Bounded Rationality and the Task of Enactment

• In Event: Understanding and Supporting Teaching Practice: Multiple Perspectives

Abstract

Teacher preparation is not only about preparing teachers to think about their teaching practice but also to put what they know into action (Grossman & McDonald, 2008). Pedagogies of enactment aimed at developing new teaching behaviors are likely to be more effective if they target the specific cognitive and contextual determinants of teachers’ behavior. In the work reported here, Herbert Simon’s (1955; 1956; 1996) perspective on human actions in complex situations called bounded rationality is used to identify the specific determinants of a secondary school biology teachers’ decisions to use specific behaviors.
Bounded rationality emerged as a critique of rational choice models that assumed humans make optimal choices. Simon argued that these theories of ideal rationality were largely irrelevant for understanding human behavior because they do not take two bounds of rationality into account: (1) in most cases humans do not have the knowledge, capacity, and time to construct and weigh all alternatives; and (2) people often need to realize several often incomparable goals simultaneously and therefore alternatives are difficult to weigh.
Only a few scatter attempts have been made to apply the idea of bounded rationality to understanding teacher behavior (Lee and Porter, 1990, 1993; Shavelson & Stern, 1981). In our work we have elaborated three recent theories on complementary aspects of bounded rationality. All three theories are based on the common notion that goal-directed behavior is a process in which actions are directed at reducing perceived differences between an existing situation and a desired situation (Simon, 1996). Social psychologists explain how a hierachy of goals, a goal system, guides the process of selecting and multiple goals simultanously (Shah & Kruglanski, 2008). Research in cognitive science has identified two time and information saving methods that people use when actions for goal realisation are not given but need to be found: recognition (Nokes et al, 2010) and heuristic search (Gigerenzer&Gaissmaier, 2011). Both methods presuppose that we find parsimonious descriptions of current and desired situation and selectively use relevant information in order to reduce the differences. Modularity helps us in doing this (Egidi& Marengo, 2005).
In our case study we first used a laddering procedure (Little & Travis, 2007) to construct our teacher’s goal system, including his heuristics. Then we asked the teacher to think aloud while regularly designing a lesson for a new topic in order to find out how the teacher’s goal system influence the teacher’s decisions to perform particular behaviors in the lesson. The teacher turned out to use his middle level goals to define the desired situation and to recognise relevant aspects of the existing situation, e.g. the textbook lesson. This strategy enabled the teacher to reduce differences between existing and desired situation fairly easy by using heuristics that describe which parts of the textbook (modules) should be used, recombined and/or adapted and in which way. Teachers’ goal systems, including heuristics, seem to capture important cognitive and contextual determinants of teacher behavior that can inform the design of effective pedagogies of enactment.

Authors

• Fred Janssen, Leiden University

• Hanna Westbroek, VU University Amsterdam