Psurprised by Psychology

In the course of our summer curriculum class we have had the opportunity to hear about a great number of educational psychologists whose work has been fundamental to the foundation of research into best teaching practices. Amongst those our professor mentioned were Nancy Lesko, Albert Bandura, Frank Pajares, and Jerome Bruner. The list of researchers was a bit daunting to someone not steeped in the world of educational psychology - nevertheless I intended to research at least one of these further. Since I had the opportunity to read sections of Bruner's “The Will to Learn” I decided I would look more into his work, so I checked out his series of essays entitled "On Knowing" and dove in. I was glad I did – it seems that much of Bruner’s interest runs to the understanding of the learning of mathematics, especially as it is concerned with some of the social and personal aspects behind that learning. One interesting case was that of an adolescent student who would work himself up into a near aggressiveness when faced with a math problem. In particular it is mentioned that he saw fractions as confusing, "cut up numbers". This was particularly interesting to me since many of my students have a hard time with working with fractions. It does not seem to be so much a difficulty with the mechanics rather than a fundamental lack of understanding of the concept and, as was the case of the student in the Bruner essay, a near hostility to the topic. I decided to try to put myself into the shoes of a student learning fractions for the first time. for those of you who aren't teachers, putting yourself into the students shoes is probably the most effective method of understanding what a student needs to understand and gaining crucial cognitive empathy with their difficulties. I realized that fundamentally fractions were not numbers at all but two numbers in a specific relationship where one is a precise number of times the other. With that in mind it was easier to see how students could have difficulty with the standard operations of cross-multiplication and common denominators and helped in developing a strategy to address these common problems.

In reading “On Knowing” I was impressed with the fact even though Bruner was recruited to do work in industrial psychology (the science of turning multi-dimensional human beings into cogs in a capitalist tool shop - my definition) he nevertheless was astute and caring enough to glean lessons in human cognitive development which are still cited today. I also found his discussion of experience, art and meaning much more approachable than Dewey’s writings on the same topic, which seemed to be more a sermon than anything else. Indeed his theme of left handed vs. right handed mind seems to have anticipated similar terms in the popular vernacular by at least 20 years. I also found it an interesting happenstance that particular topics he mentions in the book – non decimal base number systems, topology, and truth tables are in fact ones that I gave my students for summer assignments in my new Honors Geometry class to prepare them for enrichment lessons I have planned around those very topics! I guess I’m on the right track…