This research showed a relatively easy way to narrow the Black-White academic achievement gap. Realizing that one's intelligence may be improved may actually improve one's intelligence, especially for those whose groups are targets of stereotypes alleging limited intelligence (e.g., Blacks, Latinos, and women in math domains.)Seeing as I taught math to minorities in a Title I school, I found sharing the first article with my students to be incredibly relevant, especially for students who didn't grasp math concepts the first time I taught them but were perfectly capable of mastering the concept with a little extra practice. It was also incredibly helpful when we set individual goals for grades and improvement. It let students know with practice their goals were achievable.
Cooper's enactive approach relies on Freeman's concept of assimilation and his research and findings about neurons' interaction. Cooper notes that "Freeman argues that neurons interact to create a pattern...shaped by each individual organism's history and shaped anew in every iteration" (427). As noted in "You Can Grow Your Intelligence," "When you learn new things, these tiny connections in the brain actually multiply and get stronger. The more that you challenge your mind to learn, the more your brain cells grow." The tiny connections mentioned are connections made between neurons. As you practice and strengthen your understanding of a concept those connections grow stronger, and as Freeman notes, "interact to create a pattern" (Cooper 427) that changes with every iteration. Referring back to malleable intelligence further helped me understanding Freeman's research.
The enactive approach, as Cooper shows in Figure 1, "explains the interaction between organisms and their surround (and between neuron assemblies and stimuli) as a process of self-organization through feedback loops (circular causation). Interacting units are neither autonomous nor determined by the other, but instead continually restructure themselves as the structure of each unit responds in its own way to perturbations from the other" (427). This also appears to tie back to malleable intelligence. I'll adapt the terms Cooper uses, organism and surround, to malleable intelligence and learning. So in my example, a student is the organism. Her practice and learning opportunities are her surround. This student's neurons continually restructure themselves as she experiences the perturbations of learning.
The concept of malleable intelligence also leads into Cooper's neurodynamic arc, shown in Figure 2. Figure 2's caption notes that "learning and the formation of goals are conscious processes shaped by global patterns in the brain often in the form of narratives" (429). These apply to how important I believe it was for me to teach malleable intelligence to my students. These were both conscious processes that I led my students through for each test they took. They learned. I led them through setting goals for test scores, and/or re-test scores. Their emotions, intention, action, and the interpretation of sensory stimuli were the nonconscious aspect of their learning process. The processes of the neurodynamic intentional arc involving these nonconscious components and the "largely unconscious...resultant formation of memories and dispositions," (429) led the agents, my students, to being "provided with meaning for free" (429). The meaning for free that my students obtained allowed them to understand foundational mathematical concepts. Thus as we moved past our unit on adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing with negative numbers, understanding operations with negative numbers became a nonconscious process they could apply to equations and later units relying on that skill. They were able to quickly respond to situations relying on their nonconscious gains, much like Obama's ability to rely on the same thing when responding to the situation involving Reverend Wright.
No comments:
Post a Comment