Mod 4

1. Mod 4 Exits Slips Inspired by Vivian Turek’s Grace and Class

2. Chapter 4 • Chapter references two types of intellegence • Entity View • Incremental View • Carol Dweck’s work on self-theories of motivation (page 53) • (fixed and stable; oriented to performance goals; want to be better than others; avoid faliure; can lead to learned helplessness) • (intellegence can be changed; learning and mastery as opposed to performance; learning and meeting challenges and believe effort, engagement can increase intelligence; fear failure

3. Introduction • Imagine the following situation: A young man, let’s call him Chad, is sitting at his desk, reading some papers which he needs to complete an assignment in your class. In his right hand he has his phone. With his left one he reaches for a bag of sweets without removing the focus of his eyes from the paper. Suddenly he stares up to the ceiling of his room and asks himself: “What is happening here?”

4. Probably everybody has had experiences like the one. Even though at first sight there is nothing exciting happening in this everyday situation, a lot of what is going on here is highly interesting particularly for researchers and students in the field of Cognitive Psychology. Roughly speaking, an analysis of Chad’ssituationby Cognitive Psychologists would look like this:

5. Chad has a problem; he really needs to do his assignment. To solve this problem, he has to perform loads of cognition. The light reaching his eyes is transduced into electrical signals traveling through several stations to his visual cortex. Meanwhile, complex nets of neurons filter the information flow and compute contrast, color, patterns, positions in space, motion of the objects in Chad’s environment. Stains and lines on the screen become words; words get meaning; the meaning is put into context; analyzed on its relevance for Chad’s problem and finally maybe stored in some part of his memory. At the same time an appetite for sweets is creeping from Chad’s hypothalamus, a region in the brain responsible for controlling the needs of an organism. This appetite finally causes Chad to reach out for his sweets.

6. Early Times • Early thoughts claimed that knowledge was stored in the brain.

7. Over time, evolution • Cognitive Psychology has morphed and grown and experienced revolutions • Not the point of this course, although it is fascinating • Here’s what I think relates to our class…

8. Well-defined problems • The problem has a clearly defined given state. This might be the line-up of a chess game, a given formula you have to solve • There is a finite set of operators, that is, of rules you may apply to the given state. For the chess game, e.g., these would be the rules that tell you which piece you may move to which position. • Finally, the problem has a clear goal state: The equations is resolved to x, all discs are moved to the right stack, or the other player is in checkmate.

9. Well-defined Problems • Can be solved by computers. • Should our classroom be set up this way? • Your thoughts?

10. Ill-defined Problems • What do you suppose an ill-defined problem will look like

11. Ill-defined Problems • Good examples for this are all kinds of tasks that involve creativity, and, generally speaking, all problems for which it is not possible to clearly define a given state and a goal state: Formalizing a problem of the kind “Please paint a beautiful picture” may be impossible. Still this is a problem most people would be able to access in one way or the other, even if the result may be totally different from person to person. And while Chad might judge that picture X is gorgeous, you might completely disagree.

12. Ill-defined • Nevertheless ill-defined problems often involve sub-problems that can be totallywell-defined. On the other hand, many every-day problems that seem to be completely well-defined involve- when examined in detail- a big deal of creativity and ambiguities.

13. Ill-defined Problems • If we think of Chad’s fairly ill-defined task of writing an essay, he will not be able to complete this task without first understanding the text he has to write about. This step is the first sub-goal Chad has to solve. Interestingly, ill-defined problems often involve sub-problems that are well-defined.

14. Exit Slips • Can we apply this to exit slips? • Take a general assignment that you might assign. • Discuss these assignments with your neighbors. • What is well-defined? • What is ill-defined? • What would be helpful for sub-goals for students? • Example…These kids don’t even know how to write an introduction! • Please expand your thinking to other departments! • We will share ideas in about 5-10 minutes. • Try to come up with good sub-goals to ask on an exit slip. (let’s record our list, and experiment with these to start our semester 2, and discuss at our next session)