Discussion: View Thread

The reaction of Michael Ayers and Sandi Dinger to Michael Levenhagen's posting
seems to be a problem of semantics. In the cognitive psychology of expertise
[e.g., Ericsson 1996 The Road to Excellence. Erlbaum], cognitive "operations"
and "rules", do not have the meanings that Ayers and Dinger interpreted. It is
not possible to perform well while thinking about every operational step that
you are taking, for example, while driving a race car. The operational steps
need to be so well-practiced that they are second nature, automatic responses.
The fact that I can walk or drive or negotiate a contract without thinking
about the steps does NOT make me a computer. What it does do is free up limited
cognitive resources that enables me to think strategically, creatively, to
question motivations and assumptions. This "higher" level of thinking "about
what we are doing" seems to be that which Ayers and Dinger were referring.

Rules: Anderson [1982] explains the acquisition of expertise as knowledge
compilation, a move from declarative knowledge (a semantic network of
interconnected concepts) to procedural knowledge (a set of "production rules"
for problem-solving). The rules are cause-effect relations, often cast as
if-then statements such as: If industry capacity greatly exceeds demand, then
there will be price cutting. One way experts differ from novices (most of our
students) is by drawing on a large set of such rules to zero in on what is
important in a problem.

To become better "thinkers", students need to extend both the depth and breadth
of their knowledge. We give them functional courses to increase depth and
general management and strategy courses to "integrate" breadth. More knowledge
helps to remove the blinders of selective perception (Dearborn & Simon 1958)
and expand "bounded rationality"(Simon). Levenhagen and I and others (such as
Herb Simon) suggest that (in my words) there is some critical mass of knowledge
that needs to be present before creativity and self-guided learning can occur.
In my view, we have to bring students up to some minimum speed before they will
be able to continue learning on their own. Teaching them how to learn is NOT
enough -- they must have a set of basic facts and cause-effect relations on
which to build. How big that minimum set is would be a good topic for
discussion.

In recent work, Ravi Madhavan (U. Illinois Champagne) and I propose that
expert-level strategic thinking develops with deliberate practice with numerous
strategic problems, IF there is progressively complex problem solving and
disciplined follow-up reviews. Case studies are ONE way of providing numerous
managerial problems, but it is critical that they be staged in increasing
difficulty. To LEARN requires feedback, from other students and professors, so
that "wrong" rules don't become encoded, excuse me, ingrained. The higher level
WHY thinking and discussion helps to pull it all together.

If any of the above seems to put my words into other people's mouths, including
my co-author, please do not interpret it that way, because that was not my
intention.

I hope that this brief discourse helped to bridge the apparent semantic gap and
promotes more effective teaching based on research in cognitive psychology. For
many, your teaching is already right on target, but the cognitive findings help
to articulate and structure the underlying process. I believe that this topic
is critically important now because so many instructors are rushing off to
teach via Internet without fully appreciating how the learning is going to
improve or suffer or how that their teaching needs to be adapted to be most
effective in a different mode.
--
Prof. John L. Naman naman+@pitt.edu

I appreciated reading Dr. Naman's point about the semantic gap that existed
between responses on the type of teaching (and learning) that needs to exist
in the classroom. Again, I came in on the discussion late and was speaking
more toward the issue of going beyond teaching the "rules" to students. I am
all too familiar with professors who decide that the "rules" ("the basic
things you'll need to know to get through this course" is how they used to
refer to them) are good enough and spend a semester talking at you from the
text and not with you about how the issues being covered work in the business
world.

One thing I like to do in my Organizational Behavior course (and it lends
itself so well to it, fortunately) is to get students to see the connection
between the terminology we will be using and their own experiences -- for
example, everyone communicates (or at least tries to), everyone has been
either a leader or a follower, every one of us has been exposed to a team
setting of some sort, we've all experienced and coped with stress, and we've
all been exposed to some type of culture, and we've tried to deal with
conflict. Therefore, I see students approaching the material in a more relaxed
manner because they see the practicality in their everyday lives -- they see
how these things apply to them. I explain that my job is simply to introduce
the formal terminology of the concepts, "the rules" for understanding these
phenomena, and allow them to think about these on a more detailed level.

Overall, we need to ensure that we're giving them the basics but that we also
require students to apply these basics in order to achieve that higher level
of learning. Having been a student myself not so long ago, I speak from both
sides -- I can't begin to recall how many classes appeared to be taught in a
vacuum where nothing seemed to be connected to anything else. Our management
school is now discussing how the classes can be linked to form a business
process so that students can see how what they learn in accounting applies to
what they learned in marketing or strategic management or finance or HRM.

Sorry for the post -- just wanted to clarify where I was coming from as there
seemed to be a misunderstanding. Thanks for the lively discussion!! It's
enlightening...

Sandi