Category Archives: Psychology and Philosophy

High- vs. low-cognitive load work, environments, and mental fatigue

Some tasks simply require more cognitive load than others. Certain work environments are conducive to low-cognitive load (LCL) work while it would be foolish to attempt high-cognitive load (HCL) work in these environments. Further, one’s mental state and energy level (e.g., Staal, 2004) also matter. I am a person who best performs HCL work in complete silence, but might be more productive doing LCL work with music or a podcast playing. However, one’s energy level also matters. Pulling an all-nighter to complete an essay requiring HCL is generally a bad strategy, for instance.

High levels of mental fatigue increase the probability of errors and reduce efficiency when doing HCL work (Meijman, 1997). Lengthy work shifts with HCL work should be interrupted with frequent, short breaks (Boucsein & Thum, 1997). In fact, several short breaks are probably superior to one long break.

Applying this to the typical office worker’s workday and work-week, it becomes clear that HCL work should be scheduled early in the day, and perhaps, additionally, early in the week. For most people, this is when more cognitive load capacity is available. On the other hand, afternoons and Fridays should be geared toward LCL work because this is when many people are more fatigued, but, fortunately, LCL work is resilient toward mental fatigue.

For academics, this may also mean that office hours should be scheduled in the afternoons and, if possible, later in the week. Because there are many interruptions from students, phone calls, et cetera during office hours, one is not going to be getting much HCL work done anyway, but most student visits are LCL rather than HCL.

Further, this conceptual framework lends credence to the idea that email is a massive waste of time and probably shouldn’t even be looked at until late in the day (or, if you can get away with it, Friday afternoon). It also repudiates open-door office policies, at least with respect to getting any HCL work done.

We are at the stage where one’s physical environment is finally being recognized as important to cognitive load theory (Choi, van Merriënboer, & Paas, 2014). Beyond the cognitive load of the task at hand, one should think both about how one’s physical environment is organized and one’s level of mental fatigue. In fact, this should partly guide one’s schedule. For example, many people find that an early-morning workout leads to a more productive workday.

The consequences of one’s physical environment being important toward productivity are numerous and far-reaching. In fact, taking steps in advance to minimize distractions and temptations in one’s work environment is a piece of this puzzle. For instance, workers may be more productive if are militant about disabling or blocking smartphone notifications and installing browser add-ons such as Facebook News Feed Eradicator to impede viewing the Facebook news feed. More extreme solutions might be to physically sequester one’s smartphone and physically disconnect from the Internet for HCL work, in addition to doing this work with one’s door closed, early in the morning before the kids wake up, or late in the night for nightowls.

A full appreciation of cognitive load requires us to recognize the stark finiteness of our mental energy, and to appropriately limit our expectations and orient our lives toward what is most important. Being efficient at LCL tasks does not make one a leader nor innovator. HCL work is key, and it is facilitated by a streamlined work environment with respect for mental energy and cyclical rhythms. If I want to encourage myself to play piano, I don’t do this by leaving the piano lid closed or placing the piano bench on the opposite side of the room.

When I criticized University of Central Florida’s College of Education and Human Performance for not allowing student nor instructor PCs to display labels nor ungroup items on the Windows 10 taskbar (in June 2017 on my blog and again in September 2017 on Twitter), it was with an appreciation that if you want students and faculty to work better and get more done, you don’t force Microsoft’s stupid default taskbar window management settings on them. When doing HCL work, having your taskbar icons identified only by the programs’ icons—and grouped together so that one must hover and then choose the correct window—is inarguably an unwise imposition.

One might posit that some sort of invisible hand of market competitiveness might drive institutions and organizations toward providing workplace and learning environments conducive to HCL work. Neither in the “free” market nor the contrived worlds of academia, churches, NGOs, or governments do I see evidence of this. I suppose it might be true for small, hypercompetitive startup companies, but firms with a modicum of largess are inclined toward systemic dysfunction. For the gainfully employed, optimizing one’s schedule and work environment for HCL is, regretfully, frequently an exercise in futility.

Can Derision Enhance Teaching and Learning?

As educators we assume that we have to be kind and supportive to establish a safe and supportive learning environment. We might even embrace the trite saying, “there are no dumb questions.” However, in environments such as League of Legends and other multiplayer online video games, as well as online discussion forums (e.g., FatWallet, Reddit), dumb questions exist, and the individuals who ask them are criticized, demeaned, and mocked by their peers.

At least for some subset of learners, might such a “toxic” environment actually enhance learning by motivating learners to demonstrate due diligence? Might it enhance teaching by preventing wasted time on frivolous questions? At what threshold does a “supportive” learning environment cross over into an unproductive learning environment that rewards incompetence and encourages mediocrity?

One issue is that newcomer integration might be impeded by being condescending toward newcomers. However, perhaps this is less of an issue if the learner is highly motivated to persist? For example, someone addicted to a video game such as World of Warcraft is unlikely to cease playing due to being derided—in fact, derision might motivate one to perform better and avoid being called a “noob.” Derision from peers might actually enhance learning.

However, in the typical classroom, derision needs to be applied carefully. It might shut down learning for some learners, while others may find it more motivating than supportive comments. Also, being derided by someone “in charge” (i.e., the teacher) is different from being derided by a peer. Therefore, I am not advocating educators embrace deriding their students, but only discussing possibilities.

As a Ph.D. student who has completed a Master’s degree and seven full-time years of college education, I have noticed that practically every class starts out with a discussion of the syllabus. Instead, what if instructors expected students to read the syllabus and derided them for asking questions that were answered in it? Instead of giving them the answer and needlessly pulling up the syllabus on the screen, tell them “if you would have actually read the syllabus, you would not have wasted our time with this question.” Similarly, throughout the semester there are perennial questions from students who are simply lazy, failing to read assigned readings, directions, et cetera. Instead of offering derision, instructors typically enable and reward these students’ laziness by serving up easy answers. Conversely, students who exercised due diligence are penalized by having their time wasted. If an instructor spends two minutes on a frivolous question in a class of 30, that’s an entire hour of time wasted. At University of Central Florida (UCF), some classes in other departments (e.g., business, engineering) have as many as 1000 students, which could waste as much as 2000 minutes of time!

When I was a psychology student at UCF Daytona Beach, professors such as Ed Fouty had rather ostentatious “three before me” policies for their students. Specifically, this meant that when asking a question of the professor or teaching assistant, students had to list three actions they took to figure out the answer on their own (e.g., consulting the syllabus, readings, Google Search). In a way, this is derision—it communicates that there are dumb questions and that instructor time is inherently more valuable than student time. And yet, mustn’t it be? Professors, in particular, must juggle teaching dozens to hundreds of students among many other professional obligations. There is simply no way to do this if one’s time is consumed with trivialities. (Note that I never actually took a course with Dr. Fouty because alternative professors taught all the courses he taught at easier levels of difficulty—although I had enrolled in one of Dr. Fouty’s courses, and then dropped it immediately after the first meeting.)

Here are several examples of how participants are derided on the FatWallet Finance forum:

1. In a topic about tipping, the first reply, receiving many upvotes, says: “OK – why is this a difficult concept? If you feel like they did a great job, leave them a tip. If not, don’t. It’s very simple.” This derides the original poster (OP) by implying (s)he lacks critical thought for asking a frivolous question.

2. An OP asks for a simple explanation of BitCoin, and the first response, receiving several upvotes, is merely “https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin.” This derides the OP for asking a question that they could easily have figured out on their own. However, the OP is arguably deserving of derision for being lazy and wasting others’ time, which shows a lack of respect. Let Me Google That for You (LMGTFY) is a website that can similarly be used to deride individuals who ask questions that could be answered via a simple Google Search query—it provides a link that shows an animation of typing the question into Google and then loads the search results. Deriding learners in this manner can enhance their learning by encouraging them to take personal responsibility, while also enhancing teaching by eliminating a particularly insidious type of time-wasting questions.

3. An OP asks about doing a chargeback for canceling a hotel reservation that lost its Best Western branding, but admits to having canceled for other reasons and that loss of branding is a “convenient excuse.” One commentator says: “Stop using the brand change as a way to scumbag you’re way out of it. It’s pretty pathetic. If you had a problem with the room then that would be the time for a chargeback. The room is exactly the same as the one you were paying for. They didn’t hack it to bits and throw garbage all over the floor bc of the brand change. Saying you want to cancel on the off chance their is a problem you can’t complain to Best Western management is an absurd stretch.” Although this commentator received more downvotes than upvotes, this sentiment of derision was echoed by several other commentators and might discourage the OP from asking similar questions in the future.

In other forums, derision commonly is incited by “reposting”—that is, posting about a topic that has already been covered elsewhere. OPs for such topics are ridiculed for their lack of due diligence—they could easily have searched for the prior topic. Here, derision potentially elicits a social norm of avoiding duplication of questions and content, which increases the efficiency of the forum.

Derision can enhance teaching by making it abundantly clear that the instructor, or a peer group, will not accept unproductive behaviors. For instance, in the realm of financial literacy education, instead of coddling individuals who continue to incur overdraft fees or resort to the services of payday lenders, we might mock, demean, and ridicule them for their lack of financial competence. “You know your actions are financially disastrous, and yet you persist—you have no one to blame but yourself for your situation, and you will find no sympathy here.”

Derision might encourage “lurking” or “participatory spectatorship” instead of active participation, particularly in games or activities with steep learning curves. Just because some activity is difficult to learn does not necessarily mean it is the responsibility of others to aid that learning. In environments where incompetence is derided, effective learners might avoid derision and exercise due diligence by observing and learning from the behaviors of others (social norms), and even by researching and implementing meta-cognitive strategies to aid their performance. Instead of “spoon-feeding” learners, may we not expect them to take at least a modicum of personal responsibility for their learning rather than behaving as lazy, impetuous children?

Thoughts on Cognitive Load and the Modality Effect; Self-Regulation and Mindsets

I wrote the following discussion replies for an assignment in IDS 6504: Adult Learning, instructed by Dr. Kay Allen. The first reply is about cognitive load theory and the modality effect; the second is about self-regulation and mindsets.

IDS 6504 Assignment 6: Replies to Others
Richard Thripp
University of Central Florida
March 17, 2017


FIRST REPLY

Richard Thripp, responding to [redacted]

Question: What are strategies that can be implemented to reduce cognitive load?

General Comment: Reducing extraneous cognitive load, that is, cognitive load unrelated to the instructional materials themselves, is a worthy goal. Two of your references might be characterized as the modality effect—that presenting information both visually and auditorily can reduce cognitive load as compared to using only one modality.

Supplement: When considering cognitive load and the modality effect, one should also look at whether the instruction at hand is system-paced or self-paced. Classroom lecturing, such as the Lewis (2016) article you cited, is a classic example of system-paced instruction, because the learner cannot decouple the auditory portion of the presentation from the visual portion—these two modalities are temporally linked. This is good. In fact, Ginnas’s (2005) meta-analysis found a strong presence of the modality effect for system-paced instruction, but a weaker presence when instruction is self-paced. In self-paced instruction, the learner consumes instructional materials in one modality while having the option of referring to materials in other modalities. An example is a textbook or learning modules with graphics and text, supplemented by an audio or video clip to be accessed separately. The modality effect may be so bad for self-paced instruction that it may even be worse than presenting instruction in one modality, at least according to a study by Tabbers, Martens, and van Merriënboer (2004). This implies that temporal contiguity is essential. Therefore, instructional designers may want to be cautious about providing text-based modules with multimedia supplements. In fact, if we accept the argument of Tabbers et al. (2004), it may be better to force students to watch a video where the temporal contiguity of multimodal information is preserved (i.e., learners hear the audio that accompanies relevant text at the right time, rather than minutes or hours after reading the text in the learning module or textbook), at least with respect to cognitive load theory and the modality effect.

While I have not mentioned the cueing effect, it may be important to the modality effect if cues are linked across modes (e.g., a narrator telling the learner to look at a particular portion of a diagram). However, the cueing effect, quite often, is seen purely in the visual modality, such as highlighting or otherwise visually drawing attention to an area of a figure, graph, table, diagram, or block of text.

As an added comment, what Dr. Allen does in this course with real-time learning sessions is a great example of using system-paced instruction to leverage the modality effect. She does not read from the slides, but auditorily elaborates on the points on the slides with different words. She does not offer the slides for download, nor a text transcript of the spoken portion of the presentation. Ironically, not offering these supplements may actually be preferable to offering them; even learners who miss the real-time session must review a video-recording of it, which ensures that temporal contiguity of the instructional modalities is preserved. If slides and transcripts were offered, learners availing themselves of them would become self-paced with respect to instructional modality, which can have deleterious, or at least sub-optimal, results (Tabbers et al., 2004).

References

Ginns, P. (2005). Meta-analysis of the modality effect. Learning and Instruction, 15, 313–331. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.learninstruc.2005.07.001

Tabbers, H. K., Martens, R. L., & van Merriënboer, J. J. G. (2004). Multimedia instructions and cognitive load theory: Effects of modality and cueing. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 74, 71–81. http://doi.org/10.1348/000709904322848824


SECOND REPLY

Richard Thripp, responding to [redacted]

Question: How can instructors of adult language-learners address the issue of learners’ self-regulation so they may better manage their learning?

General Comment: Self-regulation is multi-faceted. Explaining the research on self-regulation to learners may be beneficial. Influencing learners’ mindsets is another worthy avenue. The instruction or assessment goal at hand is a factor in whether self-regulation should be prioritized or deferred.

Supplement: In their blockbuster literature review and position piece, Muraven and Baumeister (2000) contend that self-regulation is like a muscle—it is finite, can be easily depleted, and yet may also be strengthened by being frequently exercised. Explaining this to learners may improve their understanding of self-regulation and perhaps reduce inappropriate self-blame. Moreover, learners’ personal situations and an educator’s present goals are important. During instruction and formative assessment, encouraging self-regulation among learners may be beneficial. However, allowing learners to exhibit self-regulation by making all assignments and assessments due on the last day of the semester may have profoundly negative results for learners who fail to self-regulate; instead, staggered deadlines can reduce learners’ self-regulatory burdens. Further, educators and institutions arguably should reduce the need for self-regulation among learners who are going through transitions or already have a lot of self-regulatory burdens. For instance, the self-regulation required of doctoral candidates may be foreign and overwhelming, which is a contributory factor toward the undesirable outcome of doctoral attrition (Bair & Haworth, 1999). In response, universities might mandate format reviews, committee meetings, and draft deadlines to reduce doctoral candidates’ reliance on self-regulation.

Another important factor is mindset—whether the learner has a growth mindset (incremental theory of intelligence), meaning they believe they can improve their abilities with effort, or a fixed mindset (entity theory of intelligence), meaning they believe their abilities in a particular domain, or in general, cannot be increased through effort (Thripp, 2016). In an extensive meta-analysis, Burnette, O’Boyle, VanEpps, Pollack, and Finkel (2013) found that having a growth mindset predicted superior self-regulation. Growth mindset can be easily taught through brief instructional modules advocating the brain’s plasticity and potential for growth (Paunesku et al., 2015). Such interventions may have collateral benefits to self-regulation. Efforts should be made by educators to demystify important concepts, such as mindsets and self-regulation, among their learners. Then, learners may achieve metacognitive awareness, becoming empowered to recognize and adjust for their human limitations as a step toward truly taking control of their educations.

References

Bair, C. R., & Haworth, J. G. (1999, November). Doctoral student attrition and persistence: A meta-synthesis of research. Paper presented at the meeting of the Association for the Study of Higher Education, San Antonio, TX.

Burnette, J. L., O’Boyle, E. H., VanEpps, E. M., Pollack, J. M., & Finkel, E. J. (2013). Mindsets matter: A meta-analytic review of implicit theories and self-regulation. Psychological Bulletin, 139, 655–701. http://doi.org/10.1037/a0029531

Muraven, M., & Baumeister, R. F. (2000). Self-regulation and depletion of limited resources: Does self-control resemble a muscle? Psychological Bulletin, 126, 247–259. http://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.126.2.247

Paunesku, D., Walton, G. M., Romero, C., Smith, E. N., Yeager, D. S., & Dweck, C. S. (2015). Mind-set interventions are a scalable treatment for academic underachievement. Psychological Science, 26, 784–793. http://doi.org/10.1177/0956797615571017

Thripp, R. X. (2016, April 21). The implications of mindsets for learning and instruction. Retrieved from http://thripp.com/2016/05/mindsets-education-lit-review/

On the Purported Essentiality of Higher Education for the Adult Learner

Written on January 29, 2017 for an assignment in my Spring 2017 course, IDS 6504: Adult Learning, at University of Central Florida.

1. StatementQuote: The transformation of the world economy over the past several decades has put a premium on an educated workforce. A more fluid and volatile global economy is characterized by more frequent job and career change, which is an important factor in the growing demand for continual learning and skill enhancement. Because of these changes, it is clear that current and future generations of adult workers seeking employment and better quality of life will require more education credentials. Thus 2- and 4-year degrees, certificate programs, and workforce educational and training opportunities are becoming increasingly essential for all workers. (Hansman & Mott, 2010, pp. 19–20)

2. Explanation – There is a lot to unpack in this statement. First, we have to take Hansman and Mott’s arguments with a grain of salt—they are university professors and administrators, who are obviously not a neutral source to ask about the necessity of their practice. It is difficult to imagine them saying that higher education is becoming increasing irrelevant, even if it were true.

Next, we can contrast this 2010 book chapter, having been published after the 2008 financial crisis, with the Reach Higher, America report (National Commission on Adult Literacy, 2008), which was published just three months before the worst part of the financial crisis. The Reach Higher report complains that American adults are less educated than the generation before, unlike every other OECD free-market country. While it is unfair and inaccurate to blame the financial crisis primarily on Americans’ lack of education, in a time of economic recession, high-value skills are essential to obtaining a living wage. I would contend that Hansman and Mott (2010) would not have worded their arguments as strongly had they been writing a few years earlier, when times were good.

However, according to the U.S. Census Bureau (2009), in 2009, of adults aged 25 and older, 85% reported having a high school diploma or equivalent and 28% reported having a bachelor’s degree or higher. These statistics are higher than ever before. To say that Americans are less educated is a misnomer, at least with respect to formal attainment. Nonetheless, it is possible they are completing secondary and post-secondary education yet coming away poorly educated or educated in subjects that do not provide value to employers. If so, educators, administrators, and policymakers share much of the blame.

Economically, globalization is characterized as a foregone conclusion, except perhaps by nationalists like President Trump. However, in lieu of protectionist policies, it becomes necessary for adult learners to develop increasingly specialized and high-value skills to merit a living wage in the open market. Under globalization-friendly policies, coupled with mechanical and technological advancements, jobs can be outsourced to foreigners at a small fraction of the cost of an American worker. First, this applied to durable goods, and now, in the Internet age, it applies even to U.S.-based technical positions, and certainly any jobs that can be performed remotely (e.g., customer service). For example, Americans working in information technology (I.T.) frequently complain about reduced wages or unemployment due to skilled foreigners with H-1B visas flooding the American workforce. These foreign workers are willing to work for far lower wages than Americans were previously accustomed to.

Fundamentally, however, a significant component of the “growing demand for continual learning” (Hansman & Mott, 2010, p. 19) is induced demand. If not for Pell grants, student loans, tax money, and government guarantees, it is unlikely that many of the faculty and staff—even those employed at University of Central Florida (UCF)—would be able to sustain their tenure, salaries, or quality of life. Moreover, the federal government offers student loans at unnaturally low interest rates even to non-creditworthy borrowers pursuing unsalable degrees, further incentivizing perverse educational choices among Americans. Ironically, this may be even more destructive with respect to private institutions. For example, private universities like Keiser University and University of Phoenix are over-priced and fairly pointless compared to public institutions like UCF, and yet ill-advised Americans can be suckered into ridiculous and unnecessary debt burdens due to the illogical availability of student loans for private institutions with low return-on-investment (ROI).

The burgeoning sector of the American economy that operates with relative independence from market forces—government and government-sponsored or government-like enterprises (healthcare, education, large corporations, etc.)—is now the ticket to the American dream. Yes, advanced degrees are usually required. However, I contend that in many cases, the day-to-day duties in a surprising proportion of these positions could be performed by high-functioning high school dropouts with a few months of well-executed training.


3. Statement – “Nearly half of new job growth in the first decade of the 21st century required college or other postsecondary education” (Hansman & Mott, 2010, p. 19).

4. Explanation – Once again, the temptation to conflate formal education with real education is strong. What may really be happening here is that employers are requiring a 4-year degree as a weed-out. My Psychology B.S. does not make me any better an office worker, but in an employer’s market, employers are flooded with desperate applicants. Thus, they use shortcuts to thin the herd. This may be one of the antecedents of the bizarre credential-inflation phenomenon we have seen over the past 50 years. Even quite recently, new advanced degrees like the Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) have emerged, arguably to pander to this phenomenon. The cost to the adult learner is staggering. If a job that required 12 years education (Grades 1–12) in my grandfather’s time now requires 17 (Grades K–12 + Bachelor’s), the costs are huge, even to young adults who push straight through. (In truth, completing a 4-year degree in 4 years or less has actually become somewhat unusual.) Entering the workforce at Age 22 with $50,000 in debt versus Age 18 with no debt is a massive handicap, and this is a fairly conservative debt estimate. The 18-year-old can invest in retirement funds and brokerage accounts perhaps 10 years ahead of his/her college-educated counterpart, which can consistently produce a 7% inflation-adjusted annual return. Obviously, a 10-year head start yields an increase of 1.07^10 = 1.97× in retirement, which is almost double.

Consequently, the full-time adult learner pursues education at a massive opportunity cost. It is important for learners and educators to internalize this knowledge and act accordingly. If Americans desire the overwhelming, comprehensive advantages that high socioeconomic status (SES) delivers for themselves and their progeny, then as adult learners, it may be necessary to curate their programs of study with actuarial ruthlessness.


References (Note: Certain references are only included in the narrative as hyperlinks)

United States Census Bureau (2009). Educational attainment in the United States: 2009. Retrieved from http://www.census.gov/prod/2012pubs/p20-566.pdf

Hansman, C. A., & Mott, V. W. (2010). Adult learners. In C. E. Kasworm, A. D. Rose, & J. M. Ross-Gordon (Eds.), Handbook of Adult and Continuing Education (2010 ed.; pp. 13–23). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications. Retrieved from http://www.sagepub.com/sites/default/files/upm-binaries/34503_Chapter1.pdf

National Commission on Adult Literacy. (2008, June). Reach higher, America: Overcoming crisis in the U.S. workforce. Retrieved from http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED506605.pdf

Personal Limitations and Limiting Beliefs in Adult Learners

On January 29, 2017, added my replies to others to this blog post.

A brief exploration of my emergent beliefs about adult learning, written on January 22, 2017 for an assignment in my Spring 2017 course, IDS 6504: Adult Learning, at University of Central Florida. Many terms I have included, coined, or adapted are not operationally defined.

1. BeliefDisciplined and self-aware adult learners recognize their time, energy, and willpower is highly limited; consequently, under ideal psychological and physiological conditions they concentrate their efforts on what is highly interesting or useful.

2. Explanation – The feeling of infinite time and potentialities experienced by teenagers and twenty-somethings gradually evaporates, giving way through self-agency and external influences to realistic pragmatism, unhappy disillusionment, or something in-between. Those who recognize their personal limitations can focus pragmatically on what brings them the most happiness or benefit, particularly when they feel secure, well-rested, and are in a conducive learning environment. Sometimes, this may even involve strengthening areas where they already excel, rather than shoring up areas that require overwhelming efforts to yield minimal gains. However, the disciplined and self-aware adult learner is also able to direct their focus as appropriate to the goal at hand. For example, such an individual may focus on what s/he finds very interesting when learning in his/her spare time, but when it comes to formal or professional education, s/he recognizes the importance of pandering to syllabi, rubrics, requirements of courses or programs of study, and expectations of instructors or supervisors, which may involve learning or expressing interest in certain materials or tasks that are not of intrinsic interest, even though the overall course or program is of intrinsic interest. Finally, either consciously (ideal) or subconsciously (more common), such learners recognize the opportunity cost of learning, the value of creative and divergent thinking, the imperative to seek help and feedback early and repeatedly, and the value of strategic procrastination.


3. BeliefAdult learners are more susceptible than child learners to entrenched limiting beliefs operating globally and/or with respect to specific tasks or domains, including inferiority complexes, fixed mindset (entity theory of intelligence), performance-avoidance and mastery-avoidance goal orientations, social identity threat, and stereotype threat.

4. Explanation – While child learners may face limiting beliefs such as stereotype threat for mathematics among girls (often due to not fault of their own), adult learners may carry limiting beliefs from childhood or early adulthood with them as entrenched parts of their identities. For instance, many adults have a fixed mindset for their mathematical abilities, which can circumvent efforts to develop these skills. Such limiting beliefs are often based on a modicum of truth—for instance, it certainly is easier to learn a second language as a child than adult. However, the limiting belief often serves to prevent all progress, even when a great deal of progress was possible. The velocity at which the adult learner reaches the inflection point where a limiting belief is overturned is crucial to maximizing the degrees of freedom in his/her learning horizon. For example, it is not very useful if an adult at Age 70 finally overturns the limiting belief that she is not “college material.” However, if this limiting belief can be overturned at Age 35, the remaining potentialities (degrees of freedom) are far greater. On the other hand, past beliefs and knowledge can function as heuristics that allow the learner to quickly absorb instructional materials with an adequate level of fidelity. For example, the experienced academic may be able to quickly synthesize a journal article with a surprising degree of accuracy, just by reading the abstract and skimming key sections, tables, and figures. The adult learner’s experience is a double-edged sword, inflicting self-mutilation only to the extent that experienced-derived beliefs are inconsistent with reality. The disciplined and self-aware adult learner recognizes the search for truth as ongoing, iterative, and asymptotic. Moreover, s/he recognizes and rejects fallacies of logic and reasoning such as the all-or-nothing fallacy.


Replies to discussion posts by others, written by me on January 28, 2017.

Belief to which I am responding: “Whenever a person cares about the topic they are learning about, they do a better job of learning about it.”

My response:

Sometimes, we don’t know what we find interesting. We may think we find a particular topic interesting, and yet be bored and unmotivated in a formal course on the topic. This can be related to how the topic is framed and presented in the curriculum and by the instructor, a mismatch between our perceived and actual interests, or a combination of the two. Further, I have often found myself highly interested in a topic that is of no practical relevance to my life or real-world plans. One only has to look at the hordes of people interested in fictional worlds like World of Warcraft or A Song of Ice and Fire to see that humans are not necessarily most interested in what is most relevant to their professional or financial success, even as adults.

Regarding high-level maths, it has always amused me that one of the main uses for learning these is becoming a math teacher. Now, even engineers and statisticians rely on computer programs to perform many of their calculations. Of course, people must know how to design, develop, improve, and trouble-shoot these programs, but just as farming has become concentrated in the hands of a few experts who perform it at massive scale, so might knowledge of higher maths become unnecessary for many. In fact, this simplification is ongoing in multiple domains—for example, we have a whole new generation of web entrepreneurs who don’t even know how to write JavaScript, PHP or ASP.NET, SQL, or advanced HTML and CSS thanks to software suites (e.g., WordPress, Joomla) that do much of the difficult work for you.


Belief to which I am responding: “Adult learners have a better grasp on what their learning style is, and can then tailor their education in a way that best suits them.”

My response:

Learning styles have been thoroughly debunked, but what you are describing here sounds more like learning preferences (and in fact you even used the word “preference” in your explanation), which have validity. The learning styles myth is typically summed up in the belief that some learners are better served by visual content, while others might learn better in auditory, linguistic, or kinesthetic modalities. In fact, a more accurate characterization is that particular content is best learned in particular modalities—if making a balloon animal is best learned visually, then it is best learned that way for all (or most) learners, even if a learner claims to have a linguistic learning style.

Using “learning styles” in the way you have is not incorrect, but the term just has too much baggage and must be abandoned, particularly if you attend conferences like the American Educational Research Association (AERA), lest you be lampooned by hordes of educational eggheads dying to pounce on usage of an educational proposition that has (a) been thoroughly and reliably discredited and (b) remains wildly popular and influential.

As for online versus face-to-face courses, I agree 100% that online courses work much better for those with busy schedules. Some people may ask, why even bother? If you are going to learn online, why not just use Coursera, Udemy, Wikipedia, et cetera? Well, there are plenty of reasons! Particularly as an educator, academic credentials are very important and cannot be earned via Wikipedia. You can’t go in for an interview to be a teacher, instructor, or professor without the requisite academic degrees. Being enrolled at a university provides access to journal articles that you actually have to pay for otherwise. UCF alone pays $1.3 million for its subscription to Web of Science, and many millions more to provide you with access to academic journals and resources. Try writing a literature review as an Independent Scholar, and you’ll quickly find it is no easy task. Plus, even online courses have a way of lighting a fire under your butt that a massively open online course (MOOC) simply cannot do. For example, in your M.A., Ed.D., or Ph.D. at UCF, fail more than two courses and you’ll be ejected from the program. If you stop working on your MOOC, no one cares.