Analogous Situations with Educational Systems

If our understanding of systems theory is correct, we ought to be able to analyze the misconceptions in economics as structurally correspondent assimilations to particular kinds of understandings of living systems. Educational, psychological, economic, social, biological systems are all subclasses of the general class of living systems; they therefore should have some general properties in common as well as more specific properties that distinguish then one from another.

For example, the exchanges between the biological organism and its environment are material exchange whereas the cognitive exchanges between the subject and the subject's object of thought are purely functional with no material "content." Both are systems of exchange so the correspondence is between the organism/environment and the subject/object. In social systems, the environment or object is itself another living system so the exchanges are not between an active agent and a passive object but between two active agents. In economics, the buyer seller relationship that constitutes an economic exchange is the correspondent structure. Thus, one of the most basic relationships we might examine in people’s economic thinking is whether both sides of the exchange are understood as mutually constituent aspects of a single interactive exchange or whether exchanges tend to be understood in terms of one-way relationships. Don Boudreaux mentions a myth in which people think "8. Prices and wages are arbitrarily set by businesses.". Do not consumers have a role? Apparently not. So, we might investigate the hypothesis that a person who expresses this view is seeing the dynamics of only one side of the relationship, namely the choices of sellers in the setting the price without seeing the reciprocal role of buyers' choices in what they are willing to pay. In fact, the generic form of the buyer/seller relationship is that both are exchanging something of lessor value for something of greater value. Whether the values are embodied in products or money or time or opportunity costs can all be generalized to exchanges of values. If this understanding is not general as the form of economic understanding, then other misperceptions may arise as well. For example, in the case in which people think if tolls are charged as congestion pricing, road usage is no longer free. In this case, they don’t see the value of drivers time as a cost. Hence, congested roads are free of any exchange of value on their part.

The task then is to investigate these understandings and explain, from a systems point of view, the exact nature of these assimilations and how they develop such that they produce the misconceptions and the more advanced forms of understanding of economists.

This kind of systems analysis seems particularly challenging because the tendency is to stop with the expression of a misconception and simply dismiss it as wrong while then proceeding to explain the correct interpretation. We do that all the time with students. We essentially ignore their system of understanding. We only correct their mistakes, we do not try to understand them. Some mistakes are, of course, simple mistakes but in education, misconceptions are generally cognitive systems that are inadequate according to an adult standard of validity but these systems of understanding are natural and useful, even adequate, methods of understanding from the students point of view.

Now if we really do intend to promote a change in thinking, we must begin with the system as it is currently operating in the learner and work with it to promote its change, not with simply attempting to impose our completed form of understanding on the learner. There is a caveat to this principle. When the learner's system of understanding is close to developing the form of understanding we want them to have, our explanations can have great effect as Inhelder et al found in their learning studies. It is when there is a large lag between the learner's system of understanding and the one we are teaching that verbal methods are insufficient and ineffective, perhaps even negative in their effects. In that case, the emphasis on verbal presentations seems to produce memorized effects in the learner (when the learner is so motivated) rather than change in understanding. Since the learner can "get the right answer", the problem appears to be solved and their may be no cognitive discomfort as in the case when a response doesn't seem to work.

We found this verbal learning when we investigated students' understanding of place value. Verbal instructions were often memorized as procedures to follow such as in borrowing operations during subtraction. In other words, the importance of collecting economic misperceptions and misconceptions is not to correct them but to see that they form the raw data for beginning research into the system of thought that produces the notions so as to understand how the system operates the way it does and thereby to appear to distort the facts.