30.1 Origins

Mathemagenic activities are the activities that give birth to learning (Rothkopf, 1963, 1965, 1968). The coined word mathemagenic comes from the Greek mathemain, that which is learned, and gineisthos, to give birth. Study activities, metacognition, inspection behaviors, epistemic activities, and even motivation, are other terms in the psychological literature that overlap to some degree in meaning with this coined word.

The term mathemagenic activities was chosen to emphasize that learning is an active process. The information that we acquire about the world is not the passive consequence of bombardment by informative environmental particles.** Rather, learning is the result of intense activity in which learners expose themselves to information and select from it. Learners structure, organize, and elaborate the acquired information and integrate it into memory. Mathemagenic activities are both observable and covert activities that are relevant to achieving particular learning goals when a specific information base is available. It should be pointed out, however, that in purposive learning, not all mathemagenic activities are consistent with achieving a particular goal. Some mathemagenic activities can produce stillbirths, useless information monsters, or nothing much at all. The key term in the definition of mathemagenic activities is relevant. Mathemagenic activities are relevant to attaining a particular goal. Some mathemagenic activities help, while others may hinder. For the purposes of this discussion, mathemagenic activities are those activities that provide or structure information, regardless of whether purposive learning is involved. Some learning may result from any information procurement activities, but we have no feasible way of checking definitively whether some learning has resulted from an information-procurement act. As a consequence, we consider that all of the following are examples of mathemagenic activities: (a) looking up a number in the telephone book, (b) reading directions for using epoxy to repair a boat, (c) finding out how to use large fonts in printing a computer document, (d) figuring out what a botched word in a fax means from the remainder of the transmission, and (e) studying a textbook to pass a history examination.

The success of any instructive event depends critically on what the learner does when the event occurs. An instructive event is a physical change in the environment. The description of an instructive event is simply a description of a stimulus object, the nominal stimulus. Whether this nominal stimulus produces learning depends strongly on acts by the students: whether they attend to it, process it to a sufficient degree, and form an adequate internal representation. Students must transform the nominal stimulus into a sufficiently effective stimulus for the desired learning to occur. The importance of this simple idea is obvious when learning from written material is considered. The successful utilization of written instructive events depends on highly skilled acts by the students, namely, reading. Reading to learn is a complex set of activities, most of which cannot be directly observed. These activities vary widely in different circumstances. They are all essentially under the control of the readers whether consciously or not. No learning takes place without them. Students' processing activities are even harder to observe in the case of nonwritten instructive events such as lectures, films, etc. But the importance of these processing activities under those circumstances is also clear.

Mathemagenic activities involve a variety of observable and unobservable student actions that range from postural adjustments and eye movements to hypothetical mental acts. Mathemagenic activities may include those required to decode written language into some kind of internal representation, to pay attention, to form mnemonic devices, as well as inference and other forms of intellectual elaborations of the representations of stimulus objects. They may also include other important activities of which the learner is unaware and about which we can only speculate.

Discourse about mathemagenic activities is not a single coherent scientific theory. These activities do not represent a unitary class of natural phenomena that form a simple focus for research. Rather, the concept of mathemagenic activities refers to a class of related scientific and practical questions about the role of students and information users in learning and in the use of informative documents and other information sources. The concept is intended to distinguish concern with the role of the information user from concern with the design and use of cultural artifacts to transmit knowledge. Concern with such cultural artifacts and their use has dominated applied psychological and educational research, as well as discussions of national policy.

Footnote: 'In apology for adding another strange word to psychology's already murky vocabulary, it should be kept in mind that I coined the term around 1960. At that time, much instructional research emphasized the calculus of practice, i.e., effective organization and sequencing of instructional elements. Relatively little attention was paid to the learner's role in translating instructive information into internal representations. This was due to the mindset of instructional researchers rather than the behaviorist Zeitgeist. Contrary to the current cognitivist party line, learners' activities were frequently considered in behavioral literature (e.g., Hull, 1943; Postman, 1964; Underwood, 1963).