Conversation theory is a theory of learning, knowledge and interaction developed by Gordon Pask from his work on adaptive teaching machines in the 1950s and 1960s, set out in Conversation, Cognition and Learning (1975) and Conversation Theory (1976).
Main ideas
For Pask, a conversation is any interaction between participants (people, or people and machines, or different perspectives within one person) through which concepts are shared. A participant shows they understand a topic when they can explain it back (a “teachback”) and when they can reconstruct it from related topics. Understanding is therefore something produced and demonstrated between participants, not something that sits in one head.
Concepts are networks of relations to other concepts, which Pask represented in entailment meshes: maps of how topics derive from one another. Agreement in a conversation means two participants can each derive a concept in ways the other accepts, even if their routes differ.
Pask later generalised the theory as interaction of actors theory, in which concepts themselves behave as active, self-reproducing processes.
Uses
Conversation theory informed educational software, including Pask’s CASTE and THOUGHTSTICKER systems, and theories of learning styles (his distinction between “serialist” and “holist” learners). Through Paul Pangaro, Hugh Dubberly and Ranulph Glanville it has shaped interaction design, where it offers a demanding test for interfaces, including chatbots: can the system and the user each confirm what the other has understood?
Further reading
- Gordon Pask, Conversation Theory: Applications in Education and Epistemology (1976)
- Bernard Scott, “Gordon Pask’s Conversation Theory: A Domain Independent Constructivist Model of Human Knowing”, Foundations of Science (2001)
Mentioned in
- Person Gordon Pask