Understanding and Teaching the Intuitive Mind

Student and Teacher Learning

Bruce Torff, Robert J. Sternberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2001
• ISBN:
  9781135673833
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The intuitive mind is a powerful force in the classroom and often an undetected one. Intuitive conceptions--knowledge or knowledge-structures that individuals acquire and use largely without conscious reflection or explicit instruction--sometimes work to facilitate learning in the classroom and other contexts. But learning may also be impeded by intuitive conceptions, and they can be difficult to dislodge as needed. The literatures in psychology and education include a large and diverse body of theory and research on intuitive conceptions, but this work is limited in some respects. This volume contributes in four ways to overcome these limitations. Understanding and Teaching the Intuitive Mind: Student and Teacher Learning:
* pulls together diverse theoretical and methodological approaches to the origin, structure, function, and development of intuitive conceptions;
* explores a diversity of academic disciplines--paying equal attention not only to mathematics and science, the fields in which intuitive concepts have been studied most extensively, but also to the social sciences, arts, and humanities;
* explicitly links theory and research to educational implications and classroom applications; and
* focuses not only on students' intuitive conceptions but also on teachers' intuitive beliefs about learning and teaching. Although the viewpoints of the contributors are diverse, they share the belief that educational practices have much to gain by systematic studies of the intuitive learner and teacher. This volume offers state-of-the-art, research-based information and support for psychologists, teacher educators, educational administrators, teachers, prospective teachers, and others who seek to develop educational practices that are cognizant of (and responsive to) the intuitive conceptions of students and teachers.

PART I
INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER ONE
Intuitive Conceptions Among Learners and Teachers

Bruce Torff
Hofstra University

Robert J.Sternberg
Yale University

In a high school physics class, Julie and her teacher, Mr. Ewing, are talking about the forces involved as he tosses a coin in the air. Julie suggests that Mr. Ewing’s arm imparts a certain amount of force to the coin, and when this force dissipates the coin starts to fall. Julie’s classmates indicate agreement with this commonsense analysis of the physics of a coin toss. Mr. Ewing is in his first year in the classroom and wants this matter cleared up, so he decides to inform the class about Newton’s laws. Objects, he explains, do not collect and expend “force”—once the coin is set in motion, its path is influenced only by gravity and air resistance. During the lecture the students nod their heads, but a few days later they perform rather poorly on a physics test. The test results show that students can define and describe Newton’s laws, but they continue to use naive notions to make sense of real-world problems (e.g., baseballs being thrown). Later an exasperated Mr. Ewing whispers to colleagues that this group of students is not especially strong in physics.

—Anonymous

This anecdote reveals the influence in classrooms of intuitive conceptions, which we define for the time being as preexisting knowledge or knowledge structures that predispose individuals to think and act in particular ways without much conscious reflection. Accordingly, the process of activating these conceptions might be called intuition. The domain of physics provides the “smoking gun” showing that students’ learning in the classroom is heavily influenced, and can be impeded, by intuitive conceptions. In this example, students hold fast to misconceived intuitive notions about force and agency (notions derivative of Aristotelian dynamics) even after successfully participating in a lesson featuring the prevailing scientific view of the physical world (Newtonian dynamics; e.g., diSessa, 1983; Larkin, 1988; McCloskey, Camarazza, & Green, 1980). Even students who perform in an exemplary manner in class revert to powerful yet inaccurate ideas about physics when tested on real-world problems due to previously existing ideas about physics that the typical course is apparently unable to dislodge.

Equally important in the prior anecdote are Mr. Ewing’s intuitive conceptions—in this case, intuitive notions about how the mind works and how teaching should proceed. Implicit in Mr. Ewing’s decision making is the intuitive view that learning occurs when students absorb information from the environment, so the best teaching occurs when the environment is made rich with information transmitted to students from teachers, books, and other sources. Studies of teachers’ beliefs show that prospective teachers often hold fast to an intuitive transmission model of teaching despite the constructivist view (taught in most teacher-education programs) that knowledge is constructed individually by each learner based on environmental input and individual reflection (e.g., Anderson, 1994; Brookhart & Freeman, 1992; Bruner, 1996; Hollingsworth, 1989; Kagan, 1992; McLaughlin, 1991; Morine-Dershimer, 1993; Shulman, 1987; Strauss, 1993, 1996; Strauss & Shilony, 1994; Torff, 1998, 1999a, 1999b; Woolfolk Hoy, 1996; Zeichner & Gore, 1990). Even people who are trained in education hold powerful intuitive conceptions about teaching and learning, and these intuitive conceptions exert a great deal of influence on the way they think and act in classroom settings. Intuitive conceptions held by teachers, as well as those held by students, influence educational outcomes and not always for the better.

As we detail in the following, the literature in philosophy, psychology, and education set out a variety of approaches to theory and research in the workings of the intuitive mind. This diverse body of work addresses four sets of questions:

1. Defining intuition and intuitive conceptions:

What are intuitive conceptions? How are they structured? How do they work? Where do they come from? What factors facilitate and constrain their functioning?

2. Development of the intuitive mind:

How do intuitive conceptions change of over time? What factors facilitate and constrain this development?

3. Consequences of intuitive conceptions for learning in valued contexts:

What results do intuitive conceptions produce in classrooms and other learning environments? What factors facilitate and constrain the use of intuitive conceptions in classroom learning?

4. Implications for education:

What sorts of pedagogical recommendations have been made? What kinds of interventions are required to develop (or counter) intuitive conceptions in valued contexts of learning, especially in schools?

The present volume presents the viewpoints of nine sets of invited authors who were asked to discuss how their work relates to the notion of intuitive conceptions and what the educational implications of these intuitions might be. To set the stage for the remaining chapters, this chapter reviews the literature on intuitive conceptions. In what follows, to further define and conceptualize the slippery notions of intuition and intuitive conceptions, we provide a framework that brings together diverse approaches to the intuitive mind. We then employ the framework in a review of the literature on the influence of intuitive conceptions on learning. Finally, we take up a special case of intuitive conceptions with particular importance for education—teachers’ intuitive beliefs about learners, learning, and teaching and the influence of these beliefs on educational practices.

CONCEPTUALIZING THE INTUITIVE MIND

Classicism and Interactionism, Past and Present

The notion of intuition has a long and disputatious history that begins in the discipline of philosophy, where there is vigorous debate centering on the origin and function of the intuitive mind. The classic view, identified with Spinoza and Bergson, holds that intuition is a form of intellectual process that is separate from conscious thought and that yields qualitatively different knowledge than the explicit reasoning of the conscious mind. With this view, intuition is a special human capacity that affords an experience of reality—a glimpse of ultimate truth precluded by reason. Opposing the classicists are the interactionists such as Dilthey and Wittgentein, who agree that intuition is conceptually distinct from reason but locate intuition in the person’s interaction with the social world. With this view, what comes to an individual as intuitive depends on socially shared canons of knowledge and skill.

Psychologists have also devoted considerable attention to the notion of intuitive conceptions, especially in the decades since the cognitive revolution of the mid-20th century. Not surprisingly, the psychological literature tends to recapitulate the classicist-interactionist split in the form of the eternally vexing nature-nurture question. No single question has raised more attention than the relative contribution to human behavior of heredity (innately specified, biologically regulated factors) and environment (socially shared and culturally produced factors; see Sternberg & Grigorenko, 1997). On the one hand, views reminiscent of the classic tradition can be seen among a variety of branches of psychology, including cognitive psychology, cognitive-developmental psychology, and evolutionary psychology, where theory and research on intuitive conceptions have been presented as part of a more general quest to understand the innately specified universals of human cognitive structure and function. On the other hand, interactionist views of intuition also abound in contemporary psychology. Psychological anthropologists, cultural psychologists, and psychologists of the sociocultural school (i.e., psychologists focused on the influence of culture and context on cognition) see the origins of the intuitive mind in the interactions between the person and the cultural context. Here the focus is on the influence of processes of social interaction on the development of intuitive conceptions.

Large, diverse, and provocative as these bodies of literature on the intuitive mind are, they are thoroughly fragmented. In the main, the literature comprises a handful of separate pockets of theory and research, with limited communication both within and across the classicist-interactionist divide. This is no simple nature-nurture dispute. Theory and research on intuitive conceptions may be split along classicist-interaction lines, but it is misleading to cast these as opposing camps. Most theorists and researchers focus on one or the other but acknowledge the contribution of the opposite side, and some have made considerable contributions to both sides. As a theoretical matter, an individual could believe in 2 different kinds of intuition or 10. Needed is a framework for pulling together the diversity of views on the intuitive mind.

A Framework for Intuitive Conceptions

Defining Intuitive Conceptions

Intuitive is an intuitive notion. In common parlance, intuition is a handy notion for describing a way to make sense of the world—a form of perceiving and thinking that comes to people spontaneously and naturally without much deliberate conscious reflection, yielding uncritically held knowledge that resonates as truth. In most instances of use, the notion of intuition is suitably clear as a linguistic category and does not require a definition.

However, intuition quickly becomes problematic as a scientific term. Definitions of intuition and intuitive conceptions vary; leaving readers wondering how, if at all, the various terms and theories fit together. Wertsch and Polman (chap. 3, this volume) put it as such: “Although investigators have made headway in understanding what intuitive knowledge is, clarity about many basic terms remains elusive.” Moreover, it remains unclear how intuition relates to other processes of cognitive representation.

One could argue that what is needed here is conceptual clarity in the form of a single definition for a single type of intuition. As a scientific matter, it seems impossible to develop a general theory of intuition that defines the term in a way that is palatable to theorists and researchers from differing viewpoints, given the current fragmentation of the intuitive-conceptions literature. As a practical matter, the single-definition model yields little promise for encouraging distant groups of theorists and researchers to the table.

A more pluralistic approach suggests that the human mind benefits from multiple ways to represent knowledge, and some of them operate outside of conscious reasoning and can therefore be considered intuitive. Intuitive conceptions are defined as ...

Table of contents

• The Educational Psychology Series
• Contents
• Preface
• PART I INTRODUCTION
• PART II INTUITIVE CONCEPTIONS AND STUDENT LEARNING
• PART III INTUITIVE CONCEPTIONS AND TEACHER LEARNING
• Author Index
• Subject Index