Donald J. Cunningham

Belief, Doubt and Reason: C. S. Peirce on education

In this paper, we explore Peirces work for insights into a theory of learning and cognition for education. Our focus for this exploration is Peirces paper The Fixation of Belief (FOB), originally published in 1877 in Popular Science Monthly. We begin by examining Peirces assertion that the study of logic is essential for understanding thought and reasoning. We explicate Peirces view of the nature of reasoning itself—the characteristic guiding principles or ‘habits of mind’ that underlie acts of inference, the dimensions of and interaction between doubt and belief, and his four methods of resolving or ‘fixing’ belief (i.e., tenacity, authority, a priori, and experimentation). The four methods are then juxtaposed against current models of teaching and learning such as constructivism, schema theory, situated cognition, and inquiry learning. Finally, we discuss Peirces modes of inference as they relate educationally to the resolution of doubt and beliefs and offer an example of belief resolution from an experienced teacher in a professional development environment.

Developmental Differences in Using a Superordinate Context for the Learning and Retention of Facts.

A study was conducted to explore the developmental differences in utilizing a superordinate context during learning and at retention at two grade levels. Ss were 98 students from third and fifth grade classes divided approximately evenly by sex. A 2 × 2 × 2 factorial design was used: factor 1 was superordinate vs coordinate topic sentence at learning; factor 2 was presence or absence of a superordinate retrieval cue; factor 3 was grade level. Ss were tested on both recognition and recall. Contrary to previous findings, results showed that the condition most conducive to learning was superordinate sentence present at learning, absent at recall. Reasons for the disparity in findings with previous research are discussed.

Verbal and Nonverbal Adjunct Aids to Concrete and Abstract Prose Learning.

Two experiments were conducted to evaluate the relative efficiency of verbal (questions) and visual (directions to sketch) adjunct aids for concrete and abstract prose learning. Results for the concrete passage did not confirm earlier work by the authors demonstrat ing equivalency for two types of aids. For the abstract passage, verbal adjunct aids worked best and visual aids were somewhat disruptive. Implications are discussed. SNOWMAN AND CUNNINGHAM (8) recently compared verbal and visual adjunct aids and found that with a fairly concrete passage they operated equivalently. In that study the verbal adjunct aids were multiple choice questions interspersed in the text in a manner similar to that found in most adjunct aid studies (7). Visual adjunct aids were developed by interspersing directions to sketch pictures, the directions being derived from the item stem of the corresponding multiple-choice question. For instance, the following two adjunct aids were used in the Snowman and Cunningham (8) study: Verbal With what do the Gruanda pay their taxes? a. animal skins b. wheat and beets c. colored beads d. colored stone disks Visual Sketch a picture depicting with what the Gruanda pay their taxes. The standard finding in most questioning studies was replicated for verbal questions and extended to visual adjunct aids. Thus, the insertion of questions or direc tions to sketch resulted in increased retention of material directly covered by those adjunct aids (practiced retention) as compared to a control group. In addition, when these adjunct aids were inserted just after the por tion of the text to which they referred, retention of material not directly covered by these aids (nonpracticed retention) was improved as compared to when these aids appeared before the relevant text passage. 8 This content downloaded from 157.55.39.111 on Tue, 02 Aug 2016 04:11:26 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms CUNNINGHAM, SNOWMAN, MILLER, AND PERRY 9 In discussing their results, Snowman and Cunning ham (8) speculated that different results might have oc curred if the instructional passage had not been con crete. The present study is designed to examine this possibility. The earlier study was repeated to test the reliability of its findings and, in addition, a second ex periment was conducted concurrently in which an abstract version derived from the concrete passage was employed. Since the abstract version differed in content from the concrete passage, a new criterion test was con structed for the abstract passage, necessitating treating the research as two concurrent experiments rather than as a single experiment. The hypotheses to be tested for the concrete passage are identical to those proposed by Snowman and Cunningham (8). Our predictions concerning the abstract passage were derived from the theoretical posi tion of Paivio (6), who argues that imagery facilitates the recall of concrete content but not abstract content. He has found that verbal mediators are more facilitative with abstract material. It was, therefore, expected that with a more abstract passage, verbal adjunct aids would prove more effective than visual ones; that is, the usual question position effect with practiced and nonpracticed retention would be observed only with verbal questions. Further, it was felt that visual adjunct aids would be disruptive as compared to controls reading without ad junct aids.

My Life as a Scholarly Scavenger: Reflections on Garrison's "An Introduction to Dewey's Theory of Functional 'Trans-Action': An Alternative Paradigm for Activity Theory"

I recently had the pleasure of reviewing two versions of Garrison’s article (this issue), and although I actually preferred the first version for reasons that I explain shortly, the second version is yet an important contribution. Reviewing the article forced me to do something that had been on my “BMT” (been meaning to) list for some time now: digging into Dewey’s theory of inquiry for insights into my own work in developing Peirce’s concept of abduction (e.g., Cunningham, 1998). Dewey studied with Peirce for a time at Johns Hopkins and made frequent reference (both explicitly and implicitly) to his work. Garrison is a first-rate Dewey scholar, and I was pleased to find so many of Dewey’s ideas organized and presented in a unified fashion. Before commenting, however, I need to say something about my rather peculiar reading habits. I characterize myself as a scavenger, one who tends to draw from others ideas that will assist my own thinking rather than examine the ideas on their own merits. So, for example, I don’t really care two hoots what Dewey really meant or whether Leont’ev’s views were or were not transactional. In point of fact (and I believe that Dewey would agree with me), there is no way that I can ever know precisely what either man, or Garrison for that matter, is saying. Consider this quote from the appendix of Dewey and Bentley (1949; a letter written by Dewey to a colleague who had disagreed with him). In it, Dewey was discussing what he meant by the word situation:

The Retroactive Effects of Prior Knowledge and Elaborative Processing on Prose Retention

AbstractAn experiment was conducted to examine the relative contributions of prior knowledge and elaborate processing to prose memory using a retroactive interference paradigm. One hundred eighty undergraduates from introductory educational psychology classes were randomly assigned to either an experimental or control group in one of six treatment conditions (n = 15). Using the mean scores of the control group from each condition as expected values, derived scores indicating the amount of retroactive interference or facilitation were calculated for experimental groups in each condition. Treatment conditions, allowing prior knowledge to operate, differed reliably from the baseline condition. However, conditions which precluded prior knowledge mediation differed reliably from the baseline condition. Results indicate that both prior knowledge and elaborative processing operate to diminish retroactive interference generated by reading a second passage. These data are seen as a basis for speculation on the rel...

You're Asking Me to Believe in Sentient Meat

In Terry Bisson’s (1994) short story “They’re Made Out of Meat,”1 two extraterrestrials (ETs) have a conversation about their discovery of creatures on planet Earth that make machines, send messages into space, talk, sing, dream, love and, yes, think. The ETs have heretofore only encountered sentient beings that are entirely machine or include machine components that do the thinking—co-processors, plasma brains, and the like. In the end, the ETs decide to quarantine our sector of the galaxy and avoid the necessity of having to interact with meat. I believe that Raymond Gibbs, author of Embodiment and Cognitive Science, would recognize the point of view expressed by Bisson’s ETs as the dominant one in cognitive science. In the traditional view, the thinking process requires three components: abstract symbols, rules for manipulating the symbols, and a processor to carry out the manipulation. The symbols, like the 1s and 0s of the digital computer, have no meaning in and of themselves. Meaning is mapped onto or represented by the symbols via interaction with the environment. Thinking is a logical process of manipulating these symbols entirely independent of the host—thinking could just as easily occur within a machine as a corporeal body or in a brain kept alive in a vat. A growing group of cognitive scientists, including psychologists, philosophers, cognitive linguists, and computer scientists, have championed an alternative view: that thought is embodied, that is, thought grows out of bodily processes—perception, bodily movement, and all manners of physical and social experience. Gibbs’s book provides a real service by gathering together a good share of the research and theory underlying embodied cognition, particularly empirical studies. Other sources authored by George Lakoff, Mark Johnson, Andy Clark, and others (see Appendix) are also valuable resources, but more so from the perspectives of cognitive linguistics and philosophy. Gibbs focuses more on psychology, traditional cognitive science and neuroscience. Gibbs himself provides the best summary of the thesis of his book:

BOOK REVIEW: "Minding Your Gestures"

David McNeill has provided a valuable compilation of 18 articles, most of which began as presentations at a 1995 conference on gestures and language at the University of New Mexico. The contributors are a nice mixture of veterans of research on gesture (e.g., David McNeill, Adam Kendon, Susan Goldin–Meadow) and scholars just starting their careers, many of whom trained with McNeill at the University of Chicago. Lurking in the background and cited by most of the articles is David McNeill’s (1992) masterful treatment of gesture theory and research, Hand and Mind: What Gestures Reveal About Thought. Those new to the field might want to start with that book before digging into this one. Interested readers might also consult a recent article by Wolff Michael Roth (2001) in the Review of Educational Research titled “Gestures: Their Role in Teaching and Learning.” In this particular research tradition, the term gesture refers to hand and arm movements performed while speaking. A common task is to have participants retell a story they have heard or a performance they have seen and then to study the relation between the spoken word and any gestures. Quite a number of the articles of the “Chicago group” analyze retellings of a scene from a Sylvester and Tweety Bird1 cartoon in which Sylvester attempts to reach Tweety Bird by climbing up the inside of a drain pipe, only to be thwarted by Tweety Bird who drops a bowling ball down the pipe. Sylvester swallows the ball, rolls out of the pipe, down the street, and into a bowling alley where one then hears the sound of pins being knocked down. Participants commonly use gestures to convey “drop,” “roll,” “down,” and other aspects of the story. These researchers carefully distinguish gestures from other hand movements such as “emblems” (e.g., the index finger and thumb joined in a circle with the remaining fingers extended upward to indicate OK), pantomime (movements without speech, as in the game charades), and sign languages. Although speech may accompany these other hand movements, it is neither obligatory nor always helpful. A major issue in the chapters concerns the relation between speech and gesture—does gesture merely accompany speech or do speech and gesture have unique functions in the expression of meaning that combine into a system not reducible to one or the other (or their simple combination)? As might be expected, this group of researchers supports the importance of gesture in meaning making and provides numerous examples across many languages, cultures, and individual differences. Article after article makes clear how impoverished our analyses of spoken discourse must inevitably be if we do not also examine the gestures that the speaker is simultaneously making. MIND, CULTURE, AND ACTIVITY, 11(2), 160–162 Copyright

BOOK REVIEW: "A Stroll Through the World of Infant Professional Development With an Old Friend"

Reading this book is like meeting an old friend from graduate school, reminiscing about the “good old days” and catching up on the latest news. I remember very well the excitement when Eleanor J. Gibson’s tour de force Principles of Perceptual Learning and Development was published in 1969. Many of us had been reading the work of her husband James J. Gibson on visual perception (e.g., J. Gibson, 1966; see also J. Gibson, 1979) and were actively looking for ways to link his views to educational theory and research. Their work, in my humble opinion, was instrumental in influencing the course of the cognitive revolution in human learning in the 1970s (e.g., Neisser, 1976; Shaw & Bransford, 1977; Turvey, 1977)—much to the consternation of the Gibsons themselves, I might add. Those were the days of schema, cognitive structures, and information processing, all of which the Gibsons rejected as playing any role in learning or perception. Perceptual learning and development are not constructions based on our prior knowledge, or information processes applied to impoverished environmental stimuli. Perception occurs when we “pick up” structured information directly from the environment. The Gibsons hold to a staunch and unrepentant realist ontology. Perceptual development is a process of differentiating those available structures, and perceptual learning is a process of orienting to and acting on those structures. Learning and development are discovery processes in which the characteristics of the perceiver and the structures available in the environment are coordinated. The concept of affordance is the key to understanding this view, about which I say more shortly. The book under review is a marvelous introduction to the Gibsons’ theory and the research on infant perceptual learning and development. The text is relatively short (200 pages, not counting ancillary materials) and sufficiently repetitive (issues and research studies are revisited from a variety of perspectives) such that I think it would serve well as a textbook for upper division undergraduate and graduate classes. There is a wonderful chapter on the tasks and methodologies currently used to study infant perceptual learning and development that would be very helpful for new initiates into developmental psychology. However, the book is also something of a manifesto MIND, CULTURE, AND ACTIVITY, 10(3), 254–259 Copyright