cognitive competence and performance in everyday environments

ISSUES IN COGNITION

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BULLETIN OF THE ORTON SOCIETY

In a state-of-the-art paper on "Cognitive Styles and Reading Performance," Nathan Kogan concludes, after a comprehensive review of investigations to date, that the cognitive style-reading connection is a case of still unfulfilled promise. He offers a number of suggestions, however, for research that could "bridge" the domains of cognitive styles and reading performance, including a suggestion for combining cognitive styles with other cognitive measures.

But research in cognitive development still faces, at the very least, serious procedural problems. Sheldon White makes this clear in his paper on "Cognitive Competence and Performance in Everyday Environments." After an impressive discussion of Piaget's influence on the study of children's thinking, Dr. White points to some of the limitations in Piaget's investigations (limitations that apply broadly to other investigators as well). The limitations he cites range from the studies of children's thinking only about physical objects to studies where the locus of the experiment is only within a quiet and controlled environment. In fact, children learn to think and perform in many ways and usually in relatively noisy and crowded and uncontrolled non-laboratory environments. The task now for research is to find out how this happens.

Herman T. Epstein follows a different path in his exploration of cognitive development. He not only emphasizes the biological bases of cognitive development but also of language, and he presents evidence that both are linked to stages of brain growth. In persuasive argument, Dr. Epstein presents his view of the development of language, logic, and reading as functions related to the development of the brain. He warns that ignoring their correlated growth with the brain imperils our understanding of all three functions.

Two other papers complete this section. Kees van den Bos explores cognitive abilities in children with learning disabilities and questions some of the prevailing notions about them. Of particular interest is the comparison of studies of Dutch children with studies of children in the United States. C. Addison Stone reports on his research in the cognitive development of adolescents with learning disabilities. Studying a population drawn from the diagnostic center at Northwestern University, he presents findings in the use of cognitive strategies that appear to differentiate a subgroup with generalized conceptual difficulties from another subgroup that appears to exhibit the characteristics of the "classic" dyslexic. Dr. Stone makes the point that as the child moves into adolescence, learning disabilities manifest themselves in new ways.

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Cognitive Competence and Performance in Everyday Environments

Sheldon H. White

Harvard University

Over the past 20 years, the study of children's thinking has more and more been influenced by Piagetian research and ideas directed towards a theory of the growth of children's intellectual competence. Perhaps 30-40 percent of current published research on children's cognition is in some way connected with Piaget's work. His influence spreads beyond Psychology. More than a dozen books in print offer short courses on Piagetian theory for students in Psychology or Education. The longest "short course" (and one of the best) is The Essential Piaget, a set of commentaries and excerpts from Piaget's writings by Gruber and Vondche (1977) that runs to 881 pages. Eight hundred and eighty one pages make up a lot of essence but, of course, we are dealing with the work of a scholar who has to date published some 50 books and hundreds of articles..At the moment, his productivity is not faltering.

There are mixed judgments about Piaget's work among American psychologists. Some tender him respect bordering on the reverential, but the number of psychologists who base their work completely and uncritically upon that of Piaget is really rather small. Those who see him as providing an important map of children's cognitive development generally concede that other mappings, such as those of Freud, Erikson, Bowlby, Werner, and Vygotsky, reveal important aspects of children's development not treated by Piaget. Piaget's map says that there are broad stage changes in children's cognitive development, from sensorimotor intelligence to preoperational thought to concrete operations to formal operations. But careful studies have shown that the idea that children's thought advances in broad leaps is, at best, a very approximate picture of what is going on in children's cognitive development (Brainerd 1978; Gelman 1978).

Presented at the 30th Annual Conference of the Orton Society at Indianapolis, November 1979.

Bulletin of The Orton Society, Vol. 30, 1980, Copyright © 1980 by The Orton Society, Inc. ISSN 0474-7534.

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Piaget's work is not simply psychological research as we usually tend to

think about it in this country. We have a tendency to regard psychological

research on 'children as properly an attempt to establish "the facts" about

child development. This is simplistic. Piaget has studied children with an eye

to basic biological problems of evolutionary theory and some classic philo-

sophical questions about epistemology. His work is complex and cannot

easily be judged by the conventional disciplinary standards of Psychology. 1

The mixed reception that psychologists now give to his work resembles the

mixed reception that was once given to Freud's work after it was introduced

to this country near the turn of the century. Perhaps because the case of

Freud lies behind as an example, I would expect that Piaget is going to have a

slow, sustained positive impact on American research work for some decades

to come. To an interesting extent, Sigmund Freud's writings remain today an

influential primary source for a variety of scholars in the behavioral and

social sciences. The voluminous writings of the psychoanalysts and per-

sonality theorists who have come after Freud have modified, but do not yet

obscure, Freud's salience as a theorist. It seems to take a scientific community

some time to "digest" the writings of a broad and prolific theoretical writer. In

Piaget's case, there is ample reason to believe that there is much of his contri-

bution that has not yet been fully explored by other research workers. As

large as the American response to Piaget's work has been, it remains true that

one can open his books and easily find a wealth of studies, findings, observa-

tions, and theoretical suggestions that have so far not been exploited by

others.

Of course, Freud's work has been transmitted forward in time in asso-

ciation with a wave of changed social practices. Freud bequeathed to the

present not just a theory but a therapy, the practice of psychoanalysis. The

theory and the therapy have differentiated to form the nuclei of dozens of

contemporary schools of psychotherapy. Not only psychiatry, but social

work, clinical psychology, and counseling have been heavily influenced by

iPiaget is one of those grand systematists that have traditionally found much acceptance in Europe but a smaller audience in the United States. He sees the analysis of children's cognitive development as a means of studying evolution and the analysis of evolutionary sequences as a means of arriving at a :universal logic of knowing sys- tems. There are others who treat the problem of knowledge along the large lines of Piaget. In a just-published book, Bateson, the anthropologist, holds:

It is the Platonic thesis of [this] book that epistemology is an indivisible integrated meta-science whose subject matter is the world of evolution, thought, adaptation, embryology, and genetics -- the science of mind in the widest sense of the word. (Bateson, 1980, p. 97.)

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COGNITIVE COMPETENCE AND PERFORMANCE

Freud's work. There is a Freudian legacy in the arts and in popular culture; Freudian ideas have become part of the "common sense" of educated people today. Although there is now a serious reconsideration of the basic presump- tions and practices of professional work oriented towards "mental health," there can be little question that Freud's work has had an irreversible impact on the practices of contemporary society.

It would be reasonable to expect that Piaget's work ought to be having a large impact on contemporary educational practices. That impact is probably beginning, but it is curiously hard to trace. The obvious ways in which his influence might be conspicuous are not there, and the less obvious

kinds of influence are hard to pin down. First, Piaget has never designed an educational method or curriculum so one cannot see Piagetianism traveling into education embodied in something tangible like a Froebelian kindergar-

ten, a SummerhiU, or a "new Math." There have been a number of attempts to draw out of Piaget's work principles or maxims for educational practice. A number of authors have tried this, Piaget among them (Piaget 1935; Furth 1970; Helmore 1970; Wadsworth 1971; Schwebel and Raph 1973; Ginsburg and Opper 1979). What such efforts usually yield is a broad alignment of Piagetian with Deweyan principles, coupled with an exhortat ion that children should be continuously active in learning. The principle that education ought to enlist children's spontaneous activity has a history of dis- tinguished endorsement going back to Rousseau. It is an impor tant argument, but one hardly suspects that it requires 50 volumes of rather dense research and analysis to retrieve the general principle in the 20th century. But then, perhaps it is not a fair test of a theorist to ask whether one can derive from his work some snappy little maxims or slogans for the benefit of

educators. A third line of influence of Piaget's work on education has come

through the construction of curricula for limited segments of educational practice based on trends in cognitive development suggested by his work.

American psychologists mostly pursue a science of mind in a narrower sense than that of Piaget and Bateson. They selectively consider and use those parts of Piaget's work where he conforms most closely to American ideals of an inductive, parsimonious scientific enterprise. Piaget's work is treated in this narrower sense in this paper, because I am here trying to consider his predominant American influence. But a few Americans, not undistinguished, such as John Dewey, James Mark Baldwin, G. Stanley Hall, and Heinz Werner, have believed with Piaget that large questions and large principles are entailed in children's cognitive development.

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The only really systematic use of Piaget that I know of in this direction has been in the design of preschool curricula -- notably, the curriculum approaches built by Conskance Kamii (Sonquist, Kamii and Derman 1970), Celia Stendler Lavatelli (1970), and David Weikart and his associates at High/Scope in Ypsilanti, Michigan (Hohmann, Banet, and Weikart 1979). There has been some limited use of Piaget's work in the design of upper-level science and mathematical curriculum. It is hard to believe that these educational embodiments of Piagetian principles reach many children. Of course, one can note that it is becoming routine for new textbook series and curricula to offer prefatory statements to the effect that Piagetian theory has been respected in the educational material to follow. This is the kind of invocation through which, not so long ago, textbook writers used to call upon the spirit of John Dewey. One cannot completely dismiss this kind of testimonial but, on the other hand, one cannot be sure that it betokens a serious and essential use of Piaget's work.

Having discounted some of the conventional avenues through which Piaget's work might be easily seen has having an influence upon education -- through distinctive techniques, through special principles, or through con- structed curricula -- let me quickly state that I believe that Piaget's work is bringing into currency some rather powerful new ideas about what learning and knowing are in children. An examination of textbook discussions of these topics two decades ago as compared with today will show this. It is always hard to deal with the works of a writer who changes our sense of the ob v ious . . , who changes, in Piaget's phrase, our "construction of r ea l i ty" . . . because the obvious, once it has become obvious, always feels to us as though it has now and eternally always been obvious. Yet consensual beliefs about children's learning are visibly changing (White and Siegel 1976). In this way, by first challenging our basic conceptions of what it means to know and be intelligent, and then by subsequently offering thousands of acute observations to help explore the implications of some newer conceptions, I believe Piaget will have a widening effect on the organization of educational practices in years to come.

The Yield from Piagetian Research

What, exactly, is our yield from Piaget's research?

In book after book, he has offered us crude maps of the successive states of children's abilities to compute problems of space, time, geometry, number, logic, causality, probability, perceptual illusions, and rule judgments. The

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maps are sketchy but nonetheless useful. Piaget's maps typify the intellectual movements of the "average child," that legendary creature never seen by a parent or a teacher. But general expectations have a place in an educational system. Teachers and textbook writers can use them to steer by until they find a place where they can begin to look for more specific expectations.

Mixed in with the maps -- the dozens and dozens of little stage sequences -- Piaget has offered hundreds of shrewd observations about children's cognitive processing at different ages. Piaget has an extraordinary eye for suggestive detail. We are accustomed to think of Piaget, like Freud, as a grand theorist, a prince of soaring generalizations and obfuscatory abstrac- tions, flying far and high above the observational minutiae of dustbowl empiricism. It must be remembered that Piaget, like Freud, began his career as a biologist making precise observations in a finicky field. Freud's first scientific papers were reports of microscopic observations in neuroanatomy. Piaget began his career with ten years of publications on naturalistic observations of mollusks. Today, Piaget's observations of children stand as items of value quite apart from his systematic theory. And one cannot help but notice that some who have been influenced by him have "caught" his eye for suggestive detail. American psychologists who before Piaget tended to "count behaviors" and "measure abilities" are now providing subtle observations of children's intellectual behavior of a quality that was not all that common in the early 1950's.

Piaget has offered as a broad "structuralist" principle the idea that children's cognitive adaptations proceed by a sequence that moves from "rhythms to regulations to groupings." This is a beautiful theoretical idea that needs to be explored in detail in Piaget's description of the six sensorimotor stages of infancy (Piaget 1963). Piaget believes that the sequence by which the infant adapts to the world around it is paradigmatic for all human learning. "Rhythm, regulation, operation - - these are the three basic mecha- nisms of self-regulation and self-maintenance" (Piaget 1970, p. 16).

One might express the idea in simple terms somewhat as follows. Most people first.catch hold of a new activity by following routines in what one might characterize as a somewhat mindless way. They engage in the activity without much awareness of what they are doing. They follow rituals or "rhythms." As they repeat the activity, bits of intentionality and mindfulness appear in the midst of the system of behavior. People begin to have images of what is going to happen before it happens. The activity "rises to conscious- ness." As awareness appears, people become able to vary the routinized behavior mindfully and adaptively. They begin to regulate the behavior system. Finally, as people become fully aware of what they are doing, their

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behavior ceases to be driven by ritualism and it now becomes planful, driven by intentionality. Now people can freely reorganize and permute operational behavioral elements to form knowledgeable and intelligent behavioral adaptations to the situation. The behavior has now become "flexible and mobile."

This is an idea about the organization and progressive control of skills that should be very useful as a way of thinking about education• People have very mixed feelings about the ritualism and routines embedded in American classroom practices• Some people feel it is absolutely necessary to drill in basic skills. Other people feel that is is improper, an aberration of schools as peda- gogic tyrannies or mindless bureaucracies• They believe in a kind of teaching that centers on ideas. The Piagetian analysis offers an interesting kind of middle way. It suggests that ritualism and routines have their place in early learning. It is an early and perhaps essential way to sustain activity in a confusing new situation. But the Piagetian analysis suggests also that learning must sooner or later transcend behavior modi f ica t ion . . , that teachers' fre- quent injunctions to children to "think about what you are doing" appeal to a precise part of the child's sequence of learning. In the end, the Piagetian analysis offers a view of education in which training skills and teaching ideas both play an essential part.

Some Limits to Piagetian Theory

There are some significant limits to the potential influence of Piagetian research on education, however. Some writers, staggered by the size and rich- ness of Piaget's material, have identified Piagetian theory broadly and completely with the subject of cognitive development. One hears arguments, for example, that the proper business of schools is or ought to be the expansion of cognitive development as it has been envisaged in Piagetian theory. Unhappily, it is comparatively easy to show that not everything you have always wanted to know about children's thinking is contained within the mass of Piaget's writings. As broad as those writings have ranged they have bounds and, indeed, some rather well-specified boundary conditions. Those bounds must be understood if we are to estimate where and to what extent his work will have an impact on educational practices in the future.

Piaget deals, for the most part, with children making short-term, potentially precise predictions about the behavior of physical objects present and visible to the child.

Piaget's first few books reflected the use of what he at first called his "clinical method." He asked children questions about natural phenomena

• . . "What makes the wind blow?" "Why doesn't the sun fa l l?" . . , and he dis-

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cussed the children's answers with them to try to arrive at an estimate of how they thought about the question. This early work with the clinical method came when he was under the early influence of psychoanalytic techniques and, to a remarkable extent, he produced psychoanalytic-like findings in these volumes. The preschool children in those volumes tend to be curiously like adults afflicted with little cognitive neuroses like animism, egocentrism, juxtaposition, realism artificialism, transduction, etc. - - in all, some 40 little

named disorders of the small child's thought. Neither this method nor this negative kind of theorizing seemed fully satisfactory to Piaget. After an inter-

lude filled with the publication of his three books on infancy, in which he set

forth the framework of his genetic epistemology, Piaget returned to studies of

the preschool and school years with what he called his "revised clinical method."

Now a child is always looking at some physical set of objects - - a jar that is going to be tilted, a group of beads that have to be placed in one-to-one correspondence with a line of toy flowers, some balls placed on a disc that is going to spin, etc. The child's task is to predict a pattern of events that is

going to happen, to create a specified pattern of events, or occasionally to explain events that have just happened. Generally, the desired predictions are possible to any child who has available exact conceptions of how physical objects behave and the ability to make reasonably precise calculations about space, time, number, and causative sequence. The point of all the research is to see if those conceptions are available to the child. In all the studies using the revised clinical method, Piaget offers us a brilliant series of analyses of a tabletop psychology. But does society only ask children to think about relatively short term transitions of physical objects in the here and now? No,

adults engage in other kinds of thinking. For example, at this very moment , we are discussing 60 years of work by a gentleman several thousand miles away in Geneva. We are using symbolism, imagination, and reasoning to discuss the activities of a person in an arena considerably larger than a table-

top. We regularly ask children to deal in comparable exercises in literature, social studies, and even in our discussions of science. It is not clear that any degree of refinement of a tabletop psychology will fully explicate this broader kind of thinking about the world.

Piaget deals almost entirely with solitary children. There are one or two

early Piagetian studies in which he deals with children in conversation or cooperation with one another. But these are isolated incidents in the broad body of Piaget's research. For the most part, Piaget's child is alone in a room

facing the physical objects Piaget or one of his associates has placed before

him. There is dialogue with the child to find out exactly how he thinks about

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the events before him but in the theory the Piagetian child does not advance his thought by dialogue. The child learns by seeking "equilibration" of its thought. No one ever tells the child a n y t h i n g . . , and, needless to say, no one ever screams, implores, confuses, gets excited, chatters, persuades, nags, or

argues. Piaget deals with intellectual competence. The Piagetian encounter with a

child seeks to test on upper limits of the child's capability, what we call "competence." The working environment of the encounter is undistracted, simpli- fied, and controlled because it is designed in the service of an effort to assess the intellectual competence of a child. Piaget sees the growth of a child's understanding of the world as resting upon intellectual structures. Organized groups of symbolic actions within the child allow the child to be predictive in dealing with the world around him. A genetic logic grows in children, something like a computer program that elaborates, and he wants to estimate the nature and power of that logic at different ages. Whatever children do that is not "businesslike" . . . the fact that a child daydreams, fidgets, wanders around the room, proudly interjects a story about how he and his brother went swimming last weekend . . . all these are excluded from the Piagetian records of his research, even as they are excluded from the records of most psychological studies. It is not that Piaget is not sympathetic to children. Some stories about him suggest that he may be quite gifted and warm in his dealings with children. It is simply that he makes a sharp distinction between the "serious" and the "not-serious" in his dealings with children.

If we consider the boundary conditions of Piagetian research, I believe we can arrive at some rough estimates of where that work will be likely to impinge most pointedly upon the education of children. Education has its boundaries too, of course. We sometimes like to entertain sweeping claims about "dealing with the whole child," "teaching a child to think," "preparing the child for life" but much of this kind of talk is rhetoric, what Charles Sanders Pierce used to characterize caustically as hypnosis used in place of

logic. A moment's thought will show that schools impinge on selected areas of a child's life and thought. There is only partial overlap between Piaget's range of concerns and those of the schools.

The largest single thing that educators have to worry about is literacy, starting first with the mechanics of reading and writing, and then continuing with those skills and intellectual competencies involved in comprehending and communicating via texts. None of Piaget's research deals with reading and writing. Nor does he explore children's thinking about human actions in diverse situations, times, and places. Much of what we intend in giving literacy to children has to do with bringing such thinking and knowledge to

them.

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Children deal with mathematics and science in school. It is in connection with this kind of teaching that one might expect to find serious consideration of the implications of Piaget's work for education and here, indeed, one does. Piaget has given serious research attention to children's ability to think precisely about problems involving space, time, number, geometry, probability and chance. It is with regard to topics such as these that education can probably make most direct use of his work.

In the spectrum of work in contemporary developmental psychology, it is worth noting that the limitations of Piaget's scope are today being filled in

by important auxiliary research literatures -- e.g., work on the development of language, communicative skills, children's abilities to deal with stories and texts, aesthetic development, and the development of children's ability to think about people and social institutions. Something like a wide-spectrum view of age changes in children's thinking and knowledge emerges as we look across the contemporary research literature.

The Environments of Competence

We have only the bare beginnings of a contemporary research literature that directly attacks the other major artificiality in Piaget's work. Piaget deals with children alone, in controlled and quiet environments. Schools deal with children in groups of 20 to 40 all together in a room. People usually think and learn in "noisy" env i ronmen t s . . , environments that are noisy in a physical and informational sense. The extant research literature does not correct for the special boundary conditions that limit the representativeness of Piaget's research environment. The problem of the limited boundary conditions of the Piagetian environment is reproduced in the remainder of the psychological research literature, and more and more those limited boundary conditions are presenting puzzles and problems.

Recently, Urie Bronfenbrenner and Michael Cole have called attention to the unrepresentativeness of typical research environments and the corresponding lack of representativeness of the findings about children revealed by findings taken from those environments. Interestingly their common concern stems from very different work. Bronfenbrenner has for some time been a leader in the development of American social policy for children and his work has repeatedly led him to try to relate the research literature on child development to topical issues of early education, day care, school reform, and family policy. Concerned about the ambiguities that our research data offer to the determination of public policy, Bronfenbrenner has called for a new approach to research directed towards the "natural and

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enduring environments in which children live." In a recent volume, Bronfen- brenner (1979) has set forth a schematization of the ecology of human development. He believes that a relevant and useful body of psychological research will best be developed by studies based in children's natural environments, exploring variables and factors that play a role in children's lives in those environments.

Michael Cole's work has converged on a similar argument from a different direction. He has been engaged in cross-cultural research on children's cognition. In the early phases of his work, he drew upon American laboratory procedures for studies of children in tribal societies (Cole, Gay, Glick, and Sharp 1971). He found, as many have who export Western tests and problems to Asia and Africa, that children of tribal and traditional societies often do not perform well on Western tasks. Interpreting the research data in the way we conventionally do, Cole might easily have con- cluded that these non-Western children were poor at memory or conceptualization. Yet Cole was easily able to summon observations in the culture at large that showed that the children were performing admirably in remember- ing and conceptualizing given culturally appropriate and familiar tasks. So Cole has been led to try to study children in their everyday environments, not in the interests of social policy but simply in the interests of trying to establish reasonably valid and authentic estimates of how children think.

At this writing, some psychologists have joined Bronfenbrenner and Cole in the effort to find a new direction for studies of children and one hears, variously, calls for naturalistic, ecological, ethological, or unobtrusive observations of children in their natural activities. Most psychologists still hold back. There are some problems. What, exactly, is a natural environment

for a small child? As children move into the school years, there appear to be a variety of behavior settings in which they live and perform: at home, in

school, with peers on the school playground, at church, at family gatherings, in grocery stores, in organized sports, etc. Are we to gather data about a small child in one or two dozen environments in order to draw conclusions about his thinking? Are we to regard some of these variegated settings as more natural and essential than others? A second difficult question has to do with the open and uncontrolled nature of these everyday environments. Contrary to popular belief, psychologists often place children in "simple-minded" research environments not because they believe that children are fundamen- tally simple-minded but rather because their basic research methods are rather simple-minded. The intellectual paraphernalia of psychological research -- the logic by which hypotheses are accepted or rejected, the techniques for identifying influential and noninfluential factors, the experimental and statistical designs employed by researchers -- all lose preciseness and dis-

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criminatory power rather rapidly when too many variables fly around loose in a research environment.

The advantages of working with children in their everyday environments are obvious; yet the manifest difficulties of doing so have kept most psychologists at work in the controlled environments of the laboratory.

Unhappily, the wolf may be now inside the door of that laboratory environment. The work following upon Piaget's writings has more and more brought that problem to the fore. The great excitement created by Piaget's work has caused him to have, as he gallantly puts it, the "honor" of being frequently replicated. His work stands up remarkably well to efforts to repeat it. It is a considerable tribute to Piaget's work that if you do exactly what he says he did, you will usually get exactly what he says he saw. But if you vary what would appear to be minor and extraneous aspects of his research procedures

- - the way in which questions are put to children, the presence or use of concrete prompts, the way cooperation is obtained from children - - then mischievous findings are apt to appear, findings that may be out of line with

Piaget's broader conclusions. Specifically, researchers are again and again finding that children have strategic Piagetian competences - - the ability to understand conservation of substance, the ability to take the role of the other, the ability to deal with a morality of intentions rather than a morality of consequences, the ability to understand basic properties of number - - well before the age or stage at which such abilities should appear in children according to Piagetian theory.

On an everyday basis, one can understand exactly what is happening in. these modified Piagetian experiments. If you alter the situation of an exper-

iment to make things generally easier for small c h i l d r e n . . , fewer words, less distraction, slower and clearer instructions, less complicated procedures, etc., . . . then children do better. They look smarter. Every parent and teacher knows that, or ought to know it. But Piaget is a systematic theorist who has brought a great many observations and interpretations of children's performance into alignment in his stage theory of cognitive development. The difficult thing about the wandering competences of children uncovered by recent

research work is that many of the new findings are discordant with the stages and sequences of intellectual competence postulated by theory.

At the moment, developmental psychologists are handling the recent

surge of discordant findings in a way that historians of science tell us is classic in the history of all sciences. They are collecting exceptions to Piagetian theory in a wastebasket called "the competence/performance problem." Holding on both to the theory and to the anomalies in the wastebasket, they are waiting until someone comes up with an idea about what to do with it all.

But the presence of the wastebasket means, as I said earlier, that the

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wolf is in the door of the laboratory. Laboratory procedures are not a guaran-

teed way to assess a child's competence, not simply because they are not

"natural" environments of children, but because they are not as straightfor- ward and homogeneously controlled as psychologists like to think they are.

We usually create a laboratory situation for a child, by focusing on some

cognitive faculty or computational ability of the child and by designing a task

or a problem the solution of which seems to call upon the appropriate mental

apparatus of a child. So we have experiments on children's perception,

memory, conceptualization, learning. Our procedures look as though they

call upon perception, memory, etc. They are "face valid." After we decide

that our procedure has the right conceptual properties, how do we decide that it is right for a small child? Here we use some art, some trial-and-error,

and a little luck. Experimenters who have worked with children generally

have some understanding of what kinds of problems a 6, 7, or 8-year-old child

can work with. They invent a procedure that seems appropriate. They try it

out, fiddle with it a bit, and usually work out a problem that seems reasonable

and interesting for the child. Unhappily, it now looks as though one can

invent multiple procedures for presenting problems of a given intellectual

form to a child. The rule seems to be that procedures that are somehow, on-

the-whole simpler will show younger children to have the given competence

while procedures that are somehow, on-the-whole complex will show a later

and older emergence of the competence. There is the real possibility that

there is no one age at which children show any specific kind of intellectual competence. It all depends. What we do not know in any articulated way is

how to analyze various laboratory environments to pinpoint what somehow,

on-the-whole, simpler or more complex means in the spectrum of possible

laboratory environments. As a first approximation, I would argue that a set

of factors that tends to introduce "load" or "noisiness" into the working

environment of a child influences the performance or observable competence

of the child in that environment.

Noisiness and Load in a Child's Working Environment

The idea that psychologists must move out to natural environments in

order to create an authentic psychology of cognition has a lot of appeal, but

for reasons indicated above I am not completely sure that the psychological

research tradition can be completely transplanted into the everyday world of

the child. I suppose also that I am not completely sure intuitively that a

school classroom, a Sunday dinner with Auntie, or a Little League game, is

completely "natural" to a child in a way that a laboratory experimental situa-

tion is not. What I am more sure of is that we are now going to have to work

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to build up rudiments of a theory of psychological situations, giving insights

into the special pressures and facilitations that are created for children as we bring them into various working environments. If we want to understand fully children's intellectual competence in some full-blooded sense, then we are going to have to modify our assumption that various intellectual compe-

tencies are either there or not there at a given point in a child's growth, and we are instead going to have to consider the possibility that there is a gradual shading in of intellectual competence in a c h i l d . . , from a beginning point

when, at the right time at the right place, he surprises you with something "precocious" to an end-point when a child seems to have solidly established an ability so that he can exercise it under the most demanding and stressful of

circumstances. To understand better this shaded development of competence in

children, I believe we are going to have to consider three strategic questions:

(1) What are the specific features of an ambient environment that

make it easy or hard for a child to show his best performance? (2) What does research on attention and motivation tell us about

the factors, external and internal, that hinder the elaboration of

directed engagement of a child in a task? (3) Given that we know something about noisy environments,

and about factors that impose load upon human conceptual performance, what are the psychophysiological, behavioral, or social devices that may be variously used to protect thought in a noisy environment?

Managing Environments of Competence

We know that it is not just the abstract intellectual level of a learning task that makes it easy or hard for a child. The way in which a task is presented to a child changes its difficulty. What is it about situations that cause some to add, others to subtract from, the difficulty of a task? Several aspects

of practical contexts of learning need to be carefully looked at. We need to describe the working environments we offer to children in a more

differentiated way.

Teachers and psychologists sometimes talk as though the essence of their work is to present children with tasks, problems, learning units, curriculum, etc., but this is a style of conversation. They present children with

situations. By the nature of their work, teachers and researchers have to have some competence in the creation and management of working environments for children. They tend to carry and use this knowledge unconsciously and

intuitively. Watch a classroom teacher in operation. He or she is, among

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other things, an impresario, staging and restaging the classroom as the day moves along - - now steering towards peace and harmony, now trying to stir things up, sometimes forcing the pace of the class, sometimes slowing it, here pushing one child towards participation, there shunting aside a child who is

growing rambunctious. A large part of the art of teaching is, of course, classroom management, not as a system of discipline but as a system of dramaturgy.

Psychological researchers have neither the scope nor the improvisatory responsibilities of teachers, but they create environments for children as they

present their problems to them. When Piaget sets before a child a cognitive puzzle on a tabletop, the tabletop is in a room that Piaget and the child will inhabit together for a half-hour. What will prevail in that half-hour is nothing less than what it takes to habilitate a human interaction. Piaget and the child live their half-hour together under a pace and rhythm of human interchange, a style, a courtesy, rules, rudiments of a shared esthetics and ethics. This is the milieu in the midst of which the child finds the cognitive

task. The task of the child is to survive, be comfortable and, if possible, be clever in that milieu.

Both teachers and psychologists are rather good at creating environments in which children can survive and be clever. Most classrooms work. So do most experiments. Why enter into the difficult exercise of trying to articu- late an adequate intuitive practice? If we can say a little bit about what makes a situation good or bad for cleverness, then perhaps we can explain to our- selves all of the "competence/performance" problems we have been finding lately. Children keep surprising us by being smarter in some situations than

we think they ought to be and dumber in others. Maybe if we tried to sort through the different kinds of learning situations children face we can become a little clearer about those elements that bring forward or suppress cleverness. Maybe we might discover a few things that would help us with the

more marginal and difficult students, those who are not always reached in the routine exercise of the teacher's dramaturgy.

Can we separate and classify learning environments? Probably we can, if we look at them carefully. Some years ago, Roger Barker and his associates

at the University of Kansas made pioneering efforts to map out the "psychological ecology" of childhood. They studied the life of a small town, Midwest, identifying each special conjunction of time-place-people calling for a distinctive kind of human activity. They found 585 behavior settings making up the community of the town - - situations like Midwest Hardware and Implement Company, Third-Grade Academic Activities, Dixon's Barber Shop, Baby Shower, and Cancer Control Committee. After classifying all the different ways there

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were for people to behave together in Midwest, Barker's group then studied where and to what extent children "penetrated" the behavior settings of the town, coming up with interesting findings about that complex sets of move-

ments that we loosely call socialization (Barker and Wright 1954). Something like Barker's approach might be used to pull apart the

learning environments offered by a school and, indeed, some of his associates have made efforts in that direction. The Midwest study treated Third-Grade- Academic-Activities as one behavior setting, but formal and informal observations will quickly reveal that a day in a third grade offers an intricate system of behavior settings to a child. Maybe we can describe a classroom as a set of behavior settings. Maybe using very sensitive techniques like that of Bales (Bales and Cohen 1979), we can begin to estimate the psychological

structure and meaning of those settings for the children and teacher who act in them.

We need an account of the factors that load or burden a child's thought processes.

Why do children have wobbly competencies so that situations affect them? A child is not a computer that either "knows" or "does not know." A child is a bumpy, blippy, excitable, fatiguable, distractible, active, friendly,

mulish, semi-cooperative, bundle of biology. Some factors help a moving child to pull together coherent address to a problem; others hinder that pulling together and tend to make a child "not know." Many small studies of human psychophysiology, attention, alertness, emotionality, motivation,

cognitive style, personality, etc., allow us an estimation of the factors that influence a child's performance and, hence, his apparent competence.

Broadly, there are three groups of factors. There are internal factors. A variety of rhythmic and reactive psychophysiological state changes in adults influence their attention and performance. Although corresponding research with children has been limited, there are good reasons to believe that children are influenced substantially and idiosyncratically by endogenous psy-

chophysiological factors. There are external situational factors of various kinds that influence children's task performance. In general, children find it easier to give connected thought to a problem when: (a) the question or task is very

plain, given in a few words or not requiring much analysis for full comprehen- sion; 00) the relevant cues are few; (c) the relevant cues are conspicuous; (d) the relevant cues are close together in space and time; (e) when there are

few distracting cues; (f) when the child does not have to hold too much in short-term memory; (g) when there are concrete mnemonic prompts for what has to be held in memory, etc. Finally, there are what might be most

accurately called factors of agenda. If we recognize that a child is always faced

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with a situation in the midst of which there is an intellectual task, then we

can recognize that at times children may not be able to give the task the

motivational priority expected or desired by the adult. A shy child in a room

with a strange and ominous-appearing experimenter has something more, or

other, than a cognitive task to be solved. A handicapped child mainstreamed

into a fifth grade classroom faces something other than a new set of educa-

tional tasks.

We need to help children to select environments in which they can be

competent.

Adults know all about load, of course, and they are very practiced in

dealing with it. There are a whole host of tactics, strategies, rituals, etc. by

means of which adults maneuver so that they can work at an optimum level.

Life does not always give any of us full control of our circumstances, of

course, but by and large most of us find ways to do our mental work in an

environment that is as congenial to it as possible. We "take a break" when we

are in poor shape for work. If something is "bugging" us and interfering with

work, we do what we can to untangle the problem. We manage situations,

steering towards those in which we can be competent and managing our

moment-to-moment environment in ways that maximize our ability to perform constructively. All this rests on a large and deep body of knowledge

- - about self, about situations, about social permissions and expectations --

generally available to adults but not available to young children.

We know very little as yet about how the ability to select and manage

psychological situations develops in children. If, in time, we can perfect our

understanding of the pluralistic environments of competence confronted by

a growing child, we will need then to try to understand more clearly the way

in which children consent or volunteer to move among those environments.

All children have devices for getting out of situations that have become catas-

trophic; negativism of one form or another will usually get you out physically;

if not, daydreaming will get you out spiritually. But some children have a nice

sense of the situations they can handle before they get into them. Others do

not. We need to understand children's growing knowledge of self and situa-

tion if we are to understand fully the vicissitudes of children's performance.

I believe we are more and more going to have to look at child develop-

ment -- competence, performance -- less and less according to a metaphor of

growth and development and more and more in terms of travel (White and

White 1980). Babies are born into a very complicated adult world nowadays.

They live nested in cribs and playpens and preschools and backyards in their

early years of life and only slowly, with learning and adventures and effort, do

they come into possession of larger and larger portions of the adult world.

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Children move in larger and larger orbits as they grow up, with wider and

wider access to adult society as they become more broadly competent. At the same time, their access and use of the adult world narrows and specializes as

they move towards the niches and roles they will occupy as full-grown adults.

Much that we talk about as the development of competence has to do

with this process of travel. Only as we understand the ways in which children

travel into adult society . . . where they penetrate, where they seek to

penetrate, where adults seek to help or hinder their m o v e m e n t s . . , will we

understand the detailed nature of cognitive and social development.

References

Bales, R.E, and Cohen, S.E 1979. SYMLOG: A System for the Multiple Level Observation of Groups. New York: Free Press.

Barker, R.G., and Wright, H. E 1954. Midwest and Its Children: The Psychological Ecology of an American Town. Evanston, Illinois: Row Peterson.

Bateson, G. 1980. Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity. New York: Bantam Books. Brainerd, C.J. 1978. The stage question in cognitive-developmental theory. Behavioral and Brain

Sciences 1:173-182. Bronfenbrenner, U. 1979. The Ecology of Human Development: Experiments by Nature and Design.

Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Cole, M., Gay, J., Glick, J.A., and Sharp, D.W. 1971. The Cultural Context of Learning and Think-

ing. New York: Basic Books. Furth, H.G. 1970. Piaget for Teachers. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall. Gelman, R. 1978. Cognitive development. Annual Review of Psychology 29:297-332. Ginsburg, H., and Opper, S. 1979 Piaget's Theory of Intellectual Development, 2d ed. Englewood

Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall. Gruber, H.E., and Von4che, J.J., eds. 1977. The Essential Piaget: An Interpretive Reference and

Guide. New York: Basic Books. Helmore, G.A. 1970. Piaget: A Practical Consideration. New York: Pergamon. Hohmann, M., Banet, B., and Weikart, D.R 1979. Young Children in Action: A Manual for Pre-

school Educators. Ypsilanti, Michigan: High/Scope Press. Lavatelli, C.S. 1970. Piaget's Theory Applied to an Early Childhood Curriculum. Boston: American

Science and Engineering, Inc. Piaget, J. 1970. Science of Education and the Psychology of the Child. New York: Orion Press.

(Originally published in 1935.) Piaget, J. 1963. The Origins of Intelligence in Children. New York: Norton. Piaget, J. 1970. Structuralism. New York: Basic Books. Schwebel, M. and Raph, J., eds. 1973. Piaget in the Classroom. New York: Basic Books. Sonquist, H., Kamii, C.C., and Derman, L.A. 1970. Piaget-derived preschool curriculum. In

l.J. Athey and D.O. Rubadeau (eds.). Educational Implications of Piaget's Theory. Waltham, Massachusetts: Ginn-BlaisdeU.

Wadsworth, B.J. 1971. Player's Theory of Cognitive Development: An Introduction for Students of Psychology and Education. New York: McKay.

White, S.H., and Siegel, A.W. 1976. Cognitive development: The new inquiry. Young Children 31(6) 425-435.

White, S.H., and White, B.N. 1980. Childhood: Pathways of Discovery. New York: Harper and ROW,

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cognitive competence and performance in everyday environments

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