PCT Instructional Design

[Bruce_Gregory9]

[From Bruce Gregory (970507.1540 EDT)]

For reasons we do not have to worry about now, I have been
thinking about lessons we can learn from the phenomenal success
of the video game Tetris. (For those of you who are new to this
planet,in the video game Tetris blocks made up of four squares
fall in random orientations from the top of the screen. A
player moves each block right or left, or rotates it, trying to
position the block so that it fills in the spaces created by
earlier blocks at the bottom of the screen. Completed rows of
blocks "disappear." The pieces fall faster with every new level
of the game. The goal is to fill as many rows as possible before
the screen fills with incomplete rows.)

Hardly sounds exciting. Yet by most measures Tetris is among
the most successful (and addicting) video games yet created.
When I last posted my concerns about teaching a course based on
PCT principles, I worried about "impedance" mismatches between
the goals of the teacher and the heterogeneous goals of the
students. Thinking about Tetris, however, suggests to me that my
concerns were misdirected. The goal of Tetris is to arrange
shapes to fill holes and thus to build continuous surfaces. It
is difficult to believe that millions of people have this as a
major goal in their lives. Yet millions of people play Tetris.
There must be something about the task itself that is engaging -
something more important than the particular goal, even though
knowing this goal is essential for playing the game. I suggest
that this "something" is the opportunity to demonstrate and to
enhance mastery. If I am right, the responsibility of the
teacher is to create a situation in which students can exercise
control. The domain and the perception to be controlled are
secondary to the ability to demonstrate and enhance control.
Every new skill is a new game. What about people who decline to
play? I suspect that the main reason people decline to play is
that they have experienced failure and humiliation in earlier
attempts to exercise control. The teacher's task is to insure
that the game is not so difficult that students give up before
they begin to experience enhanced mastery and challenging
enough to keep the players engaged.

Bruce

[CCHERPAS]

[From: Chris Cherpas (970507.1444]
[re: Bruce Gregory (970507.1540 EDT)]

BG:

I suggest
that this "something" is the opportunity to demonstrate and to
enhance mastery. If I am right, the responsibility of the
teacher is to create a situation in which students can exercise
control. The domain and the perception to be controlled are
secondary to the ability to demonstrate and enhance control.
Every new skill is a new game. What about people who decline to
play? I suspect that the main reason people decline to play is
that they have experienced failure and humiliation in earlier
attempts to exercise control. The teacher's task is to insure
that the game is not so difficult that students give up before
they begin to experience enhanced mastery and challenging
enough to keep the players engaged.

cc:
Bruce, it looks to me like you've finally arrived at
a priciple of instruction which I share (with, also, as
I recall, Bruce Abbott).

Now, will you please consider the next step and think in terms
of the teacher controlling for whole _developmental_
programs (recall, programs are conditional, they aren't just
fixed sequences) which exhibit this property on a relatively
continuous basis? Everybody will eventually get tired of tetris,
per se, compared to a "tetris" that adaptively maintains this experience
throughout a developmental process of taking on more and more
complex domains/perceptions to control.

Because, while the "domain and perception to be
controlled is secondary to demonstrat[ing] and enhanc[ing] control,"
I think you will find that some programs involve a (partial) ordering on those
particulars of a whole developmental curriculum, for a given student,
which "insure[s] that the game is not so difficult that students give
up before they begin to experience enhanced mastery and challenging enough to
keep the players engaged" which is _better than other other orderings_.
Your principle has to be recursively applied to the specification of the
whole conditional sequence of "subgames," as it is to any given game,
and that means swallowing the bitter pill of analyzing specific domains.

And, as I've noted before: what we've found empirically
at CCC is that students who have an average error rate
(e.g., errors in the conventional sense of "not the right answer")
of about .3 enjoy a steeper trajectory in mastering cumulative
sets of exercises than those with either > or < than .3.
This is a kind of measure of that balance between the
experience of mastery and challenge.

I have hypothesized that if you asked the students to measure their
confidence that the answer they're about to give is correct (from 0-1.0),
and your teaching program adaptively keeps THAT number at about .7
(i.e., the complement of .3), you could get a similar trajectory, OR EVEN
BETTER, as the actual, objective, error rate moves down to, say,
.05 instead of .3. And this would be (almost) "errorless learning" in
the best sense.

Best regards,
cc

[Bruce_Gregory9]

[From Bruce Gregory (970508.1545 EST)]

Chris Cherpas (970507.1444)

Bruce, it looks to me like you've finally arrived at
a priciple of instruction which I share (with, also, as
I recall, Bruce Abbott).

Some of us are slower on the uptake than others...

Now, will you please consider the next step and think in terms
of the teacher controlling for whole _developmental_
programs (recall, programs are conditional, they aren't just
fixed sequences) which exhibit this property on a relatively
continuous basis? Everybody will eventually get tired of tetris,
per se, compared to a "tetris" that adaptively maintains this experience
throughout a developmental process of taking on more and more
complex domains/perceptions to control.

I like the modesty of the goals you have assigned me

Because, while the "domain and perception to be
controlled is secondary to demonstrat[ing] and enhanc[ing] control,"
I think you will find that some programs involve a (partial) ordering on those
particulars of a whole developmental curriculum, for a given student,
which "insure[s] that the game is not so difficult that students give
up before they begin to experience enhanced mastery and challenging enough to
keep the players engaged" which is _better than other other orderings_.
Your principle has to be recursively applied to the specification of the
whole conditional sequence of "subgames," as it is to any given game,
and that means swallowing the bitter pill of analyzing specific domains.

I hate to swallow bitter pills. But if I must...

And, as I've noted before: what we've found empirically
at CCC is that students who have an average error rate
(e.g., errors in the conventional sense of "not the right answer")
of about .3 enjoy a steeper trajectory in mastering cumulative
sets of exercises than those with either > or < than .3.
This is a kind of measure of that balance between the
experience of mastery and challenge.

Seems like a very reasonable place to start.

I have hypothesized that if you asked the students to measure their
confidence that the answer they're about to give is correct (from 0-1.0),
and your teaching program adaptively keeps THAT number at about .7
(i.e., the complement of .3), you could get a similar trajectory, OR EVEN
BETTER, as the actual, objective, error rate moves down to, say,
.05 instead of .3. And this would be (almost) "errorless learning" in
the best sense.

I am still unclear what such a "teaching program" would look
like. In what sense, for example, is Tetris a teaching program?
As I see it, Tetris poses a challenge, but it is up to the
individual player to develop a strategy that works for him or
her. If I read you correctly it should be possible to develop a
program to teach the student how to play Tetris. It would be
interesting to see if this approach is (1) engaging; and (2)
successful.

Regards,

Bruce