to 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.

You can look at the process from a slightly different point of view.
When you point out inconsistencies, you are making the students aware
that you are looking for a response that they are not providing. The
error arises because they want to perceive you as agreeing with their
responses and they are not experiencing this. The reorganization
involves discovering what to say that _will_ please you. This many of
the students seem to accomplish. If this alternative model is correct,
it predicts that these new skills will not be apparent in environments
not obviously linked to "pleasing Mr. Strong" or to "pleasing a
teacher". In other words, we would fail to find evidence for "transfer".
In light of the numerous studies showing that transfer does not happen
frequently, we probably should not dismiss this interpretation out of
hand.

Bruce Gregory

[From Michael Strong (990802.108 PDT)]

Bruce,

Thank you for your reply.

The issue of students' substituting "teacher pleasing" for cognition is one to which I am extremely sensitive when I work in a classroom. When I lead discussions as a guest in teachers' classrooms often students turn to their homeroom teacher in frustration and say "I don't know what answer he wants." I intentionally seek to frustrate their "teacher pleasing" strategies. Part of this is simply a rigorous poker face together with the elimination of all of the other non-verbal cues which teachers give students.

Nonetheless, you are correct that simply the acceptance or not of a particular answer is a cue as to whether or not a teacher has been satisfied. One of the ways in which I get around this issue is that I will continue to pursue the various logical implications of various interpretative constructs long after, from my perspective, the students have achieved a "right" or a "wrong" answer. Gradually, in at least some situations, students discover on their own that a particular interpretative construct is nonsense given the textual evidence. Conversely, I also ask follow-up questions implicitly demanding more clarity and rigor even when their initial interpretation was "right on." When they see from experience that I am willing to continue to ask follow-up questions to their hypotheses apparently without regard as to whether not their intial hypothesis was right or not, then they realize that they cannot rely on the fact of my asking questions (or not) as evidence that an in!
te!
!
rpretation is correct.

Obviously there are numerous complications; my point is that one can go a long ways towards reducing the alternative "teacher pleasing" scenario which you suggest. I do believe it is possible to fundamentally change the way that students think by means of such procedures. Although I don't have a long track record, in terms of "transfer" I have had student groups post large gains on the Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal and the SAT-Verbal without any explicit test prep whatsoever - simply months of close, Socratic reading. And I have numerous anecdotal accounts, from students and teachers, about how this approach results in a fundamentally different approach to learning.

If you are deeply interested in these issues, you might be interested in my book, The Habit of Thought: From Socratic Seminars to Socratic Practice, available from amazon.com or New View publishers, in which I elaborate on the foregoing issues.

Your email address would lead me to believe you might be associated with the Harvard ed. department. David Perkins, of learnable intelligence fame, based on a manuscript I sent him a few years ago, is supportive of my Socratic questioning techniques. Do you happen to know if he is familiar with or sympathetic to PCT? I rarely mention PCT when I describe what I do because it rarely seems helpful.

And, to repeat my original question, does my use of the PCT concept "reference signal" make sense?

Thanks for your response,

Michael Strong
Director of Middle School Programs
Heads Up! Montessori Schools
Palo Alto, CA
(650) 424-1155

---- you wrote:

···

[From Bruce Gregory (990802.1210 EDT)]

Michael Strong (990730.1750 PST)

> As they come to understand that their initial 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 to 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.

You can look at the process from a slightly different point of view.
When you point out inconsistencies, you are making the students aware
that you are looking for a response that they are not providing. The
error arises because they want to perceive you as agreeing with their
responses and they are not experiencing this. The reorganization
involves discovering what to say that _will_ please you. This many of
the students seem to accomplish. If this alternative model is correct,
it predicts that these new skills will not be apparent in environments
not obviously linked to "pleasing Mr. Strong" or to "pleasing a
teacher". In other words, we would fail to find evidence for "transfer".
In light of the numerous studies showing that transfer does not happen
frequently, we probably should not dismiss this interpretation out of
hand.

Bruce Gregory

-----------------------------------------------------
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[From Bruce Gregory (990802.1707 EDT)]

Michael Strong (990802.108 PDT)

Nonetheless, you are correct that simply the acceptance or
not of a particular answer is a cue as to whether or not a
teacher has been satisfied. One of the ways in which I get
around this issue is that I will continue to pursue the
various logical implications of various interpretative
constructs long after, from my perspective, the students have
achieved a "right" or a "wrong" answer. Gradually, in at
least some situations, students discover on their own that a
particular interpretative construct is nonsense given the
textual evidence. Conversely, I also ask follow-up questions
implicitly demanding more clarity and rigor even when their
initial interpretation was "right on." When they see from
experience that I am willing to continue to ask follow-up
questions to their hypotheses apparently without regard as to
whether not their initial hypothesis was right or not, then
they realize that they cannot rely on the fact of my asking
questions (or not) as evidence that an interpretation is
correct.

You are indeed devious! I admire the approach, and I can just imagine
how it frustrates even "good" students. I've found that withholding an
answer and asking what they think makes teachers in training _very_
unhappy.

Obviously there are numerous complications; my point is that
one can go a long ways towards reducing the alternative
"teacher pleasing" scenario which you suggest. I do believe
it is possible to fundamentally change the way that students
think by means of such procedures. Although I don't have a
long track record, in terms of "transfer" I have had student
groups post large gains on the Watson-Glaser Critical
Thinking Appraisal and the SAT-Verbal without any explicit
test prep whatsoever - simply months of close, Socratic
reading. And I have numerous anecdotal accounts, from
students and teachers, about how this approach results in a
fundamentally different approach to learning.

Good for you!

If you are deeply interested in these issues, you might be
interested in my book, The Habit of Thought: From Socratic
Seminars to Socratic Practice, available from amazon.com or
New View publishers, in which I elaborate on the foregoing issues.

Your email address would lead me to believe you might be
associated with the Harvard ed. department. David Perkins,
of learnable intelligence fame, based on a manuscript I sent
him a few years ago, is supportive of my Socratic questioning
techniques. Do you happen to know if he is familiar with or
sympathetic to PCT? I rarely mention PCT when I describe
what I do because it rarely seems helpful.

Although I help teach a course in the Ed School, I have very little
contact with the faculty. I'm familiar with Perkins work but I doubt he
knows anything about PCT. The kind of quantitative thinking that PCT
encourages does not arouse much enthusiasm in the Ed School Faculty.

And, to repeat my original question, does my use of the PCT
concept "reference signal" make sense?

Perhaps. I'm vague because you use terms like "internal cognitive
states" that I can't translate readily into the PCT model. Here's one
example that would probably pass muster. Students have a higher level
perception we can call "how well I am doing in Mr. Strong's class". The
perceived variable runs from "extremely well" to "extremely poorly".
Different students have different reference levels for this perception.
Interactions with you might cause some students to alter this reference
level (say from neutral to wanting to do well). This change in reference
level would alter the reference levels for low level perceptions and
some of these perceptions might include "what it means to read a text".
Sorry to be so vague, but this is all speculation.

Bruce Gregory