Cognitive Developmental Approach 2

Running Head: A CogNitive Developmental Approach to Adult Learning

A Cognitive Developmental Approach

to Adult Learning

Ray S. Jones

2000

Abstract

This paper explores cognitive psychological development adapting to it an organizational learning approach in an original way in order to derive a possible application for individual adult learning. The cognitive development model of Robert Kegan (1994, 1982) is superimposed on the narrative form of organizational learning (Tenkasi & Boland, 1993) with the purpose of extracting implications for the individual learner. A social psychological cognitive perspective based upon scripts common to the meaning making approach provide a structure for these implications.

INTRODUCTION

The purpose of this paper is to explore one current and appealing model of cognitive psychological development, adapting to it an organizational learning approach in a way that I believe has not been proposed before, and from this derive a possible application for individual adult learning. I will begin with an examination of the cognitive development model of Robert Kegan (1994, 1982). Then, from a proposal to consider narrative as a form of organizational learning (Tenkasi & Boland, 1993), extract implications for the individual learner. Tenkasi and Boland had argued that cognitive psychology is the wrong framework from which to approach learning. However, they only discussed the computer metaphor model of cognition (Varella, 1991), which is not a universally accepted model. Yet, when Tenkasi and Boland’s approach is considered from a social psychological cognitive perspective, many new possibilities arise. It is these possibilities that I believe can affect adult learning. The basis for this argument is derived from Abelson’s (1976) theory of scripts, the importance of which appear to be a common meaning making approach with direct implications for training design. Kolb’s (1971, 1984) learning theory will provide a structure for these implications.

Robert Kegan (1994, 1982) has produced what can be described as a post-Piagetian theory of adult cognitive-social development. He has described his theory over a ten year span, principally with two major publications. During this period of time, Kegan has been at Harvard with William Perry, Harold Gardener, and Michael Basseches, other notables in the field of educational psychology. Readers of the works of these theorists will not a similarity in the role of the cognitive process to that described by Luria (1973), Ellis (1979), and Piaget (1954, 1957, 1976), and the social learning theories represented in Bruner (1986), and Bandura (1963, 1986). It should be remembered that the three aforementioned cognitive theorists dealt with the realms of biological, sociological, and psychological human development. These realms were considered by many eminent early Twentieth Century theorists as being exclusive. The strength of the behaviorist movement in the United States, occurring coincidentally with the Genevan cognitive school, were destined to conflict. At least one writer, Bruce, 1994, describes the results of this clash at the Hixson Symposium in 1948. Others, Baars (1986), Gardner (1985), and Howe (1990) provide an in depth review of these issues.

The evolution of social developmental theory possessing a defining crisis has provided a rich theoretical environment that Kegan tapped into. Kegan’s (1982), The Evolving Self, provided a post-Piagetian model of the development of human consciousness, important in its extension of cognitive development beyond adolescence. In his second work, In Over Our Heads, 1994, Kegan refines his concepts of self as a perceiving consciousness, and discusses the implications of post-Piagetian theory in the complex content of our real world. It is this complex content in which adults must make sense of conflicting and competing demands, in order to succeed in work undertakings as well as in the undertaking of learning and developing. I would argue that the realms of work, learning, and development are conceptually close to epistemological realms of sociological, psychological, and biological in regards to the existence of any human in the late Twentieth Century context. It is the application of Kegan’s theory to this context that provides the powerful potential of this work. Kegan is no self-help writer, offering step by step help. He offers a perspective that can continue to be tested, and has a very reasonable applicability to therapy, education, and training. It is this theory, and some of it’s predecessors that I will discuss in this paper, and what I believe is their importance to teaching and training adults.

Jean Piaget was a discoverer, an explorer as important as Magellan. Where as Magellan sailed uncharted waters with navigation devices of his own crafting, so too did Piaget sail uncharted waters of the mind with navigation devices of his own design. Piaget explored the perceptive processes of children with half full water beakers, discovering that the ability to reflect on sensations and actions is connected to chronological maturity, and that consciousness must develop in its capability to provide the child with a widening view of the world (1976). A reading of Piaget’s works will inform the reader that Piaget was did not fancy himself a developmental theorist or psychologist, but considered himself a genetic epistemologist (Kegan, 1982, pg. 26). Yet, he captured the human ability to see the reality of the world without having experienced all of it, and recognized how it developed through childhood to the adult state. This understanding of developmental movement has far reaching implications. Briefly reviewing Piaget’s Era I of physical - cognitive development, one finds the child developing from pure reflex as its only response to stimuli, to a search for and eventual resolution of absent objects; all within the first two years of life. I believe an equivalent intellectual growth for an adult would be Forrest Gump to Stephen Hawkins in the same period. The subsequent Eras are less dramatic, but show the increasing ability to relate from the internal sensory perspective to a capacity for reasoning about reasoning.

Kegan (1982), using Piaget’s development theory as a basis, makes a strong case for refining the theory beyond the last Era, Operational Thought, into stages of adult cognitive development. He does this through the paradoxical device of subject-object. Kegan perceives Piaget’s stages as the consequence of how children deal with the relationship of themselves as either the object or subject of perception. The subject-object balance, argues Kegan (1982), is an evolutionary movement of differentiation. In other words, the person emerges from embeddedness, in which the child sees itself as one together with all it perceives, to a reintegration with the world rather than embeddedness in it. The infant, Piaget believed (cited in Kegan, 1982), perceived the parent playing hide-and-seek, as actually being physically removed from its perceptive space. The infant at this point is of the world it sees; it conceives of no other possibility than here or gone. It is embedded in its world as a fully subjective entity. Yet, soon the infant constructs a permanence about objects that lead to perceiving the world as independent of its own perceptions. This objective view is a differentiation of perspective. Throughout childhood, the person renegotiates its embeddedness as it develops more complex cognitive abilities.

Piaget discussed assimilation and accommodation as principal means of integrating new perspectives, and these concepts are equally relevant to adults. Assimilation being the integration into one’s world view through the mechanism of reorganizing perspective (schema) to accept the new information. This is the root of attitude change, sort of a rearranging house to make room for the new. Accommodation was less reintegrative, being the use of some mechanism to allow coexistence with the new concept; perhaps a trying on of the new to see how it fits, or even use of defense mechanisms in the Freudian sense. Kegan believes Piaget demonstrated in the biological sense, indeed Piaget was a geneticist by training, that the human develops by periods of dynamic stability and balance followed by periods of qualitative instability and qualitatively new balance. To Kegan (pg. 44), the key question is to what extent does the organism differentiate itself from and thus relate itself in a new manner to the world?

This is an approach to assimilation and accommodation that allows for more complexity of an adult context. This differentiation/relating is the basis of meaning. The person receives much sensory stimuli in any given period of time; only selected elements of this plethora of stimulation is allowed into the person’s perceptions in a permanent way. This acceptance and integration results when the stimuli are arranged perceptively by the individual in a manner that endows them with meaning. It is when stimuli have meaning that the individual will potentially reintegrate, assimilate, and learning will occur. The specific cultural triggers to the process take on importance, especially when considering the role of cognition in learning.

There has been intriguing research into the process of meaning making in adults. In one study, McAdams and associates (1976) theorized that mid-life adults constructed plans for the future from the dual perspectives of complexity and generativity. Generativity considered by them a mostly adult phenomena. They cited work by Neugarten (1986) and others that characterized adult lives “in terms of relative complexity versus simplicity at a given point in time,” (p.800). McAdams et al. described a multifaceted environment and highly differentiated schedules for work and personal activities in which change, diversity, challenge, and growth occur. In opposition to this complex environment is one that is more simplistic, absent obstacles, and uncomplicated and stable. From this contrast, McAdams et al. determined that amount and diversity of goals and emphasis on growth and change would provide the evidence of complexity that could be evaluated in terms of ego development. Citing Loevinger’s construct of ego development (1976) and measurement (1978), McAdams et al. (p.801), hypothesized that “higher ego development will be associated with greater complexity in an adult’s personal plan for the future.” McAdams and his fellow researchers did not address cognition directly, however, their research suggests a relationship between complexity and other cognitive processes.

Michael Basseches (1985) described developmental transformations occurring because of constitutive and interactive relationships, in which relationships make each party to the relationship what they are, while concurrently being in a state of action. In this way he defined dialectical thinking in adults, which is beyond formal thinking because dialectical thinking implies ability to recognize continuity in anomalous situations. The cognitive ability to confront events not previously faced through the use of dialectical thinking indicates the importance of complexity to development. Certainly all adults are not operating at the level of dialectic thinking, however Basseches (1985, 1988) and others (Commons, et al., 1984, and Mines & Kitchner, 1986) believe dialectic thinking results from cognitive development, with the highest incidence of occurrence in adulthood. The second process has been described by Abelson (1976, p.33) as a “coherent sequence of events expected by the individual, involving him either as a participant or as an observer.” This “script” as he termed it, is learned throughout a lifetime and varies from individualized to universal depending on the nature of the causal events. It is reasonable to assume that child rearing, social motives, and plans for the future may be culturally weighted and derived from a “script” that has been cognitively internalized. McAdams et al., do not directly address scripts; but they do provide evidence that degrees of complexity can affect ego development. From this information I will make an assumptive leap that complexity also affects learning as a cognitive developmental process.

Abelson’s (1976) concept of scripts reflects Piaget’s schemata theory, and as described by Abelson, operates at an integrated level. Scripts may be internalized and called upon to address a specific class of situations, thus reflecting internalized schema, and may even have become ego components in the sense of Loevinger (1976). The difference between Piaget’s and Abelson’s concepts is demonstrated in the contrast between the purposes of schema and script. Schema is the set of learned perceptions that pulls together ideas and information about a stimulus, while script is an internalized operation called upon by the schema to respond to the stimuli. Thus, script as a concept extends Piaget’s theory into a realm of adult context. One can recognize scripts as the mechanism which the adult goes about collecting new information that may reinforce the script or its originating schema, may facilitate assimilation that changes the schema and script, or becomes accommodated through other adaptive mechanisms. Without further elucidation it is evident that script and schema are important concepts for training design, because information structured by an educator or trainee will create the most behavior change if it can effect assimilation (differentiation followed by integration) into new schema.

Kegan (1982, p.32) describes this process as evolving a new “psychologic,” which is the relationship of subject-object in a person’s perception. Perhaps this occurs before scripts change, in that scripts require some testing for their effectiveness before they become internalized. This may be why adults can assimilate behavior change before they show direct evidence of it, sort of a “mulling over” effect. If one considers the nature of script as an object, not subject, in other words as the activity itself, then techniques to facilitate scripting are easier to discern. One particular technique that has become prevalent in research concerns the use of qualitative interview information. This approach relies upon verbal interchange in an interview (see Belenkey, 1986 and Gilligan, 1982, for examples), and result in theory development as the process is described by Glasser and Strauss (1967). Qualitative forms of information exchange, such as the story telling, anecdote, and narrative have been used in teaching and training for many years, especially in the social sciences area. Extending the concept of narrative as a method for organizational learning was explored at the University of Southern California, by Tenkasi & Boland (1993), and has interesting parallels with individual learning.

Tenkasi & Boland (1993, p.1) wrote that “It is in narratives that we find cognitive structures and schemas being produced and reproduced. As our narratives change, structures change. Narratives are the generative process in cognition.” They argue that meaning making and subsequent changes in the structures of meaning are represented in organizational action, because “in action…we produce and reproduce the systems of signification, domination, and legitimation that define our organizational structures and our culture at large” (p. 4). This argument offers many possibilities for both understanding adult learning and describing organizational learning. Unfortunately, the paper by Tenkasi & Boland focuses on narrative as the principle means of learning, replacing all cognitive models as representational of digital computer operations. Their argument neglects the social and psychological components of more complete views, such as Kegan’s (1994, 1982) described above. Drawing from Gidden’s work in social theory (cited in Tenkasi & Boland, 1993), Tenkasi & Boland (1993) rightly disagree with cognitive structural-functionalism as an incomplete representation of cognitive processes. Structural-functionalism can be likened to a computer metaphor, and has been outlined as such by Varela et al., (1991). However, Tenkasi & Boland (1993) incorrectly imitate that Varela as his associates (cited in Tenkasi & Boland, 1993, p. 3) have established what would be a metatheory relying on a computer model of the human brain as the “central tool and guiding metaphor of cognitivism.” Varela, as well as other organizational and psychological theorists (Bruner, Stubbart, Gardner) are cited by Tenkasi & Boland (1993) as contributing to the digital computer as the predominant model for cognitive theory as applied to groups. This representation is not wholly accurate.

Jerome Bruner (cited in Baars, 1986, p. 71), who had been influenced by psychoanalytic theory, did propose in the late 1950’s that motivation may influence perceptions, and did considerable work through the 1970’s in representing this perception process in a conceptual model. Close examination of Bruner’s early work shows his inclination toward modeling perception as he and other early cognitive theorists sought empirical defense for their challenges to behaviorism. His professional association with George Miller and Noam Chomsky (cited in Baars, 1986, p. 210), theorists who based their cognitive work on linguistics, which easily fell into representational models, does not, however, assume Bruner to be an advocate of the computational metaphor, as Tenkasi & Boland (1993) suggest Bruner, in fact, produced more qualitative social theory than most of his contemporaries, and as a result his influence has been limited in experimental psychology according to Baars (1986). George Miller, in an interview with Bernard Baars (1986, p.210), stated “When Jerry Bruner and I started the Center for Cognitive Studies at Harvard, did we mean to exclude anything that a computer can’t do? Emotion, will, motivation? No, of course not.” I also disagree with Tenkasi & Boland’s (1993, p.5) position that Howard Gardner supports “making the computer model of the mind a dominant aspect of the whole field…” I find no such evidence in Gardner’s (1985), The Mind’s New Science: A History of the Cognitive Revolution. More recently, in 1993, Gardner wrote (p.7) “I define intelligence…as the ability to solve problems, or to fashion products, that are valued in one or more cultural or community settings.” This definition cannot be workable from a purely digital computational standpoint. Likewise, one will find no direct support for the computer model in Kegan (1994, 1982).

Unfortunately, Tenkasi & Boland (1993) have weakened their compelling argument for narrative learning as a cognitive process by theoretically demanding all or nothing. Their (p. 1) fundamental view that narrative learning is the basic organizing principle of cognition is a fascinating perspective but it is not supported empirically, and is difficult for me to accept for the very reason they argue for it. The cognitive process they describe exists in paradoxical state. People create the cognitive model while they are themselves not using it to learn from, yet this process becomes the model for learning. This paradox is, in my opinion, the very reason some cognitive structuration is necessary to understand learning. With schema and like processes, the circular differentiating – relating explained by Kegan (1982) balances the natural tensions between existing knowledge and what to do about the newly perceived. Additionally, the work of Kahnemann & Tversky (1974) on heuristics in decision making, that of Kohlberg (1973), Toulmin (1974), Selman (1971), and Chandler & Boyes (1982) reporting on social cognitive processes, provides extensive support for the presence of underlying cognitive structure. Narrative alone does not fill the bill. Nonetheless, Tenkasi & Boland provide an extremely compelling argument for consideration of narrative as a meaning making process. For that reason I will discuss their points most relevant to adult learning processes.