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Re: [xmca] Piaget on Within-Stage Variability
I have two fresh examples of within-stage variability, each of which (to me) demonstrates that variation is not meaningless, random fluctuations, and that intra-stage variability contains, in embryo, inter-stage variability.
My first example is from one of my grads. He is sitting with his three kids ten year old Yangil, seven year old Kyeongil and five year old Ryeongeun. He wants to see if they have been learning any English. So he asks "How old are you?" to Yangil. Yangil refuses to answer; he wants to play with his toys, and it's not schooltime. Ryeongeun sees an opportunity of getting attention and announces LOUDLY that she will do it, but she only repeats the question and cannot answer even when Daddy tells her, in Korean, how to answer ("I'm five"). Kyeongil then answers "I'm fine" and Yangil laughs. Daddy carefully reformulates "i'm fine" into "I'm five", and Yangil sneers at Kyeongil "Are you five?". Kyeongil, horrified, changes his answer to "I'm seven". We can see that Ryeongeun's answer depends on interpreting the question as a simple "Listen and Repeat". Kyeongil's answer depends on interpreting it as part of a fixed routine. Yangil's refusal to cooperate
depends on understanding English as a whole as something that does not belong at the dinner table in any form. But we can also see that although the answers DO represent different stages, they interpenetrate when we put them together in real time (and space).
My second example is from the annual Girl Scout English drama contest, where I was a judge last Saturday. It's a beautiful cross section of development, going from early elementary school right up until high school. Every year the dramas fall into roughly three categories.
a) STRINGS of events. For example, this year there was "The Last Tiger". A dystopic world in which all the forests have been cut down. The last tiger is dying of some form of chemical pollution unspecified. The tiger attacks a grandma to try to get red bean porridge that may save his life. With the help of a motley association of gods of different religions (talk about syncretism!) the grandma beats off the tiger attack; the tiger is however granted red bean porridge if he will swear to become an ecologically friendly tiger... You can see that the story is a string of events taking up the ten minutes of the skit, and there is no real attempt to make it a coherent string leading tendentiously to a conclusion or to make the tiger consistently good or bad.
b) STORIES. This is the majority genre. There is a well defined situation (usually a realistic one set in a primary or middle school). There is a clear consistent hero (usually a boy beset by parental nagging or a girl afflicted with self-doubt) and a coherent problem (e.g. bullying, thwarted ambition to be a pop singer or soccer star, lack of respect for elders/the environment, or what Ulvi would call "egotism"). The problem is evaluated in various ways by various characters (sometimes an "angel of hope" and an "angel of despair") and then solved (usually by a change of consciousness, a seizure of confidence, an apology) and then everybody sings and dances (including all the villains). The final dance number is a reversion to the STRING form of syncretic narrative but the rest of the story is clearly a single, sustained argument.
c) CONCEPTS. Very rarely there will we a clear winner. The clear winners are stories that have been written BACKWARDS, from title to story, or rather from concept to tale. For example, this year there was a story called "Happy Number One". On the face of it, this is just a story: a little boy is pressured by his mother to succeed on a test; unable to do so, he copies from a girl, is caught by the girl. The girl helps him but in return he has to help the class as a whole by coming up with a good idea for the science fair contest. He does so, building a robot that actually works out of detritus from the science laboratory but the result, which looks rather messy, only wins the Silver Medal. He is downcast and full of regrets, but the other children assure him that it was the process and not the product and that the resultant friendship generated means that Number Two is really number one. The mother shows up and apologizes, saying how proud she is of the
whole group, and there is no syncretic dance number at the end. This play, which was clearly designed to win a lesser prize, won the grand prize, because it was so much more coherent and unified and consistent at every level.
We can see both of these situations as naturally occuring Zopeds if we simply imagine that for thousands of years children (most children) did not sit in same-age cohorts but rather all played together in inter-generational cohorts. In this way, it was possible for children to observe inter stage variability in others, and deliberately apply it to intra-stage variability in themselves, transforming a "listen and repeat" exchange into a "listen and answer" exchange and making a string into a story, and a story into a concept. In this way, it seems to me very useful to conceptualize "zone" as both time and space, with the proviso that it is on the playground rather than simply in the classroom that they interacted. In the classroom, the spatial interaction between stages is artificially arrested by classroom walls.
We can also see that both situations DO contain lots of noise--that is, intra-stage variability that does NOT turn into inter-stage variabity but instead dumbs the activity down. Can we deliberately ("artificially") select for the former variability and dampen the latter? Can we do it in a public education environment?
I think, actually, we already do: in BOTH situations, what is being shared between stages is often the fruit of public education. I wonder to what extent this is true of other "outside classroom" environments (e.g. Mike's Fifth Dimension and Ulvi's "Little Beehive").
David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education
--- On Sun, 11/14/10, Jorge Fernando Larreamendy Joerns <jlarream@uniandes.edu.co> wrote:
From: Jorge Fernando Larreamendy Joerns <jlarream@uniandes.edu.co>
Subject: Re: [xmca] Piaget on Within-Stage Variability
To: "Martin Packer" <packer@duq.edu>, "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Date: Sunday, November 14, 2010, 8:19 AM
To my understanding, the microgenetic method was developed (by researchers such as Inhelder and Siegler [Siegler himself influenced heavily by analysis of the same kind by Simon and Newell), inter alia, to increase the resolution of analyses so that within-subject and between-task variation can be observed and accounted for. As expected, the microgenetic analysis implies not only a finer grain-size, but also strategies such as using the same task in repeated sequences and a variety of tasks that belong to the same famliy (e.g., isomorphic). I fully agree with David that despite his recognition of variation, Piaget's stance amounts to seeing variation as a noise, as something irrelevant given the fact that the subject has already shown to be proficient at a higher structural level, which is what ultimately matters to him. But the fascinating aspect of the microgenetic method is that it shows how specific performances are a function of even minor
variations in the task environment, including the interaction between the child and the experimenter. Increasing the resolution of analyses and having the child (or anyone for that matter) go several times through the same task or through families of tasks shows again at times minor variations in performance that are, nevertheless, not something to be eliminated as a nuisance, but to be conceptualized as the very focus and goal of the analysis itself. The resulting picture of development is much messier, but more challenging from a heuristic point of view.
Jorge
Jorge Larreamendy-Joerns, Ph.D.
Profesor Asociado y Director
Departamento de Psicología
Universidad de los Andes
On Nov 14, 2010, at 9:41 AM, Martin Packer wrote:
> (Jorge, would you like to continue this thread? I am tempted to ask about methodological lessons. Or if autonomous cognition has been overturned in these studies.)
>
> Martin
>
> On Nov 12, 2010, at 4:26 PM, Jorge Fernando Larreamendy Joerns wrote:
>
>> Martin's idea that we should study the glitches of cognition that Piaget dismissed as performance is an excellent one. Actually, the same reasoning is on the basis of much of the recent (well, not so much) interest in variability in development (back to Piaget's quote) and the use of microgenetic methodologies (see Siegler & Crowley as an example).
>>
>> Jorge
>>
>> Jorge Larreamendy-Joerns, Ph.D.
>> Profesor Asociado y Director
>> Departamento de Psicología
>> Universidad de los Andes
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Nov 12, 2010, at 4:17 PM, Martin Packer wrote:
>>
>>> David,
>>>
>>> I think your proposal that Piaget considered these momentary variations in cognitive level merely changes in performance, irrelevant to his studies of competence, is a convincing one. Structuralist approaches tend to have the aim of identifying a formal level - of binary oppositions, or group logic, or recursive rules - that 'underlies' what they consider to be mere surface phenomena. This competence is assumed to be "some abstract cognitive ability" (Levinson, Pragmatics, p. 25). Chomsky's linguistics is a clear case in point; Chomsky considered irrelevant such phenomena as hesitations, repairs, grammatical lapses, as well as processing limits such as memory capacity. These were simply aspects of performance; his job, as he understood it, was to characterize the underlying competence that generated all and only grammatical sentences.
>>>
>>> This way of understanding Piaget also has the merit of suggesting what a better approach would be. Linguists since Chomsky have very successfully studied the things Chomsky paid no attention to as evidence for the real-time pragmatic organization of speech in context, to the point where the central doctrine of the autonomy of syntax has largely been rejected. In the same way, we could look at these shifts in cognition that Piaget acknowledged but dismissed as ongoing changes in gear that are suited to the environmental affordances and demands of any given moment. If a traffic light turns red in front of me I am perfectly capable of figuring out an alternative route if there is a need for that kind of complex thinking, if there is an emergency, for example. But when there is not, there is a cost to such operational thinking, while there is little cost to fuming over the way frustrations tend to cooccur and conspire to thwart my plans.
>>>
>>> LSV proposed that learning and development are tied together - neither separate nor identical - and that although we need to metaphorically untie the knot to understand what is going on, in practice the knot will always be there. He also proposed that child and situation are always knotted, so that Piaget's aim of identifying an abstract cognitive competence that defines the child in isolation from their circumstances will always miss the mark.
>>>
>>> Martin
>>>
>>> On Nov 11, 2010, at 12:10 AM, David Kellogg wrote:
>>>
>>>> I just finished retranslating Piaget's comments on from the French original in Francoise Seve's translation of Thinking and Speech (the original manuscript in Piaget' s hand was apprently LOST by MIT Press and parts of it had to be retranslated from the English).
>>>>
>>>> One of the things you notice in reading this is that Piaget has a very strong tendency to concede things and then discount their importance (e.g. Yes, Vygotsky was right about the fate of self-directed "egocentric speech" but it doesn't really matter because by the time inner speech develops, intelligence has already emerged through other mechanisms).
>>>>
>>>> It seems to me that this is another good example. Piaget concedes that there is an enormous amount of variability within stages (at least DOWNWARD variation, the centration of the child imposes a very clear limit on upward variation), but ir really doesn't matter because what we are looking at is performance errors; the child is simply unable to perform his competence, and this has no real effect on that underlying competence which depends on development.
>>>>
>>>> Vygotsky turns this completely upside down. It is precisely this variability of performance that LEADS development. What happens is that not that the child UNDERPERFORMS some putative competence clearly limited by some supposed developmental glass ceiling. What happens is that the child OVERPERFORMS his mental structures thanks to various affordances in his environment, and the "intro-revolution" of those affordances is what creates new mental structures.
>>>>
>>>> I just listened, over lunch, to Mike's talk on Zopeds (I kept waiting to hear exactly why he called it that, and all he said was that it's easier to say in English). At first, I was a little irked by the name (I prefer "Nemode", for Next Moment of Development!). I was also a little irked by the emphasis on dual stimulation. For me, the term "dual stimulation" suggests very early Vygotsky, reflexology, and the "second signal system" interpretation of speech.
>>>>
>>>> But I can see that if we could just come up with some other name for it, "dual stimulation" is a really important concept. I think, in fact, it would help us DIFFERENTIATE variability within the various stages. Kim Yongho and I tried to do that in our article "Rules Out of Roles", which argued that WITHIN schoolwork it helps to differentiate between the "main activity" (which is for the most part neither conducive nor susceptible to development) and a "leading one" (which necessarily occupies a small fraction of the school day but which plays a leading role in development).
>>>>
>>>> It seems to me, though, that we got it wrong. We assumed that because "rules" are more abstract form of dual stimulation, they must be developmentally higher. This appeared to be corraborated by the much poorer quality of the language we saw generated in the rule-based games compared to the role plays. The problem is that rules and roles are so thoroughly interpenetrated in any game that any statement like this is based on a rather arbitrary classification that has little psychological reality for the child.
>>>>
>>>> So how do we go forward? The more I think about it, the more it seems to me that Paula's work on Chapter Five might be the key. But one has to consider each of the preconcepts described by Vygotsky not as products but as results of dual stimulation, or tool/sign bearing processes. Its as processes that we can really talk (as Vygotsky does in Chapter Six) of generalizing the generalizations instead of just throwing them away and starting over again like poor old Sisyphus.
>>>>
>>>> In Chapter Five, LSV points out that there is a kind of link between each new psychological structure and some important activity in the child's daily life: the collection is clearly connected to activities like brushing teeth, putting on clothes, going to bed, while the chain complex is connected to games like tag where the loser becomes the "it" and generates new losers, and the diffuse complex suggests an imaginative tale--which means it is at a HIGHER level of development rather than a LOWER one as Kim and Kellogg 2007 argued.
>>>>
>>>> Tonight I am teaching some grads about a new elementary school book written by a colleague across the hall. There are five characters:
>>>>
>>>> Kobi (a Martian who speaks English)
>>>> Mike (a little Jewish boy, maybe Mike Cole with Leon Trotsky's hair)
>>>> Dami (a Korean girl)
>>>> Sally (a British girl with two pet hamsters)
>>>> Jisu (a Korean boy)
>>>>
>>>> The idea is to have FIVE different activities with these characters corresponding to the different preconceptual structures of Chapter Five:
>>>>
>>>> SYNCRETIC:
>>>>
>>>> T: Listen and CIRCLE. I am Jinsu. I am Kobi. We are Jinsu and Mike. We are Kobi and Sally…etc. Who has more circles? More, more, more! Who has many? Who has most? Each circle is a HUNDRED won! What’s your score?
>>>>
>>>> ASSOCIATIVE COMPLEX
>>>>
>>>> T: Listen and CIRCLE: I am a boy. I’m a girl. I’m a child. I’m a Korean. We are foreigners. We are humans. More, more, more! What's your score?
>>>>
>>>> COLLECTION COMPLEX:
>>>>
>>>> T: Listen and CIRCLE. The rainbow club has one of EACH kind of child. Who has the biggest rainbow club? More, more, more! What's your score?
>>>>
>>>> CHAIN COMPLEX: This is based on the Korean "frying pan game". Each child says a name and then another name--that child is next. Make a mistake and you get hit in the head with an imaginary frying pan.
>>>>
>>>> Round One
>>>> S1: I am Kobi!
>>>> S2: I am Dami.
>>>> S3: I am Sally.
>>>> S4: I am Jisu.
>>>>
>>>> Round Two
>>>> S1: I am Kobi. you are Sally.
>>>> S3: I am Sally. You are Jisu.
>>>> etc.
>>>>
>>>> DIFFUSE COMPLEX:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> T: Listen and circle, adding ONE or MORE members, e.g.
>>>>
>>>> S1: I am Jisu.
>>>> S2: I am a Korean. (Jisu and Dami)
>>>> S3: I am human. (Jisu, Dami, Sally, Mike)
>>>>
>>>> You can see, though, that if you differentiate TOO much like this, you get exactly what Mike warns against in his talk: development is simply reduced to learning, specifically, to learning the particular conceptual structure that we find in the "dual stimulation" apparatus!
>>>>
>>>> David Kellogg
>>>> Seoul National University of Education
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> --- On Wed, 11/10/10, mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> From: mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>
>>>> Subject: [xmca] Piaget on Within-Stage Variability
>>>> To: "eXtended Mind, Culture,Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
>>>> Cc: "Patricia Greenfield" <greenfield@psych.ucla.edu>, "Glick, Joseph" <jglick@gc.cuny.edu>, "Boris Meshcheryakov" <borlogic@yahoo.com>, "Jerome Bruner" <jerome.bruner@nyu.edu>
>>>> Date: Wednesday, November 10, 2010, 5:33 PM
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> In the early-mid 1950's a remarkable group of scholars met in Geneva to
>>>> discuss issues of development. The entire book of discussions on child
>>>> development is too big to make a pdf of, but the discussion on stages and
>>>> mechanisms of change, involving Piaget, Margaret Mead, Lorenz, Grey
>>>> Walter, Tanner the growth guy, and others could be if there is sufficient
>>>> interest -- or perhaps Mead's paper.
>>>>
>>>> This is the set of meetings sponsored by Macey Foundation which got Piaget
>>>> and Mead talking about culture and development and contributed a lot to the
>>>> large set of empirical studies in the late 1950's. In reading the discussion
>>>> as part of re-viewing the cross-cultural landscape, I came upon this
>>>> statement in the discussion about stages.
>>>>
>>>> *PIAGET:
>>>> This is the same point that Bowlby raised when in his reply to my
>>>> essay he said 'I wonder if Piaget accepts the idea that, at all ages,
>>>> behaviour is regulated by cognitive processes of different degrees of
>>>> development-that in some of our actions we operate with a fullyfledged
>>>> intelligence and in others none at all, and that in respect
>>>> of anyone activity we may shift from one level to another?'
>>>> Well, I fully accept this idea. Our cognitive functions are certainly
>>>> not uniform for every period of the day. Although I am mainly engaged
>>>> in intellectual operations, I am for example at an operatory
>>>> level for only a small part of the day when I devote myself to my
>>>> professional
>>>> work. The rest of the time I am dealing with empirical
>>>> trial and error. At the time when I drove a car and my engine went
>>>> wrong it was even empirical trial and error on a very low level, as
>>>> you can imagine. Every moment I am indulging in pre-operatory
>>>> intuition. At other times I go even lower and almost give way to
>>>> magical behaviour. If I am stopped by a red light when I am in a
>>>> hurry it is difficult for me not to link this up with other preoccupations
>>>> of the moment. In short, the intellectual level varies considerably,
>>>> exactly like the affective level, according to the different times of the
>>>> day, but for each behaviour pattern I think we shall find a certain
>>>> correspondence. For example, for a primitive emotion a very low
>>>> intellectual level, and for a lofty aesthetic or moral sentiment a high
>>>> intellectual level. We shall always have this correspondence between
>>>> the two aspects.*
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> How did it come about that this discussion was forgotten? I have never seen
>>>> Piaget quoted in this way in the English or Russian language translations.
>>>> My French is too lousy to have any idea about that. The closest I can come
>>>> to systematic investigation by Americans that follows this logic is in the
>>>> work of Kurt Fischer and his colleagues.
>>>>
>>>> For me a big question is: How does this kind of variability get organized
>>>> along with the diachronic sequence of transformations laid out in Boris's
>>>> article in the Vygotsky Companion very interestingly elaborated upon by
>>>> David Kel? This question is related to my constantly worrying the issue of
>>>> what is meant by "social situation of development" (singular) for people who
>>>> think that higher psychological functions are organized according to the
>>>> activities they mediate as well as the properties of the mediational system?
>>>>
>>>> mike
>>>>
>>>> PS- Still reading LSV's *Educational Psychology* and working up to David's
>>>> essay on the Psych of Art and its place in development of LSV's thinking.
>>>> That far behind!
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