Sternberg. Chapter 1. continued…

With apologies to Freudian pop psychologists, inquiring about a user’s relationship with his mother is not likely to yield useful information for instructional design. Post modern scream therapy, on the other hand, may make users of a broken instructional system feel better for a short time. I have certainly screamed at WebCT over the last 4 years, yet I never detected an improvement in the design.

Research in cognitive psychology aims at discovering the ways in which people think: how they absorb, process, retain, and disseminate information, and how they use that information to make decisions. Understanding the principles of cognitive psychology benefits the designers of instructional systems. The findings from cognitive research can help designers issue products that benefit the user by taking advantage of his or her preferred learning style. Since an institution is likely to use only one instructional system (at a time [most of the time]), students with distinct learning styles from each other are likely to use the same system. Designers need to account for diverse learning styles, and give users the right to set preferences according to their own taste or need. More importantly, designers need to provide a product that does not inhibit a user with bugs that inhibit learning, or engender frustration.

Sternberg, Chapter 1…

…and my existing relationship to the concepts therein:
Structuralism, as understanding the elements of the mind and its perceptions by analyzing those perceptions into components, limits the imagination.  If I divide a flower into the components of color, form, size, I understand very little about the combined effects of these components, which lead a poet to call them the Earth’s laughter.  Radical behaviorism is just as silly for the same reason.  Gestalt, as explicated by Sternberg, makes more sense to me.

If we were to only combine observable behavior with associationism, we are left with bad statistical analysis, as pointed out by Steven Leavitt in his book Freakonomics.  “Oh look, people with lots of books at home have children that tend to do well in school.  Let’s give books away to everyone so they get smarter.”  Except that, as Leavitt pointed out, the people who own lots of books don’t necessarily read them.  There are other factors to consider, and the analyst/observer must consider the system as a whole rather than the components, which are mere symptoms.

Some members of my faculty insist that what Sternberg terms Pragmatism, leads to more funding for research.  If fewer people understand a field of research, and those few can not explain its significance to others, they are less likely to get funding for their research, especially if they can not demonstrate the social benefits.  As such, I have been encouraged to conduct research that I can explain to a generalist, and that has broad and perceivable positive contributions.  This idea has aided me in crafting research proposals.  If I have an idea that seems whimsical at first, I try to connect to some social need.  Often, my idea shifts in the process, but that develops into something I can be more passionate about.

That doesn’t make the Society for Improbable Research any less inspirational.