The Nature, Efficacy and Affordances of Value-embedded Learning

Abstract

This thesis, partly set against the Australian national policy context, investigates the critical role of ‘value’ in education and its relationship to learning and achievement in schools. It is framed within dynamic system (complexity) theory (DST), embodied and embedded notions of cognition and argues empirically and philosophically that ‘value’ is neurobiologically embedded in the affordances (Gibson, 1979) of the learning environment. Three appropriations of ‘value’ in educational discourse are critically examined – philosophical, pedagogical and psychological. Pushing past these linear notions of ‘value’, the seminal studies of Santiago Ramón y Cajal (1894) and Donald Hebb (1949), Gerald Edelman (1987), Walter Freeman (1999, 2000), Esther Thelen and Linda Smith (1994), interspersed with the recent work of Thomas Fuchs (2018) are discussed to establish a value-driven and selectionist account of cognition, perception and action that is applicable in educational contexts. These studies are connected by the dynamic themes of multiple causality, self-organisation and the nesting of time scales. The emerging notion of the Bayesian brain (Friston, 2011; Clark, 2015; Barrett, 2017) as an interoceptive, prediction system, is considered in terms of its promise to provide a new integrative framework of brain function. This literature provides an account of learning where value is imposed in the brain by the brain (Edelman, 1994), which is selectionist and driven by value, salience and emotion, in forming and strengthening neuronal connections, within the learning, developing brain. This account provides the foundation for the concept and methodology of value-embedded learning (VEL). Supporting this claim, a school-based electroencephalogram (EEG) imaging research was conducted. The study collected electroencephalogram (EEG) and Event Related Potentials (ERPs) data to capture the real-time spatiotemporal dynamics of brain activity of a cohort of forty-nine (49) Year 9 students receiving immediate, and affectively differentiated error feedback to 50 NAPLAN Mathematics questions. Using repeated measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) and structural equation modelling (SEM), comparisons of the dynamic neural wave forms between the control and experimental groups suggest that value-embedded error feedback, compared to non-value-embedded error feedback, enhances initial sensitivity to ‘prediction error’ but reduces the ‘dwell’ of the emotional burden of error. Also, the reduction of emotional dwell initiated by the value-embedded feedback leads to subtle but detectable improvements in performance. Value-embedded error feedback is therefore theorised as a primary ‘affordance’ of a value-embedded learning environment. Few studies have investigated how different types of error feedback operate under the skin of learners. This novel, school-based experiment, conducted with Australian fifteen-year-old students, suggests that error feedback provided in the context of a national assessment task, needs to be immediate, perceptually salient, and directed to future action. The ERP data indexing the ‘dwell’ of negative emotions induced by error feedback, is a phenomenon this study has identified as the emotional burden of error (EBE). This study has important and arguably highly significant implications for the way national testing and assessment regimes are conducted, and for how feedback in the classroom could be more appropriately timed and valenced. Developing attentive policy and practice stances to the management of error in school settings is therefore a key recommendation of this study.