Overcoming Objectivity

Prompt: Learning, Motivation, and Theory

“Share a story about how you overcame a learning challenge. Why was it a challenge? What strategies did you use? Use the language you used in this unit”

At the end of my first year of University, I made the decision to switch my degree from biology to political science. While I enjoyed the lab aspect of the introductory science courses I took, such as biology and chemistry, reaching the correct answer using a specific scientific method was quite challenging for me. As discussed in the EdTechAdmin post “Why is learning hard?”, learning is difficult because it involves changing your mind about something (EdTechAdmin 2023). I did not have enough interest or dedication to engross myself in the work it was going to take to fully grasp scientific problems. I think that part of what led me to that point was a particular learning style in high school.

I took many science and math courses in highschool, but I never felt like I fully understood what I was doing. I could solve a problem, as long as I observed someone else doing it enough to replicate their method. I believe that my high school experience made me familiar with a learning style that falls into the Behaviorism learning theory, which “equates learning with changes in either the form or frequency of observable performance” (Ertmer and Newby 2013). The hands off approach of my high school education meant that my teachers did not take the time to understand my structure of knowledge or the mental processes I used (2023). Although I did not fully grasp concepts, I got by with a Behaviorism learning style because all I needed to do was respond to a target stimulus, getting the question right, and it did not matter how I did it. This lead to some problems, though. I never learned how to do long division properly because the stimulus for solving that type of math problem was changing during a curriculum shift in my schools county in Maryland. Teachers were forced to teach long division in a new way that did not resonate with kids, so some teachers just refused to include those types of problems on tests, and I got by without ever learning the original or new stimulus to solve division math problems in the first place.

My switch to political science was when I first fully indulged in learning strategies more in line with Cognitivism learning theory. I could not watch someone write a political science essay and replicate it exactly to achieve an identical result, because that would be plagiarism! I needed to critically think and explain my own ideas, two processes unfamiliar to me. I was the most challenged at the beginning of my degree because I was frustrated that there was no right answer to political questions. When I went to talk to a political science professor for the first time, I learned that I would need to break my habits of learning purely based on replicability and enhance my mental processing. I found that unlike biology, I was interested enough in political problems to put in the work to re-learn the ways to learn. The way my professors supported me in my hesitance to respond “correctly” to essay prompts was exactly in line with cognitivism: I was encouraged to engage in complex cognitive processes such as thinking, problem solving, language, concept formation and information processing” (Ertmer and Newby 2013; Snelbecker 1983). Like in the video Backward Bicycling, in order to succeed in my political science studies I needed to unlearn my dependence on objectivity and accept that there is no “correct” answer to a lot of the social problems I was expected to analyse (EdTech Admin 2023).

It is through the shift between these learning theories that I was able to face a learning challenge and ultimately improve my critical thinking and writing skills. I am so appreciative of my education and I think I will always want to learn more, even if that includes the task of unlearning previous ways of knowing.