Self-determination theory

I shared my ASEE talk with a few friends and colleagues and, as expected, received a range of responses from total to cautious agreement to complete skepticism. What was interesting to me, though, was that most of the skepticism centered around the issue of "trust": In a completely free and autonomous environment, how can we trust that all students will be sufficiently self-motivated to learn? Or is the approach to learning I advocate one that can only work for students that are already (somehow, magically, innately) self-driven?

My own intuitive feeling is that if our education process from the very first days of schooling is truly free, then all students (who have not had their self-drive destroyed by conventional one-size-fits-all schooling) will retain their innate self-motivation to learn and grow. But this is only a partial answer. Other environment factors may be important too. What are they?

For deeper insights on this problem, I want to explore the psychology literature, particularly research findings and theories that relate to motivation for growth.

After my talk, someone in the audience came up to me and asked me if I had read about "Self-Determination Theory" develop by the psychologists Deci and Ryan at the University of Rochester. I had not, so he jotted down a pointer for me on a card. I came across that card today, which reminded me to take a look.

I confess I haven't made it past much more than the Wikipedia entry on SDT, and the high level overview of self-determination theory on their website yet, but from what I can tell, it is quite consistent with what Rogers and Maslow (two noted psychologists whose work on related subjects I am more familiar with) have had to say on the subject of autonomy and self-actualization.

This theory posits that there are three innate human needs that must be satisfied for optimal growth: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. The Wikipedia entry further notes:

Deci and Vansteenkiste (2003)^[7] claim that there are three essential elements of the theory:

1. Humans are inherently proactive with their potential and mastering their inner forces (such as drives and emotions)
2. Humans have inherent tendency toward growth development and integrated functioning
3. Optimal development and actions are inherent in humans but they don’t happen automatically

To actualise their inherent potential they need nurturing from the social environment.

I am looking forward to learning more about this. In particular, the third point is exactly what I want more insights on. What kind of nurturing is needed?

Leaving academia for Industry

This week, Matt Welsh, a faculty member at Harvard Computer Science, who I know well because we have worked in the same area of wireless sensor networks, announced that he was quitting his hard-won tenured position to go to Google. Here's his blog entry about it: http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/2010/11/why-im-leaving-harvard.html .

As I noted in my comment on his post, I think everyone should do what they have passion for. Matt has clearly identified what he finds satisfying and what he does not:

I also admire the professors who flourish in an academic setting, writing books, giving talks, mentoring students, sitting on government advisory boards, all that. I never found most of those things very satisfying, and all of that extra work only takes away from time spent building systems, which is what I really want to be doing.

As someone who most enjoys learning through teaching, and working with students to help them grow, I can't imagine making such a decision to leave academia. But I wish Matt all the best, and know he'll do a great job at Google, just as he did at Harvard.

Matt's announcement did provoke in me some soul-searching about why I sometimes feel a tad disappointed that none of my own Ph.D. students have made it into tenure-track faculty positions (well, so far, anyway). I think it's mostly a sadness that they either don't share the same passion for teaching, mentoring, and basic research, or in the few cases where they do find academia attractive, gave up perhaps too soon. But ultimately, what I do wish for each of my students (indeed, for everyone) is that they find work that matches their passion and does not limit their potential for growth.

Carl Rogers on Teaching and Learning

The following excerpt from an essay by Carl Rogers (the noted humanistic psychologist) struck a very deep chord within me when I first encountered it just a few years ago. It has changed the way I approach teaching. I often share this article with students in my classes.

I wonder how many classroom teachers would come to this point in their thinking if they reflected deeply on their own experiences of learning.

Personal Thoughts on Teaching and Learning (1952)

I wish to present some very brief remarks, in the hope that if they bring forth any reaction from you, I may get some new light on my own ideas.

a) My experience is that I cannot teach another person how to teach. To attempt it is for me, in the long run, futile.

b) It seems to me that anything that can be taught to another is relatively inconsequential and has little or no significant influence on behavior.

c) I realize increasingly that I am only interested in learnings which significantly influence behavior.

d) I have come to feel that the only learning which significantly influence behavior is self-discovered, self-appropriated learning.

e) Such self-discovered learning, truth that has been personally appropriated and assimilated in experience, cannot be directly communicated to another.

f) As a consequence of the above, I realize that I have lost interest in being a teacher.

g) When I try to teach, as I do sometimes, I am appalled by the results, which seems a little more than inconsequential, because sometimes the teaching appears to succeed. When this happens I find that the results are damaging. It seems to cause the individual to distrust his own experience, and to stifle significant learning. Hence, I have come to feel that the outcomes of teaching are either unimportant or hurtful.

h) When I look back at the results of my past teaching, the real results seem the same - either damage was done - or nothing significant occurred. This is frankly troubling.

i) As a consequence, I realize that I am only interested in being a learner, preferably learning things that matter, that have some significant influence on my own behavior.

j) I find it very rewarding to learn, in groups, in relationships with one person as in therapy, or by myself.

k) I find that one of the best, but most difficult, ways for me to learn is to drop my own defensiveness, at least temporarily, and to try to understand the way in which his experience seems and feels to the other person.

l) I find that another way of learning for me is to state my own uncertainties, to try to clarify my puzzlements, and thus get closer to the meaning that my experience actually seems to have.

m) This whole train of experiencing, and the meanings that I have thus far discovered in it, seem to have launched me on a process which is both fascinating and at times a little frightening. It seems to mean letting my experiences carry me on, in a direction which appears to be forward, toward goals that I can but dimly define, as I try to understand at least the current meaning of that experience. The sensation is that of floating with a complex stream of experience, with the fascinating possibility of trying to comprehend its ever-changing complexity.

I am almost afraid I may seem to have gotten away from any discussion of learning, as well as teaching. Let me again introduce a practical note by saying that by themselves these interpretations of my experience may sound queer and aberrant, but not particularly shocking. It is when I realize the implications that I shudder a bit at the distance I have come from the commonsense world that everyone knows is right. I can best illustrate this by saying that if the experiences of others had been the same as mine, and if 1 had discovered similar meanings in it, many consequences would be implied:

a.) Such experience would imply that we would do away with teaching. People would get together if they wished to learn.

b.) We would do away with examinations. They measure the inconsequential type of learning.

c.) We would do away with grades and credits for the same reason.

d.) We would do away with degrees as a measure of competence partly for the same reason. Another reason is that a degree marks an end or a conclusion of something, and a learner is only interested in the continuing process of learning.

e.) We would do away with the exposition of conclusions, for we would realize that no one learns significantly from conclusions.

I think I had better to stop here. I do not want to become too fantastic. I want to know primarily whether anything in my inward thinking, as I have tried to describe it, speaks to anything in your experience of the classroom as you have lived it, and if so, what the meanings are that exist for you in your experience.

Iron Range Engineering

I'm very much interested in alternative models of engineering education that cede greater autonomy in the learning process to the student, and give them experiences that boost their self-confidence in their ability to learn and do.

I recently found out about a small engineering program in Minnesota has set out to do just this. It's called Iron Range Engineering. The students in this program develop essential skills in a self-driven manner while working on real-world projects.

Here's a video of a talk by the founder, Ron Ulseth, describing the aims of this program when it started just a little over a year ago:

http://irengineering.blogspot.com/2009/09/rons-speech.html

I'm hoping to visit this unique program sometime next year, and see for myself how it works.

Paper reading in class

I think one big mistake we make when teaching is to always present facts that are fully digested and neatly packaged. By doing this, we're depriving students of opportunities to learn how to chew on raw "unprocessed" ideas and extract meaning for themselves.

To put these thoughts into action, instead of just telling my wireless networks class how certain wireless routing protocols work through a presentation/lecture, I instead did a joint paper-reading session in class today.

We read through, together, the original papers by the authors of two protocols. The students took turns reading a few paragraphs each, and we took breaks periodically to discuss and consider the meaning of what we had read. I did go to the board to clarify a few points, but overall, it definitely felt like I ceded more control over their own learning to the students today. Very satisfying.

A new place to learn

It is rare to hear of the founding of a new college:

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/08/the-woe-is-us-books/

Ralston College sounds like a wonderful enterprise to me, though I can hear the skeptics asking "what kind of jobs will the graduates of this college land?"

The dangers of classroom teaching

Recently, I had an opportunity to give a speech at the American Society of Engineering Education's 2010 Frontiers in Engineering Conference, titled "The Dangers of Classroom Teaching". I talked about some of the experiences that lead me to pursue a career in academia, and my growing beliefs about how best to learn and share learning.

A transcript of the talk can be found here:

http://ceng.usc.edu/~bkrishna/TheDangersOfClassroomTeaching.pdf

I know it comes across to some as idealistic and utopian, and many are skeptical about the practicality of implementing such ideas. But it is too easy to accept the way things are, and the system we have now is too far from perfect to be so complacent about it.

Grades as a threat to excellence

Here's a fantastic article about grade inflation . An excerpt:

A grade-oriented student body is an invitation for the administration and faculty to ask hard questions: What unexamined assumptions keep traditional grading in place? What forms of assessment might be less destructive? How can professors minimize the salience of grades in their classrooms, so long as grades must still be given? And: If the artificial inducement of grades disappeared, what sort of teaching strategies might elicit authentic interest in a course?

To engage in this sort of inquiry, to observe real classrooms, and to review the relevant research is to arrive at one overriding conclusion: The real threat to excellence isn't grade inflation at all; it's grades.

What makes for good research?

Claim 1: Any strong paper should possess at least some of the following characteristics:

• Solve a significant/important problem (such as being of practical relevance, having a broad impact, solving a long-standing problem)
• Come up with a significant conjecture (whose solution would be important)
• Use a sophisticated/surprising solution method
• Say something non-obvious/counter-intuitive
• Correct a popular misconception
• Shed new light/initiate a new line of research
• Demonstrate significant improvement over state of the art
• Make a valuable contribution to further research (e.g. present new metrics/models, provide new experimental data, present observations that clearly merit further study)
• Present convincing results (e.g. by validating simplified analysis with realistic experiments)

Claim 2: the following features are must-haves in a good paper:

• Demonstrate thoroughness and effort
• Be technically rigorous
• Present material in a clear, compelling manner

It would be nice to have some kind of a checklist like the above when writing a paper, to gauge its quality for oneself before submitting it for external review...

Building Knowledge, Together

"In the long history of humankind (and animalkind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed." - Charles Darwin

Even a casual glance over my publication list will reveal that I am a great believer in both intra and inter-disciplinary research collaborations. In my first two years as an assistant professor, I have actively developed collaborations with a number of faculty members in several departments/institutes at USC: Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, Information Sciences Institute, Industrial and Systems Engineering. My collaborators span a wide range of disciplines and perspectives including experimental networking, signal processing, optimization, data management, distributed computing, and algorithms. My own research focus is on applying theoretical techniques (including modeling, performance analysis, and algorithms) for practical problems in sensor networks.

In nearly every case, I have found that the complementary nature of interests between my collaborators and me has yielded interesting new problems and helped to bring relevant techniques to bear on such problems. For instance working with more experimental colleagues I am able to understand practical considerations and determine what empirical observations need to be better understood through modeling and analysis. At other times I help translate practical problems into a formal setting so that I can work with colleagues who have expertise in particular relevant theoretical tools (e.g. estimation theory/randomized graphs/network flow optimization) to develop solutions for them.

Such collaborations are becoming increasingly fruitful because they bridge the gap between theory and practice, between independent yet related disciplines. Indeed, in recent years, the National Science Foundation (NSF) as well as other funding agencies have expressed a clear preference for funding collaborative research.

This may all be well and good, but I am now having second thoughts that my strong focus on collaborative research runs counter to a conventional "bean-counting" perspective to evaluating scholarship. Come tenure time, how can the individual contributions of a faculty member like myself be assessed "quantitatively" if most papers are written in collaboration with others? One base assumption in this perspective is that all papers have the same "value." Under this assumption, it follows that the individual credit for a genuinely significant collaborative paper with 3 authors (say with one student and two senior collaborating faculty members) is worth less than that for a paper with 2 authors (say just the student and his advisor).

The alternative perspective I would advocate strongly, but that I genuinely fear is not widely accepted in the academic world today, is expressed beautifully by Keith Dorwick in a thoughtful essay titled "The Ways We Build Knowledge." Although Dorwick's focus is on literary fields, the following comments from his essay apply equally well to engineering disciplines:

"Currently, there is only one dominant model for the creation of knowledge that we call research -- that model is a solitary one in which, generally speaking and especially among literary critics, scholarship is seen as a personal possession, one that is owned by the person who has done the work necessary to write the books and journals that bear her name and that, for those who find themselves in the professoriate, is not just a creative expression of one's talents, but the means necessary to keep one's job in a market that is only now possibly beginning to open up.

In this model, collaboration is seen as a problem, not an opportunity -- since both initial employment and tenure depend on the production of scholarly articles that are disseminated in peer-reviewed journals and books that are published by university presses that also depend on peer reviews, it is very necessary to know exactly who did what work. Collaboration becomes nothing less than an administrative problem -- how can tenure and promotion committees and deans, for instance, know whether or not to promote a local candidate who has spent much of her career in collaboration. The problem is simple, from this viewpoint: who owns the work, and who, therefore, should benefit from it?

Of course, the simple answer is this: "we did it together." A collaboration ought to be judged as the collective work of the individuals involved and tenure and promotion committees ought to see good work as something of which the department, college, and university can be proud. In fact, of course, as anyone who has worked in a good collaboration knows, the fact is that the work is often the stronger for being the product of two or more people... "