- Email: [email protected]
One person made a difference: The legacy of Rodney R. Cocking
Applied Developmental Psychology 24 (2003) 619 – 626
Preface
One person made a difference: The legacy of Rodney R. Cocking$ This issue is dedicated to Rodney R. Cocking. May his work continue to create a cascade that will benefit us all.
Rodney R. Cocking made a difference. We have previously acknowledged that Rod’s premature death through violence created a significant void in the hearts and minds of his family and many friends (Sigel & McGillicuddy-De Lisi, 2003). He was a vibrant and energetic colleague and friend who was generous with all his assets—his ideas, his time, and his support, and it is difficult to reconcile the manner of his death over money with the person that he was. We have mourned Rod collectively in a formal public setting over a year ago and paid our respects to him and his family. With this special issue, that mourning is now transformed into a celebration of our memory of Rod’s life. We wish to celebrate Rod’s professional life and his contributions as a researcher, scholar, and advocate—work that forms a living legacy for the field. The articles presented in this special issue honors Rod, but represents only the tip of the iceberg of his impact on the field.
1. Rod Cocking’s career path Rod had an unusual but highly successful career that grew out of a dual undergraduate degree in biology and psychology, a graduate degree in clinical psychology that involved studying Arapaho Indian children’s fantasy confessions and produced several publications on clinical testing issues (Cocking, Dana, & Dana, 1969; Dana & Cocking, 1968, 1969; Dana, Cocking, & Dana, 1970), a doctorate from Cornell in Human Development and Family Studies based on work in language acquisition (Cocking & Potts, 1976), and a postdoctoral position evaluating preschool interventions before he joined the ETS’s early $
Portions of several articles (Liben & Downs; Greenfield & Calvert; Sigel) published in this issue honoring Rodney R. Cocking’s legacy to the field of developmental psychology were previously presented at an SRCD symposium in Tampa, FL, in April 2003 that was organized by Lynn Liben. The response to the request for submissions to honor Rod’s legacy was too great to include all the articles that met the standard for publication in this issue. Therefore, several articles dedicated to Rod Cocking’s memory will be published in a subsequent issue of the Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology. 0193-3973/$ – see front matter D 2003 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.appdev.2003.09.009
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childhood experimental program. Rod’s illustrious career continued through appointments at the National Institute of Education, the National Institutes of Mental Health, the National Academy of Sciences, and the National Science Foundation, interrupted for a period by a position as a professor at the University of Delaware. Throughout his career, Rod also maintained an active role in professional organizations such as the American Psychological Association, Society for Research in Child Development, International Society for the Study of Behavioural Development, and the Jean Piaget Society. He served as an officer and received awards from several of these organizations. However, Rod’s legacy is not reflected just in his curriculum vitae, no matter how impressive it is. Rather, it is reflected in the pattern of his work and in his impact on programs of research that we can see in retrospect. Rod’s professional life was marked by order and purposeful directionality; he appeared to be in control of his destiny. He had a mission, which he expressed through his commitment to the application of scientific knowledge of human development to practical programs for the health and welfare of children. To put Rod’s contribution into meaningful perspective, we will first review his own scholarship, which broke new ground in significant ways and yet showed a steady sense of purpose and commitment over the course of his career. We also will elaborate some of the unseen ways through which Rod affected the work of others, both in research and application, through his mentoring, policy planning, and funding capacities. Finally, we will illustrate an indirect legacy Rod left us, through his work in creating places where researchers and policymakers could seek to have important applied issues addressed through sound theoretical and empirical research.
2. The contribution of Rod Cocking’s published scholarly work A cursory inspection of Rod’s curriculum vitae would suggest that his interests changed over time. However, a closer look reveals that all of his work was based in cognitive theory and was specifically focused on the role of representational processes in development. His early work in language and in cognitive development (his dissertation, his postdoctoral position with Charles Smock, his 1977 book with Sigel, for example) were each very much steeped in representation. Over 20 years later, in 1999, Rod wrote that ‘‘one of the enduring problems in cognitive–developmental psychology has been that of cognitive representation—in its many forms that include the entity called representations, the activities of representing, the uses of representations in learning, memory, and thinking, and the mechanisms that control the formation of representations’’ (p. vii). In this article, he tied new neuroscience research, computer, and interactive technologies, current conceptualizations of memory, scientific reasoning, and the study of the meanings of cultural symbols and their relation to behavior to representation. Rod’s work on language acquisition (Cocking, 1977; Cocking & McHale, 1981; Cocking & Potts, 1976; Potts, Carlson, Cocking, & Copple, 1979) is closely tied to his subsequent work on learning and thinking in other domains, such as planning (Cocking & Copple, 1987; Friedman, Scholnick, & Cocking, 1987) cognitive development and learning (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 1999), psychological constructs (Cocking & Renninger, 1993), mathe-
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matics learning and performance (Cocking & Mestre, 1988), social cognition (Emmerich, Cocking, & Sigel, 1979), interactions with media, such a television and computers (Calvert, Jordan, & Cocking, 2002; Greenfield & Cocking, 1996), and educational programming (Cocking, 1986; Sigel & Cocking, 1977) through his conceptualization of representational thinking. That is, his research interests and agenda included the study of media effects, language acquisition, educational program effects, planning, mathematics learning, and so on, but each of these areas was linked to a broader overarching view of cognitive development that had at its core the unifying principle of representation. Indeed, Rod saw representation as the unifying concept for science itself (see Cocking, 1999). Further, Rod’s own work over his entire professional career was characterized by his view of developmental research as ‘‘big science’’ and by a concern for connecting that science to the everyday lives of people (most notably, but not exclusively, to the lives of children and adolescents). In his introduction to Cocking and Mestre’s (1988) volume on mathematics learning, Herb Ginsburg (1988) wrote, ‘‘The Cocking and Mestre volume performs a valuable service by calling our attention to broader aspects of mathematics learning. Linguistic and Cultural Influences on Learning Mathematics brings the study of mathematics learning into the real world of schools, culture, and bilingualism. The volume’s diverse chapters, drawing on many scholarly disciplines, explore these and other factors that make the learning of mathematics so difficult in American school’’ (p. xi). Ginsburg’s remarks pinpoint three aspects of Rod’s contribution that appear over and over again not only in Rod’s own scholarship, but also in the scholarship that others were able to develop as a result of his professional involvement in their research programs. First, Ginsburg tells us that Rod saw the ‘‘big picture.’’ (Remarkably, Rod was also famous for maintaining vigilant attention to details, but he never lost sight of the big picture.) Rod was able to communicate the importance of such a larger perspective to other researchers whose work was improved and enlarged by his involvement. Second, Ginsburg’s shows us that Rod was a master of multidisciplinarity. These two aspects—attention to the big picture and multidisciplinarity—characterize Rod’s professional life from his earliest training as an undergraduate. Although transformed as he and the field changed, these aspects created an ever-present pattern in Rod’s personal scholarly endeavors and in the works of others that he supported and nurtured in his various professional capacities. His multidisciplinary perspective enriched the literature in multiple areas of research. Third, Ginsburg tells us that Rod’s research was applied. Rod helped others see how to rely on multiple theoretical perspectives and use rigorous scientific methods to meet our social responsibilities to children and families. Let us look to some examples in the present volume. It is easy to see Rod’s continued influence in the area of applying cognitive development research and theory to the real world of children in Copple’s article on early childhood education that appears in this volume. Rod and Carol were longtime friends and collaborators, sharing a commitment to developing and evaluating educational plans for many years. In addition, both had a strong sense of the value of theory and research that is embedded in a larger view of how to improve the experiences of children. Copple’s article represents this perspective admirably as she presents the critical components of three early educational programs that differ in specific practices but which, at their core, are based on the premise that
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representational abilities are fundamental capacities that underlie skills that are the target of many educational efforts, i.e., the development of self-regulation, problem solving, planning, and higher level thought processes that are the goals of most educational ventures. Copple keeps us focused on the deeper function of education just as Cocking viewed representation as a unifying principle. In addition, she returns us to the origin of Rod’s dedication to applied developmental science education. Sigel, too, was a lifelong collaborator of Rod’s and the mutual influence they had on one another is apparent in Sigel and McGillicuddy-De Lisi’s article (this volume). This work summarizes the development of the distancing model from 1973 to 1980 that formed the basis of an ambitious preschool intervention at ETS. Rod’s role in the development of the model grew out of both practical considerations, i.e., his role in formulating child assessments to tap the impact of teacher distancing acts on children’s representational thinking, and in assessing teaching behaviors that were instances of such acts, and Rod’s commitment to the ‘‘big picture.’’ He could not conceive of setting up an assessment program to test the effects of distancing teaching strategies without tackling the deeper questions of how children develop representational abilities and what purpose they serve for the child in her cognitive life. Here we see the tremendous advantage of Rod’s ability to move from the practical demands to the theoretical underpinnings, while keeping the necessity of sound research principles interwoven with both the theoretical formulations and with the applied aspects of the educational program. Once this was accomplished, Rod moved on in a 1994 volume edited with Ann Renninger to redefine distancing, setting it a larger context that could be applied to the zone of proximal development, temperament, delay of gratification, video game play, as well as parent and teacher behaviors, during interactions with children. In this work, eminent scholars broadened both the definition and the application of the distancing model while maintaining its roots in representational thought. Rod made a special contribution in this volume in his vision of the implication of the distancing construct for cognitive, linguistic, social, and educational domains. Throughout the metamorphosis of the distancing construct, however, the thread of representational thinking that weaves through his work is apparent: ‘‘Central to this construct is the cognitive process of representing information to one’s self and the ecology of the environment that enables an individual to represent information to him or herself in the service of conceptual development’’ (Cocking & Renninger, 1993, pp. ix–x). Ceci and Williams describe the Cornell Institute for Research on Children (CIRC) in this volume. They were not direct collaborators of Rod’s but they tell us of Rod’s importance in the development of their ideas and in the formation of their institute, which is focused on bringing together the top researchers from different fields to address issues raised by those in the trenches of social and public policy. Here we see Rod’s instinctive appreciation of the value, indeed the necessity, of a multidisciplinary perspective as well as his continued focus on creating research opportunities that both stem from and lead to the real world needs of children and developing adults. Rod’s guidance and enthusiasm comes through as clearly derived from his view of the ‘‘big picture’’ and is imbued with all the practical knowledge accumulated through his years in service at the nexus of theory, science, and policy. CIRC is an instance of Rod’s legacy beyond the visible accomplishments presented in his curriculum
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vitae, yet we can see that this institute is consistent with all that came before it in Rod’s professional life. The empirical studies presented by Calvert, Mahler, Zehnde, Jenkins, and Lee (this volume) and by Greenfield and Subrahmanyam (this volume) were conducted under the aegis of the Children’s Digital Media Center. This center, created through a grant from the National Science Foundation, is a result of Rod’s work as a project officer for National Science Foundation. Calvert’s study focuses on the development of peer relationships in a multiuser domain, an on-line site designed to facilitate identity exploration and peer interaction. Quite early in his career, Rod saw the links among social cognition, development of the self, and representational thinking (Emmerich et al., 1979); his ideas became increasingly complex as he incorporated the role of newer media into his conceptualization of how representation plays a role in social and cognitive development (see also Calvert, Cocking, & Smrcek, 1991). Greenfield and Subhamanyam’s research shares the on-line context of Calvert’s research, but focuses on teens’ chatroom behavior and ways in which the discourse evolves. Here, Rod’s interest in linguistic representation as well as personal–social development has been melded with the new media of computer communication. This is not Rod’s personal conceptualization, but both Calvert’s and Greenfield and Subrahmanyam’s new work provides us with evidence that the seeds of Rod’s ideas have continued to flower through the work of those he has influenced and supported. Other researchers who were influenced by Rod had developed research programs prior to Rod’s involvement that appear to be quite different from Rod’s own interests. For example, Lynn Liben had a well-established research program in children’s spatial development and Roger Downs was active in studying knowledge of geography before encountering Rod as a potential project officer. When these investigators came together as collaborators interested in educational issues, Rod, deeply rooted in applying both theory and research to education, helped them to conceptualize research on graphic representation and geography in terms of education. The Liben and Downs research that Rod helped bring to fruition led to unanticipated avenues of research and application for Liben and Downs’ subsequent work. For example, they became consultants to Sesame Street, translating their knowledge of developmental aspects of graphic representations of space into practical suggestions for educational presentation on this educational television show (perhaps foreshadowing Rod’s own interest in television as vehicle for educational intervention; see for example, Calvert & Cocking, 1992; Calvert et al., 1991). The Sesame Street work was then instrumental in Downs’ subsequent involvement in the 1994 National Assessment of Progress for Geography. By the time that this special issue devoted to Rod Cocking appears in print, another volume—tentatively entitled Learning to Think Spatially: GIS as a Support System in the K-12 Curriculum—will also have appeared. It is the final report of a National Research Council committee, chaired by Downs and including Liben as one of the committee members. This illustrates a cascade effect of Rod’s involvement and support, a cascade that we hope will continue Rod’s legacy, to the benefit of the field and to education in general. In other instances, Rod’s approach as a funding officer rather than his personal knowledge and research predilections led to an impact on the work and career development of other
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individuals. For example, Adele Diamond (Wilkinson, Ross, & Diamond, this volume; interestingly a study of language acquisition, Rod’s doctoral research area) describes the impact of Rod Cocking on her research and career as a result of someone who went beyond the usual support as a project officer. Rod was the NIMH program officer on her first R01 grant, submitted as she started her first year as a faculty member. That year, the U.S. Congress was battling with President Reagan over the budget, and Rod quite literally had almost no money in his program budget. Rather than reduce the budget for her award, Rod redefined the calendar. He declared that the first year of the award was 4 months long because he had just enough money in the budget to fund 4 months and the last year of the award as 20 months long. It was creative problem-solving that, with the benefit of hindsight, paid off in the form of great research. Rod consistently showed great caring, generosity, and selflessness—illustrated here by the experiences of Adele Diamond but echoed by many others as well. To illustrate, Rod considered moving Diamond’s grant from his NIMH Basic Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences Research portfolio to the Cognitive and Behavioral Neuroscience Research portfolio because funding was greater for the neurosciences than for developmental psychology. Most grant officers were jealously guarding the grants in their portfolio, but Rod could see the ‘‘big picture.’’ Rod’s commitment to multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary study and application is most clearly apparent in his approach the Ceci and William’s CIRC structure. His appreciation for work that crossed disciplinary boundaries was also evident in the manner in which he fostered connections among seemingly disparate areas such as neuroscience and community psychology. For example, Rod collaborated with Lonnie Sherrod in 1985 to organize a scientific meeting on cross-cultural and cross-species insights into brain maturation and cognitive development. This 1985 meeting brought together anthropologists, sociologists, neuroscientists, psychologists, evolutionary biologists, animal behaviorists, and historians. When Adele Diamond sought funds to bring together scholars in neuroscience, cognitive science, and developmental psychology who used the same experimental paradigms to study behaviors, Rod was the first to contribute funds from his division at NIMH, and others followed. This conference, ‘‘The Neural Basis of Higher Cognitive Functions,’’ which took place in 1989, played an important role in helping to launch the field of developmental cognitive neuroscience. Rod was the catalyst that made subsequent events happen, and from those events, new inroads continue to be made today.
3. Indirect effects of Rod’s commitment to those ‘‘missing’’ or not represented in mainstream research A third aspect of this volume also provides us with an additional thread of continuity in Rod’s approach to developmental research. The previously mentioned volume by Cocking and Mestre (1988) examined mathematics achievement and language of minority children, mathematics achievement in bilingual communities, and mathematics participation, attitudes, or achievement in Asian-American students, Mexican-American women, and Ute Indian children. Rod looked for those who were missing in studies of development and made sure
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they were included in the projects that he worked on. He was one of the first to use developmental science as a vehicle for addressing AIDS intervention (Calvert & Cocking, 1992). And when stereotype threat effects were made known, Rod saw the opportunity for intervention studies. He dedicated himself to work spanning the divide between basic research and application. Josh Aronson (co-author of Good, Aronson, & Inzlicht, this volume, an intervention study that reduced effects of stereotype threat) tells us that he met Rodney shortly after the release of National Science Foundation’s Children’s Research Initiative, when Aronson and others were trying to get a center funded for research on cultural influences on development and education. Rod generously made the trip to New York several times, including one trip a week or so after 9/11, when few people were willing to travel to New York. Rod described his vision for the initiative, which was to create centers dedicated to research that would benefit children through innovative, interdisciplinary research. Rod clearly wanted to do something new and important for the study of children and Aronson’s research group was honored that he was taking their goals and work seriously. As part of the process, Aronson read Rod’s writings on learning, especially the book he worked on for the National Research Council (Bransford et al., 1999). Aronson reports that being with Rod and reading his work from the National Research Council, his group was excited about having Rod as a partner and they were looking forward to a long, enjoyable, and fruitful collaboration.
4. Conclusion Rod’s death is a great loss, both personally and to the field. As so many of the chapters in this special issue demonstrate, the opportunity to collaborate with Rod has been lost forever. The editors of this journal feel this as strongly, if not more so, as the contributors to this volume. At the same time, we realize the great fortune we have had to know Rod, to talk with him, to share his vision, to hear his chuckle, and to understand that one person can make a difference.
References Bransford, J. D., Brown, A. L., & Cocking, R. R. (1999). How people learn: Brain, mind, experience, and school. Washington, DC: National Research Council, Commission on Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education, Committee on Developments in the Science of Learning. Calvert, S. L., & Cocking, R. R. (1992). Health promotion through mass media. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, 13, 143 – 149. Calvert, S. L., Cocking, R. R., & Smrcek, M. (1991). AIDS public service announcements: A paradigm for behavioral science. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, 12, 255 – 267. Calvert, S. L., Jordan, A. B., & Cocking, R. R. (Eds.) (2002). Children in the digital age: Influences of electronic media on development. Westport, CT: Praeger. Cocking, R. R. (1977). Measures of language comprehension: Relations to performance. Child Study Journal, 7, 165 – 178. Cocking, R. R. (1986). The environment in early experience research: Directions for applied developmental investigations. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, 7, 95 – 99.
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Cocking, R. R. (1999). From terra incognita to terra cognita: The science of representation. Development of mental representation: Theories and applications ( pp. vii – xii). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Cocking, R. R., & Copple, C. E. (1987). Social influences on representational awareness: Plans for representing and plans as representation. In S. L. Friedman, E. K. Scholnick, & R. R. Cocking (Eds.), Blueprints for thinking: The role of planning in cognitive development ( pp. 428 – 465). New York: Cambridge University Press. Cocking, R. R., Dana, J. M., & Dana, R. H. (1969). Six constructs to define Rorschach M: A response. Journal of Projective Techniques and Personality Assessment, 33, 322 – 323. Cocking, R. R., & McHale, S. M. (1981). A comparative study of the use of pictures and objects in assessing children’s receptive and productive language. Journal of Child Language, 8, 1 – 13. Cocking, R. R., & Mestre, J. P. (1988). Linguistic and cultural influences on learning mathematics. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Cocking, R. R., & Potts, M. (1976). Social facilitation of language acquisition: The reversible passive construction. Genetic Psychology Monographs, 94, 249 – 340. Cocking, R. R., & Renninger, K. A. (1993). Preface. In R. R. Cocking, & K. A. Renninger (Eds.), The development and meaning of psychological distance ( pp. ix – xi). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Dana, R. M., & Cocking, R. R. (1968). Cue parameters, cue probabilities, and clinical judgment. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 24, 475 – 480. Dana, R. M., & Cocking, R. R. (1969). Repression – sensitization and Maudsley Personality Inventory scores: Response sets and stress effects. British Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 8, 263 – 269. Dana, R. M., Cocking, R. R., & Dana, J. M. (1970). The effects of experience and training on accuracy and configural analysis. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 26, 28 – 32. Emmerich, W., Cocking, R. R., & Sigel, I. E. (1979). Relationships between cognitive and social functioning in preschool children. Developmental Psychology, 15, 495 – 504. Friedman, S. L., Scholnick, E. K., & Cocking, R. R. (1987). Blueprints for thinking: The role of planning in cognitive development. New York: Cambridge University Press. Ginsburg, H. P. (1988). Foreword. Linguistic and cultural influences on learning mathematics ( pp. xi – xii). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Greenfield, P., & Cocking, R. R. (1996). Advances in Applied Developmental Psychology, 11 (whole). Potts, M., Carlson, P., Cocking, R. R., & Copple, C. (1979). Structure and development in child language: The preschool years. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Sigel, I. E., & Cocking, R. R. (1977). Cognitive development from childhood to adolescence: A constructivist perspective. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Sigel, I. E., & McGillicuddy-De Lisi, A. V. (2003). Rodney R. Cocking (1943 – 2002). American Psychologist, 58, 143.
Ann V. McGillicuddy-De Lisi * Psychology Department, Lafayette College, Easton, PA 18042-1781, USA E-mail address: [email protected] Irving Sigel Educational Testing Service, Princeton, NJ 08541, USA Merry Bullock American Psychological Association, Washington, DC 20002, USA
* Corresponding author. Tel.: +1-610-330-5290; fax: +1-610-330-5349.
Preface
One person made a difference: The legacy of Rodney R. Cocking$ This issue is dedicated to Rodney R. Cocking. May his work continue to create a cascade that will benefit us all.
Rodney R. Cocking made a difference. We have previously acknowledged that Rod’s premature death through violence created a significant void in the hearts and minds of his family and many friends (Sigel & McGillicuddy-De Lisi, 2003). He was a vibrant and energetic colleague and friend who was generous with all his assets—his ideas, his time, and his support, and it is difficult to reconcile the manner of his death over money with the person that he was. We have mourned Rod collectively in a formal public setting over a year ago and paid our respects to him and his family. With this special issue, that mourning is now transformed into a celebration of our memory of Rod’s life. We wish to celebrate Rod’s professional life and his contributions as a researcher, scholar, and advocate—work that forms a living legacy for the field. The articles presented in this special issue honors Rod, but represents only the tip of the iceberg of his impact on the field.
1. Rod Cocking’s career path Rod had an unusual but highly successful career that grew out of a dual undergraduate degree in biology and psychology, a graduate degree in clinical psychology that involved studying Arapaho Indian children’s fantasy confessions and produced several publications on clinical testing issues (Cocking, Dana, & Dana, 1969; Dana & Cocking, 1968, 1969; Dana, Cocking, & Dana, 1970), a doctorate from Cornell in Human Development and Family Studies based on work in language acquisition (Cocking & Potts, 1976), and a postdoctoral position evaluating preschool interventions before he joined the ETS’s early $
Portions of several articles (Liben & Downs; Greenfield & Calvert; Sigel) published in this issue honoring Rodney R. Cocking’s legacy to the field of developmental psychology were previously presented at an SRCD symposium in Tampa, FL, in April 2003 that was organized by Lynn Liben. The response to the request for submissions to honor Rod’s legacy was too great to include all the articles that met the standard for publication in this issue. Therefore, several articles dedicated to Rod Cocking’s memory will be published in a subsequent issue of the Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology. 0193-3973/$ – see front matter D 2003 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.appdev.2003.09.009
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childhood experimental program. Rod’s illustrious career continued through appointments at the National Institute of Education, the National Institutes of Mental Health, the National Academy of Sciences, and the National Science Foundation, interrupted for a period by a position as a professor at the University of Delaware. Throughout his career, Rod also maintained an active role in professional organizations such as the American Psychological Association, Society for Research in Child Development, International Society for the Study of Behavioural Development, and the Jean Piaget Society. He served as an officer and received awards from several of these organizations. However, Rod’s legacy is not reflected just in his curriculum vitae, no matter how impressive it is. Rather, it is reflected in the pattern of his work and in his impact on programs of research that we can see in retrospect. Rod’s professional life was marked by order and purposeful directionality; he appeared to be in control of his destiny. He had a mission, which he expressed through his commitment to the application of scientific knowledge of human development to practical programs for the health and welfare of children. To put Rod’s contribution into meaningful perspective, we will first review his own scholarship, which broke new ground in significant ways and yet showed a steady sense of purpose and commitment over the course of his career. We also will elaborate some of the unseen ways through which Rod affected the work of others, both in research and application, through his mentoring, policy planning, and funding capacities. Finally, we will illustrate an indirect legacy Rod left us, through his work in creating places where researchers and policymakers could seek to have important applied issues addressed through sound theoretical and empirical research.
2. The contribution of Rod Cocking’s published scholarly work A cursory inspection of Rod’s curriculum vitae would suggest that his interests changed over time. However, a closer look reveals that all of his work was based in cognitive theory and was specifically focused on the role of representational processes in development. His early work in language and in cognitive development (his dissertation, his postdoctoral position with Charles Smock, his 1977 book with Sigel, for example) were each very much steeped in representation. Over 20 years later, in 1999, Rod wrote that ‘‘one of the enduring problems in cognitive–developmental psychology has been that of cognitive representation—in its many forms that include the entity called representations, the activities of representing, the uses of representations in learning, memory, and thinking, and the mechanisms that control the formation of representations’’ (p. vii). In this article, he tied new neuroscience research, computer, and interactive technologies, current conceptualizations of memory, scientific reasoning, and the study of the meanings of cultural symbols and their relation to behavior to representation. Rod’s work on language acquisition (Cocking, 1977; Cocking & McHale, 1981; Cocking & Potts, 1976; Potts, Carlson, Cocking, & Copple, 1979) is closely tied to his subsequent work on learning and thinking in other domains, such as planning (Cocking & Copple, 1987; Friedman, Scholnick, & Cocking, 1987) cognitive development and learning (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 1999), psychological constructs (Cocking & Renninger, 1993), mathe-
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matics learning and performance (Cocking & Mestre, 1988), social cognition (Emmerich, Cocking, & Sigel, 1979), interactions with media, such a television and computers (Calvert, Jordan, & Cocking, 2002; Greenfield & Cocking, 1996), and educational programming (Cocking, 1986; Sigel & Cocking, 1977) through his conceptualization of representational thinking. That is, his research interests and agenda included the study of media effects, language acquisition, educational program effects, planning, mathematics learning, and so on, but each of these areas was linked to a broader overarching view of cognitive development that had at its core the unifying principle of representation. Indeed, Rod saw representation as the unifying concept for science itself (see Cocking, 1999). Further, Rod’s own work over his entire professional career was characterized by his view of developmental research as ‘‘big science’’ and by a concern for connecting that science to the everyday lives of people (most notably, but not exclusively, to the lives of children and adolescents). In his introduction to Cocking and Mestre’s (1988) volume on mathematics learning, Herb Ginsburg (1988) wrote, ‘‘The Cocking and Mestre volume performs a valuable service by calling our attention to broader aspects of mathematics learning. Linguistic and Cultural Influences on Learning Mathematics brings the study of mathematics learning into the real world of schools, culture, and bilingualism. The volume’s diverse chapters, drawing on many scholarly disciplines, explore these and other factors that make the learning of mathematics so difficult in American school’’ (p. xi). Ginsburg’s remarks pinpoint three aspects of Rod’s contribution that appear over and over again not only in Rod’s own scholarship, but also in the scholarship that others were able to develop as a result of his professional involvement in their research programs. First, Ginsburg tells us that Rod saw the ‘‘big picture.’’ (Remarkably, Rod was also famous for maintaining vigilant attention to details, but he never lost sight of the big picture.) Rod was able to communicate the importance of such a larger perspective to other researchers whose work was improved and enlarged by his involvement. Second, Ginsburg’s shows us that Rod was a master of multidisciplinarity. These two aspects—attention to the big picture and multidisciplinarity—characterize Rod’s professional life from his earliest training as an undergraduate. Although transformed as he and the field changed, these aspects created an ever-present pattern in Rod’s personal scholarly endeavors and in the works of others that he supported and nurtured in his various professional capacities. His multidisciplinary perspective enriched the literature in multiple areas of research. Third, Ginsburg tells us that Rod’s research was applied. Rod helped others see how to rely on multiple theoretical perspectives and use rigorous scientific methods to meet our social responsibilities to children and families. Let us look to some examples in the present volume. It is easy to see Rod’s continued influence in the area of applying cognitive development research and theory to the real world of children in Copple’s article on early childhood education that appears in this volume. Rod and Carol were longtime friends and collaborators, sharing a commitment to developing and evaluating educational plans for many years. In addition, both had a strong sense of the value of theory and research that is embedded in a larger view of how to improve the experiences of children. Copple’s article represents this perspective admirably as she presents the critical components of three early educational programs that differ in specific practices but which, at their core, are based on the premise that
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representational abilities are fundamental capacities that underlie skills that are the target of many educational efforts, i.e., the development of self-regulation, problem solving, planning, and higher level thought processes that are the goals of most educational ventures. Copple keeps us focused on the deeper function of education just as Cocking viewed representation as a unifying principle. In addition, she returns us to the origin of Rod’s dedication to applied developmental science education. Sigel, too, was a lifelong collaborator of Rod’s and the mutual influence they had on one another is apparent in Sigel and McGillicuddy-De Lisi’s article (this volume). This work summarizes the development of the distancing model from 1973 to 1980 that formed the basis of an ambitious preschool intervention at ETS. Rod’s role in the development of the model grew out of both practical considerations, i.e., his role in formulating child assessments to tap the impact of teacher distancing acts on children’s representational thinking, and in assessing teaching behaviors that were instances of such acts, and Rod’s commitment to the ‘‘big picture.’’ He could not conceive of setting up an assessment program to test the effects of distancing teaching strategies without tackling the deeper questions of how children develop representational abilities and what purpose they serve for the child in her cognitive life. Here we see the tremendous advantage of Rod’s ability to move from the practical demands to the theoretical underpinnings, while keeping the necessity of sound research principles interwoven with both the theoretical formulations and with the applied aspects of the educational program. Once this was accomplished, Rod moved on in a 1994 volume edited with Ann Renninger to redefine distancing, setting it a larger context that could be applied to the zone of proximal development, temperament, delay of gratification, video game play, as well as parent and teacher behaviors, during interactions with children. In this work, eminent scholars broadened both the definition and the application of the distancing model while maintaining its roots in representational thought. Rod made a special contribution in this volume in his vision of the implication of the distancing construct for cognitive, linguistic, social, and educational domains. Throughout the metamorphosis of the distancing construct, however, the thread of representational thinking that weaves through his work is apparent: ‘‘Central to this construct is the cognitive process of representing information to one’s self and the ecology of the environment that enables an individual to represent information to him or herself in the service of conceptual development’’ (Cocking & Renninger, 1993, pp. ix–x). Ceci and Williams describe the Cornell Institute for Research on Children (CIRC) in this volume. They were not direct collaborators of Rod’s but they tell us of Rod’s importance in the development of their ideas and in the formation of their institute, which is focused on bringing together the top researchers from different fields to address issues raised by those in the trenches of social and public policy. Here we see Rod’s instinctive appreciation of the value, indeed the necessity, of a multidisciplinary perspective as well as his continued focus on creating research opportunities that both stem from and lead to the real world needs of children and developing adults. Rod’s guidance and enthusiasm comes through as clearly derived from his view of the ‘‘big picture’’ and is imbued with all the practical knowledge accumulated through his years in service at the nexus of theory, science, and policy. CIRC is an instance of Rod’s legacy beyond the visible accomplishments presented in his curriculum
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vitae, yet we can see that this institute is consistent with all that came before it in Rod’s professional life. The empirical studies presented by Calvert, Mahler, Zehnde, Jenkins, and Lee (this volume) and by Greenfield and Subrahmanyam (this volume) were conducted under the aegis of the Children’s Digital Media Center. This center, created through a grant from the National Science Foundation, is a result of Rod’s work as a project officer for National Science Foundation. Calvert’s study focuses on the development of peer relationships in a multiuser domain, an on-line site designed to facilitate identity exploration and peer interaction. Quite early in his career, Rod saw the links among social cognition, development of the self, and representational thinking (Emmerich et al., 1979); his ideas became increasingly complex as he incorporated the role of newer media into his conceptualization of how representation plays a role in social and cognitive development (see also Calvert, Cocking, & Smrcek, 1991). Greenfield and Subhamanyam’s research shares the on-line context of Calvert’s research, but focuses on teens’ chatroom behavior and ways in which the discourse evolves. Here, Rod’s interest in linguistic representation as well as personal–social development has been melded with the new media of computer communication. This is not Rod’s personal conceptualization, but both Calvert’s and Greenfield and Subrahmanyam’s new work provides us with evidence that the seeds of Rod’s ideas have continued to flower through the work of those he has influenced and supported. Other researchers who were influenced by Rod had developed research programs prior to Rod’s involvement that appear to be quite different from Rod’s own interests. For example, Lynn Liben had a well-established research program in children’s spatial development and Roger Downs was active in studying knowledge of geography before encountering Rod as a potential project officer. When these investigators came together as collaborators interested in educational issues, Rod, deeply rooted in applying both theory and research to education, helped them to conceptualize research on graphic representation and geography in terms of education. The Liben and Downs research that Rod helped bring to fruition led to unanticipated avenues of research and application for Liben and Downs’ subsequent work. For example, they became consultants to Sesame Street, translating their knowledge of developmental aspects of graphic representations of space into practical suggestions for educational presentation on this educational television show (perhaps foreshadowing Rod’s own interest in television as vehicle for educational intervention; see for example, Calvert & Cocking, 1992; Calvert et al., 1991). The Sesame Street work was then instrumental in Downs’ subsequent involvement in the 1994 National Assessment of Progress for Geography. By the time that this special issue devoted to Rod Cocking appears in print, another volume—tentatively entitled Learning to Think Spatially: GIS as a Support System in the K-12 Curriculum—will also have appeared. It is the final report of a National Research Council committee, chaired by Downs and including Liben as one of the committee members. This illustrates a cascade effect of Rod’s involvement and support, a cascade that we hope will continue Rod’s legacy, to the benefit of the field and to education in general. In other instances, Rod’s approach as a funding officer rather than his personal knowledge and research predilections led to an impact on the work and career development of other
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individuals. For example, Adele Diamond (Wilkinson, Ross, & Diamond, this volume; interestingly a study of language acquisition, Rod’s doctoral research area) describes the impact of Rod Cocking on her research and career as a result of someone who went beyond the usual support as a project officer. Rod was the NIMH program officer on her first R01 grant, submitted as she started her first year as a faculty member. That year, the U.S. Congress was battling with President Reagan over the budget, and Rod quite literally had almost no money in his program budget. Rather than reduce the budget for her award, Rod redefined the calendar. He declared that the first year of the award was 4 months long because he had just enough money in the budget to fund 4 months and the last year of the award as 20 months long. It was creative problem-solving that, with the benefit of hindsight, paid off in the form of great research. Rod consistently showed great caring, generosity, and selflessness—illustrated here by the experiences of Adele Diamond but echoed by many others as well. To illustrate, Rod considered moving Diamond’s grant from his NIMH Basic Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences Research portfolio to the Cognitive and Behavioral Neuroscience Research portfolio because funding was greater for the neurosciences than for developmental psychology. Most grant officers were jealously guarding the grants in their portfolio, but Rod could see the ‘‘big picture.’’ Rod’s commitment to multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary study and application is most clearly apparent in his approach the Ceci and William’s CIRC structure. His appreciation for work that crossed disciplinary boundaries was also evident in the manner in which he fostered connections among seemingly disparate areas such as neuroscience and community psychology. For example, Rod collaborated with Lonnie Sherrod in 1985 to organize a scientific meeting on cross-cultural and cross-species insights into brain maturation and cognitive development. This 1985 meeting brought together anthropologists, sociologists, neuroscientists, psychologists, evolutionary biologists, animal behaviorists, and historians. When Adele Diamond sought funds to bring together scholars in neuroscience, cognitive science, and developmental psychology who used the same experimental paradigms to study behaviors, Rod was the first to contribute funds from his division at NIMH, and others followed. This conference, ‘‘The Neural Basis of Higher Cognitive Functions,’’ which took place in 1989, played an important role in helping to launch the field of developmental cognitive neuroscience. Rod was the catalyst that made subsequent events happen, and from those events, new inroads continue to be made today.
3. Indirect effects of Rod’s commitment to those ‘‘missing’’ or not represented in mainstream research A third aspect of this volume also provides us with an additional thread of continuity in Rod’s approach to developmental research. The previously mentioned volume by Cocking and Mestre (1988) examined mathematics achievement and language of minority children, mathematics achievement in bilingual communities, and mathematics participation, attitudes, or achievement in Asian-American students, Mexican-American women, and Ute Indian children. Rod looked for those who were missing in studies of development and made sure
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they were included in the projects that he worked on. He was one of the first to use developmental science as a vehicle for addressing AIDS intervention (Calvert & Cocking, 1992). And when stereotype threat effects were made known, Rod saw the opportunity for intervention studies. He dedicated himself to work spanning the divide between basic research and application. Josh Aronson (co-author of Good, Aronson, & Inzlicht, this volume, an intervention study that reduced effects of stereotype threat) tells us that he met Rodney shortly after the release of National Science Foundation’s Children’s Research Initiative, when Aronson and others were trying to get a center funded for research on cultural influences on development and education. Rod generously made the trip to New York several times, including one trip a week or so after 9/11, when few people were willing to travel to New York. Rod described his vision for the initiative, which was to create centers dedicated to research that would benefit children through innovative, interdisciplinary research. Rod clearly wanted to do something new and important for the study of children and Aronson’s research group was honored that he was taking their goals and work seriously. As part of the process, Aronson read Rod’s writings on learning, especially the book he worked on for the National Research Council (Bransford et al., 1999). Aronson reports that being with Rod and reading his work from the National Research Council, his group was excited about having Rod as a partner and they were looking forward to a long, enjoyable, and fruitful collaboration.
4. Conclusion Rod’s death is a great loss, both personally and to the field. As so many of the chapters in this special issue demonstrate, the opportunity to collaborate with Rod has been lost forever. The editors of this journal feel this as strongly, if not more so, as the contributors to this volume. At the same time, we realize the great fortune we have had to know Rod, to talk with him, to share his vision, to hear his chuckle, and to understand that one person can make a difference.
References Bransford, J. D., Brown, A. L., & Cocking, R. R. (1999). How people learn: Brain, mind, experience, and school. Washington, DC: National Research Council, Commission on Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education, Committee on Developments in the Science of Learning. Calvert, S. L., & Cocking, R. R. (1992). Health promotion through mass media. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, 13, 143 – 149. Calvert, S. L., Cocking, R. R., & Smrcek, M. (1991). AIDS public service announcements: A paradigm for behavioral science. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, 12, 255 – 267. Calvert, S. L., Jordan, A. B., & Cocking, R. R. (Eds.) (2002). Children in the digital age: Influences of electronic media on development. Westport, CT: Praeger. Cocking, R. R. (1977). Measures of language comprehension: Relations to performance. Child Study Journal, 7, 165 – 178. Cocking, R. R. (1986). The environment in early experience research: Directions for applied developmental investigations. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, 7, 95 – 99.
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Cocking, R. R. (1999). From terra incognita to terra cognita: The science of representation. Development of mental representation: Theories and applications ( pp. vii – xii). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Cocking, R. R., & Copple, C. E. (1987). Social influences on representational awareness: Plans for representing and plans as representation. In S. L. Friedman, E. K. Scholnick, & R. R. Cocking (Eds.), Blueprints for thinking: The role of planning in cognitive development ( pp. 428 – 465). New York: Cambridge University Press. Cocking, R. R., Dana, J. M., & Dana, R. H. (1969). Six constructs to define Rorschach M: A response. Journal of Projective Techniques and Personality Assessment, 33, 322 – 323. Cocking, R. R., & McHale, S. M. (1981). A comparative study of the use of pictures and objects in assessing children’s receptive and productive language. Journal of Child Language, 8, 1 – 13. Cocking, R. R., & Mestre, J. P. (1988). Linguistic and cultural influences on learning mathematics. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Cocking, R. R., & Potts, M. (1976). Social facilitation of language acquisition: The reversible passive construction. Genetic Psychology Monographs, 94, 249 – 340. Cocking, R. R., & Renninger, K. A. (1993). Preface. In R. R. Cocking, & K. A. Renninger (Eds.), The development and meaning of psychological distance ( pp. ix – xi). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Dana, R. M., & Cocking, R. R. (1968). Cue parameters, cue probabilities, and clinical judgment. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 24, 475 – 480. Dana, R. M., & Cocking, R. R. (1969). Repression – sensitization and Maudsley Personality Inventory scores: Response sets and stress effects. British Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 8, 263 – 269. Dana, R. M., Cocking, R. R., & Dana, J. M. (1970). The effects of experience and training on accuracy and configural analysis. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 26, 28 – 32. Emmerich, W., Cocking, R. R., & Sigel, I. E. (1979). Relationships between cognitive and social functioning in preschool children. Developmental Psychology, 15, 495 – 504. Friedman, S. L., Scholnick, E. K., & Cocking, R. R. (1987). Blueprints for thinking: The role of planning in cognitive development. New York: Cambridge University Press. Ginsburg, H. P. (1988). Foreword. Linguistic and cultural influences on learning mathematics ( pp. xi – xii). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Greenfield, P., & Cocking, R. R. (1996). Advances in Applied Developmental Psychology, 11 (whole). Potts, M., Carlson, P., Cocking, R. R., & Copple, C. (1979). Structure and development in child language: The preschool years. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Sigel, I. E., & Cocking, R. R. (1977). Cognitive development from childhood to adolescence: A constructivist perspective. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Sigel, I. E., & McGillicuddy-De Lisi, A. V. (2003). Rodney R. Cocking (1943 – 2002). American Psychologist, 58, 143.
Ann V. McGillicuddy-De Lisi * Psychology Department, Lafayette College, Easton, PA 18042-1781, USA E-mail address: [email protected] Irving Sigel Educational Testing Service, Princeton, NJ 08541, USA Merry Bullock American Psychological Association, Washington, DC 20002, USA
* Corresponding author. Tel.: +1-610-330-5290; fax: +1-610-330-5349.