Beyond Human Nature by Jesse J. Prinz

The nature-nurture debate rages so, one cannot help but wonder why the sides are so vehemently partitioned. What's at stake? It is simply not clear why a great amount of people embrace either one side or the other, but dare not even blow a kiss to the opposite opinion. Prinz does an excellent job of arguing for the nurture position, zeroing in on some of the most preciously held nature arguments including the basis of knowledge, thought, and feelings in experience and cultural values, increasing as a child grows. Most prominent of the nature hypothèses that Prinz takes on may be that of language acquisition and the Chomskyean notion of inborn lingusitic knowledge, via the proposed universal language. He contends that children's language acquisition--even the notion that the supposed inborn language device shuts off somewhere in mid-childhood, meaning most people will not be fully bilingual--need not demand such a natural language faculty in the brain, as general learning strategies can account for language acquisition. His arguments can stimulate both nurturists and naturists. Yet, in the end--realizing how much of the human arise from the genes--one still cannot help wonder why the two debated positions so rally to one flag or the other

Behaviourism, Innatism, Cognitivism: Considering the Dominance to Provide Theoretical Underpinning of Language Acquisition Conjecture

The language specialists have discerned that language is a species-specific and a biologically determined scheme for the human beings After a child is born it goes under pre-linguistic and linguistic stages of language acquisition Although there are many different approaches to learning three basic kinds of learning theory are prominent like Behaviourism Innatism and Cognitivism All these theories centered around nature and nurture theories or on empiricism and nativism concepts According to empirical research usually knowledge comes through experience from the environment Nativism holds that at least some knowledge is not acquired from the environment but is genetically transmitted and innate The theoreticians never agree or disagree with any of these theories whether environmentalist or nativist The principle focus of this study is to investigate the dominance among three main doctrines by delving into the fundamental differences among them The specification of these theories is also given prominence in this article Finally in the findings session it has been tried to trace the dominance of one particular theory among other

Innate talents: reality or myth?

Talents that selectively facilitate the acquisition of high levels of skill are said to be present in some children but not others. The evidence for this includes biological correlates of specific abilities, certain rare abilities in autistic savants, and the seemingly spontaneous emergence of exceptional abilities in young children, but there is also contrary evidence indicating an absence of early precursors of high skill levels. An analysis of positive and negative evidence and arguments suggests that differences in early experiences, preferences, opportunities, habits, training, and practice are the real determinants of excellence

Levels of expertise in design education

Design ability and differences between novice and expert designers have been quite extensively studied in the field of design methodology. For example, design expertise got much attention in the latest Design Thinking Research Symposium held in Australia. Little attention, however, is paid to the development from novice into expert. At this moment, there is no theoretical basis for explaining and understanding the kinds of transformations the design student has to go through, and there is no theoretical basis for identifying the degree of design expertise of a designer at a certain moment. Also, little is known about how to stimulate design expertise development. We propose to study the development of expertise in designing. This paper introduces a model of the development of design expertise, based on the general skill acquisition model of Dreyfus. Characteristics and limitations of the general model relevant for its\ud application to the field of design are discussed. We will try to match the levels of expertise as they are identified in the model with some empirical data, consisting of a set of self-evaluations of a design student. We could find some empirical basis for the model, but much more detailed empirical\ud investigations are needed to reflect on the basic assumptions of the model. We therefore introduce a wider research programme that eventually should result in a stable description of levels of design expertise, a description of the transitions to higher levels of design expertise, and in ways to support design expertise development

Fostering collaborative knowledge construction in desktop videoconferencing. Effects of content schemes and cooperation scripts in peer teaching settings

Video-conferencing is expected to become increasingly important for tele-learning environments. In contrast to asynchronous, text-based computer-mediated communication, video-conferencing facilitates cooperation tasks that require highly frequent and continuous coordination. Typical kinds of such cooperation tasks are found in peer teaching settings. Despite the growing application of video-conferencing, only little is known about possibilities of enhancing collaboration in video-conferencing settings. This study investigates the effects of different types of support for cooperation on the learning outcomes of peer dyads in a video-conferencing scenario. The main research question is how cooperation scripts and content schemes enhance the students' cognitive activities and foster the outcomes of cooperative learning. Two factors were varied experimentally: The content scheme (with/without) and the cooperation script (with/without). 86 university students of educational psychology participated in the study. Each student of a dyad received a text dealing with a psychological theory in the field of the nature-nurture-debate. The students' tasks were (1) to teach their partners the relevant contents of their text and (2) to reflect ideas that went beyond the scope of the text. Results indicate that in particular the cooperation script en-hances learning outcomes of collaborative knowledge constructionVideokonferenzen werden für die Gestaltung netzbasierter Lernumgebungen zunehmend interessant. Im Gegensatz zu asynchroner, textbasierter computervermittelter Kommunikation, ermöglichen Videokonferenzen Kooperationsaufgaben, die einen ho-hen Grad an Koordination erfordern. Typische Beispiele hierfür sind Peer-Tutoring- bzw. Peer-Teaching Arrangements. Trotz der zunehmenden Bedeutung von Videokonferenztechnologien ist bisher nur relativ wenig hinsichtlich der Förderung kooperativen Lernens mit diesem Medium bekannt. Diese Studie untersucht die Effekte verschiedener Fördermaßnahmen auf Ergebnisse der gemeinsamen Wissenskonstruktion beim dyadischen Lernen in einer Videokonferenz. Untersucht wird hierbei der Einfluss eines Kooperationsskripts und eines inhaltlichen Strukturschemas. In einem zweifaktoriellen Design wurden die beiden Einflussfaktoren Kooperationsskript (mit/ohne) und inhaltliches Strukturschema (mit/ohne) experimentell variiert. 86 Studierende der Pädagogik nahmen an der Studie teil. Jeder Teilnehmer erhielt einen Text über eine psychologische Theorie zum Thema der Anlage-Umwelt Debatte. Die Aufgabe der Studierenden bestand darin, (1) dem Lernpartner die relevanten Inhalte des eigenen Theorietextes zu vermitteln und (2) Ideen, die über die Inhalte des Textes hinausgingen zu elaborieren. Die hier vorgestellten Ergebnisse zeigen, dass insbesondere das Kooperationsskript den Lernerfolg steigert. Weitere Prozessanalysen sind notwendi

Dasein, The Early Years: Heideggerian Reflections on Childhood

Like most philosophers, Heidegger gave little attention to childhood, but his philosophical emphasis on pre-reflective practice and understanding seems uniquely qualified to help make sense of a child’s experience and development. Moreover, it seems to me that many central Heideggerian concepts are best defended, exemplified, and articulated by bringing child development into the discussion. A Heideggerain emphasis on pre-theoretical world-involvement opens up a rich array of phenomena for studying child development, which can improve upon standard theories that have over-emphasized exclusive conditions or criteria. I begin by laying out some basic features of Heidegger’s conception of being-in-the-world as a preparation for understanding the world of the child. Then I will briefly discuss some of Heidegger’s remarks on childhood, followed by some reflections on language acquisition and the correlation of anxiety and meaning

Usage-based and emergentist approaches to language acquisition

It was long considered to be impossible to learn grammar based on linguistic experience alone. In the past decade, however, advances in usage-based linguistic theory, computational linguistics, and developmental psychology changed the view on this matter. So-called usage-based and emergentist approaches to language acquisition state that language can be learned from language use itself, by means of social skills like joint attention, and by means of powerful generalization mechanisms. This paper first summarizes the assumptions regarding the nature of linguistic representations and processing. Usage-based theories are nonmodular and nonreductionist, i.e., they emphasize the form-function relationships, and deal with all of language, not just selected levels of representations. Furthermore, storage and processing is considered to be analytic as well as holistic, such that there is a continuum between children's unanalyzed chunks and abstract units found in adult language. In the second part, the empirical evidence is reviewed. Children's linguistic competence is shown to be limited initially, and it is demonstrated how children can generalize knowledge based on direct and indirect positive evidence. It is argued that with these general learning mechanisms, the usage-based paradigm can be extended to multilingual language situations and to language acquisition under special circumstances

Psychological Innateness and Representations of God: Implications of the Innateness Controversy for the Study Of Religious Concepts

The author examines a means by which cognitive psychological notions of innateness might address the question ofhow the concept ofGod might be said to he \"natural\" or \"instinctive.\" He draws a distinction hetM\'een innate cognitive nuchanisms and innate cognitive content, and examines the concept of innateness from the perspectives of two major cognitive psychological theories of mind: computationalism and connectionism. He argues that, from the cognitive psychological perspective, concept(s) of God (or gods) cannot be said to be strictly innate, but that the development of the God concept does appear to be constrained by innate psychological structures and processes. He concludes by suggesting that the psychological origin of the God-concept may be best described as a sort of \"primal behavior\"—the inevitable product of interaction between innately determined psychological mechanisms and aspects of the environment that are common to all members of a population