The Role of Preference in Cognition, Curriculum, and Assessment





THE ROLE OF PREFERENCE IN COGNITION, CURRICULUM, AND ASSESSMENT

Robert Sylwester

Emeritus Professor of Education

University of Oregon

12/8/2010

Adapted and updated from:
 * Sylwester, R. A Biological Brain in a Cultural Classroom: Enhancing Cognitive and Social Development Through Collaborative Classroom Management (2003, Corwin Press).

Some other documents authored or co-authored by Robert Sylwester are available at:

Information Age Education Newsletter written by Dave Moursund and Bob Sylwester.

20/20 Vision for 2020 Challenges.

Fading Memories, Emerging Understanding.

Roles of Fiction in Cognitive Development.

100 articles by Sylwester published in Brain Connection.

Introduction
Our society is currently obsessed with the politically powerful but biologically naïve search for an inexpensive, efficient, one-size-fits-all assessment system that precisely measures the knowledge and skills of an imprecise developing brain.

It’s becoming increasingly obvious to educators and patrons alike that this is an almost impossible challenge. Standards and assessment are certainly important, but the current escalating system is seriously flawed in its almost total focus on easily measured correct responses, and disregard of the cognitive processes that led to the responses.

At some point school patrons will begin to wonder why we’re spending vast sums on high stakes assessment programs that measure only part of a student’s cognitive capabilities, when practically all fourth graders become fifth graders anyway.

What’s the point of an expensive, limited, stressful assessment program that discovers that most students in most schools are progressing pretty much as expected – and educators are already aware of and working with those who aren’t? Why not put at least the irrelevant part of the assessment costs into program development?

When that day arrives, educators must be ready with an alternative approach or we’ll once again be subjected to an inappropriate ineffective political solution to a complex educational problem.

A Biological Perspective
During the latter part of the 20th century educators shifted from a unitary view of intelligence, and embraced the concept of multiple intelligences—a complex of collaborating cognitive capabilities. Several excellent theories emerged, notably those of Gardner (1983), Sternberg (1985), and Perkins (1995), that encouraged educators to think differently about teaching and learning. We thus became excited about cognition as an internal process that can soar in many directions, but we seemingly couldn’t abandon an institutional focus on the assessed mastery of facts and skills.

In The New Executive Brain: Frontal Lobes in a Complex World, Elkhonon Goldberg (2009) explores the kinds of knowledge and solutions we use when responding to challenges. His excellent analysis of our brain’s executive systems and functions will help educators re-examine important troublesome issues in curriculum and assessment.

We live in a principally ambiguous social world, and our cognitive interests and capabilities reflect this. We tend to prefer metaphor to reality, estimation to precision, and negotiation to coercion, but we do need to know how to deal effectively with each of these six concepts. Goldberg uses the terms veridical and adaptive knowledge in his analysis of our brain’s thinking and decision-making systems.

Veridical Knowledge and Decisions
Veridical knowledge is knowing the answer to a problem that has a single correct answer: 6 x 5 = 30, Salem is the capital of Oregon, c-a-t spells cat. It’s the product-oriented essence of true/false – and it’s the quintessential element of such culturally popular activities as crossword puzzles and TV quiz shows (in which the winning contestant has the best command of the least important, most obscure veridical information). In school, students typically must discover and remember the hidden answers to clear-cut veridical questions they didn’t ask (and for which they often have no personal context).

Veridical knowledge is an obviously important cognitive (and school assessment) element, but true/false isn’t always as clear-cut as many folks think (Gardner, 1999).

For example, mastering one’s native language is a major juvenile task. The hundreds of thousands of words in our language are veridical in that each represents a clearly defined category. Still, it’s much easier to precisely define some concepts (such as male) than others (such as chair). But even a precisely defined concept (male) may have many synonyms (such as man, gentleman, guy, chap, fellow) that are used interchangeably in common discourse, even though each synonym has a distinct meaning.

Further, English spelling allows for few acceptable variants, but most people could easily read the word accommodate when misspelled in several different ways. Email has further confounded standard spelling with a growing number of abbreviations (such as U for you) that folks easily master and readily use to speed up electronic discourse. Mark Twain’s comment that only an uncreative person can think of but one way to spell a word seems apropos.

Our brain is fortunately sufficiently adaptable so it can function with information that’s only fairly close to precise truth. Further, we tend to off-load information that requires memorized precision to such technologies as calculators, telephone books, spell-checkers, and dictionaries. And even then, the technological precision that email addresses require frustrates our imprecise brain whenever a message gets rejected because of a single-letter error in the address.

Veridical knowledge is important (and especially in children who must master the factual elements of language, arithmetic, science, and social studies), but its cultural precision is overrated, and it’s not the driving cognitive force behind intelligent and wise post-puberty behavior`.

Adaptive Knowledge and Decisions
Goldberg (2009) calls the cognitive processes that lead to a personal preference among alternatives adaptive thought and decision-making. Knowing the names of the presidential candidates is veridical knowledge. Casting my vote is an adaptive decision. Most human thought and decision-making are adaptive, actor-centered. How do I interpret the facts? What choice is best for me?

We often use veridical information during the process of making an adaptive decision. For example, we look at a restaurant menu before ordering and note such veridical elements as the cost and composition of items. Cost may be important to the price-conscious and ingredients to the allergic–but the issue of what we should order has no correct or incorrect answer. It’s a personal preference based on many factors, and any order is a legitimate decision.

Even U.S. Supreme Court decisions are adaptive. After examining the veridical facts of the case and the relevant carefully worded laws and precedents, the judges may adaptively differ 5-4 on which position in the case is Constitutionally correct.

This veridical/adaptive relationship also exists in arts, humanities, and social skills programs that subjectively integrate veridical information into adaptive decisions. All these cognitively important curricular areas have sadly lost their school significance and funding in an era in which precise assessment controls the curricular agenda.

For example, art is a unique expression that’s centered on preference. Thus, if it’s possible to precisely evaluate art, it’s not art but rather reproducible craft. There’s nothing wrong with craft; it’s just not art. When a noted pianist was asked to explain the difference between a piano player and a pianist, he responded that anyone can play the correct notes. That response gets to the heart of the issue. Playing the correct notes (a veridical act) is important, but the aesthetics of playing the correct notes with adaptive style and grace is more important.

Consider professional basketball. Veridical information (such as scores, averages, and records) dominates sports reporting. Fans want their team to win, but they’re generally more interested in observing the many adaptive decisions that occur during a game—as elite players follow set plays or improvise shots, coaches send players in and out of the game, and referees respond to or ignore violations. Perhaps more important, fans want both teams to play with the creative style and grace expected of athletic virtuosos. It will thus be possible to identify the champion with veridical certainty at the end of the NBA playoffs, but something is seriously missing in the enterprise if that’s all the long season was about. So is it also with schools and test scores.

Scientists compare the functions of our brain’s marvelous adaptive prefrontal cortex to the CEO of a corporation, or to the conductor of a symphony orchestra. Located behind our forehead, it’s a unique cognitive system in that it’s directly interconnected with every distinct functional unit of our brain. It plays the key role in integrating information from hundreds of neuronal systems into a preference, an adaptive decision.

The decision may later prove to be right or wrong, but it’s a human decision that moves us beyond being a mere reactive true or false machine into the universe of intelligence and the possibility of wisdom within a social setting.

School standards and assessment policies should thus focus principally on our conscious brain’s definitive adaptive prefrontal functions rather than on the recall of veridical facts that often enhance no adaptive decision the student is ever apt to make.

Thus, two very important issues in resolving our current dilemma with standards and assessment are our seeming inability to separate objective true/false from subjective right/wrong, and our belief that in the education of our young, knowing veridical true/ false trumps adaptive right/wrong, beautiful/ugly, fair/unfair, ethical/unethical and all the other preference-driven decisions that humans continuously make. Failures in life are more often the result of poor personal, social, and vocational adaptive choices than of not knowing the veridical information in a standardized assessment program.

Curriculum and Assessment Challenges
Mix political realities with emerging understandings of cognition and we can expect an extended (and probably contentious) exploration of how to explicitly and effectively integrate veridical and adaptive learning into measurable curricula. Three tasks loom: (1) improve veridical assessment (factual knowledge), (2) develop techniques for assessing adaptive knowledge and behavior (preferences and choices), and (3) combine both into a broader, more integrative assessment program.

Although this discussion doesn't focus on how to improve veridical assessment, it's important to note that it isn't an impossible task. For example, Popham (2001, 2010) presents an excellent, authoritative, easily understood analysis of the validity and reliability issues posed by current high-stakes (principally veridical) assessment programs. His practical proposals for revision at the local and state levels provide educators with a thought provoking strategy for initiating long-overdue reforms.

Assessing adaptive knowledge and decision is a more difficult, but also not impossible, task. Arts, literary, and drama critics constantly do it. For example, newspaper music critics don't veridically report that the orchestra played 93% of the notes correctly, or that the first violinists were the busiest. Rather they use vague terms (such as exciting, soaring, perfunctory, mournful) to subjectively applaud or question the choices the conductor and musicians made. Readers get the general idea, and typically aren't concerned that two critics may disagree in their assessment of the concert.

Further, educational research studies that use subjective holistic procedures to assess writing/composition skills tend to achieve high inter-rater reliability. It's thus possible to achieve reasonable agreement when folks who subjectively assess students' (adaptively developed) curricular artifacts are competent, and trained in the process.

College admissions are increasingly supplementing student GPA and SAT scores with subjective assessments of the applicants' (adaptive) extra-curricular and civic activity. Further, college course assessment tends to meld adaptive (term papers, class participation) and veridical (objective text scores) elements into a single course grade.

School assessment programs have so focused on the presumed importance and precision of the veridical elements of the curriculum that it's difficult for many educators to imagine a successful subjective alternative. Educators in this group could begin their personal transition with the following simple exploratory suggestions.

1. Begin with the realization that student adaptive decisions are central to such ubiquitous educational concepts as multiple intelligences and learning styles; and to such curricular activities as cooperative learning, individual projects/papers, class discussions, and portfolio assessments. What this proposed transition is thus about is simply to make existing adaptive curricular thought and behavior explicit—and so to eventually elevate it to the premier curricular position it should hold by virtue of its cognitive centrality.

2. Explicitly insert adaptive decision making into veridical instruction wherever possible. For example, arithmetic division, which typically focuses on mastering a veridical algorithmic process, becomes a simultaneous adaptive exploration when you ask student teams to equitably divide something like three apples, one banana, 12 grapes, and two oranges among five people—and then to explain how they arrived at their several decisions.

3. The local media are a rich source of information on adaptive decision-making. Identify an emerging political (or other) issue that will be resolved within a reasonable period and track its development with your students. In an evolving classroom display, identify veridical/adaptive elements in the sequence of decisions made, and the pro/con arguments for each alternative proposed. When the issue is finally resolved, retrace the trajectory of the issue with your students. Determine where later events proved various decisions to be wise or not wise.

4. I propose that a simple shift in classroom management offers an excellent opportunity for educators to begin the long torturous task of exploring ways to effectively focus on the process of personal and social learning, rather than on the end products; on the preferences students have and the choices they make, rather than on the textbook answers they've been given.

We've tended to think of classroom management as an administrative function (the institution manages the students), but we could easily shift that perspective to one of a collaborative curricular laboratory for learning how to become a responsible citizen in a democratic society. As in a democratic society, very few classroom management decisions are veridical. Further, involving students in classroom decision-making wherever possible makes the concepts of preferences and choices explicit to them—and the immediate feedback on the wisdom of a decision that a collaborative classroom management model provides is important to maturing frontal lobes.

It's not a revolutionary idea. Many educators from John Dewey on have argued that democratically operated schools are essential to a democratic society, if students are to gradually mature in their ability to develop and express preferences, and to negotiate acceptable choices with others who view issues differently. School is the only place in our society where young people have extended direct contact with dozens of similar-age non-kin youth with different values. Why waste that marvelous opportunity for adaptive maturation on an authoritarian model more tuned to veridical thought?

Some argue that a collaborative management model will create behavior problems, but misbehavior is also a major problem in authoritarian models. A democracy is characterized as much by disagreement as by agreement (in preferences, choices, and decisions). Our country has learned how to agree and disagree on governmental management issues without being unduly disagreeable, and classroom life can function similarly if we commit to that goal.

A Bottom-Up Implementation Strategy
Those who create widely used assessment programs have little incentive to radically revise their tests. Popham (2001, 2010) thus proposes a bottom-up veridical assessment revolution in which teachers would regain control over the assessment process. He describes how teachers can individually and informally study the dynamics of assessment, and work to improve their own classroom assessment. General professional competence will thus increase over time, and positive system-wide veridical assessment changes will eventually evolve in a Darwinian manner—the useful ideas will spread, the others will disappear.

I believe the same pattern would occur over time in the development of process and adaptive assessment strategies. The exploratory suggestions above aren't part of the assessment program and they can occur throughout the day. These two factors enhance constant non-threatening explicit explorations and analyses of student preferences and choices.

Creative breakthroughs in assessing adaptive knowledge and decisions in a democratic social setting will begin to occur if thousands of teachers individually and informally begin to explore adaptive data-gathering and analysis techniques within the context of collaborative classroom management and the academic curriculum. Intriguing ideas will emerge and spread. Many bottom-up technological breakthroughs occurred in this manner during the past century, the computer hardware and software revolutions being perhaps the most prominent recent example.

Such innovations will similarly occur over time in curriculum and assessment if we educators quit complaining and simply begin the long process of reclaiming our profession. Don't think in terms of quick fixes. We're in this for the long haul, and it will be a stimulating journey.

What's required is an individual commitment to help (1) create responsible veridical assessment programs, (2) develop curricular and assessment strategies that enhance wise adaptive choices by students, and (3) convince patrons (and ourselves) that precision and comparison shouldn't be the central issues in the assessment of imprecise humans.

It's quite an agenda, but if educators don't begin now within their own personal professional assignment, things will stay as they are. Or get worse.

Author
Robert Sylwester. Emeritus Professor of Education, University of Oregon.