By Marlene Cimons, National Science Foundation
We live in a complex world where sometimes it is difficult to connect our actions to their ultimate impact. This is especially true when the behavior involves many people, distance between causes and effects, a time delay or other complicating features.
“We walk around and see certain kinds of patterns and relationships, but our attention is constrained in each of these instances,” says Tina Grotzer, associate professor of education at Harvard’s graduate school of education and director of the Understandings of Consequence Project. “We don’t necessarily see the connections between causes and effects when they are spread out, or happen over time, or are distributed among lots of different people.”
One example she uses to illustrate this involves the quintessential scene in the school cafeteria where many children are eating lunch and trying to talk to their friends. Their voices keep getting louder as they try to be heard above the voices of others. “There is a de-centralized agency spread across all of the children that organically results in too much noise--it is a form of emergent causality,” she says.
The pattern is an escalating one, with all of the kids contributing, and it finally draws the attention of those responsible for keeping order. The children are chastised, and punished.
“One of the difficulties of distributed causality is that individual intentions and emergent group outcomes are often unaligned,” she says, citing the work of educational research colleagues Mitchel Resnick and Uri Wilensky. “The idea is that the children are all just intending to be heard. No one is meaning to be too loud, but they all get yelled at for being too noisy, and told they can’t go out for recess. All of the kids are saying ‘it’s not my fault,’ and looking for the noisiest kid. In some sense, it is no one’s fault, but, yet, it’s everybody’s fault. These kinds of complexities can be really hard to wrap your head around.
“But these experiences can have similar dynamics to some of the most intransigent problems that we face,” she adds. “Consider climate change. When I jump into my car to go get groceries for my family, I’m not intending to contribute to climate change because of my carbon emissions, but ultimately that’s what I am doing. The individual intention is just like those kids in the cafeteria. I have individual level intent, but there is this emergent outcome from all these people around the world just doing their everyday thing. None of us is necessarily aware of it, and none of us is tracking it. We are all at fault, but nobody intends it.”
Yet, today, we know about such connections. “You’re aware now, but you didn’t get that way by figuring it out on your own,” Grotzer says.
Grotzer hopes that her research will help people, especially children, use these experiences to build a broader understanding of the nature of causality--its features and patterns. Working from a wealth of research in child development, she is identifying aspects of complex causality that children of different ages do understand, related everyday experiences that they have, and figuring out how to help them expand upon their understandings.
She is examining how “causal” understanding develops in “supported” contexts, such as the classroom, and how, specifically, it affects science learning with the goal of developing new curriculum.
“Why is it so important to go beyond their everyday understandings and actually focus on learning complex causalities? Our attention is pulled in too many directions in the everyday world and we tend to be efficient in our reasoning,” she says. “Unless we stop to reflect upon the patterns, to trace out extended impacts, and to reason over time, we end up reducing complexity to simpler patterns.
“For example, understanding climate change involves reasoning about non-obvious causes,” she adds. “Because you can’t see it every single day, it’s harder to keep it in mind. When you start to see things slowly changing, you get lulled into thinking: this is just sequential, and I can deal with it over time. It’s too easy to become anesthetized if it plays out over time.”
Her research has major implications for education practices, as well as for policy and decision-making. She works with scientists and other experts, and collaborates with teachers to develop curriculum and new teaching approaches that she hopes will guide the next generation to reason well about causal complexity.
Grotzer is conducting her research under a National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award, which she received in 2009. The award supports junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research within the context of the mission of their organization. She is receiving $750,544 over five years.
Also, last September, Grotzer was among 94 researchers who received a Presidential Early Career Award, the highest honor the United States bestows upon science and engineering professionals in the early stages of their independent research careers.
A book on her work, Learning Causality in a Complex World: Understandings of Consequence, was released in June, published by Rowman Littlefield.
“We are conducting very close studies of the reasoning of kindergartners, and second, fourth and sixth graders,” she says. “The focus is on figuring out what pieces of these concepts they seem to understand, and with learning support, how we can use those ideas to build understanding.”
The children learn about the different types of causality. There is, for example, domino causality: someone spreads a rumor on the playground and off it goes, and what precipitated it originally?; cyclic causality: you send a letter to a pen pal and she sends one back to you; and, spiraling causality: getting into a fight on the playground and ultimately doing things that you couldn’t imagine doing at the start.
Thus far, the research has yielded important insights for helping children build a broader understanding of the types of causality at play, she says.
“For instance, children have experiences today that help them to understand action at a distance--the idea that we can impact things that are far away from us--but that part of the problem is finding mechanisms to keep the distant effects in our minds on a regular basis,” she says. “There are also differences in what particular children understand. Those children who do understand certain concepts are helping us to find ways to teach the concepts to other children.”
The first three years of the award focused on a close study of children. The next two years will concentrate on curriculum development, with an emphasis on climate change and ecosystems understandings.
Grotzer believes that our current legacy to our children is a range of serious and intractable problems. “We are not leaving them in a good place,” she says.
Ultimately, however, she hopes her research will help children “grow up and do a much better job understanding and managing the complexities of the world than previous generations,” she says.
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