The following essay was originally delivered as concluding remarks at the “Hommage to Bob Siegler” Conference. It was since included as a chapter in the book “Cognitive Development from a Strategy Perspective,” a collection of essays from the same conference.
The Best Job in the World by Dr. Robert Siegler
In my first year as a faculty member, I needed a piece of equipment but lacked the funds to pay for it. The head of Carnegie Mellon’s Psychology Department, Lee Gregg, suggested that I approach Herb Simon about buying it for me. I approached Herb with a lot of trepidation, but he couldn’t have been nicer. After asking why I needed the equipment, he immediately agreed to buy it, saying, “We want your research to be limited only by your knowledge and imagination.” It’s been 42 years since then, but I remain grateful for Herb’s and Lee’s help and the wisdom of their perspective.
The next year, I received a phone call from my brother David, who had started the PhD program in psychology at Penn State. He sounded unhappy, so I asked what was wrong. He responded by asking, “How can you stand being in your office all day, just reading and writing?” I told him, only half joking, “That’s what I like about the job.” Being able to spend my time reading, writing, and thinking about issues that fascinate me has always struck me as amazing good fortune. Good fortune for me, not for everyone; my brother soon left academia and found success and fulfillment in a career that involves more social interaction and has more direct impact on other people.
Even the best job in the world has its downsides, and for me, faculty meetings are high on that list. Some of the issues that we discuss are interesting and some require group decision-making, but even in the many cases where neither is true, discussions expand to fill the allocated time. No matter how trivial or pointless the issue, academics feel a need to share their opinions. And this is in a department of unusually hard-working faculty; I can’t even imagine what such meetings are like elsewhere.
So why is being a professor at a high-quality university the best job in the world? Table 1 summarizes my reasons for making the claim; the remainder of the chapter elaborates them.
The thrill of insight
At the very top of my list is the thrill of insight. Between five and ten times in my career, I’ve recognized something that I was pretty sure no one else had understood and that I thought was important. Examples include the rule-assessment method, which identifies the algorithm underlying people’s choices; overlapping-waves theory, which explicates the roles of variability, choice, and change in cognitive development; microgenetic methods for studying strategy discovery; transitions from logarithmic to linear representations of numerical magnitudes; board games for improving young children’s numerical understanding; and the integrated theory of numerical development, which identifies commonalities as well as differences in development of understanding of whole and rational numbers. In all cases, the discovery process was stimulated by my efforts to understand data that I could tell reflected an underlying reality that I did not grasp––until it popped out at me. In all cases, as soon as I had the insight, I knew that I would be able to document it in many other contexts and had a good sense of where the insight would and would not apply. The insight experience is addictive––the hope of further insights continues to be the major motivation for my research.
Honing one’s intellect through thinking and writing
Generating insights and learning about the insights of others can yield qualitative changes in our understanding. However, the day-by-day process of thinking and writing about our ideas, methods, and findings yield quantitative changes that may be at least as important in advancing the quality of our thinking.
The writing process can be painful but, as the adage states, “No pain, no gain.” Part of the pain comes from the need to become a disciplined thinker and writer. To me, disciplined writing involves making a unique and necessary point in each paragraph, providing a coherent argument for the importance of the issues that we are addressing, describing aspects of the issues that remain unresolved and how the new study could help resolve them, and then, after describing what was done and what was found, explaining how the findings improve our understanding of the specific issues being addressed and discussing the broader implications.
Writing can also inculcate a more general habit of mind: reflexively considering the potential criticisms of a reasonable person with a different perspective. For many years, I used an internalized version of John Flavell––a great cognitive developmentalist and a positive but critical person––who was particularly good at identifying the main strengths and weaknesses of research. In my version of “What would John say,” I imagined his likely reactions to my manuscripts and tried to address the anticipated criticisms before submitting the manuscripts for review. The process broadened my understanding of the research and often suggested new experiments that were needed to address the criticisms that I thought John might make.
These habits of mind can generalize to many activities other than writing articles: developing theories, presenting talks, organizing courses, and formulating new research studies, among them. No doubt, such disciplined thinking can be learned in many ways, but writing provides a particularly natural and concrete context for acquiring it. The reason is that writing involves concrete statements that allow specific criticisms; unlike conversation, there is a record of what was said. A nice dividend is that trying to help students acquire this type of critical thinking improves our own thinking as well.
Collaborating with smart, motivated, nice people
Another reason why being an academic at a high-quality university is such a great job is the quality of the people with whom we interact. There certainly have been exceptions, but the large majority of my student and faculty collaborators have been smart, motivated, interesting, and admirable.
One likely reason is that becoming a faculty member or student at a high-quality university is difficult. It requires intelligence, motivation, and self-control. Those qualities might not make for the most exciting parties, but they wear well over time.
Another reason is that the ratio of collaboration to competition is higher than in many other occupations. Success of the person in the next office usually helps us more than it hurts us. A colleague winning a large grant or publishing an important article brings favorable publicity to the department and university as well as to the individual. That, in turn, can lead to attracting superior new students and faculty and increasing funding. Academic colleagues also tend to share intellectual and other interests in common. The students and faculty who attended this hommage amply illustrate these virtues.
I’ve been fortunate to spend my career in an unusually collegial department where these advantages are particularly marked. I’ve benefited innumerable times from comments about my research from David Klahr, Sharon Carver, Marcel Just, and many other colleagues. Reading and hearing about their research, and that of other long-term colleagues such as John Anderson, Sheldon Cohen, and Jay McClelland, has often stimulated me to raise my game and try to make comparably large contributions.
The social environment in my department has also been very positive. On most days, between four and 14 faculty members have lunch together. Most of the discussions are interesting, though they rarely focus on academic topics. More frequent are discussions of movies, books, television shows, newspaper articles, current events, and, of course, the Pittsburgh Steelers. One sign of the quality of the local environment is that roughly half of psychology department faculty members have been at CMU for more than 30 years, many of us for more than 40 years. We certainly haven’t stayed for the weather.
Pursuing your interests and being your own boss
Being a professor at a high-quality university enables people to pursue their interests. We do not need anyone’s permission to initiate projects; can pursue ideas that at the outset, at least, no one else believes; can collaborate with people from anywhere in the world; and can work wherever and whenever we want. If you are early-to-bed-and-early-to-rise, you can arrange your schedule that way. If you prefer to sleep in and work through the night, you can do that. These are amazing advantages relative to almost all other occupations.
Another type of advantage is not having a boss. In theory, department chairs and deans are our bosses, but in practice, they have little impact on what we do. Of course, being a successful professor requires having a reasonable number of ideas that pay off in discoveries that others find interesting and important and that lead to publications and grant funding. That’s reasonable, though; my experience has been that even exasperating reviews generally lead to improved final products. As long as you are productive in producing new knowledge and conveying existing knowledge, there is no need to curry favor with people higher in the hierarchy. Again, that’s an amazing advantage relative to most occupations.
Varying one’s activities and avoiding boredom
Many people, even those who are very successful professionally, retire at relatively young ages. Many others would like to retire, but cannot due to financial considerations. In contrast, most professors at high-quality universities work well past age 65, and few want to retire earlier (Chronicle of Higher Education, 2016).
I suspect that among the most important reasons for this desire to continue working is the opportunity to vary one’s activities and avoid boredom. Depending on their preferences, professors at high-quality universities can work with more or fewer students; can write journal articles, monographs, or textbooks; can edit journals, handbooks, or book series; can serve on local, national, or international committees; can consult with private companies, other universities, or governmental agencies; and can travel to other states, other countries, or stay home. We can even serve as administrators, if for some reason we want to do so. Moreover, unlike in most occupations, our past choices only minimally constrain our future ones. With age, many professors devote more time to committees, editorial work, and administrative activities than they did earlier, but many others continue to focus on conducting new research. These opportunities to vary one’s activities, pursue one’s interests, and avoid boredom are an underappreciated benefit of our profession.
Reaping what you sow
Another underappreciated advantage of being a faculty member at a high-quality university is reaping what we sow. When we write articles or obtain grants, there is relatively little ambiguity regarding whether we deserve the credit (or blame) for them. The relation is not 1:1––when articles are written by multiple authors, it can be difficult to identify their individual contributions—but the relation between contributions and outcomes is more direct than in most occupations. Moreover, there is a public record of one’s articles, which allows others to draw more accurate attributions than would otherwise be possible by reading multiple articles and identifying common themes and writing styles. I find this relatively direct link between contributions and rewards to be highly motivating; I suspect that others do as well.
Outstanding job security and better pay than we admit
Academics are famous for grousing about how underpaid and underappreciated we are, but I have never found this to be the case. Again, the fact that so few professors resign their positions, except to found their own businesses or go into very high-paying jobs in finance or technology, suggests that the pay is better than our grumbling suggests. I do not recall knowing any professors who were unable for financial reasons to send their children to the college of their choice. Indeed, children from academic families are highly overrepresented at the most expensive and prestigious universities. I also do not recall any professors who lived in poverty or who could not feed their families. The last time I counted, my parking lot had eight BMWs and two Mercedes among the roughly 40 cars in it. These statements obviously do not apply to adjunct or visiting professors, many of whom are paid poorly. However, for tenure track and tenured professors at high-quality universities, the pay and the security once we are tenured allows us to live very good lives.
International relations
As shown in Table 2, I’ve had the pleasure of working with graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and colleagues from around the world, many of whom came to Aix for this occasion. In addition to them educating me about perspectives of people from many nations, I’ve been able to visit all of the countries on the list except Slovenia, an omission I hope to remedy soon. Of course, I’ve also worked with many outstanding students and faculty members from the USA and have benefited from their perspectives just as much; diversity of perspectives has no geographic boundaries.
In several cases, having students from countries other than the USA has had specific research benefits. Beyond establishing the generality of many findings across cultures, this access has made possible investigation of issues that could only be examined through cross-national research. These issues include whether Chinese children are already more advanced mathematically than US children before they start school (Siegler & Mu, 2008), whether differences between US and Chinese children’s knowledge of fractions resides primarily in procedural or in conceptual knowledge (Bailey et al., 2015), whether teachers in a region of Canada with high math achievement understand the conceptual basis of fraction arithmetic operations better than US teachers do (Siegler & Lortie-Forgues, 2015), whether the geometric reasoning of Israeli students varies depending on whether they were educated in ultra-orthodox schools with minimal math instruction or secular schools with substantial math instruction (Dembo, Levin, & Siegler, 1997), and whether cultural traditions influence concepts of living things among children growing up in Japan, Israel, and the USA (Hatano et al., 1993).
There have been many other types of benefits as well. For example, Pierre Barrouillet and Valerie Camos invited me to visit the Archives Jean Piaget in Geneva, Switzerland, where I was pleased to find that Piaget’s library included a book that I edited (Siegler, 1978). Pierre, Valerie, and I found that we like many of the same novelists and the same types of wines and had memorable discussions of both. My wife, Xiaodong Lin-Siegler, would also like me to emulate Pierre’s and Valerie’s exquisite fashion sense, but that’s probably hopeless.
Helping students attain their goals
Throughout my career, I’ve tried to inculcate four main types of skills and knowledge in my students. Perhaps the most general goal is to help them accurately assess what children are doing at the micro level and simultaneously to appreciate the implications of their findings for understanding child development at the macro level. Helping students learn to use and generate precise knowledge assessment methods that address the questions that fascinate them, and to appreciate the broader importance of the detailed observations that arise from such assessments, remains my overarching educational goal.
I pursue three more specific educational goals in pursuit of the overarching one. One of these goals has already been noted: Encouraging clear writing and thinking. Many of the most amusing moments at the hommage came from different students’ remarkably similar stories about my approach to helping them write more clearly. Several of them noted that I had written on one of their drafts, “This might be the single worst sentence I have ever read.” Not the kindest or most diplomatic comment, I admit, but all of the students who cited it and a number of others noted that they really had benefited from the efforts to improve their writing and thinking. That was enormously gratifying to hear. From reading articles after they left CMU, I knew that in many cases their writing had improved greatly, but I didn’t know until the hommage that a number of them attributed part of the improvement to our working together.
Another specific goal that I’ve pursued in working with students has been to focus on large effects. Psychology has uncovered a huge number of weak and often unstable findings; even together, they often do not add up to much as far as gaining a comprehensive understanding of phenomena. In contrast, a smaller set of large effects has proven much more stable, and in my opinion, they have been much more theoretically significant as well. Why learn more and more about less and less, when there are big effects out there just waiting to be discovered? Seeking large effects does not guarantee that you will discover them, but it does make such discoveries more likely.
My third specific goal in working with graduate students and postdoctoral fellows has been setting up each of them with the equivalent of their own small business. That is, I try to help each student become the world’s expert in some area that is sufficiently rich that they can pursue it well beyond their time working with me. Most of my students have continued to pursue their small businesses, often in creative ways that I never anticipated. In a fair number of cases, their research has eventually gone in other directions, but the small businesses gave them a place to start and experience early success as independent researchers. Having the opportunity to hear about their current research and thinking was another gratifying aspect of this hommage for me.
Participating in progress
A final gift of being a professor at a high-quality university is participating in progress. Scientific understanding of cognitive development has grown remarkably in the nearly half a century during which I have been in the field. This progress is evident in the standards for reviewing journal articles and grant proposals. Early in my career, competent execution and lack of major methodological flaws were usually sufficient for articles to be accepted to high-quality journals and for grant applications to be funded. Today, much more is required for similar outcomes. Not only does the research need to be rigorous, it also needs to make a substantial contribution to understanding of the phenomena under investigation. That is the essence of progress: What once was good enough no longer is.
Although reviewing journal and grant submissions often seems like an unwelcomed burden, it also allows us to participate in progress. Because we’re not invested in other people’s research at the same level as in our own, we often can see the strengths and weaknesses more clearly. Sometimes reviewing suggests ideas that we can use in our own work; other times, the review process is not directly useful, but it broadens our perspective and creates a richer understanding of the field.
I’ve tried to apply in my reviews a perspective that I learned from Allan Newell’s comment, “Try to look where I’m pointing; don’t bite off the finger I’m using to point.” In reviewing manuscripts and grant applications, it is easy to get caught up in methodological flaws and design choices that we would have done differently and to lose sight of the main questions: Is X worth understanding, and can this research substantially advance our understanding of X? Some of the most important articles have clear methodological shortcomings, but those could be (and usually were) corrected in subsequent studies. The scarce commodity in science is good ideas; recognizing other people’s good ideas, and helping them clarify and provide compelling evidence for them, is what makes reviewing worthwhile.
Another type of progress in which I’ve participated has been advancing understanding of children’s thinking to a level where it might improve education. I believe this level has been reached in a number of areas. Reflecting this progress, the Institute of Educational Sciences (IES) within the US Department of Education has published more than 20 Practice Guides over the past decade. These Practice Guides distill lessons of research for instruction and present them in a teacher-friendly format. Such practice guides would have been far less useful even a decade earlier.
Considered in terms of its relation to education, my research falls into three main projects, all of which I pursued with people at the hommage. The first project focused on providing a sound foundation of understanding of cognitive development from which educational implications could be derived. The goal was to formulate more accurate and mechanistic theories of cognitive development than the stage theories and neonativist approaches that were the main alternatives in the field. Studies that contributed to this foundation include research with Diane Briars on the development of counting (Briars & Siegler, 1984), with Norman Brown on real-world quantitative estimation (Brown & Siegler, with Zhe Chen 1993), with Patrick Lemaire on cognitive change (Lemaire & Siegler, 1995), with Zhe Chen on development of tool use in infancy with Zhe Chen (e.g., Chen & Siegler, 2000), with Matija Svetina on development of logical reasoning in childhood (Siegler & Svetina, 2002), and with John Opfer on number line estimation as a means of assessing numerical magnitude representations (e.g., Siegler & Opfer, 2003). These studies gave rise to overlapping-waves theory (Siegler, 1996) and to the integrated theory of numerical development (Siegler, Thompson, & Schneider, 2011).
The second project involved efforts to apply this theoretical foundation to improving education in whole-number mathematics and in science. Toward this end, Julie Booth and I demonstrated that providing linear representations of the magnitudes of addends and answers improved learning of answers to whole-number addition problems (Booth & Siegler, 2008); Geetha Ramani, Elida Laski, and I demonstrated that playing theoretically based board games could improve magnitude representations and arithmetic performance (Laski & Siegler, 2014; Ramani & Siegler, 2008); and Xiaodong Lin-Siegler and I demonstrated that enhancing teacher–student communications about qualities of ideal science students increased the students’ science learning (Lin-Siegler, Siegler, & Sullivan, 2010). The third project, which builds on both of the earlier ones, has the goal of accurately describing and improving knowledge of rational numbers. In many ways, this is the most ambitious undertaking, because so little was known about the area when we started investigating it. Thus far, this project has included research with Michael Schneider and Clarissa Thompson on the role of magnitude representations in learning about fractions (Siegler et al., 2011), with Drew Bailey on longitudinal relations between early understanding of whole numbers and much later fractions understanding (Bailey, Siegler, & Geary, 2014), with Hugo Lortie-Forgues and Jing Tian on conceptual understanding of rational number arithmetic (Lortie-Forgues, Tian, & Siegler, 2015), and with Lisa Fazio on effects of playing a theoretically based computer game on children’s understanding of fraction magnitudes (Fazio, Kennedy, & Siegler, 2016).
Perhaps my proudest contribution, though, started before any of these research projects and will no doubt outlive all of them. This project involves my children, Todd and Aaron Siegler and Beth Siegler-Retchless; my grandchildren, Alexis, Reid, Sara, Tuvia, River, Eli, and Grace Siegler and Micah and Ezra Retchless; and my stepdaughter, Avianna McGhee. Todd and his family were able to attend the hommage; he, Beth, and Aaron have also written a chapter for the book. Their participation made the event even more special than it would otherwise have been.
Finally, I want to thank Patrick Lemaire for organizing this wonderful hommage. Patrick first proposed the idea at a dinner at SRCD that included many of my students. I agreed to the idea despite thinking I was too young for such an honor, because I figured that so many obstacles would need to be overcome that the event was unlikely to happen. However, Patrick found ways to surmount all of the obstacles and provided us a magical time in the South of France. I know that I’ll remember the experience for the rest of my life; I suspect that others will too.
References
Bailey, D. H., Siegler, R. S., & Geary, D. C. (2014). Early predictors of middle school fraction knowledge. Developmental Science, 17,775–785. doi: 10.1111/desc.12155
Bailey, D. H., Zhou, X., Zhang, Y., Cui, J., Fuchs, L. S., Jordan, N. C., … Siegler, R. S. (2015). Development of fraction concepts and procedures in US and Chinese children. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 129, 68–83. doi: 10.1016/j.jecp.2014.08.006
Booth, J. L., & Siegler, R. S. (2008). Numerical magnitude representations influence arithmetic learning. Child Development, 79, 1016–1031. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8624.2008.01173.x
Briars, D. J., & Siegler, R. S. (1984). A featural analysis of preschoolers’ counting knowledge. Developmental Psychology, 20, 607–618. doi: 10.1037/0012-1649.20.4.607
Brown, N. R., & Siegler, R. S. (1993). Metrics and mappings: A framework for understanding real-world quantitative estimation. Psychological Review, 100, 511–534. doi: 10.1037/0033-295X.100.3.511
Chen, Z., & Siegler, R. S. (2000). Across the great divide: Bridging the gap between understanding of toddlers’ and older children’s thinking. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 65(2) (Whole No. 261). dois: 10.1111/1540–5834.00072 to 86
Dembo, Y., Levin, I., & Siegler, R. S. (1997). Geometric reasoning of ultra-orthodox and secular junior high and high school students in Israel. Megamot, 38, 469–503.
Fazio, L. K., Kennedy, C., & Siegler, R. S. (2016). Improving children’s knowledge of fraction magnitudes. PLoS ONE. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0165243
Hatano, G., Siegler, R. S., Richards, D. D., Inagaki, K., Stavy, R., & Wax, N. (1993). The development of biological knowledge: A multinational study. Cognitive Development, 8, 47–62. doi: 10.1016/0885-2014(93)90004-O
Laski, E.V., & Siegler, R. S. (2014). Learning from number board games: You learn what you encode. Developmental Psychology, 50, 853–864. doi: 10.1037/a0034321
Lemaire, P., & Siegler, R. S. (1995). Four aspects of strategic change: Contributions to children’s learning of multiplication. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 124, 83–97. doi: 10.1037/0096-3445.124.1.83
Lin-Siegler, X.D., Siegler, R. S., & Sullivan, F. R. (2010). Students’ goals influence their learning. In David D. Preiss & Robert J. Sternberg (Eds.), Innovations in Educational Psychology: Perspectives on Learning, Teaching, and Human Development (pp. 79–106). New York, NY: Springer.
Lortie-Forgues, H., Tian, J., & Siegler, R. S. (2015). Why is learning fraction and decimal arithmetic so difficult? Developmental Review, 38, 201–221, doi: 10.1016/j.dr.2015.07.008
Ramani, G. B., & Siegler, R. S. (2008). Promoting broad and stable improvements in low-income children’s numerical knowledge through playing number board games. Child Development, 79, 375–394. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8624.2007.01131.x
Siegler, R. S. (1996). Emerging Minds: The Process of Change in Children’s Thinking. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Siegler, R. S., & Lortie-Forgues, H. (2015). Conceptual knowledge of fraction arithmetic. Journal of Educational Psychology, 107, 909–918, doi: 10.1037/edu0000025
Siegler, R. S., & Mu, Y. (2008). Chinese children excel on novel mathematics problems even before elementary school. Psychological Science, 19, 759–763. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02153.x
Siegler, R. S., & Opfer, J. (2003). The development of numerical estimation: Evidence for multiple representations of numerical quantity. Psychological Science, 14, 237–243. doi: 10.1111/1467-9280.02438
Siegler, R. S., & Stern, E. (1998). Conscious and unconscious strategy discoveries: A micro-genetic analysis. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 127, 377–397. doi: 10.1037/0096-3445.127.4.377
Siegler, R. S., & Svetina, M. (2002). A microgenetic/cross-sectional study of matrix completion: Comparing short-term and long-term change. Child Development, 73, 793–809. doi: 10.1111/1467-8624.00439
Siegler, R. S., & Svetina, M. (2006). What leads children to adopt new strategies? A micro-genetic/cross-sectional study of class inclusion. Child Development, 77, 997–1015. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8624.2006.00915.x
Siegler, R. S., Thompson, C. A., & Schneider, M. (2011). An integrated theory of whole number and fractions development. Cognitive Psychology, 62, 273–296. doi: 10.1016/j.cogpsych.2011.03.001