Week 4 - reading, writing, and metacognitive knowledge

Metacognitive Knowledge: a person's knowledge and awareness of cognitive processes.
Cognitive Self-Regulation: skill at identifying goals, selecting effective strategies, and accurate monitoring

The sections in this week's material about reading and writing, and the process of acquiring these skills, described a process of skill acquisition and adaptation that is present right from the very beginning of learning. There's a process of "learning how to learn," selecting the learning strategy most appropriate to the situation. What struck me the most was the process of reading. A few techniques are given:

• sounding out a word - common in beginning readers, encountering unfamiliar words
• direct retrieval from long-term memory
• letter-context - shortcutting some of the retrieval process by knowing that how a word starts restricts how it ends
• sentence-context - again, a shortcut of retrieval, using sentence context to limit the possible range of words that comes next

...but these techniques are not a strict line of skill progression. Even very early readers will shift in and out of each method as appropriate. This is fascinating! The human brain is always looking for shortcuts and simplifications.

And children are able to incorporate their growing understanding of the world into their reading skill. Words mean things, and as children get a greater breadth of knowledge they can immediately apply that to understanding written words.

The skill of writing progresses as children learn how to organize thought; early writing uses a knowledge-telling strategy, where the child relays information in whatever order it tumbles out of their memory. As their memory retrieval becomes more sophisticated, they are able to organize their thoughts in a way that conveys the important points, a knowledge-transforming strategy.

I really like the image that metacognition evokes - a child in control of their own learning.

Week 3 - "Understanding the self, understanding the world"

This week, I noticed this connection between how a child develops, and how they understand the world. In Piaget's 'sensorimotor' stage of development, at 8 months old, infants gain deliberate, intentional behavior: "Means" and "end" become distinct things, and they can take action to achieve their goal. When a child starts to build theories about the world they live in, their 'naïve biology' classifies living things (in part) by the ability to have goals and take action to achieve them. It's interesting to me, this reflection of a child's sense of self onto their sense of the world. And it connects to egocentrism, in that they apply their own experience onto others, but it also breaks from egocentrism in that they perceive goals other than their own.

This connects to how a child builds up their conceptual framework of the world. The assimilation/accommodation process takes information that either fits neatly in existing schemes or pushes the slight expansion of those schemes. Either way, a child internalizes a small piece of the outside world into their understanding of it. When the world presents something that doesn't fit at all, or when there is constant accommodation with little assimilation, a framework is discarded; a new one is constructed on the bones of the old (the process Piaget calls 'equilibration') leading to a new period of development.

Throughout development, there is a flow of information between image of self and image of the world.

Week 2 - "Nature, Nurture, and..."

"Heredity, Environment, and Development" from Human Development: A Life-Span View, chapter 2

[G]enes and environments constantly influence each other throughout a person's life. This principle actually has two parts. First, genes are expressed - "turned on" - throughout the life span. [...] Second, the environment can trigger genetic expression: A person's experience can help to determine how and when genes are activated. [...]
Genes can influence the kind of environment to which a person is exposed. In other words, "nature" can help determine the kind of "nurturing" that a child receives.

The concept expressed here, and elsewhere in this week's material, is that these factors (a child's genetics and phenotype, their parents' genetics and phenotype, and the environment in which the child's development takes place) are all interconnected and exert constant influence on each other. There is no isolated cause-and-effect relationship, but each element has a causal influence on all others. Sure, genes can't be changed, but they can be activated; nature and nurture are constantly modifying and modulating each other.

This week's material contextualizes this idea within early development, but it's clearly an ongoing process throughout a person's life. We are our genes, and we are also the environment in which the genes are expressed. The interplay of these factors is constantly progressing and evolving. For me, today, at age 35, the process has slowed somewhat. Genetic traits that had any chance of expressing in my personality have, by now, mostly done so. An adult is less malleable than an infant, and I suspect it's not only due to an infant's mass of unconnected neurons that this is so. As we age, the environment-genetics interplay is joined by a third factor: experience.

The weight of a person's experience is not discussed much in this week's material - again, we're focused on pre- and post-natal development. But for me, right now, I am still experiencing the overlapping influences of my genetics and my environment I did as a child, but I am now also a creature with memory. I know who I have been, and I know the choices I have made over the course of my life. This effect increases as I age; experiences that I have now might recontextualize experiences I had as a child, but they don't change them. This is the Life-Course Perspective view of human development discussed in the previous chapter. This is the increased continuity. Babies are more subject to sudden shifts in temperament and development because they don't have the cushion (or the burden) of experience to modulate the effects.

This is only in true part, of course; a baby's brain is biologically less set than ours. But I wonder - how much of this early-life development is duplicated by adults who suffer severe memory loss?

- Ben

Week 1 - "Versus"

Chapter One, "The Study Of Human Development"

As described in the introductory chapter, most theories of human development hinge on dualities; nature versus nurture, continuity versus discontinuity, universal versus context-specific. And more detailed: Erikson, for instance, lists the psychosocial stages "trust vs. mistrust," "autonomy vs. shame and doubt," "initiative vs. guilt," and so on. The learning theory, as expressed by B.F. Skinner, predicts development based on the feedback to a given behavior - reinforcement vs. punishment. Piaget's cognitive-development theory internalizes this process and gives the individual more agency, but it's still a series of experiments that succeed or fail.

Why are there so many dualities in human development? I'm not suggesting that researchers or theorists are rigidly assigning behaviors and individuals ENTIRELY into column A or column B - for instance, it is increasingly accepted that the true answer to "nature vs. nurture" lands somewhere in the middle - but still, for all these big questions, there are two poles and you must answer based inside that duality.

Why? There are two possibilities I can think of.

First, that it is a echo of the scientific method being applied to these questions. A well-designed experiment will either prove the hypothesis, or fail to prove it. This either/or, wired in to the discernment technique, is amplified and carried out into the larger theories.

The second possibility, not entirely separate from the first, is that duality is intrinsic to how humans view the world. Our brains are difference engines, sorting and categorizing everything we see into as few different piles as possible. "That thing will eat me" or "I can eat that thing." It's how we've always interpreted the world, long before it was codified into the scientific method; therefore, it's how we develop within the world.

- Ben