Educ Psychol Rev (2012) 24:1926 DOI 10.

1007/s10648-011-9187-2 COMMENTARY

Rejoinder in Defense of the Standard model of the Mind: From Whimsical to Systematic Science
Andreas Demetriou & George Spanoudis & Antigoni Mouyi

Published online: 16 December 2011 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011

Abstract This rejoinder discusses the issues raised by the three commentators of the target article. In agreement with Hunt, it is accepted that, as any overarching theory in any science, it does involve postulates about the mind that must be scrutinized by further research. However, its main postulates are well supported by the findings of specifically designed experiments. In response to Olson, it is maintained that this theory, as an integration of the standard models of the human mind in cognitive, psychometric, and differential psychology, deals better than its competitors with educationally important questions about what, how, and when to teach important knowledge. In fact, the mechanisms of specified understanding are refined enough to explicate what meaning making is possible at different ages. In agreement with Anderson, it is noted that the theory may direct curriculum developers how to develop the curriculum in different subjects and teachers colleges how to educate teachers so that learning in the classroom may become deeper, more stable, and transferable, thereby increasing the understanding and learning autonomy of students.
Response to the commentaries on Demetriou, A., Spanoudis, G., & Mouyi, A. (2011). Educating the Developing Mind: Towards an Overarching Paradigm. Educational Psychology Review: 23, 4, 601-663. Commentaries by Earl Hunt, University of Washington, ehunt@u.washington.edu Educating the Developing Mind: The View from Cognitive Psychology Lorin W. Anderson, University of South Carolina, Columbia, andregroup@sc.rr.com What Every Teacher Should Know: Reflections on Educating the Developing Mind David R. Olson, OISE/University of Toronto, david.olson@utoronto.ca Reprising John Dewey: A review of Andreas Demetriou & George Spanoudis & Antigoni Mouyis Educating the developing mind A. Demetriou University of Nicosia, Nicosia, Cyprus G. Spanoudis University of Cyprus, Nicosia, Cyprus A. Mouyi Centre of Educational Research and Evaluation, Nicosia, Cyprus A. Demetriou (*) University of Nicosia Research Foundation, University of Nicosia, 46 Makedonitissas Avenue, P.O. Box 24005, 1700 Nicosia, Cyprus e-mail: ademetriou@ucy.ac.cy

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Keywords Education . Intelligence . Learning . Meaning making . Curriculum We are very thankful to our three esteemed commentators. They raised important issues and questions, and they pointed to loose ends that our theory will have to accommodate, if it is going to fully serve its intended purposes. That is, to enhance our understanding of the developing mind and guide education in its endeavor to strengthen development and capitalize on it for the sake of learning. We believe that the ultimate aim of education is to induce individuals in the principles, tendencies, and nuances of the worldstated and unstated, past, present, and future. Obviously, it is important for education to facilitate individuals to function constructively in the world and have a reasonably satisfying and pleasant life but socialization and professional training is served more and probably better by other institutions and contexts than the school. Cognition is the engine of the mind but feelings and emotions are the fuel and, often, the steering wheel of the mind. Moreover, a constructive, successful, and reasonably pleasant life requires a sufficient grasp of the constraints imposed by the moral rules and obligations of a particular society and time. The target paper elaborates on the cognitive aspects of the mind but not on emotions or morality. This by no means implies that the other aspects are devaluated or ignored. They are very important and any theory claiming completeness must accommodate them. However, they are autonomous enough to be separately discussed, especially under the space constrains of a journal article. Therefore, here we will focus on questions related to what the paper is about but not on questions the paper is not about, even if criticized for that. Specifically, we will focus on the empirical substantiation of the psychological theory and the educational theory derived from the psychological theory. These issues are not necessarily related, because even if we accept the psychological theory, we may have a number of alternative educational theories, which are not necessarily equally valid or practically sound. In fact, the difference in the evaluation of the psychological theory between the three commentators supports this assumption. David Olson, the most critical of the three, basically concurs with the psychological theory but he rejects the educational theory. Earl Hunt and Lorin Anderson would like to see more empirical substantiation and refinement of the psychological theory but they accept its educational derivation as sound and useful.

The Empirical Bases of the Theory Hunt straightforwardly raised the problem of the empirical substantiation of the theory. He states that our world view of the developing mind may be sound and useful but the psychological theory derived from still needs more substantiation. We fully agree. There are many aspects of the theory that need to be tested against carefully designed experiments, to be hinted below. However, we need to stress that some of the fundamental structural and developmental postulates of the theory have been tested by several specifically designed empirical studies. The multilevel and multisystem mind is the most important structural postulate of the theory. That is, that the mind is a universe organized in distinct levels of functioning (processing efficiency, representational processes, and metarepresentational processes) and multiple systems of processes within each level (e.g., speed and control of processing in processing efficiency, working memory and domain-specific thought systems at the representational level, and self-monitoring, self-evaluation, and self-regulation processes and self-

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representations at the metarepresentational level). This overall architecture has been tested extensively. A large number of psychometric studies have provided exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis and structural equations models which are fully consistent with the theory. The overall architecture shown in Fig. 2 of the target article is a summary of these numerous studies (e.g., Case et al. 2001; Demetriou and Efklides 1989; Shayer et al. 1988; Demetriou et al. 1993, 2002, 2005, 2008; Demetriou and Kazi 2001, 2006). Moreover, each of the subsystems within a broad system, such as each of the SSS or representational capacity or inference is a system of its own. Therefore, it has a local architecture which can be explored and modeled independently of the rest. Indeed, we did test quite a few of these local architectures, such as processing efficiency and working memory (Demetriou et al. 2008), the causal (Demetriou et al. 1993), the quantitative SSS (Demetriou et al. 1996, 1991), and the categorical SSS, consciousness (Demetriou and Kazi 2001, 2006), and inference (Efklides et al. 1994). Admittedly, however, the mind as a fourfold universe (shown in Fig. 1 of the target article) is a new development that came as a refinement and differentiation of the multilevel multisystem architecture. This refinement aimed to accommodate the theory to current cognitive and neuroscience literature (Demetriou et al. 2010). The first study to present supportive evidence for this fourfold model of the mind is presented in Kazi et al. (submitted for publication). The interpretation of cognitive developmental change as the result of dynamic interactions between different systems within and across levels is the most important developmental postulate of the theory. In fact, according to the theory, general intelligence itself, one of the big constructs in psychometric psychology, such as gravity in physics or evolution in biology, reflects the state and possibilities of these interactions vis--vis the world. Thus, developmental differences in general intelligence are differences of kind. That is, they reflect differences between different phases in coordinating the functioning of the various systems of the mind and mustering concepts and solutions by drawing from as diverse sources as possible, once they are relevant and useful. Individual differences between same-age individuals reflect how successfully different individuals have transformed their age potentials into actual possibilities. Thus, general intelligence may be specified at different levels and in different languages. Piagets stages and symbolisms drawn from logic is one such language. Psychometric definitions of general intelligence, such as the IQ, is another one. Decades of empirical and theoretical scrutiny of these constructs showed that although valid at a global level, they are not refined enough to account for intra- and inter-individual variability of change and understanding in different domains of knowledge and problem solving. Our theory offers a more differentiated model of these interactions which captures the conditions of the interacting systems at successive periods of time, relates different parameters of understanding, and conceptual sophistication with the condition of each system, and joins this with learning possibilities directly related to concepts and skills that are taught at school. The technicalities of the studies are presented in Demetriou et al. (2002, 2010) and the implications for education in the target article. In epistemological terms, our theory strives to integrate three standard models of the human mind (the information processing, the psychometric, and the developmental theory) into an overarching theory. Naturally, this kind of theory cannot be original in all respects, because it carries over from the component theories the constructs that stood up the test of time. However, originality must be demanded in the potential of the overarching theory to make better and more refined predictions than each of the component theories. We claim that it does for the reasons explained in the target article and elsewhere (Demetriou et al. 2010). The present theory may be taken as a version of the standard model in psychology. It gives precise testable predictions. For instance, increases in working memory open the way

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for new SSS-specific constructions (Case et al. 2001; Halford et al. 1998); that massive practice in a logographic writing strengthens working memory, which, in turn, strengthen fluid intelligence and cognitive development (Kazi et al., submitted for publication); that interactions between problem solving within SSS and self-evaluations during problem solving result into changes in inference (Demetriou and Kazi 2006; Moshman 2011). We also know that particular combinations of the fourfold mind define different world views from the subjective point of view of the developing mind. Thus, different aspects or levels of reality, which were investigated by different fields in psychology, when integrated can shed light on the various dimensions that define a persons world view at a particular phase in life. Education needs to take these views into account for the sake of both enhancing understanding and meaning and value for the child. Obviously, there is much more to be tested. For example, what is the relative importance of different factors of processing efficiency, such as speed of processing and working memory for the construction of new reasoning patterns or the grasp of different concepts in various knowledge domains at different phases of development or learning? These questions are important both for the precision of our psychological theory and our possible educational interventions. There is an analogy with physics here. The so-called standard model of nature evolved over some hundred years, integrating some grand theories, such Galileos, Newtons, and Einsteins theories. The standard model proved extremely versatile to expand in order to accommodate new phenomena and impressively accurate in its predictions. As a result, it gradually provided access to increasingly deeper levels in the organization and operation of matter thereby generating impressive new technologies that would not be possible without access to these deeper levels, such as the electronic, the space traveling, and the energy technologies of our time.

Meaning Making: Lawful or Whimsical? Olson represents a tradition that has been very influential in psychology. It involves great psychologists, such as Jerome Bruner in the 1950s and the 1960s (Bruner 1966), Olson (2003) himself, and Howard Gardner (1983). Epistemologically speaking, these thinkers attempted to ameliorate the weakness of the standard theories mentioned above. Bruners (1966) claim that everything can be taught to every child if properly presented is a response to the limitations of learning supposedly associated with Piagets stages of cognitive development. Also, both Bruner (1990) and Olson (2003) reject the information-processing paradigm of the mind in favor of a meaning making model. They believe that humans connect to their world and culture by constructing subjectively laden meaning out of their encounters with the world rather than by just processing information and computing relations between information units like the computer. Computers may be computationally very powerful but the information they process means nothing to them. From a different perspective, the assumption about relatively autonomous multiple intelligences was Gardners (1983) response to the limitations of the psychometric paradigm to accommodate intra- and inter-individual variations of learning and development and the discriminations possibly associated with labeling individuals with a single IQ number. The influence of these thinkers on the education of our times was positive but not free of undesirable side-effects. Drawing attention to the individual child, his or her personal sense of value, and the importance of the subjective aspects of experience and understanding was very instrumental in the prevalence of child-centered education. Moreover, they provided the scientific rationale for the democratically and psychologically important policies of inclusion and no child left behind. Governments and teachers can accept that neither public spending,

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time, or teaching effort are wasted if science suggests that there is something valuable and important in education for every individual child every day. The side-effects come from what is abandoned at the expense of adopting these ideas. Specifically, learning remains superficial and compartmentalized. That is, teachers and students alike are satisfied if each student learns something in some domain at some level, particularly if the student enjoys so. However, the true potential of cognitive reorganization that comes from integration across fields and domains and generates an increasingly flexible and fluid mind is lost. Abandoning the information processing model for a Brunerian or Olsonian meaning making model strips educational planning for learning from the basic psychological mechanisms needed to mentate. Abandoning the psychometric model for a multiple intelligences model strips the planning of learning of the mechanisms needed to adapt the learning environments to the undeniable fact that not all children learn with the same rate, efficiency, or wit. Abandoning the developmental model of constraints on learning for an any time model strips educational planning from the frames that are necessary for properly sequencing and timing concepts. Eventually, the approaches promoted by these scholars defeat their raison d etre which was to enhance the learning opportunities of the disadvantaged and weak students. Although these students need intensive and structured support in the operation of the central integrative aspects of the mind, they are left wondering in the peripheral modules and domains. In psychometric terms, children educated under these approaches remain captive of the bell curve (Herstein and Murray 1996), preserving their relative position in it. To free them from this captivity, education needs to be directed by a model that would be able to compress the bell curve to the right. We now know that change in IQ is possible at both the collective and the individual level. The Flynn (2009) effect suggests that intelligence rises through the years. Recent cognitive neuroscience research suggests that IQ can increase or decrease in adolescence and this is reflected into the condition of the brain (Ramsden et al. 2011). Our research suggests that important cultural institutions, such as logographic writing, may affect the central information processing and representation mechanisms directly with an ensuing general cultural advantage in cognitive performance (Demetriou et al. 2005; Kazi et al., submitted for publication). In conclusion, we concur with Olson that meaning making is important and must be integrated into our theory of the developing mind. But we claim that meaning making is lawful and systematic because it is constrained by how information can be represented, processed, weaved, evaluated, and rerepresented into meaningful structures. Therefore, it can be both mapped and interpretedby the psychologistand controlledby the teacher. Hunts concern about transfer is relevant here. We concur with Hunt that, at some level, knowledge seems to come in sealed packages; when a hole is opened on the package, the learner is dragged into it instead of pulling and spreading the content out. This may be caused by any combination of difficulties arising from any of the four major systems of the fourfold mind. That is, inefficiency in the application of SSS-specific knowledge extraction mechanisms or domain-specific knowledge interpretation processes; lack of the representational capacity that is necessary for the representation of the concepts involved and the elaboration of their relations with old knowledge; failures in evaluation and epistemological awareness processes that would capture the broader implications of the new knowledge; inefficiencies in the application of inference mechanisms that would properly serve the extraction, evaluation, generalization, and metarepresentation of the knowledge to be learned and used in alternative frameworks. In order not to remain sealed in silos, the presentation of new knowledge must take into account the difficulties above, the teacher must be able to direct the student to bypass them when they appear, and the student must

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have the motivation to pay the effort needed for as long as necessary and systematically search for generalization limits to be respected and those to be broken. Therefore, meaning making may remain incomplete, superficial, and trapped into a domain- or concept-bound silo if not properly assisted to surpass the boundaries noted above. This is related to another concern raised by Olson. That is, that the realities described by the theory are not known by the child. Indeed, some of them are not. But this makes them no less important for learning. In the same way, we are not aware of the DND in each of our body cells. This, however, does not make it any less important for the functioning of our body nor does it diminish the importance of genetic therapies. Moreover, we need to remind the reader that one of the four major systems of the fourfold mind is consciousness, which generates self-awareness and self-control. In fact, the ideal for education would be to organize teaching to fully capitalize on factors defining competencies at the subconscious level and educate consciousness both for its own sake and for the sake of enhancing learning. The ultimate aim would be, on the one hand, to make learning environments efficient for their purpose as much as possible and, on the other hand, deliver the control of the learning process to the individual, when and to the extent this is possible. Olson complains that we are preoccupied with the teaching of the same old ideas since Dewey. Indeed we are. The teaching of these ideas was never actually successful probably for most of our students. How many of those who graduated from our senior high schools or even our universities everywhere in the world preserve a proper grasp of these big ideas, let alone of the very process of their discovery, their many reforms through the years, and their underlying relations? I hope we agree that they are very few. We claim that this is due to the fact that teaching of these ideas was never guided by an integrated theory of the developing mind that explicates what of these ideas to teach at grades 1, 2, 3 , etc., when and how to do this, taking into account the understanding possibilities both of each grade and each child in the grade. Very often, the sequencing of concepts in the curriculum is guided by discipline-specific epistemic or historical concerns rather than by cognitivedevelopmental concerns related to the issues raised in the target article. The result is a century-old failure to induce large numbers of students in what science really is and how it describes, explicates, and if desirable and possible, controls the world. Moreover, these major ideas are constantly changing and redefined because of new discoveries about the aspects of the world concerned. Gravity and matter in physics, heredity and development in biology, intelligence and mind in psychology are but a few of the constructs that changed dramatically through the years. Education must induce the students in both the concepts as accepted at each time and as they evolved through the years to this time.

Conclusion No one would disagree with Olson that what each child thinks, believes, and feels at any moment in every single classroom is extremely important for learning and understanding in any subject. However, what comes in the classroom, on any single day, in the schools of the modern world is designed by armies of curriculum specialists who direct millions of teachers educated at countless universities and colleges to do the job. If the curriculum is wrong, learning will seriously suffer regardless of how good the teacher is or how willing and ready our students are. If the curriculum is fine but the teacher is ill educated to grasp the stated or hidden aspects of the concepts to be taught and what each student can bring into the game of learning, education will remain weak and wanting. Anderson draws our attention to both how curriculum planning and development and teacher education must be informed by

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educationally relevant psychological science as presented in the target article. This theory tells curriculum developers and teachers what, when, and how to present to the students, how to prioritize teaching in different subjects for different ages, and how to enhance the students mental autonomy by systematically addressing the workings of their mind, however this is called, general intelligence, fluid or crystallized intelligence, reasoning, critical thinking, or creativity. Moreover, it tells the teacher in the classroom that different students develop in different pace, their strengths and weakness over the systems of the fourfold mind do not coincide and thus their learning possibilities may differ extensively. Thus, the teacher (or the school) must be able to map each students profile in each of the systems of the fourfold mind and cater a program for him or her if learning will be successful. We hope we agree that these are big aims and that we have a long way to until to reach them. We would be happy if the discussion here is a step forward in this direction.

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