James P Louviere's Science Ed Blog: James P Louviere's Science Education Blog ,Post Number Zero

James P Louviere’s Science Education Blog, Post Number Zero, July 7, 2011

About this picture: During a wonderful visit with my Cambodian

Relatives January to April 2011, I was enjoying the company of Harat (age 2½) and Tavat (7), when their aunt snapped this picture. It expresses the joy I feel when I’m with the children on the family estate. It’s the same joy I felt when teaching and administering schools from 1959 to 2008, from grades K through the PhD in the USA, Germany and Thailand. I loved being a teacher, professor, administrator, program coordinator and adjunct, and I loved writing about education. I hope this blog captures your interest, and I look forward to your comments and your visits.

The Great USA System:

Unlimited Student Achievement!

Betweem 1975 and 1985 I developed a way of managing a science class and called it “The Great USA System.” It was accepted by a now-defunct “university” as part of my “doctoral work” in science education. The Program was never published, though it served as the basis for two peer-reviewed articles in journals of the National Science Teachers Association.

I tried to find one of my old articles by Gooleing to “Let them manage their own grades Louviere,” and the following 12 items popped up. There was no source given, but it reflects my thinking and policies perfectly:

How to make children feel intrinsically motivated:

help them feel autonomous
let them feel cared for
let them have a say in making their own class rules
help them understand learning goals so they can fit them into their own ideas and world
help them internalize responsibility and have a sense of value towards goals previously thought of as external
emphasize mastery and not grades
be enthusiastic
don’t tell when you can ask
build material around student interests
help them set their own goals
ask non-threatening questions
offer options: give them “wiggle room” in choosing what they’ll read, write, and work , on.

I beg pardon of anyone who may have written this, if indeed it was not me! My next twelve Posts will look at each of the items in the list above to see if we can think of ways you could experiment with the ideas so they could enrich your science (or other) classes. I hope you find this useful.

In my “Great USA System,” USA stood for Unlimited Student Achievement,” and it used the seemingly contradictory psychological principles of Abraham Maslow’s humanistic psychology, which described the way super successful people enjoy activities that led to “self-actualization” and B. F. Skinner’s “Operant Conditioning.”

Skinner was accused of raising his daughter in a “Skinner Box” where her activities were programmed so that, in order to get something she wanted, she had to go through a behavior Skinner wanted her to perform. A psychology professor once told a class I attended that Skinner had used “operant Conditioning” on a pigeon in a Skinner Box in the lobby of a hotel where the American Psychological Association was meeting. All day long the bird was pecking and pecking like a woodpecker. Skinner had set up mechanism in the box so that at first, when the bird was hungry, it would strut around in the box pecking at random in hope of finding something to eat. When it pecked at a certain target, a grain of food fell into the box. Eureka! The bird pecked the target again, and another grain of food appeared. Eventually Skinner began rigging the delivery system so that it did not deliver the food immediately. The bird repeated the peck, and the system rewarded the behavior by delivering the food. Again and again Skinner adjusted the system so that it took more andmore pecks to get the food. The bird responded like a human does when clicking on a hyperlink or dropping a quarter into a snack machine fails. The bird simple tried again.

So Skinner demonstrated that organisms (even humans) will most likely repeat a behavior that produced a reinforcing reward even the reward is no longer immediate. The pigeon or human being has been “programmed” to do a certain action because it has produced desired rewards in the past. The nervous system is thus programmed on a stimulus-response level. Humans and other organisms can use the conscious mind to control their voluntary actions, but with enough conditioning, it becomes unlikely that “reason” will overrule conditioning. Thus people fall into destructive addictions through operant conditioning. We’ve all experienced minor episodes of this – we take a second helping of dessert, even though me know that it’s not good for us!

I once was hired to act in a television commercial for a casiono on a tribal reservation in Louisiana. I watched a number of senior citizens playing slot machines for hours, getting modest rewards occasionally that kept them pumping tokens into the slots in hopes of a jackpot. It’s not necessarily healthy for older people to sit for long periods. Circulation in the legs is hindered, but “reason” tells them that to get a jackpot, you have to keep trying. I think operant conditioning is likely stronger than reason at the casino!

Skinner was criticized for his methods and accused of treating his human subjects like guinea pigs. but nonetheless his behavioral approach to training produces powerful results and is now widely accepted.

My USA System provided students with a way of setting up an interactive science notebook, where students could record their readings and out-of-school science activities, parents could endorse students’ logs, and the teacher could put a date stamp on the log entries signifying that short conferences were held, grades and accomplishments were discussed, and the student’s work was evaluated and duly recorded on the Student Record Card. I kept the cards in simple steel box in a locked drawer in My classroom desk. At the end of the grading period, I could go through the cards with the student, show the student how the test scores, "homeworks," outside readings and other items tallied up to a given grade, and then record the student’s grade in my official Grade Book for use on the report card. (A "homework" was a unit of 15 minutes sent doing something related to science or mathematics that broadens your scientific background and deepens your understanding of the way things work, so reading for an hour counts as a reading and four homeworks!

I developed the USA System from 1975 to 1985 at Schweinfurt American School and Heidelberg Middle “School. I included the Heidelberg students’ CTBS results in the summary at the end of my 10-year Case Study. Testing records were not available for the years 1974 through 1984.

My science students’ students’ scored a spectacular 98%ile overall. Unfortunately, this was the only system-wide test they took, and it was norm-referenced, not criterion-referenced, and therefore was not very useful in proving that my USA system worked. Nonetheless, I earmed a non-traditional, State approved PhD with two majors: Educational Psychology based on the USA System and Science Education based on my Hands-On Science Activities, a book that paralleled the Stech-Vaughn high-interest, low reading abilty science books that were used in Heidelberg at the time. The DoDDS System provided me with funding for my Research and Development program that produced a phot-illustrated book describing how four students from grades 2 through 7 were making their own scientific instruments and using them to study physics, astronomy, biology and weather. Two of my own children and two of their friends posed for the photos, and I did the photography and technical drawings. The book was never published, though the professor, still active in California higher education, encouraged me to publish it, and Prentice Hall asked me to develop it into a trade book. Oh, how easy it is to produce books today using digital technology and the Internet!

My “ university” lost statewide approval eventually and was closed by court order in 2000, fifteen years after I received the PhD. I was “grandfathered” and my PhD is still legal in California. My Louisiana teacher’s certificate lists the PhD as one of the five accredited out-of-state degrees I’ve earned - the others are the BA,General Science from the College of Santa Fe,NM, the MA, English, from St. Mary’s University in San Antonio (TX), a BS, Psychology, from Excelsior College in Albany (NY, and the AM Masters, Educational Theater, from New York University.

James in Austin, I am the inventor of the Lou-Vee-Air™Car* (below).
You can build this Mark 1 model using the plans in our free
downloable Teachers Manual (click to get to the free Manual.

https://sites.google.com/site/louveeaircarmanual/