AN “INCREMENTAL” ETHOS

 

Of late, this blog reported on a distinction that psychologist Carol S. Dweck has made in how people view intelligence.  People tend to see intelligence as a given trait in terms of how much they have – entity theory – or as a malleable trait one can work on and increase – incremental theory.[1]  The last posting suggested that this basic distinction – how people see intelligence – can and does influence how people approach civic concerns.

          That posting, in passing, suggested that people who adopt an entity view might very easily attribute intelligence levels to inherited biological factors and further be attributed to such conditions of birth such as race, nationality, gender, or similar factors.  One should be clear here; there is no evidence to support such general attributions people make in their efforts to cast people they don’t like as “them” as opposed to “us.”  And included in such castigation is that “they” are not smart enough.

            This sort of thinking, in whatever guise it takes, hits directly, in a negative way, on federation theory in that it questions equality.  Here is a definition one can use for equality:  Equality is a social quality based on the belief that despite inequality in talent, wealth, health or other assets, it calls for equal consideration of all persons’ well-being, that all have an equal right to maintain their dignity and integrity as individual persons.  

What Dweck offers is an argument that varying levels of intelligence are mostly not determinant.  Sure, some people are blessed with exceptional intelligence.  Surely this blogger is not in Albert Einstein’s league when it comes to physics, or Pablo Picasso’s when it comes to art, or Chris Rock’s when it comes to humor, etc.  But he and most people are within ranges of intelligence that allow for meaningful interaction when it comes to governance and politics.

And this would be further enhanced by a population that believes intelligence is not a given trait in terms of how much one has, but a trait that one can improve on to meet the challenges one faces either individually or as a member of a political association.  The trick is to find out how that improvement occurs. 

Unfortunately, for the purposes here, those “hows” vary according to the challenges one faces.  Therefore, there is no set pattern in how to approach these efforts, but there are general modes of problem solving or investigation one can learn that, given the challenge, can be utilized to advance one’s intelligence given a particular area of concern.

So, for example, such instructional models, usually denoted as inquiry models, can be employed and they lend themselves to an incremental approach to intelligence.  These models are usually forms of the scientific method[2] or some process in which students apply a more logic-based activity such as the jurisprudential inquiry approach.[3] 

But short of those models, essentialist instruction (usually associated with recall objectives) can also be more friendly to this incremental view.  For example, Robert M. Gagne’s model, while essentialist in nature, strives for students to reflect on the material teachers present.

This deserves a bit more explanation.  In summary, here is what Robert Gagne called conditions of learning – five of them – and nine progressive levels or “steps” in which students can advance and engage with school subject content.  The conditions are: 

 

·       Verbal information which consists of knowledge claims one finds among various sources of subject information and can be interrelated with other information in meaningful ways. 

·       Intellectual skills are those abilities students can develop by which they process knowledge such as forming hierarchies, contextualizing relevant, new information, or acquiring information that adds distinctive attributes to what is being studied among other skills. 

·       Cognitive strategies consist of analytic abilities in which students can break down sets of information that assist in exposing problems, the problems themselves, or the information needed to solve those problems. 

·       Motor skills are those behavioral steps that students develop and, through practice, improve upon in which they tackle challenging academic issues. 

·       Attitudes are those sentiments students need to motivate themselves to address the material that classroom instruction presents to them.

 

Hopefully, readers can appreciate how these concerns draw educators beyond just seeing teaching as presenting content for the sake of students to recall that content.

And as for the levels or steps, they are: 

 

Level 1:  Reception (or capturing the attention of students),

Level 2:  Setting expectations (or students being informed about what they are to learn and why they are to learn it),

Level 3:  Relevant retrieval (or calling on students to recall what they know and is helpful in meeting a lesson’s objectives),

Level 4:  Targeted or selective perception (or presenting new information that students are to learn with an array of aids such as visuals, examples, discussions),

Level 5:  Verbal encoding (or presentation of the new information in a variety of language presentations such as graphics or case studies),

Level 6:  Responding (or student presentation of new information in various communicative approaches such as tests, demonstrations, interpretations – perhaps artistic productions),

Level 7:  Evaluative reinforcement (or teaching agents providing students with feedback as to the proficiency students demonstrate with the goal to improve on student performance),

Level 8:  Evaluative assessment (or determination of how well students have learned the content), and

Level 9:  Enriching the retained information (or have students transfer learned content to novel or real-life situations that do not totally match information learned but need to be adjusted or nuanced to be applicable).[4]

 

This is a far cry from a teacher presenting information and students committing information to memory, which is how essentialist instruction usually transpires.

          The point is that incremental approaches are out there and Dweck offers data that supports the belief that this view of intelligence is the more accurate way to view student potential.  Hopefully, for the sake of students and for the sake of approaching governance and politics from a federalist perspective, teachers will opt for strategies reflecting incremental understanding of intelligence, leaving behind strategies that entity theory encourages.

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[1] Carol S. Dweck, Self-Theories:  Their Role in Motivation, Personality, and Development (Philadelphia, PA:  Psychology Press, 2000).

[2] For example, see Molly S. Bolger, Jordan B. Osness, Julia S. Gouvea, and Alexandra C. Cooper, Jennifer Momsen, “Supporting Scientific Practice through Model-Based Inquiry:  A Students’-Eye View of Grappling with Data, Uncertainty, and Community in a Laboratory Experience,” ASCB/Life Science Education, October 22, 2021, accessed February 7, 2024, URL:  https://www.lifescied.org/doi/10.1187/cbe.21-05-0128.

[3] For example, see Muhammad Japar and Dimi Nur Fadhillah, “Do We Need to Learn about Human Rights Values?,” Atlantis Press, 2018, accessed February 7, 2024, URL:  25891038.pdf.

[4] For example, see “Gagne’s 9 Events of Instruction,” Information Technology/University of Florida (n.d.), accessed February 7, 2024, URL:  https://citt.ufl.edu/resources/the-learning-process/designing-the-learning-experience/gagnes-9-events-of-instruction/.