Abigail Lipson

[1] The article “Learning: A Momentary Stay Against Confusion” by Abigail Lipson tackles the process of learning by analyzing the learning path that passes through “clarity” and “confusion”. Lipson uses examples from her personal experience, diagrams and quotations from professional sources to examine the topic and reach a conclusion on the effects of clarity and confusion in our learning experience in life. She defines clarity as the phase in which we are sure of our knowledge. As a result we feel comfortable with it and tend to choose it over confusion (11). Confusion phase, on the other hand, is when we encounter new and challenging material and we feel less confident and comfortable with ourselves (11). In the end of the article, Lipson

In the beginning, she uses a scenario which she experienced before of a student discussing the probability of heads and tails of a coin. The student is sure about their knowledge but then gets confused about their knowledge to finally reach a more complex clarity (3-5). By using this example, Lipson brings a visual aspect to the paper where the reader can actually picture real life situation. After explaining the example, Lipson immediately introduces Piaget’s terms of “assimilation” and “accommodation” to strengthen her claim by supporting it with a professional’s definition. Here while Lipson defines Piaget’s assimilation as “the incorporation of experience into already existing cognitive structures” while also showing in which lines this can be seen in her student-teacher example (6). She then defines accommodation, as the phase when the cognitive structure changes to adapt to the environmental demands. The reader can this way relate clarity to assimilation, and confusion to accommodation phase which are already defined by a developmental biologist making it more convincing. After tackling the example in depth, to target the visual stimulus in the readers, Lipson creates a diagram of learning which includes “Initial State, Resistance, Disruption, Reorganization” and “Final State” where she analyzes the students’ behaviors and teachers’ reactions to make her abstract argument a more tangible one (8). This helps the reader to simplify the idea given in the text, but also connect it to real life by the example reactions given by the students and teachers in every phase (8). Finally, Lipson criticizes her diagram by saying that “It doesn’t describe every learning experience. (10)” In this way, she gets the chance of replying a possible criticism which results in an increased trust from the reader. After