Perspectival Understanding of Conceptions and Conceptual Growth in Interaction

Abstract

We propose a bridge between cognitive and sociocultural approaches that is anchored on the sociocultural side by distributed cognition and participation, and on the cognitive side by information structures. We interpret information structures as the contents of distributed knowing and interaction in activity systems. Conceptual understanding is considered as achievement of discourse in activity systems, and conceptual growth is change in discourse practice that supports more effective conceptual understanding. We also introduce a concept of perspectival understanding, in which accounts of cognition, including conceptual understanding, include points of view. This concept generalizes the concept of schema by hypothesizing that a perspectival understanding can be constructed by constraint satisfaction when a sufficient schema is not known or recognized. We provide an example in which perspectival understanding was jointly constructed, illustrating an interactional process we call “constructive listening.”

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

This research was supported by Grant No. 200300029 from the Spencer Foundation.

We are grateful to Gale Sinatra and anonymous reviewers for constructively critical comments.

Notes

This distinction between concepts and conceptions is from Strike and Posner (1982). In contrast to concepts, conceptions have “plurality and internal complexity” and “are in some way central and organizing in thought and learning,” for example, “A learner who is able to replace a Newtonian or Aristotelian view of motion with Einstein's has undergone the kind of conceptual change with which we were concerned” (p. 148). In Giyoo Hatano's presentation in Montreal (Hatano, 2005), he illustrated the distinction aptly, contrasting a concept of beef, which supports classifying a kind of meat, and a conception of beef, which we would expect of an expert chef whose knowledge includes a rich collection of ways of preparing beef, including ways in which beef can be combined with various seasonings and sauces.

²Subsequent writers, including Strike and Posner (1982), have cited Toulmin's discussion in developing a biological metaphor for conceptual change, but have focused their discussions on changes in individuals' under-standings, for example, by identifying a person's conceptual ecology with her or his relevant background of knowledge, beliefs, and motivations. These important ideas have much merit, but they do not continue Toulmin's efforts to understand changes in conceptualizations in intellectual communities.

³Perspectives function at many levels. Our focus in this article is on what we might call “informational perspectives.” Analogous to the concept of perspective in a painting or photograph, we focus on arrangements in which constituents of a scene are arranged in some way in relation to each other, rather than some other way that they could be interrelated. Another sense of perspective, also in common use, associates perspectives with broad aspects of a person's or group's social, cultural, ethnic, gender, economic, or organizational identity. We have only vague premonitions of how the ideas we are developing concerning perspectival understanding of problems and situations relate to broader issues of differing perspectives between people differing in identity.

⁴A process of constraint satisfaction generates candidate contributions to achieving a task and evaluates whether they satisfy a set of constraints. The configuration of information or actions that succeeds need not be known in advance. In this way, constraint satisfaction is a more general process than processes that depend on knowledge of a schema that is instantiated when the task is achieved.

⁵An example is young children's conceptual understanding of number. We follow Gelman and Gallistel (1978) and Greeno, Riley and Gelman (1984) in attributing conceptual understanding of number to children whose performance of counting tasks complies with principles such as a stable order of numeral terms, one-to-one correspondence of numerals with objects counted, and assignment of the last numeral of a count as the cardinality of the counted set of objects.

⁶We believe that Bartlett's (1932) concept of schemata was more general and can be interpreted in modern terms as a theory of constraint satisfaction. An example that he used to illustrate the concept was a physiological postural schema that explains how we mobile animals maintain our balance. Our suggestion that Bartlett's view is compatible with the modern concept of constraint satisfaction, rather than patterns stored in memory, is at odds with what Bartlett wrote in his autobiography (Bartlett, 1936, quoted by Brewer, 2000), but perhaps Bartlett was not entirely consistent on this point.

⁷Developmental theorists, especially Case (e.g., 1991) and Fischer (e.g., Fischer & Bidell, 2006) have developed and evaluated hypotheses about conceptual growth that are more flexible than standard schema theory. We believe our hypotheses of perspectival understanding may be consistent with Case's hypothesis that development involves coordination between understandings of initially separate dimensions, and Fischer and Bidell's hypothesis that development involves increasing elaboration and integration of conceptual structures in the form of developmental webs. Another information-processing proposal to address the limitation of schema theory was by Schank (1982), who extended his theory of text understanding beyond schema-based structures with a concept he called “memory-operating packets” (MOPs), which are schemata that organize parts of the information about a situation and need to be combined to form a coherent representation. We differ from this proposal by formulating the constructive process as constraint satisfaction, and, of course, by assuming that understandings incorporate points of view that are crucial in their functioning.

⁸These data were presented previously at the AERA symposium that originated this special issue (Greeno & van de Sande, 2005) and at the International Conference of the Learning Sciences (van de Sande, 2006).

⁹In the transcriptions, Ms. S is Ms. Sanchez, G is Gillian, and H is Hannah.

¹⁰This schema also would have been a constituent of Ms. Sanchez's perspectival understanding of the plan we infer she had intended initially.

¹¹When Giyoo Hatano received a draft of this article, he responded with the following cautionary message: “I like the Stigler-Hatano episode in your [article] but would like to point out that we should be careful about emphasizing the cultural differences—I now think we might characterize the situation as follows: for the HEI method to work, students have to be good listeners, and because of the earlier participation in instructional activities, the American students may have underdeveloped listenership. This implies that, if we introduce some effective activities for listenership prior to the use of the HEI method, it will work in the United States as well; to put it differently, many Japanese teachers introduce such activities in the classroom.” We believe that Giyoo Hatano concurred with our interpretation of the difference in the two outcomes being attributed to differing participation in activities encouraging constructive listening and wished to forestall a possible inference involving cultural differences that some might attribute to the finding.