LearningSciences

S. MISTRETTA’S NOTES TAKEN FOR ASSIGNMENTS FOR INSTRUCTIONAL DESIGN AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY TEACHERS COLLEGE IN THE CAMBRIDGE HANDBOOK OF THE LEARNING SCIENCES
THE BOOK IS EDITED BY R. KEITH SAWYER
C H A P T E R 2

Foundations and Opportunities for an Interdisciplinary Science of Learning

IMPLICIT LEARNING AND THE BRAIN

- Refers to situations in which complex information is acquired effortlessly, without conscious effort, and ther resulting knowledge is difficult to express verbally.

- Common processes – the rapid, effortless, and untutored detection of patterns of covariation among events.

- Influences social attitudes and stereotypes regarding gender and race, visual pattern learning, motor response time tasks, syntactic language learning, and young children’s imitative learning of the tools, artifacts, behaviors, customs and rituals of their culture.

- Implicit learning has educational and even evolutionary value – it emables organisms to adapt to new environments by listening, observing, and interacting with the objects and people encountered there, even in the absence of formal pedagogy or a conscious effort to learn,

Experiences during develoopment have powerful effects on the physical development of the brain itself.

Experiments suggest that “rich environments” include those that provide numerous opportunities for social interaction, direct physical control with the environment, and a changing set of objects for play and exploration.

Critical period for learning depends on experience as much as time, and is a process rather than a strictly timed window of opportunity that is opened and closed by maturation.

Children learn a great deal outside of formal learning settings simply from watching and imitating other people.

INFORMAL LEARNING

- usually takes place outside of school

- important distinction is the contrast between informat learning and the explicitly didactic instructional practices that have emerged in Western schooling.

- can be pervasive in peer-to-peer interactions

Cognitive Consequences of Schooling and Contrasts in Learning Settings

- School represents a specialized set of educational experiences which are discontinuous from those encountered in everyday life and that it requires and promotes ways of learning and thinking which often run counter to those nurtured in practical daily activities.

- School contributes – greater facility in abstract reasoning, greater use of language.

- Informal learning features – person-oriented or particularistic – expectations of performance are based on who a person is instead of what he has accomplished. – fosters traditionalism; involves fusing emotional and intellectual domains – the content of knowledge is inseparable from the personal identity of the teacher.

FORMAL LEARNING

- characterized by the presence of universalistic values, criteria and standards of performance; language is the dominant medium of teaching and learning, rather than modeling and observation/imitation; teaching and learning occur out of context, with mathematical symbol manipulatioin a paradigm case.

IMPORTANCE OF IDENTITY

- fusion of emotion/intellectual domains and social/identity issues:
scaffolding, apprenticeship, ligitimate peripheral participation in communities of prac6tice, guided participation.

PATHWAYS TO EXPERTISE

Many children who fail in school demonstrate sophisticated competence in non-school activities. Raises questions about how to crosspollinate learning opportunities across settings.

DESIGNS FOR FORMAL LEARNING

- adaptive expertise – expert knowledge that supports continual learning, improvisation and expansion.

- expert performance – this research contributes to an understanding of the ways that knowledge, skills, attitudes, and thinking strategies combine to support effective performances in a wide variety of domains.

- experts notice features of situations and problems that escape the attention of novices (chess study)

- important findings – meerly showing novice students videos of experts doing things does not guarantee that the novices notice all the relevant features; we do not simply learn from experience, we also learn to experience.

- experts – knowledge is connected and organized around important idea of their disciplines, and includes information about the appropriate conditions for applying key concepts and procedures.

ADAPTIVE EXPERTISE –

- routine experts develop a core set of competencies that they apply throughout their lives with greater and greater efficiency,

- adaptive experts evolve their core competencies and continually expand the breadth and depth of their expertise as the need arises or as their interests demand; often requires them to function as “intelligent novices”

- involves at least two major dimensions – processes that lead to innovation or invention and those that lead to efficiency through well-practiced routines.

- third dimension suggested – metacognitive awareness of the distinctive roles and trade-offs of the innovation and efficiency of expertise and the active design and creative structuring of one’s learning environment.

TOWARD A SYNERGISTIC SCIENCE OF LEARNING

- a more robust understanding of learning can be achieved by synthesizing the three traditions, implicit learning and the brain, informal learning and designs for formal learning and beyond.

- the strands can inform one another

- we need a better theoretical understanding of the dynamics between people and resources in any learning ecology.
- the situative perspective – the importance of social aspects of learning as people engage with learnign activities, one another and their identities as learners and does of particular activities.

- important role of cultural practices for learning and the understanding that arrangements and values for learning are themselves cultural practices

MOVING BEYOND THE INDIVIDUAL

- pairs, small groups, organizational levels of analysis

THE ROLE OF AFFECT IN LEARNING

- affective and motivational resources may mediate effort, attention and a desire to engage in learning,

EXPANDING OUR CONCEPTS OF WHAT IS LEARNED

- there is more expertise than content knowledge

CONCLUSION

The ecological, situative and increasingly cultural approaches characteristic of the learning sciences can help us to understand the biological and embodied aspects of learning and development that shape adaptation.

We need a science of learning that works from “Neurons to Neighborhoods”

C H A P T E R 3

CONSTRUCTIONISM

Seymour Papert – creator Logo programming language. Cofounded the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory with Marvin Minsky.

Jean Piaget – the founder of constructivism.

Papert’s constructinism view learning as building relationships between old and new knowledge, in interactions with others, while creating artifacts of social relevance.

ConstructiVism places a primacy on the development of individual and isolated knowledge structions
ConstructioNism focuses on the connected namture of knowledge with its personal and social dimensions.

This combination of individual and social aspects in learning is at the heart of many discussions in the learning sciences.

Constructionism challenges us to reconsider our notions of learning and teaching.

Logo:

1. it included learning about your own thinking and learning mathematics and science in conceptually new ways.

2. children were writing commands to move a graphic object – called the turtle on the screen, rather than to manipulate arrays of numbers on the screen.

3. served as a first representative of formal mathematics, because they could act out commands using their own body.

4. allowed children to manipulate objects on the screen as they would manipulate them in the physical world.

5. children learn about their own thinking and learning, called reflection or metacognition.

6. computer programs can become objects to think with.

7. negative aspects of Logo – the time needed to learning programming before being able to apply it to a math problem.

KEY ASPECTS OF KNOWLEDGE CONSTRUCTION:

1. appropriation – how learners make knowledge their own and begin to identify with it. These appropriations go beyond the intellectual and include emotional values.

2. physical objects play a central role in this knowledge construction process – “objects to think with” – such as the Logo turtle.

3. Piaget – formal abstraction is seen as the ultimate goal of all knowledge construction, with concrete thinking alwasy associated with younger children. Papert – concrete thought would be jus as advanced as abstract thought.

bricoleur – Bricolage as a design approach – in the sense of building by trial and error – is often contrasted to engineering: theory-based construction.

A person who engages in bricolage is a bricoleur: someone who invents his or her own strategies for using existing materials in a creative, resourceful, and original way.

Knowledge construction is the deliverate part of learning which consists of making connections between mental entities that already exist; new mental entities seem to come into existence in more subtle ways that escape conscious control. This suggests a strategy to facilitate learning by improving the connectivity in the learning environment, by actions on cultures rather than on individuals.

MICROWORLDS

A computer based interactive learning environment where the prerequisites are built into the system and where learners can becom the active, constructing architects of their own learning.

1. prototypical constructionist learning environment
2. scientific and mathematical mircroworlds offer access to ideas and phenomena – sucha s the frictionless world – that students may not easily encounter in their regular textbooks or classroom lessons.
3. provide environments that challenge naive understanindg by providing the learner with feedback on their interactions and mainpuations.
4. interactions with the microworld allow the learner to develop personal knowledge that can provide the foundation for more formalized interacitons.
5. microworlds create a type of learning environment in which talking about mathematics or science is part of the classroom peer culture.
6. Logo is a place

CONSTRUCTION KITS

LEGO building blocks and the programming language Logo were combined to create computationally enhanced construction kits that allow children to explore engineering and architectural design. Hands on and team experience.

SOFTWARE DESIGN FOR LEARNING – A CONSTRUCTIONIST LEARNING ENVIRONMENT

1. situated the daily programming activities in the classroom rather than in a distant computer laboratory visited only once a week

2. it integrated the learning of programming with other subject matter such as the learning of fractions, rather than keeping programming isolated from the rest of curriculum.

3. students were asked to create a meaningful artifact, suca as an instructional piece of software to teach younger students in their school.

4. apprenticeship component – how connections across grade levels can help to create a learning culture.

5. experience and not age was a decisive factor in how student designers handled programming and collaborative interactions.

6. students working with experienced team members were provided with more flexible and collaborative work arrangements.

C H A P T E R 4

COGNITIVE APPRENTICESHIP

Throughout most of history, teaching and learning have been based on apprenticeship.

We learn our first language from our families, employees learn critical job skills in the first mongth of a new job, and scientists learn how to conduct workl-class research by working side by side with senior scientists as part of their doctoral training.

But, for most other kinds of knowledge, schooling has replaced apprenticeship.

CENTRAL FEATURES OF TRADITIONAL APPRENTICESHIP:

1. focuses closely on the specific methods for carrying out tasks in a domain.
2. skills are instrumental to the accomplishment of meaningful real-world tasks
3. learning is imbedded in a social and functional context
4. apprentices learn domain specific methods through a combination of observation, coaching and practice.
5. the apprentice repeatedly ovserves the master and his or her assistants executing or modeling the target process , which usually involves a number of different, but interrelated subskills.
6. the apprentice then attempts to execute the process with guidance and help from the master.

A key aspect of coaching is guided participation.

The concept of apprenticeship has tobe updated to make it relevant to modern subjects like reading, writing and mathematics – cognitive apprenticeship.

Cognitive Apprenticeship :

1. emphasizes that knowledge must be used in solving real-world problems.
2. conceptual knowledge and factual knowledge are learned by being used in a variety of contexts, encouraging both a deeper understanding of the meaning of the concepts and facts themselves – rich web of memorable associations.
3. the focus is on cognitive skills and processes rather than on physical ones.
4. old apprenticeships – the coach could see physical results, cognitive apprenticeships – teacher cannot see cognitive processes.
5. students cannot see problem solving processes of instructors.
6. the learning environment must be changed to make these internal though processes externally visible.
7. bring these processes out in the open.

TWO MAJOR DIFFERENCES BETWEEN COGNITIVE APPRENTICESHIP AND TRADITIONAL APPRENTICESHIP:

1. because traditional apprenticeship is set in the workplace, the problems and tasks thar are given to learners arise not from pedagogical concerns, but from the demands of the workplace.
2. cognitive apprenticeship – tasks and problems are chosen to illustrate the poser of certain techniques and methods to give students practice in applying these methods and diverse settings.

FOUR DIMENSIONS OF COGNITIVE APPRENTICESHIP:

1. content – domain knowledge – includes the concepts, facts and procedures explicitly identified with a particular subject matter, generally found in textbooks, class lectures and demonstrations. Examples in reading are vocabulary, syntax and phonics. Domain knowledge is necessary but not sufficient for expert performance. Insufficient clues for many students about how to solve problems and accomplish tasks in a domain.

Tacit knowledge – supports people’s ability to make use of these concepts, facts and procedures to solve real-world problems.

Strategic knowldege – composed of three parts, heuristic strategies, control strategies or metacognitive strategies and learning strategies:

Heuristic strategies – the tricks of the trade – tacitly acquired by experts through the practice of solving problems. In math, a heuristic for solving problems is to try to find a solution for simple cases and see if the solution generalizes.

Control strategies or metacognitive strategies – control the process of carrying out a task. Have monitoring, diagnostic and remedial strategies.

Learning strategies – strategies for learning domain knowledge, heuristic strategies and control strategies. e.g. if students want to write better, they need to learn to analyze others’ texts for strengths and weaknesses.

2. method – teaching methods that emphasize apprenticeship give students the opportunity to observe, engage in and invent or discover expert strategies on context.
Core methods of traditional apprenticeship – modeling, coaching and scaffolding.
Articulation and reflection are methods designed to help students to focus their observations of expert problems solving to gain access to their own problem solving strategies.
Exploration is the method aimed at encouraging autonomy in carrying out expert problem solving processes or formulation the problems to be solved.

- modeling – expert performing a task and students observing
- coaching – observing students whild they carry out a task and offering hints, challenges, scaffolding, feedback, modeling, reminders and new tasks aimed a bringing their performance closer to expert performance.
- scaffolding – the supports the teacher provides to help the student carry out the task.
- articulation – any method of getting students to explicitly state their knowledge, reasoning, or problem solving prcesses in a domain.
- reflection – enabling students to compare their own problem solving processes with those of an expert.
- exploration – guiding students to a mode of problem solving on their own.

3. – sequencing – increasing complexity – more of the skills and concepts necessary for expert performance are required. – increasing diversity – construction of a sequence of tasks in which a wider variety of strategies are required. – global before local skills – allow students to build a conceptual map bebore attending to the details of the terrain

4 – sociology – traditional apprenticeship – not segregated from the actual environment to apply new skills. Real world problems. – situated learning – students carry out tasks and solve problems in an environment that reflect the nature of such tasks in the world. Dewey – had students build a clubhouse involving arithmetic and planning skills. – community of practice – creation of a learning environment in which the participants actively communicate about and engage in the skills involved in expertise. Community does create sense of ownership. – intrinsic motivation – the need to create a learning environment related to a goal that interests them. – explointing cooperation – having students work together in a way that fosters cooperative problem solving.

THEMES IN RESEARCH:

1. Situated learning:

goal -based scenarios – learners given real-world tasks and the scaffolding they need to carry out such tasks. The Jasper series developed by the Cognition and Technology Group at Venderbuild to teach middle school mathematics.

2. Communities of Practice
3. Communities of Learners -four characteristics – a. diversity of expertise among its members who are valued for their contributions and given support b. a shared objective of continually advancing the collective knowledge and skills c. an emphasis on learning how to learn d. mechanism for sharing what is learned.
4. Scaffolding – computer based, interactive learning environments can be designed to offer support to learners.
5. Articulation
6. Reflection – encourages learners to look back on their performance in a situation and comare their performance to others.

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