Sternberg Thinking and Problem Solving

1. Auflage 2013
ISBN: 978-0-08-057299-4
Verlag: Elsevier Science & Techn.
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, Band Volume 2, 461 Seiten

Reihe: Handbook of Perception and Cognition

Thinking and Problem-Solving presents a comprehensive and up-to-date review of literature on cognition, reasoning, intelligence, and other formative areas specific to this field. Written for advanced undergraduates, researchers, and academics, this volume is a necessary reference for beginning and established investigators in cognitive and educational psychology. Thinking and Problem-Solving provides insight into questions such as: how do people solve complex problems in mathematics and everyday life? How do we generate new ideas? How do we piece together clues to solve a mystery, categorize novel events, and teach others to do the same? - Provides a comprehensive literature review - Covers both historical and contemporary approaches - Organized for ease of use and reference - Chapters authored by leading scholars

Autoren/Hrsg.

Sternberg, Robert J.

Leseproben

CHAPTER 2 Contemporary Approaches to the Study of Thinking and Problem Solving
K. Anders Ericsson and Reid Hastie Publisher Summary
This chapter discusses the contemporary approaches to the study of thinking and problem solving. The modal approach to create a comprehensive theory of thinking strives to identify simple conditions under which a given type of thinking can be reliably reproduced. Following the successful example of experimenters in many of the natural sciences, the goal of this approach is to discover general laws and invariant constraints in well-defined tasks that do not require access to complex knowledge and experience. The most popular alternative approach to the study of thinking starts by examining performance in everyday life and identifying stable and reproducible phenomena. Of particular interest is expert performance, because it offers the highest levels of performance and also the largest stable individual differences in performance when compared with that of beginners. An understanding of thinking is incomplete unless it provides an account of how the elements of adult thought—such as concepts, representations, and skills—are acquired. Research on learning and skill acquisition on the whole range of activities ranging from performance on simple laboratory tasks to complex life-long efforts to attain expert performance shows that effective learning is not an automatic consequence of extended experience. I INTRODUCTION
Recent reviews of thinking (Holyoak & Spellman, 1993; Oden, 1987) distinguish between a general definition of thinking that includes all intelligent cognitive activities and a more specific definition that includes only the most “complex” forms of cognitive activities, such as reasoning, decision making, and problem solving. Most reviewers, then, restrict their discussion to findings from empirical studies examining performance on laboratory tasks designed to induce particular forms of complex thinking, usually under conditions where the subject is motivated to achieve a clearly specified goal. This amounts to focusing on extensional aspects of the meaning of the term “thinking,” and especially on experimental tasks designed by researchers to capture empirically analyzable aspects of thinking. In fact, the table of contents from the present volume could probably serve as an exemplar–based definition of an academic psychologist’s concept of thinking: representation and categorization, deduction, induction, problem solving, creativity, wisdom (we might add one or two categories such as decision making and scientific discovery). Most nonpsychologists would probably endorse the more general conception of thinking. For example, a typical dictionary definition would begin: “Think … To have or formulate in the mind … To reason about, to reflect on, to ponder …” (American Heritage Dictionary, Second College Edition, 1982). But, linguistic analysis and ratings of word meanings reveal a culturally shared collection of everyday concepts with thinking, very much like the professional psychologist’s, as the superordinate for activities such as problem solving, reasoning, conceptualizing, and deciding, and with coordinate, contrasting categories such as perceiving, feeling, dreaming, wishing, remembering, and willing (D’Andrade, 1987; Rips & Conrad, 1989). The interesting (and perhaps sobering) conclusion is that technical and everyday definitions of thinking are not very discrepant and there is probably as much systematic structure within the layperson’s system of related concepts as there is in the professional psychologist’s. If we attempted to piece together a more intentional definition from various dictionary and encyclopedia entries, we would conclude with something like: A sequence of internal symbolic activities that leads to novel, productive ideas or conclusions. We could supplement this definition with a suggestion that the symbolic activities represent events external to the thinker and that the sequence is not simply the reflection of externally driven perceptual experiences or the reproduction of long–term memories. We suspect that the major difference between the layperson’s and the psychologist’s intentional definitions would involve the psychologists’ focus on tasks in which thinking is motivated to achieve a clearly specified goal; while a layperson would be likelier to include various types of spontaneous reflection and reverie in the category. One reason we are so concerned with the relationship between the layperson’s and the researcher’s definitions of thinking is because a fundamental goal of research on thinking is to elucidate phenomena that occur in everyday situations. Researchers have tended to focus on important phenomena such as exceptional achievement in intellectual tasks (for example, mathematical reasoning, engineering problem solving, and predictive and diagnostic judgment). However, more mundane achievements (for example, daily planning and navigation, arithmetic calculation, mechanical troubleshooting) are also important. The layperson’s conceptions of thinking are also of interest because, in a nascent science like Psychology, there is considerable interest in simply changing “folk models of the mind” or at least in conducting research that demonstrably goes beyond everyday conceptions. Where the layperson’s intuitions and the researcher’s assumptions about thinking differ sharply is in notions about how the systematic study of thought processes should be carried out. Many people today view thinking and conscious experience as reflecting ineffable spiritual aspects of our existence, in contrast to the mechanistic and material aspects of our physical environment. A more sophisticated version of this anti–empirical orientation is seen in the writings of many philosophers, who have concluded that the nature and structure of thought could never be studied with objective methods or described by general laws and mechanisms. When confronted by the expanding corpus of empirical results from the behavioral sciences, most people respond that “thinking” studied in the laboratory (or by other systematic methods) is artificial and doesn’t capture the more interesting forms of thinking in everyday life. They are also likely to endorse techniques for studying thinking, such as self–observation and introspection, without considering serious deficiencies of these methods. To fully account for thinking we need to consider the complexity and diversity of adult thinking in the context of accumulated knowledge and skills acquired over a lengthy developmental experience. We are far from approaching these goals and some argue that the current research methods are insufficient to ever attain them. In preparation for our discussion of the contemporary approaches to thinking, we will outline the history of the study of thinking with its major approaches. Most modern themes, now represented in approaches to empirical research, can be found in historical precedents. But, causal interpretations are dubious, as there is a fundamental problem with historical hindsight: A multitude of historical themes are not reflected in any contemporary trends. II A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE STUDY OF THINKING
A Prescientific and Philosophical Accounts of Thinking
Around the time civilization emerged, it appears that thinking was not differentiated from experience in general. It was only when philosophers found that some experiences did not simply reflect the outside world that thinking was distinguished from perception. If thinking included experience that was not directly related to perception or divinely transmitted, where did the ideas and thoughts in our heads come from? Could they all be explained in terms of transformations of our sensory inputs and through a study of developmental experience? Aristotle is generally credited with the first systematic analyses of his own thinking. Aristotle’s method of introspection consisted of extensive self–observation, with observation leading to general hypotheses, which were then evaluated by further self–observation. His goal was to induce the general laws describing thought from these instances of self–observation. Anticipating later specialized definitions of thinking, Aristotle excluded perceptions (experiences reflecting the current external world) and reproductive memories of specific past experiences from the category of thinking. He also distinguished between contemplation, thought directed at the attainment of new knowledge, and deliberation, thought directed toward practical action (cf. Sternberg, Conway, Ketron, & Bernstein, 1981, for a similar distinction between kinds of intelligence). Aristotle concluded that thinking, in particular recall, corresponded to a sequence of thoughts, as illustrated in Figure 1. This led to further reflections on the relations between consecutive thoughts and the discovery that these relations could be described by a small number of associations, such as similarity, contiguity, and contrast. Hence Aristotle went beyond a recording of recalled sequences of thoughts primarily by his extraction of the relations between thoughts. FIGURE 1...