The Uncertainty Effect: Learning vs Knowing
- coquinarestrepo
- Jul 6, 2022
- 11 min read
“There is nothing in the dark that isn’t there when the lights are on.”
-Rod Sterling, creator of “The Twilight Zone"
There’s a bump in the night, where is coming from? The power suddenly snaps, what happened?? You’ve staring at the same question on your test for ten whole minutes and you still have another page to finish, why can’t you remember the answer???
We tend to assume that when something’s unknown then it’s probably either something interesting or dangerous. It’s why the dark corners of life tend to inspire radically different things: horror, science fiction and fairy tales love to tumble out when we don’t understand something. What inspires this creative history, strengthens our imagination and pushes us to explore our ideas: That’s uncertainty.
We all have run into uncertainty at any time in our lives and we’ve had different reactions to it. Interestingly, there are two different ways of looking at uncertainty, from our day-to-day issues and we also have the mental state of uncertainty.
Uncertainty (n):
A situation in which a something is not known, or something that is not known or certain.
The feeling of not being sure what will happen in the future.
-Cambridge Dictionary, 2022
The state or condition wherein something isn’t correctly or totally acknowledged.
The absence of confidence or consciousness in someones’ ideas, judgements or aims.
-APA Psychology Dictionary, 2011
Unfortunately for most of us, uncertainty doesn’t prompt us to ask questions or be curious. Often uncertainty makes us anxious, stressed and sometimes even defensive. Students can experience uncertainty when they’re being called to answer a question in front of class or are simply trying to remember the correct answer to a single test question. Their reactions can range from becoming nervous, crying, bursts and frustration to even completely shutting down.
Uncertainty doesn’t just effect how students feel, it directly effects how they learn. As teachers are prompted to teach with certainty, materials based on facts, students are taught that every question has to have a correct answer. Because learning is based on memory, if students don’t feel certain they’ve remembered something correctly or they’re confused, they’ll begin to associate the stress of failure with uncertainty. Which can lead later to anxiety disorders attached to ‘uncertainty intolerance’, making it even harder for them to learn from their mistakes in the future.
Why are we so focused on what we don’t know instead of what we do? We want to take a look at what uncertainty is in our brains and how it effects learning, memory and social relations. Because our students and other teachers have had to deal with uncertainty at some level in their daily lives, we’ll look at strategies on how to cope with uncertainty in the class room and supporting ourselves when we’re feeling stressed with not knowing.
“A lot of cognition is really about handling different types of uncertainty.”
-Michael Halassa, MIT associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences
Why don’t we like uncertainty?
The brain craves predictability. Through evolutionary biology, we know that our brains are hardwired to notice patterns because it helped us make quick decisions based on our predictions. Our prediction skills are hardwired into our survival brain, located in our brainstem and cerebellum, which is also one of the parts that processes uncertainty.
Uncertainty activates two regions in our brain: the limbic system and the survival system, also known as “the emotional brain” and “the reptile brain”. These processes are instinctual, they’re the parts of our brain that can’t be reasons with. That’s why it’s incredibly hard to logically or rationally explain your way out of uncertainty, because logic isn’t processed in those brain regions.
Generally we can rely on our long term memory skills to give us clues about how react or what the solution to a problem is. But, if we can’t remember a specific detail or we’re unsure about the situation, our memory fails us and we can’t access the higher logical part of our brains to resolve it. When our immediate memory can’t solve a problem our brain goes to act on instinct, which is a terrible idea if you’re in the middle of a classroom.
Uncertainty sets off a trail of dominos in your brain when your logical self can’t solve the issue. When you can’t rely on your memory, uncertainty triggers your brains’ instinctual drives. When your instincts fail you it triggers your emotional drives, which is why we feel discomfort and other emotions including anger, irritation and depression. So what triggers an unhealthy response to uncertainty?
Levels of Uncertainty: From Suspense to Catastrophe.
Like any good emotion, uncertainty is multifaceted and has different effects on our brains. We react to uncertainty in different ways because it changed in different circumstances. Let’s break uncertainty down into five levels:
Curiosity -> Suspense -> Avoidance/Procrastination -> Worry/Anxiety -> Catastrophic Thinking
Every student has experienced uncertainty and at different levels. They react to uncertainty based on how they can possibly resolve it.
Immediate Uncertainty: Curiosity
Initially, uncertainty makes us curious because we’re intelligent creatures. We like new things and our brain likes to learn, even though it’s a fairly lazy organ. A low level of uncertainty draws in expectation and when you’re in a safe environment, you immediately want to explore it. This is why uncertainty is central to learning.
Low Uncertainty: Suspense
Suspense is essentially uncertainty that you know will eventually be resolved and is a lead driver in engagement. When you can’t predict something accurately but you’re looking forward to it’s resolution is one of the reasons why we seek out action movies and engage in thrill seeking behavior.
Medium Uncertainty: Avoidance -> Procrastination
Students who experience intervals of uncertainty will react to it by avoiding the questions or activities that make them uncomfortable. This is because when we don’t understand something our brain labels it as unpredictable and the brain is uncomfortable trying to resolve something that it cannot easily predict. When we can’t predict an outcome or resolve is quickly our natural tendency is to avoid it.
General Uncertainty: Worry -> Anxiety
If you experience uncertainty in regular periods you are more likely to develop an aversion to a specific action or class. This is based in our social engagement patterns, when we can’t predict what will happen in a group or we feel threatened we develop an aversion. When we know we cannot avoid or escape something that makes us uncomfortable, we develop anxiety around it. When students develop anxiety around their class or studying they begin developing negative mindsets, anxiety disorders and avoiding challenging social situations.
High Uncertainty: Catastrophic Thinking
When we are unable to handle and have an extreme low tolerance for uncertainty, we lean into our negative bias that leads to catastrophic thinking. This is based in an ‘either or’/‘all or nothing’ mindset where we close ourselves off from other perspectives. Closed mindset habits can lead to avoidance behaviors, anxiety and closing yourself off from opportunities because you cannot predict that you will succeed.
Why do our brains make us uncertain?
Evolution has programed our brains to use uncertainty for two reasons: To notice danger and to keep us from running into a bad situation. It was therefore very important for us to develop the habit of looking for patterns and reflecting on our experiences because it keeps us from jumping to conclusions.
Uncertainty is our brain warning us that we don’t know what to expect from an issue and to stop so that we can either look for a way out or to try and remember a similar situation. This is why we say uncertainty is at the root of learning, it’s our first tool used to look out and respond to sudden change.
Many of us have had an emotional response to uncertainty, usually in levels ranging from “cautious” to “frightened”. These emotions are our brains way of telling us to “stop and think about it”. The unpleasant part about it comes from our stress system activating when we can’t remember an answer or solution to this problem. It’s a structural flaw of nature that has become harder to manage when we’re expect to “know” the “right” answer all the time.
How does our brain process uncertainty?
The brain is a highly complex system, but it’s not known for working well most of the time. The way the brain stores it’s information is through memory, which is how we make our decisions. All of our logic is stored in the same place that makes emotions and controls how much we sweat; not a really well thought out storage system. This region in our brain is known as the Thalamus, which is perfectly located right in-between the limbic system (emotion) and the brain stem (survival).
The thalamus is at the center of the brain and acts like a busy intersection, directing multiple sensors to travel to different parts. It helps in accessing different parts of your brain used for different kinds of reasoning, like accessing long term memory to make your working memory more reliable and make informed decisions. The thalamus is used in adjusting signals to your brain, which helps in focusing. This is why sometimes you can feel like you can’t escape an uncertain situation or stop looking at a difficult issue, your brain is literally forcing you to make a decision with less information.
Uncertainty divides the brain: The prefrontal cortex has decoded the content of the message (what it wants) while the thalamus (mediodorsal) is trying to understand what the actual answer is. When we feel uncertain about an answer or how to behave in a situation, our thalamus works harder to access information through multiple parts of the brain and bring it to the pre-frontal cortex. Anything can effect how your brain processes uncertainty such as the environment, how someone was speaking, what words were used and how you felt that particular day. Which means you brain is trying to separate reliable information from unreliable information all the time, making uncertainty an incredibly stressful mental state to be in.
Uncertainty and Learning
What would you think a class with Socrates or Plato be like? Simple, you’d start your day with a simple grammar tutor, followed by your arithmetic tutor, and then you’d walk all the way across town to sit in an open air pavilion. And the first thing you’d have to do is listen to one of these men go on and on about things they don’t know. At the end of the day you would be trudging back home in silent contemplation about all the things you didn’t know, everything that was unknowable and unanswerable. Then you’d become civil servant, government official, architect or a really good foreign trader.
How is it that when we don’t understand something we begin to learn more about it?
Classical education focused on having students develop their problem solving skills through dialogue, where essentially students were asked to constantly be asking questions. Anything you read, heard or made was questioned. You were asked to elaborate about how you came to your conclusions and the process of thought you used to complete an experiment. Which led students to developing very well thought out arguments that included multiple perspectives, resources from experienced teachers and even alternative ideas if something didn’t work.
Today we associate learning in a very standardized practice: rote memoriza tion followed by endless testing. Through rote we try eliminate uncertainty by promoting facts and “the right” answer, prompting our students to avoid uncertainty in the classroom.
What happens when we avoid uncertainty? Uncertainty is at the root of learning, but we have set up our current education system to discourage uncertainty in favor of higher test scores. The reasons for this is multifaceted: not enough time in the day, not enough resources, limited communication time, limited mental bandwidth, etc.
When we instruct our students to try and ignore uncertainty and only focus on facts, we start limiting their ability to ask questions. Questions and leaning into uncertainty are critical for developing our critical thinking skills and supporting meta-cognition development. When we explore something that confuses us or we question something that doesn’t make sense to us, we are branching out and expanding our base of knowledge. We never develop the mental resilience and effective problem solving skills when we box ourselves in and only focus on what we KNOW and repeating answers from books and our teachers.
Asking questions and making mistakes is at the heart of effective learning, uncertainty can be a major driving force in boosting our students’ comprehension and engagement with the curriculum materials.
How to ”Solve” Uncertainty
We want to let our students ask questions and engage with their materials through analysis and dialogue. To do that, we need to set up our classrooms (wherever they are) as safe spaces to explore uncertainty. Rather than “solve” uncertainty, we are going to look at ways to engage with uncertainty in our classrooms.
Play Based Learning
Learning through play isn’t just a tool for primary school instruction, every student at every age can use play as a way to explore broader concepts and subjects. Play can also help students explore what parts of the concepts confuse them and help the teacher notice what facts or ideas give them issues. Using play a refocusing technique and a method of exploration in the classroom can keep students engaged throughout the lesson and encourage their interests within different subjects.
Using play in your classrooms can take the form of models, interact arts or performance pieces. The idea is to let students take a moment to explore the concepts you have teaching in a smaller setting, so that they can break down the methods and information in a controlled setting. Play based learning is a great tool to use in harder subjects such as math and science because they allow students to explore more abstract concepts in material form. In language arts and history, play based learning can encourage students to think deeper through presentations.
Experimentation and Presentation of Reasoning
We like to think that science is the only subject that uses experiments but every subject takes the concept of exploring different themes through question and answering. What makes experiments synonymous with science is the fact that students have to present their reasoning in order to pass. This method of engaging students with their project by letting them throughly explore a question and defend their answers by presenting their reasoning is one of the most important factors in critical thinking development.
When students are allowed to experiment, answering questions by exploring the whole subject, we are asking them to fully engage with the material. To explain their reasoning, they have to be able to think backwards and deconstruct their entire thinking process which allows them to review their own findings and reflect on their process. Most classes don’t use experimentation because experiments regularly fail, and modern education doesn’t leave room for failure. Being able to present your failures as evidence is central to learning because it helps you understand what DOESN’T work.
Give your students projects that lets them explore questions in different ways and means. Have them take a study of a book and allow them to watch different movie versions and come to a conclusion through a film review. Let them explore a specific history date by presenting a photo essay about different paintings about that date. Have students explore the root of pi by baking pies! Just emphasize that they have to be able to explain their reasoning.
Cooperative/Team based Learning
Being able to work with others improves your uncertainty tolerance and also offers you multiple solutions to a problem. Since every person has a different perspective, working with peers is an excellent way to demonstrate how team work and cooperation are central to solving complex, multistep problems. It also supports solution seeking skills through asking for help and trains students to be able to see other peoples’ opinions and perspectives as equal to their own.
This is why team based learning and discussion groups are important in our classroom. Setting up classroom events like debate, round tables, book reviews and study groups give students the space to learn through discussion. When we let our students talk to each other through peer review, they begin to learn more.
If you find that you or your students are having difficulty managing uncertainty, there are also simple strategies you can use to help you overcome the stress:
Focus on your tasks and goals that you CAN control.
Distract yourself from negative thoughts.
Walk away from it until your mind is clear, and then come back to solve it later.
Reach out and ask for help - social support and peer guidance is a key stone to be a successful student and functioning adult.
“Wherever there is change and wherever there is uncertainty, there is opportunity!”
-Mark Cuban
We are all living in a time of uncertainty and it’s completely reasonable to feel anxious and alone in it. Which is why now is the perfect time to change our view of uncertainty as something that is uncomfortable into something that pushes us to explore. When we look at uncertainty as an invitation to experiment and explore alternatives, we open up a new world of opportunities. That’s why we want our students to explore uncertainty in our classrooms.
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