Abstract

Over the past twenty-five years, or so, considerable advances have been made in understanding how learning occurs in the brain, though much of this research is still to make its way into education. One contribution it should be making is to furnish the philosophical critique of past and current theory with supporting empirical evidence. For example, motivation theory and its cognate expectancy-value theory continue to be taught in teacher education, even though their rational cognitivist foundations are philosophically shaky, and their shared representational notion of the mind is incompatible with what is now known about the learning brain. Furthermore, the central claim of motivation theory that children need to be motivated in order to learn is educationally problematic, not least because it incorporates a deficit model of the child as learner. This paper provides a philosophical and educational critique of motivation and expectancy-value theories and begins to sketch out an alternative dynamic systems (complexity-theory) approach, which argues that value is deeply embedded in the learning process, not only in the value students may or may not attach to their learning, but also neurobiologically. In opposition to motivation and its notion of the learner this paper argues that every student is equipped with a brain that is value-orientated towards learning and will learn, when nested in suitably affordant learning environments. In place of expectancy-value, we argue for value-embedded learning (VEL), which provides a non-reductive and biologically plausible account of how value and emotional salience are dynamically interwoven in the learning process.

摘要

在过去 25 年左右的时间里，在理解大脑中的学习是如何发生的方面取得了相当大的进展，尽管这项研究的大部分仍将进入教育领域。它应该做出的一项贡献是为过去和现在的理论提供哲学批判，并提供支持性的经验证据。例如，动机理论及其同源的期望值理论继续在教师教育中教授，尽管它们的理性认知主义基础在哲学上是摇摇欲坠的，并且它们共同的心智表征概念与现在对学习大脑的了解不相容。此外，动机理论的核心主张，即儿童需要被激励才能学习在教育上存在问题，尤其是因为它包含了儿童作为学习者的缺陷模型。本文提供了对动机和期望价值理论的哲学和教育批判，并开始勾勒出另一种动态系统（复杂性理论）方法，该方法认为价值深深植根于学习过程中，而不仅仅是学生可能获得的价值。或者可能不重视他们的学习，但也是神经生物学的。与动机及其对学习者的概念相反，本文认为每个学生都配备了一个以价值为导向的学习大脑，并且当嵌套在适当的负担得起的学习环境中时，他们就会学习。代替期望值，我们主张价值嵌入学习（VEL），它提供了价值和情感显着性如何在学习过程中动态交织的非还原性和生物学上合理的解释。