Today we host a very stim­u­lat­ing essay on the impor­tance of problem-solving and encour­ag­ing com­plex game-playing for children’s com­plete “cog­ni­tive nutri­tion”. Enjoy!

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Children’s Com­plex Thinking

– By Tom O’Brien and Chris­tine Wallach

Pop over to your neigh­bor­hood school and visit some class­rooms. Is what’s hap­pen­ing cog­ni­tively nutri­tive? That is, does it sat­isfy present needs and pro­vide nour­ish­ment for the future health and devel­op­ment of children’s thinking?

Or is it puni­tive, with lit­tle con­cern for present nour­ish­ment and future health and development?

The Genevan psy­chol­o­gist and researcher Her­mina Sin­clair said,

All of us con­cerned with edu­ca­tion should view chil­dren as wear­ing sign­boards say­ing Under Con­struc­tion. No, wait a moment. I didn’t say that strongly enough. All of us should look at peo­ple as wear­ing sign­boards say­ing, Under Con­struc­tion — Self Employed. (See Ref­er­ence 1.)

We are in the fifth year of research, work which sheds light on Sinclair’s claim, shows that present edu­ca­tional goals for chil­dren are often triv­ial, and which sug­gests that cur­rent meth­ods of caus­ing learn­ing to take place should be re-thought.

The work shows that chil­dren at grades 1–5 are capa­ble of stun­ningly com­plex think­ing and that this goal can be achieved with no direct teach­ing, but rather by pos­ing prob­lems for the chil­dren to solve.

Our work involves casual log­i­cal games cre­ated by O Brien. Reports on the research appear in Ref­er­ence 2.

The games are avail­able for Palm pdas through OS 5 at Handango.com under the title Trea­sure Hunt. See Ref­er­ence 3.

The games involve a search for jew­els on a 4 by 4 grid.

In all games, play­ers ask for infor­ma­tion and then assess the con­se­quences of the infor­ma­tion to locate the jewel(s) with log­i­cal neces­sity. The issue is infer­ence: the deriv­ing of new infor­ma­tion (con­clu­sions) from old infor­ma­tion (data).

In all games, two lev­els are avail­able: 1) search for 1 jewel and 2) search for 2 jewels.

In one game, Find the Emer­ald, an emer­ald is hid­den at ran­dom and the player chooses a box (in this case, A-2.)The dis­tance from A-2 to the mys­tery jewel is 2. The dis­tance is left-right and up-down, not diag­o­nal. So if a child asked about A-2 and if the feed­back were 2, the Emer­ald would have to be in B-1, C-2, B-3, or A-4. Which box would you ask about next?

In a dif­fer­ent game in the Trea­sure Hunt suite, Rubies, play­ers choose a box and the com­puter looks in that box and all the boxes which touch that box and tells the play­ers whether or not it sees a Ruby. (In the case of the two-Ruby game, the com­puter reports 0, 1 or 2 Rubies seen.)

In a third game, Dia­monds, the player chooses a box. If the mys­tery jewel is in that box or if it is touch­ing that box side­ways, the feed­back is Hot. If the mys­tery jewel is touch­ing the child’s box cor­ner­wise, the feed­back is Warm. If the two boxes are not touch­ing, the feed­back is Cold. (In the two-Diamond game, the child’s box may be Hot to one jewel and Warm to another. The feed­back is Hot, because Hot over­rules Warm. Sim­i­larly, Hot over­rules Cold. And Warm over­rules Cold.)

Dur­ing our research, no teach­ing took place aside from giv­ing chil­dren an expla­na­tion of the rules of the game. Chil­dren worked together with the teacher as the data-giver. Some­times a Palm device and a pro­jec­tion device were used and some­times the teacher cal­cu­lated the feed­back and recorded the data on a chalkboard.

Although three-jewel games have not been pro­grammed for the Palm, recent research has involved three-jewels (with the teacher hid­ing the jew­els and cal­cu­lat­ing the feedback.)

One-jewel games are acces­si­ble to most chil­dren, even as early as grade 1. Two– and three-jewel games, how­ever, are very com­plex. Read­ers are encour­aged to play the games with friends with or with­out an elec­tronic device.

Con­clu­sions

The main find­ings were four:

1. In gen­eral, chil­drens think­ing from grade 1 to grade 5 was very com­plex and eco­nom­i­cal. Chil­dren very rarely asked a use­less ques­tion and very rarely made a false inference.

2. Chil­dren worked together with enthu­si­asm and respect. They ques­tioned each other’s think­ing in ways that were con­sid­er­ate, and they sup­ported each other’s learn­ing by explain­ing how they arrived at their con­clu­sions. This behav­ior would be a sur­prise to many teach­ers. How to explain what hap­pened? Chil­dren were trusted to tackle very com­plex tasks rather than being spoon fed with the accom­pa­ny­ing hid­den mes­sage, “You are capa­ble only of fol­low­ing the teacher’s instructions.

3. Vir­tu­ally all chil­dren were suc­cess­fully engaged and it was often the case that chil­dren who had had lit­tle class­room suc­cess did very com­plex think­ing. One impli­ca­tion is that the tra­di­tional method, direct teach­ing, often doesn’t encour­age orig­i­nal and com­plex think­ing Our research shows that they crave it.

One girl who was birth-deformed and who never spoke above a whis­per, took over the class at one point, “Tell me, John, What box do you want to know about? A-3? A-3 is 3. What are the con­se­quences? Now, Susan, tell me what you have to add to what John just said. Another child, Boris, had had no suc­cess, aca­d­e­m­i­cally or socially, from kinder­garten to grade 5. He thrived on the search games. Unknown to the school staff, Boris was an Asperger’s logic machine, capa­ble of incred­i­bly com­plex thinking.

4. Through­out the years of research, evi­dence has been pre­sented to sup­port the view that learn­ing involves pro­voked adap­ta­tion. Peo­ple revise their orig­i­nal net­works of ideas and con­struct new ones in the face of chal­lenges, nov­elty and prob­lem sit­u­a­tions. This is far from what’s com­mon­place in today’s world of fun­da­men­tal­ist abso­lutist author­i­tar­ian poli­cies and practices.

Com­ments

The notion that knowl­edge is con­structed is not pop­u­lar in these days. Indeed, a denial of this fun­da­men­tal human act per­haps the must fun­da­men­tal cog­ni­tive act of all has led Amer­i­can edu­ca­tional crit­ics to impose an approach to edu­ca­tion appro­pri­ate only for par­rots. See Ref­er­ence 3.

But in our research one sees chil­dren con­struct­ing impor­tant ideas con­cern­ing log­i­cal necessity.

The research sup­ports the idea that knowl­edge evolves in terms of coher­ence, sta­bil­ity, econ­omy and gen­er­al­iz­abil­ity. And when it achieves equi­lib­rium it quests.(See Ref­er­ence 4. It was rou­tine no, uni­ver­sal that kids fin­ished a game and said, “Can we do a harder one?”

Are these expe­ri­ences nour­ish­ing? That is, will they have an effect twenty years from now? We don’t know. Come back in twenty years.

We think that the answer is yes. We base this hunch on the fact that we meet par­ents in the school­yard or the gro­cery story who say, “What are these logic games Johnny is play­ing in class? He likes them very much and he has the whole fam­ily play­ing Emer­alds and Rubies and Dia­monds around the din­ner table at night.”

Other kids pop back to class two or three years after their class has moved on. “Can I play Dia­monds? I remem­ber the game well.” And they play a game or two of Dia­monds with all their tac­tics still fresh.

Indeed, it is the rare teacher who can cite such events. Rather, they say, “With the tra­di­tional cur­ricu­lum it often seems as though that kids for­get every­thing they’ve learned when sum­mer vaca­tion arrives. They come back in Sep­tem­ber hav­ing for­got­ten nearly every­thing. It seems like they had never been to school in the first place.

— Thomas C. O Brien is pro­fes­sor emer­i­tus, South­ern Illi­nois Uni­ver­sity at Edwardsville. He is a for­mer North Atlantic Treaty Orga­ni­za­tion (NATO) Senior Research Fel­low in Sci­ence. He is a con­sul­tant, author, and soft­ware devel­oper. His web­site is http://www.professortobbs.com/.

— Chris­tine Wal­lach is a vet­eran teacher at New City School, St. Louis MO.

Ref­er­ences

1. Extracts from a Sem­i­nar, “Intel­lec­tual Devel­op­ment, Research and Edu­ca­tion,” by Her­mina deZwart Sin­clair (Uni­ver­sity of Geneva), Teach­ers’ Cen­ter Project, South­ern Illi­nois Uni­ver­sity at Edwardsville, Edwardsville, IL, 1977.

“The Child as Sci­en­tist,” an inter­view with Her­mina deZwart Sin­clair (Uni­ver­sity of Geneva), Teach­ers’ Cen­ter Project, South­ern Illi­nois Uni­ver­sity at Edwardsville, Edwardsville, IL, 1977.

2. Thomas C. O Brien and Judy Bar­nett, “Fas­ten your seat belts,” Phi Delta Kap­pan, 85(3), 201–6, Novem­ber 2003.

Thomas C. O Brien and Judy Bar­nett, “Hold on to your hat,” Math­e­mat­ics Teach­ing, 87, June 2004.

Thomas C. O Brien and Chris Wal­lach, “Chil­dren Teach a Chicken,”  Math­e­mat­ics Teach­ing, 93, Decem­ber 2005.

Thomas C. O Brien, “A Les­son on Log­i­cal Neces­sity,” Teach­ing Chil­dren Math­e­mat­ics, 13(1), August 2006.

Thomas C. O Brien and Chris Wal­lach, “Chil­drens Con­struc­tion of Log­i­cal Neces­sity, Pri­mary Math­e­mat­ics, Autumn 2007.

3. The Trea­sure Hunt games are avail­able for pur­chase at www.Handango.com. See Here.

Two other suites of O Brien’s soft­ware, Find It and Mys­tery Three, show iden­ti­cal research results, These can be found at the Han­dango site.

Accord­ing to Palm experts, all three soft­ware suites work with all mod­els of Palm devices includ­ing hand­helds and smart phones  i.e., M100 series, M500 series, Lifedrive, Tung­stens, Zires, Treos and Centro.

4. Thomas C. O’Brien, “Par­rot Math,” Phi Delta Kap­pan, 80(6), Feb­ru­ary 1999.

5. Thomas C. O Brien, “What’s Basic a Con­struc­tivist View” in Hand­book of Basic Issues and Choices, National Insti­tute of Edu­ca­tion, USOE, March 1982.

Thomas C. O Brien, “Some Thoughts on Treasure-Keeping,” Phi Delta Kap­pan, Jan­u­ary 1989.

Thomas C. O’Brien, and Ann Moss, “What’s Basic in Math­e­mat­ics?,” The Prin­ci­pal, Novem­ber 2004

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