ABSTRACTION AND MOTIVATION OF FEDERATION THEORY

I want to address, in this posting, the final two concerns in my critique of federation theory. In the past, I used the ideas of Eugene J. Meehan¹ to evaluate the three separate mental constructs I have presented in this blog: the natural rights construct, critical theory construct, and federation theory construct. Each of these constructs is or can function as a theoretical guide to educators in determining content in the study of civics and government. In terms of my postings which evaluated federation theory to date, you can check the postings of June 29, July 13 and 30, August 10 and 20, and September 3 and 14, all in 2012. Each of these postings looks at federation theory by taking one of the seven criteria Meehan offers and applying it to the content the construct would have an educator incorporate in the study of civics and government. In addition to the seven Meehan concerns, I indicated that two criteria should be added: the abstract level of the construct's content and its motivational quality. This posting utilizes these added concerns to conclude my evaluative review of federation theory.

I believe these two concerns, while separate, are highly related. Their meanings are fairly straightforward. Abstract level refers to how much the construct's information or images contain elements of reality which constitute the phenomena it describes or explains. Any representation, by necessity, has to strip elements of reality from it. For example, if I asked you how your day was, you would not be able to convey every little bit of reality that made up your day. If you had gone to the movies during the day you would very likely not tell me the color of your seat or whether it was cushy or not. The more you leave out, the more abstract the information is. Scientific research is known for its abstraction as a scientist tries to distill the causal factors that account for some occurrence or condition.²

Motivational quality simply refers to the potential a body of information has in soliciting interest on the part of an observer or consumer. Of course, the motivational quality of any material varies among the people who are exposed to it. What's interesting to me might be downright boring to you. But there are certain general aspects about motivation that we can abstract that help us explain why some presentations tend to be more motivating than others. Such characteristics as relevance, understandability, entertainment, curiosity, challenge, and the like are some of those aspects. These are generally seen as qualities that enhance the motivational quality of information or other symbolic presentations.

The connection between abstraction and motivation zeroes in on the quality of understandability. It is hard to see any presentation or activity being motivational unless it is at least understandable to the learner or consumer of the content to some minimal degree. Whether the presentation or activity meets this minimal degree reflects on the sophistication of the person consuming the information. Sophistication in a given area, in turn, reflects the level of abstraction the consumer can handle in dealing with the content in question.

There have been two particular theorists whose ideas help us see this relation between sophistication and abstraction and which I want to highlight. They both understood that the abstract level of information is dependent on the media in which the information is presented. Some modes of presentation, by their very nature, contain more or less of the reality contained in the situations or conditions described or explained. Before identifying these pioneers, let me make the central point of this posting: in order for presentation media or instructional activity to be motivating, the presentation of the content must employ an instructional effort that suitably matches the sophistication level of the student vis-a-vis the content being taught. This is done by employing appropriate levels of abstraction or lack of abstraction in the media employed. Some media, simply due to the nature of the media, will contain more or less elements of the reality being addressed. The general trend is that the less sophistication the student has, the less abstract the media needs to be. Conversely, the more sophisticated the student is, in relation to specific content, the more abstract the media can be. While for the lesser sophisticated students, in order to be successful, lower abstraction media can be considered necessary, for higher sophisticated students, higher abstraction media can be considered preferable because such instruction takes less time to implement and is likely to maintain the interest of such students. Low abstraction material can easily turn out to be boring for the more knowledgeable student.

The other factors affecting media choices are availability of material options, time availability, and technological options. Material options are affected by financial resources of the purchasers of the materials and the access to material markets. Time availability refers to the amount of time the instructor can dedicate to any lesson or set of lessons. As indicated, in general, instruction that is less abstract takes more time to use – if for no other reason due to the amount of reality it contains – and the more abstract material takes less time assuming the student is sophisticated enough to understand and appreciate its educational value. Technological options refers to the media hardware and software the instructor or instructional institution can secure and the instructional staff can proficiently use.

The two theorists referred to above are Jerome S. Bruner³ and Edgar Dale.⁴ Both of these educational academics provided relevant insights to this topic in the 1960s. Bruner provides a model for the different modes by which information can be communicated and at what minimal ages a person can understand the information presented by the different media modes. Generally, as observed by studying subjects at different age levels, Bruner discovered that the following trend exists: the youngest (least sophisticated) subjects understood information in the enactive mode of representation (children 0 to 1 year of age depend on this mode). This mode refers to an activity of direct experience. For example, teaching a baby to shake a rattle is done by an action activity in which the rattle is placed in the baby's hand and the teacher grasps that hand and shakes it. This can be described as action learning. For students more sophisticated but still lacking in higher levels of sophistication, a more abstract mode can be employed. Bruner calls this intermediate level of abstraction iconic modes of representation (applicable to teaching young children from 1 to 6 years of age). This teaching uses media that present images of what is to be learned. “How to” demonstrations or pictures are examples of this mode. Cooking shows on TV use this mode to teach viewers how to cook particular dishes. Last, for the most sophisticated students, the most abstract mode of representation can be used and is what Bruner calls symbolic (applicable to teaching students 7 years of age and above). These instructional media rely on language. By depending on language, these informational materials can have the highest degree of applicability to varying aspects of reality – it's the most generalizable information (lesser abstract media modes need to convey more specific content). Language media open the student to concepts which categorize elements of reality. For example, the concept, transportation, refers to a wide variety of phenomena which can be grouped so as to convey meaningful information, as in the sentence, “costs affect the mode of transportation people use.”

The work of Dale addresses the same concern between abstraction and modes of representation. Instead of devising more general modes of representation, Dale identifies specific media types and activities that instructors can choose. Dale arranges them hierarchically by listing them within a triangle, from bottom to top, in an ascending order of abstraction within the triangle – the visual depiction of his model is called Dale's Cone of Experience. Let me superimpose Bruner's modes on Dale's listing of media types:

MOST ABSTRACT – SYMBOLIC

Written text as in a book

Spoken word as in a lecture

INTERMEDIATE ABSTRACTION – ICONIC

Still pictures as in a picture portfolio

Moving pictures as in a film

Exhibition as in a collection of artifacts

Demonstration as in a person showing a student how to cook a given dish

LEAST ABSTRACTION – ENACTIVE

Hands-on participation as in a workshop in which student makes an object (e. g., a birdhouse)

Role-playing as in a learner pretends to be a person in some social situation (e. g., as family members when father or mother comes home to announce he/she has lost his/her job)

Simulation as in playing a game based on a model of some reality (e. g., playing the game Monopoly)

Direct purposeful experience as in internship in which student takes on real life responsibilities in a given job

Applying all these ideas regarding sophistication, abstraction, and motivation to evaluating federation theory, the question becomes: How well does the construct allow instructors, curriculum developers, and media developers to match the sophistication of secondary students to civics or government material being taught? Here I will simply state that federation theory does not primarily rely, as most classroom instruction does, on either structural descriptions of complex bureaucratic institutions – branches of government, political parties, interest groups, and the like – or behavioral analysis of political variables – such as the correlation between demographic dimensions and particular individuals securing leadership positions in government. Instead, a curriculum guided by federation theory relies on instruction that focuses on more dynamic aspects of civics and government. It would guide instruction to, for example, describe contextualized political and governing accounts, elicit students to empathize with political actors dealing with interpersonal human challenges, and/or has students recreate the inter-dynamics of groups in varying degrees of federated associational arrangements. By doing so, this approach lends itself to a more humane and less abstract treatment of governance and politics. While federation theory relies on more historical analysis – and by doing so presents less abstract content – and lends itself to relying on cognitive psychology, it can, nonetheless, be geared to be more abstract media. For example, it does not, out of hand, dismiss behavioral studies, but can rely on them when it is applicable and prudent.

In short, the judgment is that this perspective allows for very high degrees of flexibility on the part of instructors, curriculum developers, and media developers to gauge the material and experiences in which students are asked to take part. I believe federation theory comes closest to following Bruner's advice: when presenting new content, the overall strategy should be to follow the progression from enactive to iconic to symbolic. All other things being equal, in order to be effective, the less sophisticated student needs less abstract content and, therefore, less abstract media mode in his or her instruction. Conversely, for the more sophisticated student, given the content being taught, the more abstract the media mode of instruction can and often should be.

As for the other elements of motivation, what sounds more motivating? Are dry abstract descriptions of unfamiliar material more motivating than materials that depict the interactive activities of human encounters? These depictions would be contained in stories of collective entities such as families, work places, back room negotiating sessions, war fronts (ones that don't glorify wars but get at the real life sacrifices war demands), political campaigns, and so on. These are the types of content settings that federation theory encourages instructors to use and their students to study. I believe, to say the least, that federation theory holds its own in terms of motivation and is best when it comes to matching the sophistication of students and the abstraction levels of the media and content used.

1Meehan, E. J. (1969). Explanations in social science: A system paradigm. Homewood, IL: The Dorsey Press.

2This could be, for example, information relating to what causes water to freeze. A scientist observes water in a variety of environmental conditions and might eventually abstract the varying temperatures in which water is found and detect a pattern between lower temperatures and the freezing of water. The abstracted bits of information would be the falling temperature of the water's environment, the changing temperature of the water, and the degree to which the water hardens into ice.

3See http://www.simplypsychology.org/bruner.html . Less I'm misleading, Bruner was not arguing that younger students had to mature to learn complicated material. He was of the mind that any content could be taught to any student regardless of his/her sophistication. The issue was how the material was presented. And one of the factors determining success was the nature of the media used to present the information.

4See http://www.etsu.edu/uged/etsu1000/documents/Dales_Cone_of_Experience.pdf .