Blog #7: Learning Systems and Learning to Read

The Meta-Tastic Dynamic:

Embracing Systemic Familiarity

A teacher asks you to read something you’re not interested in, and then write a paper on the topic. You choose to skip reading the book, instead listening to an audiobook or examining articles and Spark Notes, and piece together a passable paper from the context clues. Have you just cheated the assignment? Regardless of whether or not you consider this cheating, the simple reality is that students utilize such strategies constantly. As a student, this can be a lifesaver. As a teacher, this can feel like a frustrating slap in the face. For whatever particular reasons they may have, humans will always try to find “easier” paths and shortcuts. Historically, pedagogy’s answer to this problem has been to suggest either making assignments that are impossible to cheat^⁠1, or blindly catering to whatever seems to be the most popular thing to read^⁠2. In both cases, something of a disservice is being offered to the students, either through assignments that have the potential to stifle creativity, or that lack challenge. This problem has largely been settled within composition studies by a compromise, wherein the teacher aims for a personally preferred balance of permissiveness of creativity and restriction of loopholes. However, when discussing these issues, the framework of the conversation is almost always centered around trying to stomp out “cheating” behavior. Even when acknowledging the effort and critical thinking involved in these processes, there is rarely a positive institutional reaction. But, what if educators were to view these efforts as part of the learning process? If we look to how students work to bypass the measures that educators establish, we see an incredible dynamic- people engaged in a careful negotiation of the boundaries between acceptable behavior and duplicity. Learning these processes, learning systemic familiarity, contributes to a student’s intellectual development and literacy skills. As teachers, we would be better served trying to accept, perhaps even embrace, student efforts to understand and work around problems. 

Reading adaptations and cheats extend all the way to the micro-textual level, where they are suddenly relabeled as “reading tools”. A student who can piece together roots, prefixes and suffixes into a facsimile of a large vocabulary in order to enhance their reading pace is considered a good reader. A student who knows where the heading, relevant parts of a text, citations, and other textual elements is a good reader. In reality, there isn’t really much of a controversy in embracing systemic familiarity and tools that allow for workarounds of difficult aspects of these processes.

When Ellen Engstrom wrote “Reading, Writing, and Assistive Technology: An Integrated Developmental Curriculum for College Students”, it is unlikely that she was thinking about cheating or shortcuts at all. As a teacher and researcher for students with learning disabilities^⁠3, Engstrom’s focus was on teaching her students literacy, with whatever tools happened to be available. As part of this process, she committed a number of actions that would be considered egregious sins in a traditional English classroom. Central to her classroom process was focused on providing and training her students in technology that allowed them to avoid reading and writing^⁠4. Because her students happened to be unusually hampered by these aspects of the literacy experience, Engstrom was able to reassess her pedagogical priorities. It seemed that students didn’t need actual physical reading and writing as much as they needed “opportunities to…understand the multifaceted process of reading, and be active observers of their own reading styles so that they can develop the skills, strategies and confidence needed to be successful students.” Engstrom’s presentation of this concept is so subtle that is fairly easy to overlook. By framing these assistive tools as necessary for those with learning disabilities, her argument for not reading in the reading classroom becomes palatable. But, why couldn’t this philosophy apply to the greater student population? With Engstrom’s work, there is clear evidence that shortcuts can be beneficial to literacy growth. Reducing educational opportunities in the name of some obtuse work ethic or sense of pride is to go against the very concept of teaching itself.

Systemic Familiarity in the Real World

Although there are certainly issues with the lens of interpretation I am about to put forward, I invite the reader to enter into the mindset of a “market” model, wherein all actions and objects are goods and services available for barter, with facets being valued differently based on the relevant participants. Although it will occasionally be necessary to reduce options to binary choices, most marketplaces will rely on actors attempting to advance multiple lines of progress simultaneously. A possible classroom example of this dilemma is a phrase like “I will cheat to pass this test, but I actually want to know more about this subject, so I will also study.” In this case, the student has decided that grades can be traded for correct answers, regardless of their origin or the effort and processes put into obtaining the answers^⁠5. The teacher, now deceived by an incongruity in values, has lost out on some of the returns expected from the trade. But what has been lost? In our example, it would be the loss of the service of the student reading the readings and filtering the work through their own interpretative lens. Because this is quite impossible to quantify, it seems that as the moral skeptic in these trade agreements, the teacher is ultimately the partner at the mercy of the students’s choices, as the process requires willful compliance on only one end^⁠6. Some teachers may claim that students have “cheated themselves out of an education”. But, if the students were not seeking “an education” outside of trade-specific skills, nothing has been lost in their eyes^⁠7.

Let us examine this concept outside of the classroom, and look to the most-read document in the world: the Google Search Results webpage. In its earliest days, Google Search organized its results in an “F’-shaped pattern, mimicking printed textual formats, but with a greater emphasis on the upper left corner of the page^⁠8. As a way of monetizing their services, Google began putting Sponsored Links, a form of paid advertisement^⁠9, in the center of the most heavily-read areas of their search page. Presumably, consumers would integrate reading the Sponsored Links into their reading activity. In reality, this didn’t seem to happened. Instead, Google’s attempts seemed to lead to a warping of internet reading processes as a whole. By 2014, looking through their search results, the average experienced Google user spent virtually no time or mental energy on examining the first two entries on their results page^⁠10. Not coincidentally, the first two results on any Google post are the aforementioned Sponsored Links. Therefore, for Google (much like a teacher who wants their students to read), who measure their success in terms of time spent viewing something, the fact that their product have different priorities from their own ideals of success becomes a source of consternation. As the viewership rate for these positions goes down, the rates Google can charge to prioritize occupying this position dwindles^⁠11. However, even more damaging than the loss of revenue is the relative loss of control. Google’s algorithms and education run on a sort of “opt-in” system, where a website has to both agree to be indexed by Google, and also play by Google’s rules regarding interacting with their search engines. Part of the implied deal with everybody involved in this indexing partnership is that Google is attempting to provide a fair platform for which to promote their websites and causes, and that adherence to the rules is part of assuring that merit is the cause of a page’s indexing priority. As of 2015, Google doesn’t seem to have an answer to this problem- any attempt at subterfuge destabilizes the product as a secure platform, removing the entire value of Google’s side of the deal. Had consumers simply continued to blindly read in a traditional format, the overall quality of literacy would have declined. Critical analysis of sources and authorial intention would be laid by the wayside, in favor of “not cheating” at Google^⁠12. Reading is reliant on systemic familiarity and shortcuts to advance it as a form.

Potential Applications in the Future

Rather than throw our hands up in the face of the concept, researchers like Lynn Graham-Matheson and Simon Starr have examined ways in which student familiarity with system processes can actually be turned to explicitly beneficial^⁠13 and directed purposes. In examining the “TurnItIn” online automatic plagiarism detection system, Graham-Matheson and Starr found that students were able to take advantage of TurnItIn’s features to enhance their awareness of writing processes. Their research (and any teacher’s personal experience) found that students were typically enthusiastic about the idea of producing professional-sounding academic writing, but were nervous about the boundaries of acceptability and unsure of their own limitations. Questions regarding the ambiguity of writing systems lead to paralysis of effort. For the students in their research, TurnItIn served as a clear^⁠14 demarcation of the systemic boundaries of plagiarism and similar system features of writing. Particularly in underperforming students, there was a general perception that TurnItIn helped students to detect plagiarism when reading, and subsequently avoid it in their own writing^⁠15. In essence, when given the tools to quickly and effectively become familiar with the process, when systemic familiarity is demystified instead of reviled, students became enthusiastic about their own erudition and literacy. I can think of nothing more that a teacher could want.

Works Cited

Engstrom, Ellen, “Reading, Writing, and Assistive Technology: An Integrated Developmental Curriculum for College Students”, Teaching Developmental Reading (2nd Ed), 2014, 146-159

Meditative Marketing, “The Evolution of Google's Search Results Pages & Effects on User Behaviour” (2014), http://pages.mediative.com/SERP-Research

Jakob Nielsen, “F-Shaped Pattern for Reading Web Content” (2006), Nielsen Ratings, http://www.nngroup.com/articles/f-shaped-pattern-reading-web-content/

Ackerman, Rakefet; Goldsmith, Morris, “Metacognitive regulation of text learning: On screen versus on paper.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, Vol 17(1), Mar 2011, 18-32.

Graham-Matheson, Lynne, and Simon Starr, “Is It Cheating or Learning the Craft of Writing? Using Turnitin to Help Students Avoid Plagiarism." Research in Learning Technology, 21.1 (2013): 1-13.

¹ An absurdity outside of totally immediate and isolated assessment. At the very least, any cheater can resort to crowdsourcing to outrun any authenticity or anti-automation measures. (Ostensibly, one could isolate a student after project submission, and grill them on their acquisition process until the guilty confess. There are some minor moral quibbles with this method)

² I have had a number of English and Composition teachers and professors who encouraged students to read whatever they wanted for the semester. In one class, this resulted in twenty book reports on various books in the Twilight saga. While there were certainly other factors that led to such a sub-optimal outcome, an assignment with so much variance results in an unreliable product.

³ This is Engstrom’s preferred word. I choose to abstain from the discussion of terminology on this topic.

⁴ Engstrom, Ellen, “Reading, Writing, and Assistive Technology: An Integrated Developmental Curriculum for College Students”, Teaching Developmental Reading (2nd Ed), 2014, 146-159

⁵ A teacher can choose to reject this trade, insisting that the exchange is for a performance, rather than a photograph of the results. The student could potentially offer a counter to this, and the negotiation continues until specific parameters of acceptance and rejection are laid out.

However, in order for this rejection to occur, a teacher must first be aware of the distinction between what they are requesting and what they are trying to request. If a teacher misidentifies an objective request as a performative request, there is no reasonable objection to any results that match the requested objective criteria.

⁶ The problem could also be solved by removing the expectation of having read the book. However, such a response does not solve the problem of a lack of reading.

⁷ And if the knowledge they are gaining serves the student’s purposes in the trade being made, do teachers have the authority to rewrite a person’s will and needs?

⁸ “F-Shaped Pattern for Reading Web Content” (2006) Jakob Nielsen, Nielsen Ratings, http://www.nngroup.com/articles/f-shaped-pattern-reading-web-content/

⁹ Sponsored Links are indexed into their own separate search functions. In effect, an advertiser is paying for priority indexing in a prime reading location.

¹⁰ “The Evolution of Google’s Search Results Pages and Effects on User Behavior”, Meditative Marketing, 2014

¹¹ And, of course, it is not simply a matter of continually shifting the goalpost. If Google made the entire first page of results into Sponsored results, there would be a publicly available program that skipped you directly to the second page within the hour.

¹² Is the person who skips reading the advertisements on a crook or a savvy reader?

¹³ Graham-Matheson, Lynne, and Simon Starr. "Is It Cheating or Learning the Craft of Writing? Using Turnitin to Help Students Avoid Plagiarism." Research in Learning Technology, 21.1 (2013): 1-13.

¹⁴ There are certainly a number of serious issues with TurnItIn and other digital assessment methodologies, but for the sake of focus, they will be overlooked here.

¹⁵ The major caveats of this study, as confirmed by Graham-Matheson and Starr, are largely grounded in the lack of focused, blinded, and long-term trials. Based entirely in the self-reported answers from teachers and students, the results were oddly binary. Students who had used TurnItIn reported roughly the same level of benefits, largely independent of duration of use.