Quick armchair experiment: Imagine you have a 12 year old boy named Johnny. You have requested a conference with his 7th grade math teacher, Mr. Smith. When you ask Mr. Smith to explain Johnny’s relatively low report card grade for math, he says that Johnny is less intelligent than others in the class. How does that make you feel?
Now imagine a nearly identical scenario with only 1 difference: substitute “motivated” for “intelligent” so that Mr. Smith’s explanation for the low grade is that Johnny is less motivated than others in the class. How does that make you feel?
If you are like me you have had plenty of parents inquire about kids’ grades, and so have already put yourself in the place of this imaginary parent. And you likely never have nor ever will attribute poor performance to lack of intelligence -- that just seems cruel! But you probably have offered something like the second explanation: that little Johnny just hasn’t put in the effort required. If he just works harder his grades will improve. That sounds so much nicer.
The difference between the two explanations -- the reason the first seems cruel and the second nice -- may seem obvious, but only given an intuitive model of intelligence and motivation that I think needs revision. According to the model intelligence describes something about a person’s biology while motivation describes something about a person’s spirit. With this model intelligence limits a person, something like a person’s height, except even more broad in the scope of things a person won’t be able to do. Motivation, on the other hand, potentially expands the person. It feels like the immaterial medium through which we transcend our physical boundaries.
I'd like to point out two good reasons to get over this model. First, any conceptual model that relies on non-natural phenomena puts itself beyond the scope of science. What research program can you design to look for the sources of motivation if it is, in essence, a non-physical trait? Second, as new data emerge they must be reconciled with our models for understanding the underlying processes at work. Brain imaging studies, for example, may produce data about motivation that need explanation. Models built on non-physical attributes will not provide the foundation needed to accommodate these data and something will be forfeited -- either the best interpretation of the data or the model that we have come to rely on.
Most of the non-scientific community is ready to forfeit the best interpretation of the data. Social-scientific studies, particularly in education, also seem determined to follow human intuition and attempt to fit the data with outdated models of human agency. The rest of this post will illustrate with a case in point.
A small buzz began to hum in the blogosphere following the December publication of a new study about the sources of improvement in understanding math. [see http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/cdev.12036/abstract] The website of the British Pschological Society led with: "Being motivated could be of greater importance than intelligence when it comes to academic achievement, new research has suggested." The post continued, "the study found a young person's growth in mathematics achievement is driven more by their determination and how they study rather than how smart they are." [http://www.bps.org.uk/news/motivation-more-important-intelligence]
US News reported that "Innate intelligence -- as defined by IQ tests -- may provide a head start, but it's learning skills and determination that ultimately add up to success, according to the new research." [http://health.usnews.com/health-news/news/articles/2012/12/20/motivation-and-study-not-iq-are-keys-to-kids-math-success]
Most tellingly,Time.com posted, "You don’t have to be born with math skills; solving problems is a matter of studying and motivation." This is a welcome finding, the author contends, because "...the findings provide reassuring confirmation that academic success is not governed by a student’s cognitive abilities alone." [emphasis mine] [http://healthland.time.com/2012/12/26/motivation-not-iq-matters-most-for-learning-new-math-skills/]
Thank goodness, these posts imply, math performance depends on something besides the brain -- even if ultimately the brain has to do the work. You are born with the brain (or at least the instructions for growing it) but motivation comes from somewhere else. Someone demanding a fully naturalistic account of math performance might like to know where to find all the non-cognitive human math abilities.
The appetite for this kind of news is abundant and calls out for an explanation. One reason is that it seems to support the intuitive model that motivation and intelligence are different. This feeds into the desire that parents and teachers feel to help young people. It's hard to imagine ways to intervene to increase intelligence but easier to imagine ways to intervene to increase motivation. It likely goes even deeper, though, to the sense of personal efficacy that correlates with perception of control. When we feel that something is outside of our control -- then it is outside of our control. Conversely, to the extent we are convinced that something is within our control, we actually gain a concomitant measure of control over it.
The intuitive model of human motivation requires that it works something like Dumbo's magic feather. Both posit the need for magical source of power. The point of the story, though, was that the feather wasn't actually magic. And for Dumbo to think that flying depended on magic made his flying susceptible to what nature would ultimately reveal -- that the feather was just a feather, and what mattered was Dumbo's belief about himself.
The intuition about motivation is like Dumbo's belief about the feather. It may have served to foster a sense of self-efficacy, but we have to grow past the belief that it's source is other-worldly if our powers are to continue. Continued research in neuroscience will likely reveal that motivation is a cognitive ability just like intelligence. It is built into the brain, varies from person to person, and worst of all, levels of motivation probably remain stable within one person. I think it is likely we will learn we have no more power to intervene over intrinsic motivation than over intelligence.
That intelligence and motivation are both real and physically mediated in the brain does not need to imply that our involvement as teachers and parents is wasted. Understanding how someone processes information and how they are self-motivated gives us the tools -- perhaps the only tools -- for appropriate intervention. Discussing the intelligence of the children we work with should not be any more taboo than discussing relative levels of motivation.
Showing posts with label biological determinism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label biological determinism. Show all posts
Friday, January 18, 2013
Tuesday, January 15, 2013
Lance, Grit, and Dope(amine)
Put aside your grief for a moment and you can likely bring to mind an iconic image of Lance Armstrong driving himself toward the finish line of yet another long and grueling race. We are compelled by great athletic achievement because it shows us what is possible. Your sympathy for Armstrong may be low right now, but only obstinate denial will keep you from remembering that there was a point when he was bald, bedridden, and facing death. You may decide to cast your stones now, but who had the stones then? The greatness of a successful athlete is not due to having a true moral compass -- as we might like. What is required of our athletes is the true grit to accomplish personal goals. Lance doped because that’s what it took to win the Tour De France. The real difference between Lance and the other riders on tour wasn’t the dope, it was the dopamine -- a chemical in the brain now implicated in motivation.
Let me suggest that what we all want -- what we need, really, to participate as persons in the world -- is the leverage to move ourselves toward what is of value. The term for that leverage is agency. Further, despite wishful thinking to the contrary, agency isn’t a birthright. We have to work for it ourselves and demand it of others. Agency is the parent of twins: freedom and responsibility. We get traction for our agency from grit. Athletes show us what grit looks like so that we can use it, in some measure, for ourselves.
Athletic pursuit operates in a specially designed microcosm so that goals are readily defined and success in easily measured. All the work that athletes put in -- all the planning, training, dieting, managing, and competing -- is rationalized by a set of explicit performance goals that generalize to “winning.” To that extent you cannot dismiss the importance of winning because it defines the index used to measure the success of all that work. We still mean it when we say “winning isn’t everything” though, because the pursuit of winning is itself in service to the greater purpose of athletics: to showcase our capacity to set and meet goals -- to prove our agency in the world.
One reason you are grief-stricken over the Lance Armstrong scandal is because the means he used to reach his goals were against the rules. Rules, however, like all other defining aspects of sports contests, are a means for establishing what competitors have to do in order to win. To a non-competitor the rule may look simple: “don’t take EPO.” That’s about as simple in bike racing as the rule: “don’t foul” is in basketball. Just like the real goal for basketball players becomes to make the greatest possible use of personal contact without getting called for a foul, the real goal for endurance cyclists is to get the most possible red blood cells without failing a drug test. Although those outside the sport are upset, my guess is that most of Armstrong’s immediate competitors at the time accepted that Lance had won at the game they had all tacitly agreed to play. Unspoken rules among athletes are subject to interpretation and change -- and of course pressure from outside. I suspect that is what is going on now.
Lance Armstrong won an unprecedented 7 Tours De France. Two questions emerge for me now that he is poised to confess his use of performance enhancing drugs. First, should these drugs be against the rules? He had to successfully take and cover up PEDs in secret for his whole career. Think what he could have accomplished if he could have used PEDs to maximum effect with the full benefit of doctors and specialists working openly! That interesting question is not the subject of this post, however. The question I’d like to consider, and I’m going to assume that most of Armstrong’s main rivals were not above doping themselves, is what set Armstrong apart? For that matter, what sets any of us apart? Even if you remain indignant and hold that Armstrong deserves no credit, will you at least concede that he was highly motivated? Lance saw where he wanted to be even when he was a long way from it. And he got there, taking large risks along the way. That’s motivation, right? I think it’s fair to say that Armstrong was sufficiently motivated to do what it took to win the Tour De France.
If you ever took a psychology class you can probably bring to mind the experiments in which rats greedily press a lever to get a morsel of food. A very general finding was that the neurotransmitter dopamine was released when the rats got the food. Dopamine is known to be integral to human experience of pleasure as well. New research continues to refine our understanding of the role of dopamine, however, and it goes a lot deeper than mediating our desires for food and sex. According to a recent study by John Salamone and Mercè Correa [The Mysterious Motivational Functions of Mesolimbic Dopamine. Neuron, 2012; 76 (3): 470 DOI:10.1016/j.neuron.2012.10.021] the neurons activated by dopamine are tasked with “behavioral activation, exertion of effort, approach behavior, sustained task engagement, Pavlovian processes, and instrumental learning.” If that sounds a little technical, I can paraphrase. Dopamine is not the chemical of reward, washing over us after the work is done, it’s the chemical of motivation -- jacking us up to do the work required. The cells that kick in with dopamine cause us to get going, to work hard, to go toward the thing we want, to stick with it, to do more of the things we find working, and to do more of the things that help us to achieve our goals. Experimental evidence suggests that dopamine circuits don’t cause us to find the destination more rewarding, they increase our willingness to do more work en route to getting there.
The neurochemistry of dopamine is important because we seek interventions for people suffering from a range of conditions from depression to addiction. At root these conditions are about motivation -- too little in the case of depression and too much in the case of addiction. A stark and unsettling implication of this research is that one could literally take the measure of the brain chemistry of any group of individuals and quantify a range of motivational states. Some people are more motivated than others. I’m sure one could similarly take the measure of a single individual over time and find a similar range of motivational states. We are more motivated at some times than at others. Biological determinism rears its ugly head. Are we just puppets pulled by the firings of nerve cells that have too much or too little of the chemical needed for motivation?
That is not the kind of question broached in the standard fare of education literature. Michael Horn authored the book Disrupting Class to describe his system for motivating young learners. In his blog on Forbes he posts this synopsis with the title: Building Motivation, Instilling Grit.” [See: http://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelhorn/2013/01/10/building-motivation-instilling-grit-the-necessity-of-mastery-based-digital-learning/] In it he argues that technology now provides the means for all students to work toward mastery individually at the appropriate level and pace. All that is required is the intrinsic motivation to get there. I was right with him until he went on to describe (as the title suggests) how we should instill the grit needed into seemingly unmotivated students. How, I wanted to know, can you “instill” something and it also be intrinsic to the person? Never mind the chemistry -- whose motivation are we talking about here? If it is intrinsic, it has to be the student’s own. If the educator does the work, it was the educator who was motivated. Can a teacher work to get students to do something? Of course! Call and order pizzas for students who finish. But if that is what moved the student it was extrinsic. Remove the promise of a pizza and the student will stop working.
And before you correct me, I realize that in a real classroom the dynamic is considerably more complicated. Maybe I ordered pizzas just because I’m a nice guy and I like my students. Students like me because I’m a nice guy and because I like them. Kids do the assignment, therefore, because they like me, even if I don’t always have a pizza waiting for them. Psychoanalyzing a group of kids is fraught with peril in any case -- you can’t always know why they do what they do! The point I hoped to make is more definitional. Behavior that is motivated intrinsically doesn’t depend on someone else making you do it.
More perplexing still, Horn insists that all young people are equally motivated to pursue what is of value. The reason some students appear more motivated than others, he says, is that schools haven’t made the case that all students should buy what schools are selling. Few things are as aggravating to me as the assumption that differences in student performance are best explained by differences in the effort of teachers and schools. That implies that improving the performance of students requires teachers and schools to be more motivated. Grit doesn’t work that way. Grit is the real traction given a person to pursue what is of value -- to him. It takes work: stepping toward the problem, confronting it, and sticking with it until one has achieved the thing of value. No one can do it for you.
That the chemical transactions in your brain likely differ from those in other brains might cause you to view your own agency as limited or absent. With that view you are as doomed as the student waiting to be sufficiently motivated by his teacher. In the meantime I suggest you continue to watch and revere those who do not shrink back in the face of apparent obstacles to their own success.
Let me suggest that what we all want -- what we need, really, to participate as persons in the world -- is the leverage to move ourselves toward what is of value. The term for that leverage is agency. Further, despite wishful thinking to the contrary, agency isn’t a birthright. We have to work for it ourselves and demand it of others. Agency is the parent of twins: freedom and responsibility. We get traction for our agency from grit. Athletes show us what grit looks like so that we can use it, in some measure, for ourselves.
Athletic pursuit operates in a specially designed microcosm so that goals are readily defined and success in easily measured. All the work that athletes put in -- all the planning, training, dieting, managing, and competing -- is rationalized by a set of explicit performance goals that generalize to “winning.” To that extent you cannot dismiss the importance of winning because it defines the index used to measure the success of all that work. We still mean it when we say “winning isn’t everything” though, because the pursuit of winning is itself in service to the greater purpose of athletics: to showcase our capacity to set and meet goals -- to prove our agency in the world.
One reason you are grief-stricken over the Lance Armstrong scandal is because the means he used to reach his goals were against the rules. Rules, however, like all other defining aspects of sports contests, are a means for establishing what competitors have to do in order to win. To a non-competitor the rule may look simple: “don’t take EPO.” That’s about as simple in bike racing as the rule: “don’t foul” is in basketball. Just like the real goal for basketball players becomes to make the greatest possible use of personal contact without getting called for a foul, the real goal for endurance cyclists is to get the most possible red blood cells without failing a drug test. Although those outside the sport are upset, my guess is that most of Armstrong’s immediate competitors at the time accepted that Lance had won at the game they had all tacitly agreed to play. Unspoken rules among athletes are subject to interpretation and change -- and of course pressure from outside. I suspect that is what is going on now.
Lance Armstrong won an unprecedented 7 Tours De France. Two questions emerge for me now that he is poised to confess his use of performance enhancing drugs. First, should these drugs be against the rules? He had to successfully take and cover up PEDs in secret for his whole career. Think what he could have accomplished if he could have used PEDs to maximum effect with the full benefit of doctors and specialists working openly! That interesting question is not the subject of this post, however. The question I’d like to consider, and I’m going to assume that most of Armstrong’s main rivals were not above doping themselves, is what set Armstrong apart? For that matter, what sets any of us apart? Even if you remain indignant and hold that Armstrong deserves no credit, will you at least concede that he was highly motivated? Lance saw where he wanted to be even when he was a long way from it. And he got there, taking large risks along the way. That’s motivation, right? I think it’s fair to say that Armstrong was sufficiently motivated to do what it took to win the Tour De France.
If you ever took a psychology class you can probably bring to mind the experiments in which rats greedily press a lever to get a morsel of food. A very general finding was that the neurotransmitter dopamine was released when the rats got the food. Dopamine is known to be integral to human experience of pleasure as well. New research continues to refine our understanding of the role of dopamine, however, and it goes a lot deeper than mediating our desires for food and sex. According to a recent study by John Salamone and Mercè Correa [The Mysterious Motivational Functions of Mesolimbic Dopamine. Neuron, 2012; 76 (3): 470 DOI:10.1016/j.neuron.2012.10.021] the neurons activated by dopamine are tasked with “behavioral activation, exertion of effort, approach behavior, sustained task engagement, Pavlovian processes, and instrumental learning.” If that sounds a little technical, I can paraphrase. Dopamine is not the chemical of reward, washing over us after the work is done, it’s the chemical of motivation -- jacking us up to do the work required. The cells that kick in with dopamine cause us to get going, to work hard, to go toward the thing we want, to stick with it, to do more of the things we find working, and to do more of the things that help us to achieve our goals. Experimental evidence suggests that dopamine circuits don’t cause us to find the destination more rewarding, they increase our willingness to do more work en route to getting there.
The neurochemistry of dopamine is important because we seek interventions for people suffering from a range of conditions from depression to addiction. At root these conditions are about motivation -- too little in the case of depression and too much in the case of addiction. A stark and unsettling implication of this research is that one could literally take the measure of the brain chemistry of any group of individuals and quantify a range of motivational states. Some people are more motivated than others. I’m sure one could similarly take the measure of a single individual over time and find a similar range of motivational states. We are more motivated at some times than at others. Biological determinism rears its ugly head. Are we just puppets pulled by the firings of nerve cells that have too much or too little of the chemical needed for motivation?
That is not the kind of question broached in the standard fare of education literature. Michael Horn authored the book Disrupting Class to describe his system for motivating young learners. In his blog on Forbes he posts this synopsis with the title: Building Motivation, Instilling Grit.” [See: http://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelhorn/2013/01/10/building-motivation-instilling-grit-the-necessity-of-mastery-based-digital-learning/] In it he argues that technology now provides the means for all students to work toward mastery individually at the appropriate level and pace. All that is required is the intrinsic motivation to get there. I was right with him until he went on to describe (as the title suggests) how we should instill the grit needed into seemingly unmotivated students. How, I wanted to know, can you “instill” something and it also be intrinsic to the person? Never mind the chemistry -- whose motivation are we talking about here? If it is intrinsic, it has to be the student’s own. If the educator does the work, it was the educator who was motivated. Can a teacher work to get students to do something? Of course! Call and order pizzas for students who finish. But if that is what moved the student it was extrinsic. Remove the promise of a pizza and the student will stop working.
And before you correct me, I realize that in a real classroom the dynamic is considerably more complicated. Maybe I ordered pizzas just because I’m a nice guy and I like my students. Students like me because I’m a nice guy and because I like them. Kids do the assignment, therefore, because they like me, even if I don’t always have a pizza waiting for them. Psychoanalyzing a group of kids is fraught with peril in any case -- you can’t always know why they do what they do! The point I hoped to make is more definitional. Behavior that is motivated intrinsically doesn’t depend on someone else making you do it.
More perplexing still, Horn insists that all young people are equally motivated to pursue what is of value. The reason some students appear more motivated than others, he says, is that schools haven’t made the case that all students should buy what schools are selling. Few things are as aggravating to me as the assumption that differences in student performance are best explained by differences in the effort of teachers and schools. That implies that improving the performance of students requires teachers and schools to be more motivated. Grit doesn’t work that way. Grit is the real traction given a person to pursue what is of value -- to him. It takes work: stepping toward the problem, confronting it, and sticking with it until one has achieved the thing of value. No one can do it for you.
That the chemical transactions in your brain likely differ from those in other brains might cause you to view your own agency as limited or absent. With that view you are as doomed as the student waiting to be sufficiently motivated by his teacher. In the meantime I suggest you continue to watch and revere those who do not shrink back in the face of apparent obstacles to their own success.
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