David N. Perkins

Are Cognitive Skills Context-Bound?

Effective problem solving, sound decision making, insightful invention—do such aspects of good thinking depend more on deep expertise in a specialty than on reflective awareness and general strategies? Over the past thirty years, considerable research and controversy have surrounded this issue. An historical sketch of the arguments for the strong specialist position and the strong generalist position suggests that each camp, in its own way, has oversimplified the interaction between general strategic knowledge and specialized domain knowledge. We suggest a synthesis: General and specialized knowledge function in close partnership. We explore the nature of this partnership and consider its implications for educational practice.

Partners in Cognition: Extending Human Intelligence with Intelligent Technologies

We examine how technologies, particularly computer technologies that aid in cognitive processing, can support intellectual performance and enrich individuals’ minds. We distinguish between effects with and of a technology: Effects with occur when people work in partnership with machines, whereas effects of occur when such partnerships have subsequent cognitive spin-off effects for learners working away from machines. It is argued that effects both with and of depend on the individuals mindful engagement in the partnership. Such mind-machine collaborations also invite reexamination of prevailing conceptions of intelligence and ability: Are they properties of the individual or of the joint system? We respond to these dilemmas by offering two views, one emphasizing mainly the upgraded performance in a person-machine system of partnership, the other emphasizing more the educationally valued cognitive residue that can result. The use of computer tools to extend the reach of minds is briefly discussed within wider normative, theoretical, and practical contexts.

Patterns of Misunderstanding: An Integrative Model for Science, Math, and Programming

This article examines unifying factors among diverse problems of understanding in several fields. Certain misunderstandings in science, mathematics, and computer programming display strong structural analogies with one another. Even within one of these domains, however, not all misunderstandings are structurally similar. To explain the commonality and variety, four levels of knowledge are posited: (a) content, (b) problem-solving, (c) epistemic, and (d) inquiry. Through analysis of several examples, it is argued that misunderstandings have causes at multiple levels, with highly domain-specific causes predominant at the “content” level and somewhat more general causes at the other levels. The authors note that education characteristically neglects all but the content level, describe successful interventions at all levels, and urge more attention in education to integration across the levels.

The Fingertip Effect: How Information-Processing Technology Shapes Thinking

Contemporary beliefs about the impact of information-processing technology (IPT) on thinking are examined. Whereas some suggest that learning to program and other contacts with IPT will empower thinking, it is argued from both theory and evidence that typical contacts with IPT today do not meet certain conditions for significantly reshaping thought. Whereas others suggest that IPT will have a narrowing and dehumanizing influence, it is argued that the striking diversification of IPT now underway will eventually allow for many styles of involvement. In the long term, as this diversification spreads to nearly all aspects of society, thinking may change in certain basic ways as it has in response to literacy and print.

Teaching thinking dispositions: From transmission to enculturation

This paper was written as part of a project funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. The authors thank the foundation for its help, acknowledging that the ideas expressed here do not necessarily reflect the position or policy of supporting agencies.

Conditions of Learning in Novice Programmers

Under normal instructional circumstances, some youngsters learn programming in BASIC or LOGO much better than others. Clinical investigations of novice programmers suggest that this happens in part because different students bring different patterns of learning to the programming context. Many students disengage from the task whenever trouble occurs, neglect to track closely what their programs do by reading back the code as they write it, try to repair buggy programs by haphazardly tinkering with the code, or have difficulty breaking problems down into parts suitable for separate chunks of code. Such problems interfere with students making the best of their own learning capabilities: students often invent programming plans that go beyond what they have been taught directly. Instruction designed to foster better learning practices could help students to acquire a repertoire of programming skills, perhaps with spinoffs having to do with “learning to learn.”

Transfer of Cognitive Skills from Programming: When and How?.

Investigations of the impact of programming instruction on cognitive skills have yielded occasional positive and many negative findings. To interpret the mixed results, we describe two distinct mechanisms of transfer–“low road” transfer, resulting from extensive practice and automatization, and “high road” transfer, resulting from mindful generalization. High road transfer seems implicated where positive impacts of programming have been found; insufficient practice and little provocation of mindful abstraction are characteristic of investigations not demonstrating transfer. Our discussion affirms that programming instruction can improve cognitive skills under the right conditions, but cautions that implementing such conditions on a wide scale may be difficult and that programming instruction must compete with other means of improving cognitive skills.

Spatial and ordinal components of form perception and literacy

Abstract We suppose that the visual nervous system possesses compensatory rectifying mechanisms by means of which it achieves “constancy” of visual recognition despite variation in physical appearance of the stimulus object. Using geometric rotations, reflections, and other transformations of text as the physical variation, we studied the recognizability of the texts and the influence that practice in reading one type of transformation exerted on the recognition of others. The mathematical structure of the training set was used as a clue to the perceptual mechanisms mediating transfer, isolating perceptual functions involving a geometric transformation and an ordinal operator. The main feature of the theory is its emphasis upon a dialogue or interaction between ongoing problem-solving processes in visual rectification and the sample being recognized. The theory developed is contrasted with other theories of pattern recognition in which concepts such as stimulus generalization, tuned detectors, and preprocessing play major roles. A relation of this theory to problems encountered among disabled readers (“dyslexics”) is also brought out.

Intelligence in the Wild: A Dispositional View of Intellectual Traits

Most accounts of intelligence are “abilities-centric.” They aim to explain intelligent behavior in terms of IQ or other measures of intellectual aptitude. However, several investigators have proposed that intelligent behavior in the wild—in everyday circumstances in which carefully framed tests do not tell people exactly what intellectual task to attempt—depends in considerable part on thinking dispositions. Definitionally, dispositions concern not what abilities people have, but how people are disposed to use those abilities. Everyday language includes a number of dispositional terms such as curiosity, open-mindedness, and skepticism. We review several dispositional constructs that researchers have investigated, sometimes under the label dispositions. The findings in trend show that dispositions are stable traits that help to explain intellectual performance over and above measures of intellectual aptitude. It is argued that a dispositional view of intelligence is warranted, and that it is an important area for continued research.

Visual discrimination between rectangular and nonrectangular parallelopipeds

Twenty-seven university students judged whether each of 128 drawings of parallelopipeds appeared to represent three-dimensional rectangular boxes. Half the pictures could not geometrically have been projections of rectangular boxes. The null hypothesis that Ss’ judgments were unrelated to geometry was rejected at the .001 level of significance, and the correlation between Ss’ judgments and perfect discrimination averaged .86 over three variations of the experiment. The results support a general hypothesis about the perception of simple space forms according to which viewers impose geometric constraints, such as rectangularity and symmetry, but only when the constraints are projectively possible.