Bielefeldt’s Inverse Complexity Function
I am a complexiphile. (“Complexivist” is more accurate, but that term has already been appropriated for other use.) I believe almost everything is more complicated than it appears, and part of my job as an evaluator is to discover and reveal as much of that complexity as is necessary in order for people to make decisions. This is not a popular position today. It seems that every public speech on a major problem begins with the caveat that there are no silver bullets, after which the speaker draws and blazes away, shooting from the hip.
Nor is this anything new. I recall arguments that certain curricula were “teacher-proof” because they specified all pedagogical behaviors. I went to grad school at the University of Oregon, an institution steeped in the tradition of Direct Instruction. I was impressed at how dependent DI was on my teacher colleagues’ commitment to training and practice with the materials. DI seemed no more “teacher proof” than an orchestral score is musician proof because the notes are written down.
Later, as an evaluator, that impression was borne out in classroom observations. Superficial use of an instructional script sooner or later left learning stuck in a loop of repeated prompts that students did not understand. Breaking the cycle depended on a teacher’s ability to invoke alternative examples or exercises. I can make the same argument in reverse: I observe the success of an open-ended, hands-on, student-centered, inquiry-based project to depend on the teacher’s ability to efficiently teach any preskills that students lack.
Which brings me to Bielefeldt’s Inverse Complexity Function: The simpler and more rigid a proposed solution to a problem, the more complex and flexible the required implementation to achieve the desired outcomes. Researchable questions around the BIC Function include whether the net level of effort to implement a simple, draconian solution differs from what is required to anticipate complexity in the first place. And of course, whether one or the other approach works better. There may be opportunities to collect some data on these issues over the next few years, at least in the United States. If we come up with some answers, I assume they will be complex. That’s simply the way it is.
