Tag Archive for 'reinforcement'

What makes somebody good at something?

Published on 4 February, 2009 in High Performance and child genius. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Great minds frequently encounter violent opposition from mediocre minds. Yet, those great minds should also be physically superior if you listen to our friends from Cambridge (Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance).

Observing that those born earlier in the year tend to perform better – especially at age-level sports but also beyond – researchers are trying to understand why. While having a few months as a child over the person sitting beside you might give you a little advantage as a child, it’s the gap created by teachers, coaches and the public reinforcing talent that really creates an advantage. By inadvertently rewarding earlier development rather than genuine talent, and punishing delayed development rather than accepting variations as just part of the heterogeity of childhood, we make the smart kids smarter, and let the less talented students trail.

I didn’t realise that it was so marked until I learned about how national youth teams (the ones that feed into the senior teams) have children born in January, February and March – at the start of the measured year – outnumber those born in the rest of the year by up to a dozen or so to one!

Sure talent has a role – especially in grabbing attention – but, according to Ericsson, the key to learning is less talent: the game is really about immediate feedback and specific goal setting. So do what you love… it’s the only thing that you’ll bother to do well anyway.

Further reading: New York Times article, "A Star is Made ".

Daniel Smith

Some ideas that I’ve been developing…

Published on 23 January, 2009 in High Performance and Personal Growth. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Separation of Powers in Education, Cognitive Competencies and Selective Reinforcement of Spontaneous Behaviour… they’re all “hobby horses” that I have ranted on about from time to time, yet I haven’t always explored them as much or taken them as far as I could.

Separation of Powers in Education: A pillar of the Rule of Law is the separation of powers between the legislature, the executive and the judiciary. In the same way, I believe that such a separation would benefit education. Let us have one body that defines the desired learning outcomes, another body responsible for assessing performance against those outcomes and a separate domain for those who prepare the learners for the assessments offered. This would necessitate clear and specific definitions of the desired learning outcomes that would – I believe – be facilitated through cognitive competencies.

Cognitive Competencies: What is an MBA worth? What about a law degree? Heck, what does it mean to get an “A” for maths? Much education is focused on measurements devoted to delivering a matriculation score – a measure that has enough superficial validity to permit discrimination between students. Yet they usually don’t mean very much.

Learning outcomes are so ill-defined that we resort to relying upon the tacit knowledge of our educators to transform them into something useful. Fortunately, this has worked adequately. However, with increasing competition, it is about time that we replaced this centuries-old process with a measurement of the mental operations that we want to see developed. Firstly for the sake of the students: Let them focus their energies upon correcting their mistakes rather than spending endless hours not really knowing what they need to work on. But also for our society, so that we can fast-track prodigous learners towards more suitable challenges and more effectively direct the energies of our teachers and our students.

Selective Reinforcement of Spontaneous Behaviour: My concept of ‘genius’ is that individuals exhibit a large range of behaviours, some of which are reinforced; reinforcement leads to the development of clusters of skills that tend to work together to create talents and, especially when developed early, the development of an identity that works to offer a sustainable advantage.

For example, I learnt to perform split-attention tasks and to work quickly when I was doing my homework on my lap inside my tidybox in primary school (since if I did ‘homework’ at school, I didn’t have to do it at home!) – a spontaneous behaviour – and kept doing it because the first few times I received the reward (free time) without punishment (being told not to do it – as I was later, though largely ignored having experienced the reward!). Very small shifts yield massive long-term changes…

I am considering writing further on these, though have been thinking or writing about them since at least 2003. Let me know if you’re interested… I like encouragement :)

Daniel Smith