When the Locus of Control Becomes the Control of Locus

A rich tradition of research has looked at the dynamics of motivation in academic settings from both anthropological and psychological perspectives. Why do some learners exert sustained effort and achieve high levels of performance while others exert minimum effort, none at all, or flat out resist? These studies often turn on a distinction between factors intrinsic and extrinsic and their interactions.

As the globe pulsed with human conflict so dangerously throughout the 20th century, U.S. federal education policy makers finally, mid-century or thereabouts, opened their eyes and actually saw commissioned blue-ribbon jaw-dropping evidence of black and white disparities in academic outcomes in the Coleman Report resulting from an oppressive, recently desegregated, place-bound, meritocratic, meandering, factory-style public school system. Earlier, the launch of Sputnik had awakened the country to a need for better science education. The stage was set for a historic foray into public school reform.

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Beginning in the 1970s, seminal research was published (Edward Deci and others) that explored the concept of intrinsic motivation, a drive to take action for the reward of an experience of internal satisfaction. Extrinsic motivation, a drive fueling whatever action is tied to an external reward, seeks approval, certification, or objects of value. Remove the tie to the outside reward and the motivation dissolves.

Intrinsic motivation, studies discovered, is powerful in that failure is not seen as permanent, persistence in the face of challenge only increases the reward, exerting effort is required to find satisfaction. Extrinsic rewards are fleeting and can corrupt intrinsic satisfaction. Take the reward away, the action subsides. Above all, these studies showed that motives are learned, not a stable feature of personality. We are not born with academic motivation.

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In its original conception in the 1950s, locus of control referred to a personality feature, similar to a feature like introversion or extroversion in the Myers-Briggs personality sorter. Each of us contains within us a stable, durable locus of control, either intrinsic or extrinsic. If a person’s locus (location) of control is external, that person believes they are at the mercy of their environment. If the locus is internal, they believe they are in control and can take action in ways to influence their environment.¹ Their lives in the world unfold with a sense of control, but where that control resides is a personality feature.

Note that though both intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation notions and intrinsic vs extrinsic locus of control notions are grounded in social psychology, they share a concern with the relationship between the individual and their environment. I want to rearrange the words locus of control to import this notion more fully into a Vygotskian framework where mind is transferred from society to individuals through mediation by way of psychological tools and signs. I want to mint the phrase control of locus.

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Instead of locus of control as an unconscious, hardwired belief about the human condition that influences all decisions to act, I want to discuss control of locus as malleable and contextual, an on-off switch or a volume control, governed by reflective analysis to lead to reasoned awareness of how much inner control over outcomes one might have under particular circumstances.

Here is the meaningful difference between locus of control vs control of locus. On one hand, first generation locus of control is thought to be a fact of life. You are either internally or externally controlled—forever. Your personality is delivered to you in the alphabetic soup of the genome.

On the other hand, second generation control of locus is thought to be malleable, not fixed, not a stable element of personality. It is learned through interactions with more expert others and can be developed throughout life. Depending on your level of expertise, available resources, factors as they stand in the circumstances, etc., you can control your locus to maximize the likelihood of a more optimum outcome, to do what you can do that may be enough to change the outcome.

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In the new phrase, control of locus, if I face a challenge, I realize that I control my perception of locus of control. The locus of control in any moment is for me to determine consciously, not for my unconscious disposition. A rational approach would be to size up the challenge, its level of difficulty in light of my competence, and my access to resources to inform my plan to resolve the challenge by applying myself and by seeking help as appropriate. Of course, there will be times when the environment does indeed hold all the cards—but I will look for a wild card.

Here, I’m assuming that everyone among us reading this post has control of locus, which means you decide for yourself how you focus on it and the outcome you seek. Furthermore, I’m assuming that you are in control of your decision to read (to focus)—or not. Note that these assumptions rarely hold for class reading assignments. How would your reading change if you knew you would be tested on this content? How would students’ reading change if they had greater control of locus? How can we teach them control of locus?

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At increasingly higher levels of educational institutional abstraction—learner, teacher, class, school, district, state, country—I envision concentric circles of a distributed control of locus where participants occupying roles with responsibilities in a cultural historical activity setting are monitoring and taking actions to optimize shared local outcomes using shared objects, distributed resources and expertise, and mediating signs and tools. Society depends on a centralized distribution of control of locus so that individuals located in far flung settings can take action on behalf of the collective. Otherwise, we collectively throw our arms up in the air and give in. Why take action if the wild always wins?

Edwin Hutchins published Cognition in the Wild (1996), a study of distributed cognition among humans working collectively to bring an aircraft carrier into a harbor, a complex, perilous maneuver executed flawlessly day in and day out. Hutchins documented how skills, knowledge and expertise, tools, tasks, and responsibilities necessary to are mastered, arranged, synchronized, and executed at the nexus of culture and cognition where joint control of and responsibility for the loci of countless expert foci leave little margin of error.²

What happens when teachers believe they have no control of locus in their classrooms? On the aircraft carrier, the sailor reading an alidade to establish one fixed point on a map has no control of locus. Their focus must be on getting an accurate reading from the instrument. That is to say, what happens when teachers believe that they must concede control of locus to a script or a protocol? When their actions—the actions that make sense to them—can have no bearing on outcomes? When teachers assume they have no choice but to focus where they are externally directed? What works on an aircraft carrier doesn’t easily transfer to a classroom. Still, clarity in terms of control of locus is essential to optimize the outcome.

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In 1962, a summary of research into strategies to improve instruction for gifted students, including those attending rural schools, was published in Illinois³. The Soviet Union in 1957 sent a small satellite with four external radio antennas to broadcast radio pulses back to Earth, a scientific achievement with national security implications. The U.S. federal government responded with a call for public education to identify every gifted candidate for a fast track curriculum to produce U.S. Space racers. Sputnik was a wake-up call for public schools.

My high school was a willing site for curriculum reform during the1960s, including accommodations for gifted students. As a rural white child moving from a junior high of 150 students to a consolidated high school with a predominately middle-class white student body of 2,000 students gathered from surrounding farming communities, I benefited from structural changes. Recent critical research has aimed to “recover spaces and ways of thinking” about giftedness to bring access to resources to all children, black and white and otherwise marginalized and othered. One important recommendation for change is universal screening for gifted education (screen all students) vs. referral by an adult. Witness (see footnote 3):

“Three specific strategies for more inclusive identification of gifted students that have been documented as potentially effective are universal screening (or screening of all students, not just those referred by parents or teachers), use of data collected about all students from teacher rating scales, and application of local norms” (p.5)⁴

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In the 1962 Illinois report, the problem of identification was acknowledged and discussed though hardly solved. IQ testing continued to hold importance, but individual assessment using an anthropological lens was on the rise. The report makes the following point:

The debunked and frankly offensive characterization of ‘talent’ in primitive societies as “quite simple” invoking the hunt and warring tribes while in the seats of Western Civilization ‘nations’ “produce men [sic] [with] brilliant insights and ideas” for the ages must be noted, but this excerpt highlights an expanding role for sociocultural theory and research and predicts a future for cultural and historical activity theory (CHAT).

Recommendations for reform in Illinois were made with full awareness that Midwest high schools existed in two worlds, one of tiny towns and corn fields where graduating classes of 100 students were considered large, perhaps “primitive,” and one of large cities and suburbs, population centers with 400+ graduates each year, perhaps more “civilized.” Because there were two worlds, control of the locus had to split the focus to optimize the desired outcome, i.e., increasing numbers of talented scientists.

Given the pressure of rising global security threats as well as the “knowledge explosion” of the time, underdeveloped ‘talent’ could mean the weakening of the country. Implementation of recommendations would be challenging for small schools and for large, but the core recommendation would remain, commanding fidelity, the same regardless of culture, place, or geography. Witness:

The launch of Sputnik intimidated American educators to the point of despair visible between the lines of this excerpt. Ability grouping had been the holy grail of the IQ movement since the early 1900s, a tool to guide the allocation of scarce educational resources in utilitarian ways. But the Cold War put an edge on the ambition to control the locus of local administrations as per the factory model in play.

What is the “extra something?” That “something extra” was elusive, inviting experimental changes in the temperature of the kilns, the ingredients in the sauce, curricular spices added to a recipe. Enrichment could be “added on” to the the “regular group” with no change to the framework. Why not speed up the content rather than the individuals (I admit confusion here)? Evelyn Woods waiting in the wings? As a last resort, the devil be damned, change the content.

Above all, schools should group students by ability to help teachers modify their purposes or control their locus (regular vs enrichment), their expectations for learners (low, medium, high), and the pacing of delivery. Public schools became obligated to find the diamonds in the rough, to control collectively the locus on giftedness, being especially careful not to leave behind a promising candidate. It would not be enough to find just the gifted ones; schools would need to identify the ability level of all students to schedule curriculum and instruction.

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The authentic assessment movement of the 1980s and 1990s, resulting from the explosion of constructivist theory and a broadening of disciplines doing research on education, ran into a brick wall. Authentic assessment offered promises of insights into place-based planning to help control the locus of local curriculum makers, instructional agents, and professional development, often at the expense of ‘individual scores.’ California’s statewide effort to use matrix sampling wherein learners experience tasks of a range of types, level of difficulty, was legislatively eliminated in 1994, largely because parents wanted individual scores and felt as the following parent felt:

Stretching the typical parent’s control of locus to include in its focus the informational needs of professional teachers and enlightened administrators, subjective as some of those needs might be, wasn’t in the external cards. Now we have Common Core to control the locus.

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My family left our home in the ravine and the aging school buildings in a nearby town early in my eighth grade year. When I enrolled in the city school, I was evaluated for placement—twice—by a psychologist. The first time I was given several paper and pencil tests (I now believe they were modified versions of IQ style items) and then interviewed. I remember feeling awkward in my overalls and t-shirt, standard school clothes in the ravine, in a setting where adult males wore a suit and tie. I did well enough on the multiple choice tests, but I reverted to my shy, country boy behavior during the interview, a behavior loop in my memory that I’ve learned to moderate over time. Initially, uncertainty clouded the picture. I waited to hear how I had done. They decided to place me on a slow track to see how I would do. They could change the placement if appropriate.

I was surprised at the outrage my mother expressed when she read the letter informing her of the decision. As far as she knew, her boy was pretty smart and always had done well in school. She had put six boys through school before I me; some of them hated school and one dropped out. Although I was quiet and shy, introverted, with her I babbled incessantly, constantly under foot. She bought me “All About” books in third grade. She bought a set of encyclopedias for me in fourth grade. I begged her for a typewriter when I was in fifth grade.

She called the school and asked to speak with the principal. I had no idea she felt so strongly about what was being planned for me in school. In the end, my placement was switched. I was on the accelerated track.

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My history teacher in eighth grade in 1967 wore a suit and tie, standard practice among male teachers of the day in the city. He lectured impressively, forcefully, a man marinated in gravitas who commanded our respect. He was deadly serious, careful with his words, his posture formal at his lectern, his gestures precise, his presence comforting to me.

He assigned a library paper, typed if possible, with a title page, footnotes, and a bibliography. I decided to write about the American Revolution. He spent considerable time explaining documentation and bibliographic format. I don’t remember discussing possible topics, except that the paper should be about American history. I had free control of locus.

My mother ordered a typewriter from a Sears catalog for me a few years earlier, which came with a Websters dictionary, my first dictionary, and a vinyl LP with an album cover sketch of a happy young woman typing. I taught myself to type—not well, but with white-out and an intense locus of focus, I could produce readable print.

Mr. Ruff was surprised when I handed him my paper, a hefty 40 pages with title page and bibliography, much longer than any other paper turned in that day. I’d been in the city library several evenings and a whole Saturday reading and taking notes. No one ever told me so many books had been written about colonial times. So many books on one big thing opened up a world of possibilities. Hours passed in the stacks and still I read and made notes. I was lost in thought and in time.

When it came time to write, I organized my notes from beginning to end, pretty much as I had taken them, a prehistoric I-Search paper where you simply say what you learned. I’m sure I did little if any analysis or synthesis, but it had footnotes, painful to format with a typewriter. The paper mirrored my movement from one book to another; it was an information dump, not a paper.

I’d been typing up my short stories—the habit of making up stories began around fourth grade, why I just had to have a typewriter. So I knew to shape what I wanted to say firmly in my head before I typed a sentence—short-term control of locus. The treachery of a slip up increased as the page filled.

I watched the manuscript slowly thicken. I titled my paper, appropriately, “The American Revolution.”

I got a C+ on the paper, and Mr. Ruff must have known I was disappointed because he talked with me about how important my hard work was. But the paper had no focus, he said, no point. Furthermore, there was nothing wrong with a C+. Almost everyone in class got a C, a few earned a D. Grades didn’t mean much to me. I’d always received good grades and satisfactory deportment marks. Maybe this was what being accelerated meant? Mr. Ruff talked with me at some length about grades and what their importance would be later when I apply for college.

The only people I knew who had been to college were my teachers. I wasn’t sure what they did in college. I didn’t expect to go there, but I did want to write. I felt alive and full of energy when I worked on writing, like when I practiced music. Focus, Mr. Ruff had said. Focus on a clear thing. My paper had no point, no focus.

“Think of it like taking a photograph,” Mr. Ruff said.

Mr. Ruff may have taught me the most important lesson of my academic career. When I wrote my dissertation and had to give the school a pseudonym, I named the site of my study ‘Charles Ruff Middle School.’

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During a six-week block in an 18 week semester in high school in the late 1960s, as part of an innovative effort to offer modern technical training, I elected to take what we might call a mini-course in photography and had access to a camera. As I recall there was a nominal lab fee to defray costs for film, its development, and printing, which was waived for low-income students such as myself. I had access to other learning elective opportunities over time as well.

One assignment was to select an ignored object to photograph, something in view but never noticed. Then I was to take three shots—a close up, a shot a few feet away, and a shot from far away in which the object is still visible.

I took three photographs of a fire hydrant, adjusting the point of view accordingly, close up, back a bit, at a distance. As I taped the 3x5 photos onto notebook paper to submit to my teacher, the images took me back to my eighth grade history teacher.

Close up, the fire hydrant was dramatic, a metal sculpture of heft and bulk, the afternoon sun shining on it, almost a monument, a thing to be reckoned with. From ten feet away, the hydrant shared the stage with its shadow, slabs of concrete, a patch of lawn. It looked like a fire hydrant near a curb. From across the street, it melted into the background.

I don’t remember exactly what I said, but I did notice how the close up photo seemed to be about a fire hydrant almost as a sculpture. It opened my eyes to a way of looking at objects that lifted them up from their surroundings. I still remember it and would love to see it.

1. https://www.masterclass.com/articles/locus-of-control

2. https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262581462/cognition-in-the-wild/

3. Citation: Hemmler, V. L., Azano, A. P., Dmitrieva, S., & Callahan, C. M. (2022). Representation of Black students in rural gifted education: Taking steps toward equity. Journal of Research in Rural Education, 38(2). https://doi.org/10.26209/

4. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED026753.pdf