Psychology and education: two takes on individual differences

This post is an excerpt from my book "Ready to Learn: A crash course in child development, and how children experience school."

Objectives:

A. Learn how plasticity supports different kinds of learning in humans.

B. Learn how plasticity and experience work together to generate individual

differences in young learners.

William James coined the word “plasticity” to describe how an organism’s “nervous tissues” are impressed by repeated experience during the formation of habits (James, 1890). That capability, he claimed, ensures that future behaviour will be more precise and less tiring than previous behaviour.

If only James were alive today to see how far his idea of plasticity has advanced. Many forms of plasticity have been identified. According to one easy-to-understand perspective, there are two broad varieties. The first variety appears early in life during critical and sensitive periods that have evolved to support crucial species-specific learning. This type of plasticity, detailed in Chapters 1 and 2 on perceptual narrowing, tunes perception to favour sociocultural regularities that occur together and most frequently, such as the speech sounds of one’s native language. Attention is a slave to this process, and so perceptual narrowing is sure to occur as long as the infant experiences adequate exposure to the native inputs in question during the sensitive period.

The second variety of plasticity supports more everyday learning so individuals can learn what they are ready and motivated to learn. It allows young children to learn to ride a bicycle, hold a pencil to print letters and spell their names, zip up a jacket the way their friend at daycare can, or play a simple tune on a keyboard. Everyday learning of this sort can be advantaged or disadvantaged by many factors, including one’s personal history (e.g., prior learning and acquired ability to purposefully control attention), circumstances favouring learning (e.g., access to a bike), and nudging instruction from a significant other. Because these factors can vary considerably from one child to another and from one situation to the next, and because this second kind of plasticity is always readily available, one child might learn to tie shoelaces at age five, another at age eight. Even within a family, one child might quickly learn long division or how to swim while an older sibling, somehow less advantaged, struggles on and may require lessons.

Both types of plasticity described above provide capacity to learn and adapt, but the first offers stability to the species, while the second offers flexibility to the individual. We can immediately intuit why the second day-to-day variety is sure to contribute to greater variability between individual learners. On an ongoing basis, each of us interprets our unique situation to form unique decisions, evaluate the unique outcomes of our unique responses, and revise our unique valuations of what is good for me or not so good for me. As we do this, our personal experience expresses and accumulates in increasingly unique ways. The resulting divergence across individuals is known as individual differences, and careful observation can even betray robust differences between young infants. Thelen and Smith (2007), in describing an earlier study on reaching behaviour by one of the authors, tell how individual differences seen in infancy result in unique learners, each of whom must chart a personalized path forward on a given task. Here, the authors describe how the set of infants in this study were tracked as they developed reaching behaviour in the presence of a toy:

The week-by-week development of four babies was tracked over a 3-month period as they transitioned from not reaching to reaching. Four very different patterns of development were observed. Some babies in the nonreaching period hardly lifted their arms at all, but sat placidly watching the world. Other babies were more high-strung and active, flailing and flapping and always moving. These different babies had to learn to solve very different problems to learn to reach out and grasp an object. The flailer would have to learn to become less active, to lower his hands, to bring them into midline. The placid baby would have to learn to be more active, to raise her hands, to lift them up from their usual positions on her side. Each baby did learn, finding a

solution that began with exploration of the movement space. (Thelen & Smith, 2007, p. 286)

Thelen and Smith go on to report how the four infants were observed to move through the same three-phase learning path. Each child first experienced arousal (sighting the toy), which led to spontaneous motion and the exploration of space, making it possible to select increasingly efficient reaching movements. On closer examination, however, each child’s developmental path was entirely unique. Each child began with postural and behavioural tendencies that could predetermine their approach or impact progress. From those unique starting points, each child followed an individualized pathway of patterned progressions of movement—including accidental successes, such as bumping or brushing the toy—that would eventually lead to successful reaching.

Thelen and Smith’s account supports the prevailing view in psychology that everyday plasticity and personal experience multiply to generate individual differences from the outset of life. Mind you, a prevailing view is rarely the only view in town. One early tenet of cognitive psychology assumed all humans are equipped with the same cognitive structures, and a hardline stance arose in the field that all individuals, including students in classrooms, must therefore learn the same way. Reasonably interpreted, it is true that cognitive psychology has successfully conceptualized and reduced many of our higherorder capacities to models of stable cognitive abilities. It is also true that cognitive models have enabled researchers to derive general principles of human learning and memory. Unfortunately, the same stroke of the brush has encouraged some in the field to adopt a strict one-size-fits-all view of human cognition. Levinson (2012) frankly described this situation, writing that cognitive psychology was founded on the “denial of variation” and the rigid principle that “the architecture of human cognition is uniform and universal across the species” (pp. 396–7).

The one-size-fits-all view of cognition is, thankfully, a declining view. In truth, psychology has long been considered the science of individual differences, drawing substantially from its parent sciences, anthropology (the science of diversity) and biology (the science of genetic variation). We must also remember, in fairness, that cognitive psychology is well known for its study of individual differences in cognitive abilities (e.g., varieties of reasoning, memory span, perceptual or processing speed) and cognitive approach (e.g., age, gender, expertise, personality) (see footnote 1).

As for the specific claim that all individuals learn the same way, that is undeniably true on some coarse level. But again, we need to squint our eyes and look more carefully. Returning to Thelen and Smith, those four infants were indeed observed climbing the same learning curve toward the same learning goal. However, each infant’s learning path over three months involved unique sets of readinesses, tendencies, approaches, and timelines, not to mention the sure variation in acquired temperament and each child’s task history of fortunate accidents. These factors, on the one hand, and previous experience, on the other, inevitably multiplied from day to day in increasingly personal ways. Summarizing, each infant began each daily session from a unique starting point and then did or did not attain some measure of personal learning in some unique fashion to finally emerge with a unique session experience. That fresh experience would itself roll over and contribute to increasingly divergent experiences and takeaways in the next session. On what meaningful level can those infants be claimed to be learning the same way?

Some readers may wonder how individual differences present to the teacher of a typical

early years classroom. Imagine Mrs. Campbell, a long-time kindergarten teacher who, on most days, enjoys lunching in the staffroom with colleagues and sharing admiring tales of the 5-year-olds in her care. This year, she tells of Alia, the tiniest child in the class, who already speaks two languages fluently and is thriving in her first year of French Immersion. Dustin, viewed by friends to be the most athletic student in the class, must conjure such focus to print certain lowercase characters that he might not hear Mrs. Campbell announce a whole-class request from alongside his desk. Jordan neatly prints his name multiple times a day in his home classroom, but his efforts in any other room in the building are illegible. A quiet smile from Katie has more than once betrayed that only she deeply understands certain of her teacher’s quips. Milan doesn’t play a musical instrument but surprised his parents at a recent piano recital when he cried upon hearing Beethoven’s “Piano Sonata No. 14,” known to many as “the Moonlight Sonata,” for the first time. Coincidently—or perhaps not—his good friend Sebastian was the only student in the school moved to tears during the Remembrance Day assembly.

Skyler, meanwhile, cannot yet properly pronounce /r/, but classmates approach him on the playground for help adjudicating personal problems and conflicts. Marc can walk on his hands, which is most unusual for his age, and yet he resists all suggestions at home and school that he abandon what looks to be a painfully awkward pencil grip. And while Megan can already read age-appropriate texts accurately and fluently, she remembers surprisingly little. Stranger still, Nathan benefits from frequent deskside check-ins during seat work, and yet the gains he makes on his good days often seem to disappear overnight. Lauren, who on most days adamantly prefers to work alone, reliably counts into the late thirties at home but struggles at school to count past eleven.

Sophie teaches arithmetic procedures to anyone who will listen and insists that the hair elastics and barrettes in her growing collection can only be purple. And then there’s Samantha, the second youngest in her large family, who seems to truly believe every fib she utters as soon as she utters it, and that grabbing what she wants from others suitably reduces any likelihood of going without. Because Samantha’s reactivity has canalized to the point she tends to over-read social cues and think the worst, Mrs. Campbell takes special care to slow down and actively listen when this little girl approaches with a request or a bit of news.

A position has been presented that everyday plasticity and accumulating experience together generate individual differences during development and that those differences produce different learners. It is a well-accepted view that goes a long way to explain why the term “individual differences” enjoys good standing in the working vocabulary of most every educator. But what do these differences really mean for student experience in the classroom? Or, as the pragmatist would ask, how must we design learning activities considering such differences? If educators intend for student learning to be meaningful in terms of each student’s identity and previous learning, then, one way or another, the design of classroom experience must account for the full range of differences in a group to ensure barrier-free participation and equitable outcomes for all. Awareness of individual differences is crucial for activity design to support the full range of learning pathways that student agency is bound to yield. Educators refer to that design practice as “inclusive or universal design” (Ontario Human Rights Commission, 2018, p. 46), an idea we will soon more directly address.

Notes:

1. Psychologists have measured and studied individual differences in conscious (explicit) learning for decades. Familiar examples include working memory, intelligence, processing speed, and plasticity. For most of that same long period, researchers had assumed that preconscious (implicit) kinds of learning reflected very little individual difference. In recent years, however, clever research designs have been helping researchers realize that measurable individual differences are also present in implicit learning. We will consider a few examples here. First, readers will recall from Chapter 3 that the valuable perceptual advantage known as “multisensory integration” occurs when different sensory inputs (e.g., visual and auditory) are perceived to coincide. Stevenson et al. (2012) found that the duration of the brief interval during which inputs are perceived to coincide varies considerably between individuals.

Our mental grammar is another area of implicit learning that shows individual differences. Dabrowska (2012) reviewed relevant studies and concluded that native language learners acquire clear-cut individual differences in grammar usage (e.g., in applying suffix rules, interpreting quantifiers such as “every,” understanding passive tense and subordinate clauses). These differences were attributed to learner characteristics, but also to environmental factors, including one’s education.

Researchers also find individual differences in “statistical learning.” This term refers to our preconscious sensitivity to regularities experienced in a stream of single sensory information, and it is a crucial concept in language acquisition. For example, think about the stream of phonetic speech sounds we make when speaking. Thanks to statistical learning, newborns begin to learn grammatical and other linguistic regularities simply by being exposed to spoken language (Gervain & Werker, 2008). Long before they speak words, children in English-speaking homes begin to implicitly learn, for example, that the speech sound /m/ can sometimes precede /p/, but never vice versa. Also, the word “in” often precedes the word “the,” but never the other way around. In fact, learning the regularities of spoken language in this fashion enables infants in dual-language homes to sort and acquire multiple grammars simultaneously. Research over the past twenty-five years has shown that individual differences in statistical learning predict many linguistic capabilities, including but not limited to early receptive vocabulary in infants (Shafto et al., 2012); reading and language (Frost et al., 2013); syntax comprehension in 6- to 8-year-olds (Kidd & Arciuli, 2015); and sentence processing (Misyak et al., 2010).