Critical Questions
We understand that asking the right questions is
at least as important (arguably more so) than finding the right answers. What
problems are we trying to solve, and how should we go about framing a question
that is solvable? The way the questions are asked will guide the answers that we
accept and will tell us much about the assumptions that we make about higher
education. Many people agree that higher education needs to be fixed, but we
can’t agree on what it is that is broken.
In preparing for the retreat, invited
participants were asked to think about the following questions. One of our
stellar graduate students (Art Zavala and Kathy Hayes) phoned each participant
and tape-recorded their answers.
- What are the findings or theories from your area
of expertise that we could apply to higher education? (Feel free to define
your area of expertise any way you want. Some examples of what we are thinking
about include research on the transfer of training, understanding how people
work in groups, encouraging creative or analytic thinking, cultural or
motivational factors, learning with multimedia, and maintenance of attention.)
- What are the (most important) unsolved problems?
What should be included in an agenda for research?
- What prototypes can you point us toward where
principles from the science of learning are already being applied (e.g.,
activities, courses, fields of study, degree programs, or entire systems)?
- What are the major problems with or barriers to
redesigning higher education? Do you have any ideas for overcoming them?
- What additional questions should we be asking?
- What do we need to do so that one outcome of the
retreat is to effect change (in ways that we want)?
Here are summaries of the responses that they
provided and they questions they thought we should be asking. Additional
responses will be posted to this site as they become available.
Ralph Wolff
Area of Expertise
- Leading assessment of student learning for all WASC accrediting schools
- Action Research or educational effectiveness
- Executive director of an accreditation association
What are the (most important) unsolved problems? What should be
included in an agenda for research?
We do not
have a common definition of learning. There are implicit definitions of learning. Our definition of learning grows out of the industrial
model and the Newtonian physics model, in which learning is
about mastery of facts. I
have read research and I have found, consistent with what my
observations are, that we confuse learning with mastery of
fact. Faculty are
also divided about what learning is and about whether learning
can be measured or evaluated effectively. So it is necessary that we continue and enrich the
conversation about learning and that our discussions are
grounded on research. Students
should also not be left out of this. We need to have faculty and students in learning
centered conversations and discuss what is learning and what
are the methods by which we acquire learning
The
change in the demography of American higher education has
forced us to really reassess what are the purposes and what
are the indicators of effectiveness in our institutions. Higher education is no longer a privilege; it is perceived to
be an absolute economic necessity by policy makers for
continued economic growth and by students and parents to be
the only ticket to success in the American culture. As a consequence the role of higher education has taken
a huge significance and it has taken a vital role to the
future success of the American dream. It has become an economic one, but nonetheless we now
have a diversification of the educational system (e.g.,
typical students work 20 hours a week, the average age of the
students in the CSU system is 28 instead of 21, typical
student can be married with children). So we need new indicators of success and effectiveness. The only ones we are relying upon now are through put
statistics—how many graduate in six years. But we do not have good qualitative measures. Most people would agree that the SAT and ACT are only
good predictors of the first year of success and are really
not intelligence tests, although they are viewed that way. So we need indicators of academic quality because we
can no longer rely on the SAT and entry level statistics
(GPA). There is
an increasing need to know whether graduates will be able to
do or know
The second
point is that we are also at a critical time with the
information revolution and the explosion of what there is to
know and thus there is a desperate need to build connections
to redefine what learning is. The model that most faculty were raised in, myself
included, is that there are a set of facts that need to be
mastered and each course is separate from one another. What students need is a different model of learning and
knowing. A much
different model that is generative, contextual, that is
interrelated, and that truly understands the changing
character of knowing. The
foundations of every major discipline are rapidly changing,
although there are some basics that are constant. Students need to be prepared for this change and this
notion of fact mastery has got to give way. So we really need to rethink what learning and knowing
is and whether curricula are actually structured for student
learning.
We
are also trained to teach and to tell, but not to induce
learning. Faculty
were trained to profess, but not to think about learning. Grant Wiggins tells this story that Michael Jordan
didn’t become a great basketball player because he scored an
A on it. Wiggins terms this feedback-based learning. True learning or mastery occurs through constant
practices. A
pianist does not become a concert pianist or a person does not
get a black belt by reading about it, it is practiced and
there is ton of feedback that is provided to them. We have a post-hoc assessment model of evaluating
learning and teaching, but not a feedback and
confidence-building model.
What are the major problems with or barriers to redesigning higher
education? Do you have any ideas for overcoming them?
On major
barrier is that there is not agreement that higher education
needs to be redesigned. A
lot of people you have in higher education are quite satisfied
with it. We are
the victims of our own success. We believe that we are the best system of higher
education in the world. We
are the richest, but I’m not sure we are the best anymore. I have been in other countries and met with enough
other people to actually know that they don’t hold that
view. We have the richest system, which means that for
graduate study the Chinese and others want to send people here
because of our research facilities. But at the undergraduate level that’s questionable.
Second, I
think there is a lack of a willingness to experiment,
particularly in the western part of the United States. There is an established paradigm that the only knowing
is scientifically validated knowing. The only true work is that which is scientifically verifiable
and within that only research universities can produce good
science and that only quality comes from that or the elite
institutions. There is just such a higherarchy and little experimentation.
What prototypes can you point us toward where principles from the
science of learning are already being applied (e.g.,
activities, courses, fields of study, degree programs, or
entire systems)?
There is a
tremendous amount of work in teaching writing and it reflects
feedback-based learning. In music and in art it is more of a feedback-based
system, in which the criteria are as openly discussed as the
product. But traditionally universities as a whole do not adopt a
feedback-based learning system in terms of curriculum design
and evaluation. Sure
there are prototypes, there is Evergreen State and Fairhaven
College of Western Washington, so there are a lot of those who
take education in a more holistic way. I just saw that Washington state is trying to develop a
whole community college based on integrative learning.
What additional questions
should we be asking and what do we need to do so that one
outcome of the retreat is to effect change (in ways that we
want)?
Why would
we even care about learning? Do we care? And if we do, then are we satisfied that what we are doing is
sufficient. If
the answer is we don’t care or that it is not our job to
care and that the faculty are doing a good job and things are
working well, then I don’t think what we produce at this
meeting will create change. So the real question is are we satisfied with the level
of learning? I
would have to say that I do not feel satisfied with the level
of learning or engagement, nor do I feel that faculty
consistently employ methodology in their relationships with
one another, let alone with the students, that are geared to
stimulate the kinds of student learning and mastery that we
are trying to accomplish in large enough numbers. We do produce a lot of wonderful graduates, but there
are a lot of people who leave college feeling burnt out and
devastated. The
second issue is do we have a common basis to even talk about
what even learning is. Thirdly,
is there a protocol by which we can discuss and evaluate
whether learning is effective? My biggest fear is that the only protocol we have is
the post-hoc model called the test. Another issue is how do we make learning as interesting
as cancer research. I
think it is. How
do we enlist faculty to make learning as energizing,
interesting, and researchable rather then the byproduct of
professing?
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Carol Tomlinson-Keasey
Some of the Challenges Facing Higher Education
- Increased
need for higher education.
More people are attending college than in the past. In most of the 20th century people could
survive without a college education, but as we enter a new
century there is an increased need for people to attend
college.
- Changing Demographics. The increase in population combined with the first
point that more people will need to attend college only
exacerbates the problem.
- Increasing Costs. In California we have been lucky that our public
institutions have not faced the same increases as other
institutions across the nation. Still approximately 15% of a family’s income goes
towards education for a child that is of college age,
whereas just a few years ago it was only 9%.
- Lifelong
Learners. We need to be educating people much longer and
throughout their lives.
When
these factors are added together it becomes apparent that
higher education is not going to meet these challenges using
its current model. This
is where the use of technology and looking at different ways
to approach the problem become incredibly relevant.
What
are the (most important) unsolved problems? What should be
included in an agenda for research?
- On an academic scale our institutions are divided into
departments and colleges that do not easily morph into new
departments or colleges to reflect the way that the fields
are growing. All
of the funding and resources go to the departments and
colleges not to the new interdisciplinary areas that
people are excited about.
- We need to know more about the way that students learn and
especially how they learn via the new technology.
What prototypes can you point us toward where principles from the
science of learning are already being applied (e.g.,
activities, courses, fields of study, degree programs, or
entire systems)?
- Rensalears' model for studio courses.
- Also,interested in looking at open university options.
What are the major problems with or barriers to redesigning higher
education?
- We don’t change quickly.
- Our institutions are designed to support a model that is time
and place bound.
Do you have any ideas for overcoming them?
- I think it was Sir John Daniel that said, “Technology is
the answer. What
is the question?”
- There
are many ways that technology will be helpful and that it
can be used to help us overcome some of the barriers that
we are not able to overcome as institutions.
- This
is not to oversimplify the problems and to say that
technology will be able to solve all of the problems, but
it will definitely be a solid tool with which to begin.
What additional questions should we be asking?
- There
are many levels on which to address each of the questions
that have been asked.
- Each
question can be answered globally, for the U.S., for
California, or for individual campuses.
What
do we need to do so that one outcome of the retreat is to
effect change (in ways that we want)?
- Outline
the problem so that people are drawn away from their
day-to-day character and begin to see that what they do
really does impact education over the next 5 to 10 years.
- Show people reasonable solutions.
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Sharon Riedel
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Anne Petersen
What are the findings or theories from your area of expertise that we
could apply to higher education?
I have done
research on cognitive functioning especially gender
differences in spatial ability. I have a couple of books
and probably a couple dozen research articles on the topic.
I've especially been interested in how biological and
social factors influence cognitive functioning over the first 25
years of life. This relates to higher education in
understanding different learning styles of men and women (among
other groups) in higher education. For example, there is
evidence that experiences such as through sports affect
cognitive performance and probably brain development.
From a totally different part of my professional experience
that in university administration, I've learned a
lot about what affects student learning. While at Penn
State University, I was a member of a group examining
undergraduate education what practices enhance learning
and what dampen it. For example, research demonstrates the
minimal effectiveness (in terms of retention of information) of
traditional lectures whereas more interactional teaching
approaches have better learning outcomes. Another
memorable finding in this review of the learning research was
that young women who drop out of science and technology majors
do not do so because they are doing poorly in classes; rather,
they drop out because they find the classes boring (repetitious,
requiring memorization and rote learning).
While at the National Science Foundation, we worked especially
on efforts to emphasize hands on learning of science and
technology at all educational levels. This approach
has been effective at engaging young people in the science and
math and motivating them to continue their studies in this area.
Higher Ed was the most difficult level at which to
implement change.
Currently, I chair a Board at the National Academy of Sciences
on Behavioral, Cognitive, and Sensory Sciences. One of our
committees examined the research on The Aging Mind (also the
title of the resulting volume). Among the fascinating
conclusions of this inquiry (whose focus was to propose a
research agenda for the National Institute of Aging in the area
of cognition) was the effectiveness of a compensatory strategy
to maintain performance competence. For example, people
could continue to perform cognitive tasks by using various ways
to enhance memory, or continuing physical performance by
reducing the number of things being done at once. Compensatory
strategies would seem useful to consider at various ages to deal
with weaknesses in skills. Similarly, a group examining
learning at the other end of life concluded that activity based
learning was much more likely to be retained.
Another inference arising from many professional experiences is
the high salience of interdisciplinary learning for application
in the real world. Higher education has yet to implement
interdisciplinary learning beyond various exploratory efforts;
most are not integrated into usual practice despite their
appeal to students and relevance for most kinds of work.
What are the (most important) unsolved problems? What should be
included in an agenda for research?
-
Stereotyping of learners and its effects on
performance over the short and long terms
We know (from the research of Steele and others) that
stereotyping exists, and that it has powerful effects in the
near term. We don't know how pervasive these practices are, and
we don't know the long term effects.
Effective ways of changing teaching practice to
increase learning of students
We know about practices that increase learning. Achieving
effective implementation of these is less well known.
What
prototypes can you point us toward where principles from the
science of learning are already being applied (e.g., activities,
courses, fields of study, degree programs, or entire systems)?
Many prototypes exist of most any important practice. Challenge is to get
these used more systematically.
What are
the major problems with or barriers to redesigning higher
education?
Entropy.
I suspect that change will require both top down and bottom up
approaches. It will require great patience and tremendous
persistence. Everyone needs to get on board with desired
change and persist until it is fully integrated into practice.
It may take a generation.
What additional questions should we be asking?
I would be interested in knowing what faculty feel about the need
to change. I know that most administrators have been there
for about a decade know. Initially many felt that the
challenge was a hopeless one. More recently, things appear
to be moving some.
What do
we need to do so that one outcome of the retreat is to effect
change (in ways that we want)?
Both university
leadership AND faculty need to want change and be supportive of
the use of more effective approaches.
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Kaiping Peng
Area of Expertise
- Cultural Psychologist.
- Culture and Cognition
- Study
how culture-specific etiologies and theories and
representations affect people’s thinking, reasoning, decision making, and
emotion
What are the findings or
theories from your area of expertise that we could apply to
higher education?
Culture matters. There are cultural-specific etiologies and theories
that affect people’s behavior, including the behaviors of
learning something (as in an education setting). These issues have not been fully studied in the field of
psychology. Sometimes
they have been overlooked, not just internationally, but also
in the US. We all
know that many of the subjects in our studies, for many years,
have traditionally been white male sophomores. We have not studied other ethnic groups to same extent,
and we have not explored fully the impact of socioeconomic,
racial, and other ethnic experiences and the ways in which
these experiences may affect learning and education.
A lot of what we study in
cultural psychology primarily focuses on definitions of
culture and the formulation of cultural-specific theories., We
have some of understanding of these issues, but we have not
applied our understanding of cultural effects to higher
education. We should be able to design better ways of teaching
based on our knowledge of cultural influences on how people
learn.
What are the (most
important) unsolved problems? What should be included in an
agenda for research?
Two kinds of problems:
- The problem of the independent variable. What is culture? Is it a purely cognitive, affective, or behavior? We do not know much about culture from a psychological
perspective, even though we talk about it all the time. So the issue of what is culture is still not well
understood.
- There are issues of the dependent variable as well. How broad are the cultural effects? How psychologically deep (in terms of mechanisms or
processes) are these effects? We also talk a lot about multiculturalism, but mostly
from a political perspective instead of a psychological one. We need to focus more on what are the cognitive
benefits of multiculturalism.
What prototypes can you
point us toward where principles from the science of learning
are already being applied?
We know that there are differences in school performance by
students from different ethnic groups. One example we all know is that Asian students perform better
on math tests than any other ethnic group. There are a lot of theories about why they do so well
in math. One
possibility that has not been talked about much is that math
is taught differently in Asian countries, which may be key to
their success. Professor
Howard Stevens at the University of Michigan provided one
example of how teaching styles may affect performance. Dr.
Stevens looked at an inner city school in Chicago with a
predominantly Black student population. He found that the
school did very well in a standard math test. He was very surprised to learn that the principal and
the school in general emphasized what they called an “Asian
way of teaching math.” So what is the Asian way of teaching math? One important component is that whenever you teach
something, you do it in groups. New information is never
taught solely with student-teacher interactions. An important part of the “Asian model” is an emphasis on
students learning from each other. So they have a lot of group activities, and the
activities are not simply presenting the answer as a group,
but rather have the groups solve specific problems together. Also, when they solve the problems they do them in
public. That is,
they ask kids to solve the problem in front of the whole
class, which can be very intimidating and humiliating, because
if you do not know how to do it everyone will know. No American school or public school teacher would do
this in the US because they believe that it would hurt the
child’s self esteem. However,
in Asian societies, teaching is always done this way. The
public group method is based on the theory or folk belief that
if you get learners excited or aroused, even by some
humiliation, then they will be motivated to try and do their
best. And even if
learners don’t solve the problem, they remember the solution
to the unsolved problem for quite sometime because they were
aroused. When
they applied the Asian way of teaching in that inner city
Black school, the kids did very well. What I’m saying is that there are different practices
from the ones we use in the US that might be helpful. We can
look to other countries and other ethnic groups to understand
alternative practices that we could be using.
What are the major
problems with or barriers to redesigning higher education? Do
you have any ideas for overcoming them?
Different
beliefs about education may be a problem. People in the US have their own folk beliefs about
education and about the intellectual development, which I
sometimes call the Socrates view. The nature of the Socrates view about intellectual
development can be categorized in this way:
- We emphasize questioning. That is, you have to question what people tell you.
- We also emphasize evaluation. That is, that you have to evaluate judgments about
other peoples stories, theories, and results.
- We also emphasize self-generated knowledge.
- We believe that there is a single truth
These
are ideas that are promoted and emphasized in the US. These ideas are not bad, but they are cultural-specific
because people in other cultures do not share them. Asians views about education are more influenced by Confucius,
which emphasize:
- Effort—effort for learning--you have to spend some
time to learn something
- Respect—everybody has some knowledge that you don’t
know.
- Dialectical—thinking from two different perspectives,
contemplating the contradictions. For Westerners, the contradictions are error or
mistake. For Asians, much of the intellectual and human life is about
contradicting statements and they do not seem to feel the need
to resolve contradictions
So
I think those are the cultural specific views about
intellectual development and cultural specific views about
education. I
think that the barriers to redesigning higher education are,
in fact, cultural biases and cultural different beliefs.
What do we need to do so
that one outcome of the retreat is to effect change (in ways
that we want)?
Reach
out to the general public by way of the media. Inform them of our goals, and then present them with
the major findings of the retreat. Publish articles that summarize the findings as well
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Vimla L. Patel
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John Newman
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Nora Newcombe
Area of Expertise
Development of
spatial skills in children and adults, and how to facilitate
skill development. Sex differences and other individual
differences in higher level cognitive skills. Teaching cognitive science theories to educators.
What
are the findings or theories from your area of expertise that we
could apply to higher education?
Major concern
is that there is a body of knowledge on such topics as
analogical transfer, reading, and other issues concerning how
people learn, that needs to be communicated to prospective
teachers. Education majors need to have courses in cognitive
science in the same way that engineering majors need physics and
premed majors need biology.
What
are the (most important) unsolved problems? What should be
included in an agenda for research?
The major
unsolved problem is a political one. There is a real need to convince colleges of education
and also school districts that the knowledge provided by
cognitive science is important for educators to have and to
continually be trained in. How do we sell the achievements of cognitive science to those
that could benefit from it, namely educators?
In looking at
an agenda for research, we would want to look at the leverage
points for achieving the transfer and wide scale acceptance of
knowledge about cognitive science to educators. There is a need to fund demonstration projects that can
exploit these leverage points and to evaluate their
effectiveness. It
should be a funding priority to have people explore technology
transfer in cognitive science.
What
prototypes can you point us toward where principles from the
science of learning are already being applied (e.g., activities,
courses, fields of study, degree programs, or entire systems)?
John Bransford
and Marilyn Adams are good examples of people that have worked
very effectively in developing cognitive science applications
and actively interfacing with school districts. However, the work that they are doing is specific to
types of problems and to age groups. So I would say that there are not any prototypes for the
broad intertwining of cognitive science with colleges of
education and schools in the way that I am suggesting.
What are
the major problems with or barriers to redesigning higher
education?
There are
institutional barriers that are created by the current
structuring of academic departments. Colleges of education do not traditionally employ
cognitive scientists. The
people who would need to teach the courses that I am envisioning
would need to come from different departments and this creates
turf issues
Do you
have any ideas for overcoming them?
Nothing is as
powerful in overcoming barriers as financial incentives. That is why there is a real need for funding
demonstration projects that can illustrate the effectiveness of
this type of training. Financial
incentives to get colleges of education to work with cognitive
psychology departments would be very helpful.
What do
we need to do so that one outcome of the retreat is to effect
change (in ways that we want)?
It is typically
the case that people will have personally rewarding and
illuminating experiences at the conference or retreat and come
up with interesting recommendations. However, as the outcomes
are turned into a report written to the funding agency there is
often no further monitoring or follow up. I think that it is important to see what could be done
with Spencer Foundation and other funding agencies in terms of
further monitoring and exchange after the writing of the report.
It would be helpful
to set up a format in which there was a meeting with Diane and
others along with the funding agencies to create an exchange
about the ideas that were generated. The follow up with funding agencies is key and it would
be very beneficial to continue to develop funding contacts with
other agencies so that the ideas generated by the retreat could
be pursued.
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Jose Mestre
Area of Expertise
- Learning in the sciences (particularly physics)
- Study the following:
- Problem solving
- How to develop expertise
- How do people organize knowledge in memory so that
it is useful for retrieval and solving problems
- How to apply research in the above areas to teach better,
or more efficiently, or teach in ways that makes students learn
the material at a deeper level
What are the (most important) unsolved problems? What should be
included in an agenda for research?
- Lecturing to
students in large classroom settings is not the most effective
method of instruction. Findings
that come from studies about how people learn indicate that
whenever students are actively engaged in their learning, they
learn better and faster. So,
we need to find better ways of getting students to learn
material than just lecturing in large classroom settings:
- In a small class you can address students' needs more
effectively
- In large classes (50+ more students), which are typical
of many introductory classes (in science in particular),
lecturing is not effective. Other methods should be employed
- Classroom Communications Systems. It is a version of the audience-polling device of “Who
Wants to be a Millionaire.” Students are given questions to work on in groups and
then submit answers that get displayed onto a histogram. The instructor then uses the histogram to direct the
direction of the discussion in the class. The instructor is viewed more as a learning coach rather
than a repeater of what is in the textbook. It has its benefits in the sense that the instructor can
shape the instruction to meet the needs of the students…if
students get it, then the instructor can move on, and if they
don't then he/she needs to back track and figure out what is
wrong and deal with it. Students
seem to like it and they seem to get more engaged.
- Implementation—How
do you get instructional techniques and implications of research
into practice? Getting
a charismatic instructor is not the answer. Charisma only goes so far; research evidence in the
sciences suggests that students learn about the same amount
regardless of who teaches them. How do you take things that work and scale them up so
that other instructors are willing to adopt them—that’s a
big problem.
Two problems to implementation:
- To teach at the university level, you never have to take
a course on teaching, pedagogy, or cognition (the only exception
may be school of education professors). You become a teacher by getting a Ph.D. in some subject
and it is assumed that content expertise is the only thing
needed to teach that subject, and nowhere in between are you
taught about instruction. In
general, you are never taught about how to apply findings from
research and learning to instruction in your discipline. We are essentially reproducing a failed system of
instruction, and not because we don’t turn out good Ph.D.s,
but we because we fail at teaching the general mass of students.
- People who have been teaching for a number of years think
that they “have it down,” and feel that if they say it in
the right way or make lectures a little more clear then students
should “get it,” when, in fact, the issue is students have
to be engaged in learning. Lecturing is really a boring way to go for students.
Telling
people what to do to improve their teaching does not really
help, even if they are willing to change. You may have to have an apprenticeship model where
teachers observe or co-teach a subject or class with somebody
else. Teachers might be able to adopt a new technique so that it
meets their style and their students' needs with this learning
model.
So,
how do you train perspective Ph.D.s in all fields so that they
know something about teaching and learning, and how do you get
at the people who are teaching already to adopt new styles? These are big challenges.
What
prototypes can you point us toward where principles from the
science of learning are already being applied (e.g., activities,
courses, fields of study, degree programs, or entire systems)?
- Books: How
People Learn—has a number of chapters on teaching math,
science, and history.
- Physics education research is becoming more accepted in
physics departments. In
our department and 10-12 other research departments around the
nation, there are physics education research groups with
doctoral students who do their dissertation on some aspect of
physics education research. So you have some degree programs that are geared to help
people with both the content and the teaching and learning of
that content.
What
are the major problems with or barriers to redesigning higher
education? Do you have any ideas for overcoming them?
- Higher education has been very compartmentalized into
departments, groups, and schools. And often times, those groups look down their noses at
the other groups. For
example, it is typical for scientists to look down their noses
at schools of education. We
need to break down barriers to solve the complex problems of
education.
- One example where barriers need to be broken is in the
training of teachers. Every
science department plays some role in the training of
prospective teachers (at the high school level). So, if you are majoring in biology and you want to become
a biology teacher, you take several biology classes. But, biologists teach those courses. You would have to go to the school of education to get
the pedagogical methods course. However, based on what we know from the NRC's How
People Learn report, the pedagogy and the content need to be
taught together to develop "pedagogical content
knowledge". Put
a different way, just because I can teach physics well does not
mean I could teach biology well.
- So,
although it is unlikely, there needs to be cross-disciplinary
work
- Telling people that they are doing something wrong is
really not going to work.
- One way the physics community was able to get faculty
interested in finding effective ways of teaching large lecture
courses was by developing a conceptual test in physics and
encouraging faculty to administer it at the end of their
courses. After
students scored very poorly on the test, a test that most
physics instructors considered "trivial" and thereby
thought that their students would perform very well in it, the
professors started to question what they were actually
accomplishing by teaching in large lectures courses with the
lecture method. What
was clear was that students were able to solve
"standard" problems, but they did not really
understand the concepts. This
opened up dialogue across many departments and faculty began to
ask “How do I go about teaching in different ways.”
- Once you have the attention of the faculty, it is
important that they are given enough support, so that they are
able to implement new techniques.
What additional questions should we be asking?
What
are the goals and what are we (at this conference) trying to
accomplish, and are they modest enough so that you can make some
headway? Trying to
reform higher education is a big job.
What
do we need to do so that one outcome of the retreat is to effect
change (in ways that we want)?
Need
administrators to be involved, either at the conference or at
some point.
(Back to top)
Richard E. Mayer
Area of Expertise
Cognitive Psychologist,
Cognition and Instruction
What
are the findings or theories from your area of expertise that
we could apply to higher education?
At the most general level I
would say that we need a theory of learning, an understanding
of how people learn if we want to design instruction that will
help people learn. We
need findings and theories that tell us how people learn. Essentially what we need is an educationally relevant
theory of learning.
What
are the (most important) unsolved problems? What should be
included in an agenda for research?
There are very few solved
problems, which leaves just about everything else as an
unsolved problem. The
question that I am most interested in is how can you teach in
ways that promote transfer. What kinds of learning experiences allow people to take
what they have learned and apply it in situations? Transfer is
a classic issue in psychology and in education, but I think
that it is really the fundamental unsolved problem. We really want to know how to teach for transfer. I think that we know how to teach facts and procedures,
what we don’t know is how to teach higher-level concepts and
strategies.
An agenda for research needs to
include an educationally relevant theory of learning.
What prototypes can you
point us toward where principles from the science of learning
are already being applied?
We
can all point to our own work. At this point in our research in learning we have
decided that it does not make sense to have a general theory
of learning and what we have are much more domain-specific
models of learning. The
theories that we are going to develop are going to have to be
domain specific to a certain extent.
What are the major
problems with or barriers to redesigning higher education?
One
of the barriers is that we don’t have a good concept of what
“good instruction” is and we don’t have good theories of
what “good instruction” is.
Another
barrier involves the use of technology in education. I have
been interested in educational technology. I think that sometimes people confuse media and method. This is kind of a traditional issue in instructional
technology. At
the level of higher education people sometimes think that
innovation means using technology. We know from many, many years of research on
educational technology that technology does not create
learning; it is instructional methods that cause learning. Just inserting technology into higher education is not
really a viable solution. We need to find the instructional methods that help
people learn and then see how technology can be used to serve
that purpose. Many
people take a technology-centered approach rather than a
learning-centered approach.
Do you have any
ideas for overcoming them?
To overcome these barriers we need more research. Research on what constitutes “good instruction” and
research on how to use technology to improve learning.
What do we need to do so
that one outcome of the retreat is to effect change (in ways
that we want)?
Until
we know what constitutes “good teaching” I am not sure
that we are ready for change. I am interested in what do we know about how people
learn that would let us know what the change should be. Do we have a theory of learning that is relevant and
what are its implications? I get nervous about people talking about change before
we have really looked at what should be changed.
(Back to top)
Marsha Lovett
Area of Expertise
Cognitive Psychology; acquisition and transfer of problem solving skills
What
are the findings or theories from your area of expertise that
we could apply to higher education?
There
are two empirical studies that I point to whose results can be
used to improve instruction. In particular, these exemplify
some of the simple things that can be done to enhance transfer
and generalization of knowledge.
The first is by Cummins (1992: JEP:LMC)
in the domain of algebra. She found that when subjects were given simple
instructions to compare and contrast analogous problems, they
were much more likely to induce a generalized problem schema
(& transfer the problem solving skills). This finding helps to illustrate that some of the
things we can do are very simple: participants benefited from
the comparison task without even solving. It is often just a matter of asking questions in a way
that prompts students to provide their own self-explanation or
will allow some other processing that will allow students to
generalize their results (see recent work by Chi that extends
her work on the self-explanation effect).
The
second study is by Catrambone (1998: JEP:G; 1996: JEP:LMC;
1994: Mem&Cog) regarding procedural skills and schemas. He was able to demonstrate that if you highlight the
structure of problem solving steps in examples presented to
subjects, the subjects are more likely to generalize the
procedure to other problems. He found that this was even effective when subgoals were
highlighted by being formatted into groups with arbitrary
labels. His
explanation for this was that highlighting the steps to
students helps to lead to self-explanation.
Another
important contribution to this is Singly and Anderson’s
theory of transfer of skill (Singley & Anderson, 1989).
What
are the (most important) unsolved problems?
The
first one involves the research on epistemology and
students’ beliefs about learning. There has been a considerable amount of work
classifying students’ beliefs about knowledge or describing
the impact of metacognitive beliefs on learning. Much less work has been done on understanding how students change their views on learning. Often this change has been thought to occur naturally
as a result of maturation, but an unanswer question is: can we
create interventions that will help to effect this change.
For
example, students’ typical belief that learning is quick and
problem solving is immediate is an obstacle to their learning:
they think that if they can’t do something right away it
can’t be done. The belief that authority on knowledge comes
from “the teacher” or is “in the book” can also impede
deeper learning. Again,
the unsolved problem is: How can we help to change these
beliefs?
The
second issue involves the link between motivation and
cognition. People
tend to study either cognitive issues or motivational issues;
an important problem is understanding (and dealin with) the
interactive link between the two.
A
final issue is how students should be scaffolded in their
instruction (both computer-aided and other forms of
instruction) and how and when this scaffolding should be
removed. There is empirical work on this topic but not much
theoretical development in this area. I believe that framing
the empirical results in a theoretical structure (and
extending them) would help to guide instructors in how to
apply these results in new situations.
What
should be included in an agenda for research?
In
developmental psychology, we have gone from emphasizing the
description of developmental states to actually describing the
changes between states and the mechanisms for accomplishing such
changes. In a
similar way we could have people trying to understand the
changes that occur in students’ epistemology (see first
unsolved problem above), not just describing a student’s
state of mind but describing the change process. Additionally, it is important to get people
collaborating on different pieces of learning from a variety
of perspectives, ranging from the cognitive to the
motivational.
What
prototypes can you point us toward where principles from the
science of learning are already being applied (e.g.,
activities, courses, fields of study, degree programs, or
entire systems)?
We
are in the process of refining instructional design in an
introductory statistics class at Carnegie Mellon. At each step
of the redesign, we try to bring more of the principles of
cognitive psychology and learning research into practice (cf.
Lovett & Genovese, 1999 from The American Statistician;
Lovett, in press: A collaborative convergence on studying
reasoning processes: A case study in statistics. To appear in
S. Carver & D. Klahr Cognition and Instruction: 25 Years of Progress. Mahway, NJ: Erlbaum). We put theory into practice when we select the
materials for the course and design activities that engage
students in learning. The
last step of the process will be to incorporate a cognitive
tutor to help students solve statistical problems based on
their own level of understanding. This work is based on cognitive tutors that have been
very successful at the high school level in algebra and
geometry classes. The
work of Ann Brown (Communities of Learning, I believe a
relevant ref is from 1992 Journal of the Learning Sciences) is
also a good example of interdisciplinary and collaborative
work.
What
are the major problems with or barriers to redesigning higher
education?
Everyone
is inventing their own wheel for solving instructional
problems. People
are not building enough on the work that has already been done
and they fail to fully explore what is already out there, both
in terms of what works and what does not work. One part of this problem is that the information is not
readily available or easily accessible. The other piece of the problem is more of a cultural
impediment in that people get invested in “name brand
work.” This produces resistance for people to build on other
people’s work.
Do you have any ideas for overcoming them?
The
lack of information problem could be addressed with searchable
databases or archives that could provide a place to reference
work that is being done in applying cognitive and learning
principles to higher education, and to document what works in different areas and what does
not.
What
do we need to do so that one outcome of the retreat is to
effect change (in ways that we want)?
After
looking at some of the different perspectives on the most
important problems, it would be helpful to find the
commonalities in these problems and then to set out to have
people attack these problems using shared resources. One success would be to get people communicating and
looking for ways to get people together for longer-term
collaborative projects. Herb
Simon gave a speech at Carnegie Mellon on instruction and
learning with a title something like, “Why isn’t teaching
a team sport?” This
title gets at the cultural issue of the solo aspect to
instruction and instructional design. The statistics project we are working on is a very
collaborative effort, with cognitive psychologists,
instructional designers, statisticians, and software designers
all working together to tackle this large problem. This requires extra effort (from developing a common language
for communicating to figuring out how to meet with 5 other
busy researchers for whom this is not a major project), but it
would be great to get people to work on and maintain long-term
collaborations.
(Back to top)
Joel R. Levin
- Interested in improving the
quality of evidence and the credibility of claims in
educational research.
- Focusing on the quality of
research in education and psychology, especially, as it
applies to policy
implications.
Suggestions
for Improving the Quality of Educational Research
The first suggestion
would be to improve the design of educational research and to
move toward more scientifically based models. It is important that we are not faddish in research
questions and that we do not simply jump from one hot topic to
another. There is a need to employ more systematic long-term research
methodology. We
need to be scientific in our method of inquiry—begin with a
research hypothesis, test the hypothesis in small laboratory
settings, and then move on to large scale, but very controlled
settings (as in medicine, for example). We also, must not rely merely on demonstrations and
uncontrolled studies, but instead, we should be guided by an approach where we would use multi-site testing in our
research and use analyses that match the design of our
research.
It is important that we begin
to get away from testimony and opinion in education. Too many programs are put into place for political
reasons and subjective opinions. New ideas hit the press and school districts implement
these programs without really evaluating the effectiveness of
these programs.
We need teams of people working
together—interdisciplinary teams of people with strong
scientific research backgrounds, along with people who are
good in applied settings and in implementing programs. We need to entice people who know how to do
scientifically sound research to work on field research and
program evaluation, and we need to get the funding to do
applied research. To
answer questions about the effectiveness and outcomes of
teaching strategies in large-scale classroom settings, as
opposed to controlled laboratory studies of individual
learners or short-term implementations of programs, there
needs to be much bigger and better controlled studies than
have previously been done. There is a need for classroom-trials studies (Levin
& O’Donnell, 1999), research in classrooms that is
modeled after clinical- trials research.
Additional Questions
- What do we need to do to get
people who are in positions to evaluate the evidence
(funding agencies, policy makers, implementers of special
programs) to be able to discriminate between differences
in the quality of evidence? How do we build the understanding in people that
not all evidence is equally credible?
- How do you get both the people
who evaluate programs and people outside of the education
arenas who are not necessarily educated in scientific
thinking to change the way that they think?
Programs for Students Who
are Academically at Risk
- Are there programs that can be
used to help these students succeed?
- Should we expect different
educational outcomes for different students?
- How do we address these
concerns, and how do help such students succeed?
- We know that with adequate
resources and proper motivation and interest from faculty
at-risk students will do better.
- What are the critical
components of successful retention programs for at-risk
students?
Thoughts on Students’
Thinking and Learning
- What is the relationship
between memory and critical thinking?
- Must information be memorized
and readily accessible before it can be used in the service of
thinking critically?
- If so, would it be beneficial
to help students learn underlying factual information in a
shorter amount of time, so that they could spend more time on
higher-level tasks?
(Back to top)
Alan M. Lesgold
What are the findings or
theories from your area of expertise that we could apply to
higher education?
Most
of my work is in the area of developing technology so that
students can “learn by doing.” As more opportunities for computer simulations and
instructional design become available, we can provide more
instruction that involves “learning by doing” as opposed
to the traditional model of “learning by telling.” There are many areas where in the past we were only
able to provide instruction through lecture or by having
students memorize materials. In the past, when it was important, we would use
simulation as our main method to provide the more active part
of learning (i.e., clinical psychologists), however with
technology we are now able to use active learning in a much
greater number of areas. In the area of complex skills, we could be doing much more in
terms of designing instruction that would help to bring
together knowledge of skills with actually doing and working
with these skills.
What are the (most important) unsolved problems?
The really hard problems lie in certain niche corners of the
area of motivation. We
have this whole area of distance learning that is developing,
yet we don’t have much information about the variables that
will help keep students motivated to continue through these
classes. We
don’t know much about what connections students need to
interact with other students or with faculty in order to help
facilitate their motivation to do the work on their own and to
complete the class. When
distance learning first began, prior to the current wave of
computer classes, there was an initial track record that
demonstrated a dropout rate of about 40-50%. Students would sign up, but would not finish the work
for the class. While
the situation does seem to have improved, there is still work
to be done. For
example, the University of Phoenix, which is a private
institution where the primary focus has been on distance
learning, still offers more hours of sit down class and
primary instruction than they do network instruction. This is primarily because this is what we know how to
do.
Motivation may also be a cover for skills of self-management and time-management. We need to tease apart these variables; therefore, it
is important that cognitive psychologists along with
motivational psychologists work on this problem.
We also need to develop a better understanding of the way
that research and practice relate to each other. What are the ways that concepts ground themselves in
experience? For
education in general this is very important, but it is also
relevant for higher education. We don’t have a solid understanding how different
kinds of knowledge work together. How do different kinds of knowledge support one another
and how do different kinds of knowledge interact with one
another?
What should be included in an agenda for research?
Programs
of multidisciplinary work connecting motivational efforts with
metacognition efforts.
Factors
that would help to contribute to success in the distance
learning environment. Issues
of time management are sometimes short-term problems, but some
students can also have holistic problems with time-management. What are some of the ways that task analytic work could
help? What could be done to create a clearer identification of the
cognitive and motivational aspects that help a student succeed
in a less socially manipulated area?
What prototypes can you point us
toward where principles from the science of learning are
already being applied (e.g., activities, courses, fields of
study, degree programs, or entire systems)?
Intelligent Tutoring systems represent an application that is
heavily grounded in primary theory. The work by John Anderson,
Ken Koedinger, and
Al Corbett in developing intelligent tutors is one example. The aim for these tutoring systems has been at the high
school and middle school level, but they have also been used
at community colleges.
There is also the use of intellegent tutoring systems for
complex skills that has been used in the military and at the
industry level.
Another example is work by Kurt VanLehn on tutors for physics
and ways to use machine intellegence to help people do a
better job of managing their study skills.
What are the major problems with or barriers to redesigning
higher education?
A major barrier is the development of learning organizations
and organizational research. Organizationally, universities have not learned how to
build upon research on learning in designing their courses. The organization and structure of the academic world, tenure
and the compartmentalization of academic areas, along with the
mapping of academic freedom onto highly localized planning and
decision making creates problems for implementing learning
research. In looking at an agenda for educational research it
is important that we include research on organizations.
Do you have any ideas for overcoming them?
Universities are adapting to these problems, but are doing so
slowly. The
number of tenured positions has been reduced, and there have
been problems with the way non-tenured faculty are treated. The university benefits from the flexibility of
non-tenure, but has not found a way to compensate its nontenured
faculty properly. Change
is taking place slowly; I don’t know if there is any way to
speed this change process.
What do we need to do so that one outcome of the retreat is
to effect change (in ways that we want)?
The best that you can do is to put provocative ideas in front
of the policy and decision makers. Along with the standard reports that come out, maybe
the commissioning of work on some of the ideas/prototypes that
come out of this meeting. No easy way to do this. Possibly presenting the information that comes from the
retreat to a meeting of universities presidents and provosts.
Ideas for the Retreat
- Setting aside time for presentations of the prototypes and
demonstrations.
- What data do we know about the students in distance learning
classes?
(Back to top)
Daniel R. Ilgen
Area of Expertise
I/O psychologist; work
motivation, teams and team decision-making
What
are the findings or theories from your area of expertise that
we could apply to higher education?
These are several areas that
I/O psychologists have been traditionally involved in where
the theories and findings could be applied to higher
education.
- Active Learning. There is a lot of work in training that works with
active learning. Web-based training and life-long learning
models have demonstrated the importance of treating the
learner as an active participant in learning.
- Decision-making.The use of choice models and issues related to
the decisions that people make.
- Teamwork. The idea that learning in teams is important,
especially, since much of our behavior outside of the
university is done in teams. We use teams in the educational setting; however, one of the
implications of this is that we do not reward behavior in
teams, we reward individual behavior—grades and diplomas
are given to individuals not to teams. People are learning in teams and are learning about
teamwork itself; this is a domain that I/0 psychology has
worked with for a long time and has a lot to contribute.
- Behavior between
organizations. Education
is moving from the sole property of the university to more
of a joint venture between businesses, communities,
universities and individuals. We don’t know much about how these areas will
work together and what will happen as we cross these
boundaries. What
will be important in getting these various enterprises to
work well together?
- Competencies. Evaluating the competencies of individuals. I/O psychologists tend to work backwards by asking what is
needed for the specific job and what is important to the
nature of the job and then create the bundles of knowledge
and competencies that would be expected. Education could benefit from a similar approach in
attempting to understand how to bundle and cluster
knowledge.
- Task Motivation. Why do people stay on task? What kind of things keep students going? What things can be used to help with task
motivation?
What
are the (most important) unsolved problems? What should be
included in an agenda for research?
Learning and the choice
process. People
are much more involved as active learners than we have
previously thought or than we have looked at. The nature of learning puts much more burden on the
person in terms of acquiring information. As an example, many people know how to use Microsoft Word,
but the degree to which people learn the software often
depends on their own level of motivation. Much more of the learning that we do is a process of
our own willingness to go forward and the choices that we make
in the learning process. We don’t know a lot about what keeps people motivated
and keeps them pushing forward when they are left on their own
to learn information.
Motivation. Businesses and universities are invading more and
more on people’s personal lives. For example, businesses used to send employees to a
retreat to get new information, now companies will often give
employees a web site to go to and get the new information. At some point we have to ask how much we should be
asking from people.
Team Work. How do we create the proper reward systems for work
that is done in teams? As
previously mentioned we don’t give degrees to teams, we give
them to individuals. How
can we structure a reward system for team and group work?
The first question is what
level are we talking about in an agenda of research. We can do more research on web-based training,
life-long learning, and training displays this research is at
more of the micro level. At a different level we need to look at the
psychological processes of being an active learner.
What prototypes can you
point us toward where principles from the science of learning
are already being applied?
Active Learning. In terms of active learning there is a lot of work
going on in the area of web based training; we are learning
what it takes for people to get the information and to be
motivated to continue. Web
based training is an example of active learning, but it is
still very early in the development stages.
Michigan Virtual University. This is a consortium between the automotive industry,
the junior colleges and the four-year colleges. Asking what is the way in which all of these
organizations can work together to create a model. This is an area where organizational research will be
important.
Collaborative work sites, also
apply some of the principle of learning to the workplace.
What are the major
problems with or barriers to redesigning higher
education?
Higher Education is itself its
own barrier. Universities are very conservative institutions,
and there is a lot of resistance to change. The separation of the university into different
academic departments means that we tend to compartmentalize
our solutions to these problems. We stress interdisciplinary work, yet we continue to advance
the level of knowledge in our disciplines so that people need
to be more and more specialized. The more specialized that we are the harder it becomes
to talk to anyone outside of our area.
Funding and these types of
issues are also probably a concern, but not one that I am very
familiar with.
Rapid change in technology
results in things becoming outdated so quickly. By the time systems are purchased and people are
trained in it; the technology is out of date.
Do you have any ideas for
overcoming them?
Putting together
interdisciplinary teams. Trying to get people to cross borders of disciplines. The constraints of the university are something that we
just have to try to work around.
What do we need to do so
that one outcome of the retreat is to effect change (in ways
that we want)?
We need a provocative report
that could stir things up. I have always liked the National Research Counsel
model. For
example a book published by the Institute of Medicine titled “To Err is Human,” reported the number of medical
errors in hospitals and other medical areas that lead to the
loss of human lives. This
study stirred things up. Although education does not have the same level of
shock value—people dying as a result of mistakes—it would
be great to have some report that could get people stirred up
in a similar way. A
group of experts that can get together and provide a
provocative treatment of the problem is a great start to
effecting change.
(Back to top)
Earl Hunt
What are the findings or
theories from your area of expertise that we could apply to
higher education?
The importance of building
knowledge on knowledge. It
is a fact that different people have different beliefs, even students that have passed
through the same class. The diversity of beliefs creates a
situation where individualizing instruction so that it is
geared to address students’ different beliefs can be much
more effective than the standard “stand and deliver”
lecture. We now
have the technological means to create an individualization of
instruction. We
have an opportunity to react to the students’ individual
state of knowledge, as opposed to just lecturing to the group
norm.
Differences in states of
knowledge are qualitative differences, rather than just
quantitative. This is not to say that all people’s knowledge
is equal, but rather to say that people have different
approaches to looking at a problem that are not necessarily
right or wrong. Knowing
how a person is approaching the problem and then tailoring
instruction to fit the different approach that a person is
taking to the problem will greatly improve the outcome of the
instruction. Good instruction should engage a student and
identify a student’s individual beliefs. This comes right out of schema theory and any theory on
the organization of knowledge.
Use of Technology in the
Classroom. We
have designed a diagnostic project that can write diagnostic
assessment programs. We
can have continual self-assessment programs that can monitor
the understanding of the students, and we can put these on the
web. Instructors
can get weekly reports, students can discuss their
understandings with each other in chat rooms, and instructors
can monitor these discussions and then modify the lectures and
work with TAs to tailor the instruction to the students in the
class. This is a great improvement over the pre-prepared lecture
that does not adjust to the differences in individual classes. The horror of it was that you used to be considered a
good instructor if all of your lectures were prepared before
the start of the quarter; teaching this way is analogous to a
ballistic missile, the lectures do not adapt to the new class
of students nor to the new ideas that may develop through the
course of the semester.
Additionally, academia is the
only place where we have a system of assessment that Bob
Inslay (?) once called “drop in from the sky assessment.” A typical course has a mid-term and a final. This form of assessment is terrible. The final is of no use as a teaching device; it is
strictly a grading device. Most students don’t even come to pick up their
finals. A mid-term is somewhat less useless as a guide for learning,
but it is more often used as a device for students to monitor
their progress. How
often do instructors modify their instruction based on the
results of the mid-term? Instead we should be doing continuous assessments,
self-assessments that are built right into the instruction of
the course. We
have the ability to do this. Right now a student should not be told that on a 100
question multiple choice exam that they got 78 right and not
given any further discussion as to what was right or wrong of
why a problem was graded as right or wrong. Students will rarely go back to find out what they
missed and why. I
would really like to see education come to the point where
there were no midterms and finals. I am not saying that we would get away from grading,
but we could begin using more frequent self-assessments that
provide feedback to the student and the instructor.
We should be assessing base
knowledge consistently. In
general, I think that we put too much effort in a single
report. There are huge amounts of forgetting by students. In psychology, we know ways to help with this. One way is by building on levels of knowledge and by
connecting the different pieces of knowledge. In mathematics,
one course builds on the other—stabilizing your knowledge. In most of the other disciplines, educators take a very
disjointed approach. Psychology,
for example, is a very poorly designed curriculum. It jumps from one topic to the next—personality one
day and history and systems the next. We do not build on the knowledge that the students are
gaining.
What
are the (most important) unsolved problems? What should be
included in an agenda for research?
In order to see what I want
done, it is necessary to have a substantial background of
knowledge about how people think about this or that topic. What views are people likely to have? The diagnostic and assessment programs that I have
discussed exist in areas such as physics and statistics, but
they do not exist in many other areas because we have not done
the research to see what it is that students’ know and
don’t know in these areas.
We need to have psychologists
and subject matter experts working together to determine the
sorts of problems and misconceptions people have in these
areas. The
problem is that this is not exciting research, but we need to
have an understanding of how student’s understand all of the
academic subject areas in order to make continuous assessment
work.
Another important area of
research is in convincing people that learning is an active
process, and at the same time making them realize that active
learning does not always mean it will be fun. Some people believe that active learning means that you
get to play a game, and game playing leads to learning. Americans tend to have the attitude that learning is
either “easy” or “I can’t do it at all.” People
often claim that they can’t do 8th grade algebra,
something that is generally within most people’s range of
abilities. The truth of the matter is that people often don’t want to
put in the time and work that it would take to be able to do
algebra. We also
need to get rid of the attitude that it is not okay to ask
questions or in any way to demonstrate that you don’t know
something.
One of the problems in applying
what psychologists know about the science of learning to
education is related to the image of psychologists as
clinicians. Psychologists
are not seen as being relevant to the discussion of education.
I feel that some our biggest
problems for redesign of higher education are not related to
research, but are instead issues related to the institution. There is not a lot of motivation for professors to
change their teaching methods. What is the incentive for a professor to do the things
that I have suggested for a class?
Another problem is that
students come with a certain set of expectations; it is almost
an unwritten contract that the professors’ job is to tell
them what will be on the final and that the students’ job is
to memorize this information. The students have become accustomed to the memorization
game, if you change the rules of the game by using methods
such as continual assessment of learning; students are most
likely going to be upset. It is going to make these students very nervous to have
the rules changed. In a system where we rely on students’ evaluations of the
professors, innovative teaching techniques might not be
thought of well.
What prototypes can you
point us toward where principles from the science of learning
are already being applied?
David
Maddigan’s work at University of Washington used exactly the
types of methods that I have been talking about. I also point to Peter Falk’s work in New Mexico with
computer-graded and latent indexing methods to improve
students’ essays.
What are the major
problems with or barriers to redesigning higher education? Do
you have any ideas for overcoming them?
In
addition to the many topics discussed previously, one of the
biggest problems is the lack of incentive to change teaching
methods. To illustrate this problem let’s look at the reward for an
associate professor for being a good teacher versus the reward
for the professor being a good researcher. Using my school, University of Washington as an
example, an associate professor who has tenure can win a
teaching award that amounts to about one month’s salary or
the same professor could spend the time that would have taken
on improving their teaching methods on applications for grants
that could provide grant money of 2 month’s summer salary
for the next 5 years. Why
should that professor spend his time trying to get the
long-shot teaching award instead of spending his time going
after more l
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Keith J. Holyoak
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Robert Hoffman
Concept-Map
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Douglas J. Hermann
Area of Expertise
Cognition; cognitive technology
What are the findings or
theories from your area of expertise that we could apply to
higher education?
There are many, especially with
the rapid advance of computer and other computer related
devices. I have
an especially strong interest in personal data-management
devices. I have
been interested in how palm-held devices can be used as a tool
to help both time management and studying. There is also a large amount of technology on the web
and different technologies that have come out of distance
learning courses, such as graphic displays, that could be used
in the classroom and also to advance personal learning.
What are the (most
important) unsolved problems? What should be included in an
agenda for research?
In the case of learning I think
that the most important unsolved problem is how people can
learn to focus their attention or their consciousness on a
learning task. For
example, when I talk with my students I tell them that I could
give them new information about something that they are
interested in, such as sports or music, and they could pick up
the new information without having to take notes. They would
be able to focus their attention on the new information in a
way that they are not able to for a typical class lecture. I think that this is an area where we have a huge
opportunity for success. If we can figure out ways to capture attention even
when people are not necessarily trying to give it, we will
have a real possibility to change learning.
Research is needed in how
learning occurs in a broad framework. The environment of the educational setting must be included
in the research in order to have a true sense of how learning
takes place. For
example, if someone is teaching in a school where there are
many commuters, the effect of commuting on the ability to
study and learn must be addressed. Each campus has an individual environment that creates
different outcomes in learners. Often we look at learning in a strict situation of how
long it takes a person to learn a particular amount of
information; while this is needed research, it does not
generalize well. We
really need to look at the social context and setting of the
school in order to understand how learning takes place.
What prototypes can you
point us toward where principles from the science of learning
are already being applied?
One example of a prototype is
science classrooms that have computer communication between
the students and the instructor. In these classrooms students have access to a computer
keyboard that will allow them to respond to questions posed by
the instructor. Students are able to respond electronically to simple
“yes” or “no” questions or they can also respond to
things such as a 5-point likert scale that rates the lecture
from interesting to not interesting. This allows students to have more interaction in the
lectures. Something
that I have noticed with distance learning is that students
are more willing to offer criticism over e-mail than they are
in classroom situations. We now have the ability to use technology in a way that
students can interact with the professor. This allows students an opportunity to express whether or not
they understand material without the pressure of demonstrating
their lack of knowledge to other students. Often when you ask
students whether or not they understand a concept, it is only
the top students that will give an answer.
What are the major
problems with or barriers to redesigning higher education? Do
you have any ideas for overcoming them?
I personally think that a very
big problem is the relationship between basic and applied
research. The
idea in our society is that basic researchers generate some
excellent ideas and applied researchers put these ideas in
practice and then basic researchers come back and modify these
ideas. Our
students should be socialized into that process regardless of
what field they enter. Students
need to have an understanding of the give and take
relationship between basic and applied researchers. The current state of science in America segregates
basic researchers from applied researchers. I think that students see some of this and they do not
have a good example to demonstrate how these two groups can
work together. The
productivity of American science is held back by that problem.
In order to overcome this
barrier we need to create more communication between basic and
applied researchers. By
segregating the basic researchers from the applied researchers
we perpetuate the problem. Conferences, such as this one, and other places where
people can come together and share ideas from both sides of
research are very important.
What additional questions
should we be asking?
It might be good to look at
questions about people that are not comfortable with
technology. Is
there something unique about the way these people interpret
their environment?
Some other areas to consider
relate to the use of distance learning. Should the same credit be applied for a class that is
offered over the web as it is for the classroom? Is it possible that certain types of pedagogical
activities are good over the web and that there are other
pedagogical activities that are better for the classroom? To what extent are people able to learn through new
modes of technology?
What techniques work to help
get students to maintain attention? Electronic classrooms could go a long way towards this. If students could express their pleasure or displeasure
about the lecture it would help students feel more
interactive.
What do we need to do so
that one outcome of the retreat is to effect change (in ways
that we want)?
Empower some practicums or
small studies and then provide feedback from the study. I
think that what is going to be important as well is for people
to be able vocalize their resistance to the ideas of other
people. There are
lots of good people at this conference, but it is limited in
time. People
often do not want to be rude, but it is important that people
are able to express their disagreement with ideas that they do
not think will work. It is important to create an environment
for people to feel able to open up and express their ideas.
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Diane F. Halpern
Concept-Map
Area of Expertise
- Cognitive Psychology
- Issues related to thinking
What are the findings or theories from your area of expertise that
we could apply to higher education?
- These
are some of the pertinent questions that are addressed by
cognitive psychology research in relation to higher education.
- What
are the things that we know that help to promote remembering
beyond the time that someone is in school?
- What
is it that helps people to become better thinkers?
- Is
thinking something that happens in one specific domain of
knowledge or are there general skills of thinking that would
transfer among domains?
- With
all of these questions it is very important that we find good
measures, so that we can accurately answer these questions in
order to begin to apply this knowledge. Good measurement is essential if we are attempting to
find out what works and what does not work.
What are the (most important) unsolved problems?
- The
unsolved problems are really about how to get transference. How do we get someone to spontaneously use the skills
and knowledge that they have learned in class in other
situations?
- How
do we keep people motivated and get students actively involved
in the learning process?
- How
do we get people to accept that good learning is going to be
hard work when all of the rewards and incentives are not set
up to promote this?
- How
can we go about getting people to want to look at real
research answers, and to not shy away from research answers
that we do not like for fear of disappointment?
What should be included in an agenda for research?
- List
of what the most important questions are.
- How
do you do good applied research?
- How
do you get people to value evidence for what works and what
doesn’t work, especially in the very politicized educational
environment that we now have?
What prototypes can you point us toward where principles from the
science of learning are already being applied (e.g.,
activities, courses, fields of study, degree programs, or
entire systems)?
There do not appear to be that many instances of people really
breaking down the walls of traditional teaching styles. One example of an alternative learning environment is
the work that Donald Norman has been doing. He has created a more problem-based learning
environment in online instruction. An example of the problem-based style is in the
approach to teaching statistics. Students start with a data set and are then asked what
are the interesting questions that relate to our business. Students are able to learn statistics through application as
opposed to a traditional model.
What
are the major problems with or barriers to redesigning higher
education?
There
are many barriers in the way of reform. Faculty unions are one
barrier; unions establish a mindset of not doing extra work,
and change requires a great deal of work. Changing the rules of the game will upset the current
winners and losers in the system. There are also barriers as a result of state
legislation and state agencies that are not willing to take
risks. There are
not enough faculty trained to make the changes, and it is also
possible that both faculty and students do not understand the
possible or potential benefits when the outcome is uncertain.
There
are also systems of constraints, such as standardized tests
like the GRE, and also, licensing exams. What happens to these requirements when the educational
system begins to provide a different kind of knowledge than
what these types of tests assess? The whole system needs to move at once.
Do
you have any ideas for overcoming them?
Time
and a few brave leaders willing to take the first big plunges;
people who are willing to convince a whole network that there
is a need for change and that this is what we should be doing. Possibly some very large national agency changing their
learning structure, such as the military for example, that
would have an impact on the whole society. Provided, of course, that this change could demonstrate
a beneficial outcome.
What
additional questions should we be asking?
We
need to ask questions outside of cognitive science and extend
our investigations to include social areas, groups, and group
thinking. Also, questions about different means of presenting
information. Another
issue could be how to present these ideas to make them more
palatable to the general public.
What
do we need to do so that one outcome of the retreat is to
effect change (in ways that we want)?
We
have to get someone to make a real commitment to take the good
ideas that come from the retreat and put these ideas into
action. There is
a need to get someone or some groups to fund this process. We need an energetic leader to help support this and
also a few really good demonstrations that could help to
convert the general public.
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Milton D. Hakel
Concept-Map
Area of Expertise
- I/O
psychologist
- Motivational
factors and learning
What are the (most important) unsolved problems?
How can we stop wiping out our kids in our educational system? A specific example of this can be found in the rankings of
our school children in math and science. American 4th grade students ranked 2nd
in international comparisons of math and science while 8th
grade students ranked around 35th. Is this merely a cohort effect or is there something
that happens in the education system and/or the American
culture that alters the motivational aspects of learning?
How can we encourage students to become engaged in the learning process?
For
example, undergraduates at my university (Bowling Green) are
somewhat interested in learning, but are often more
preoccupied with grades and ultimately with serving their time
at the university in order to get to the next step and get a
job.
What
should be included in an agenda for research?
The first step would be creating specific starting points for
research. The How
People Learn book should be a good place to start. Hopefully, this conference will crystallize specific
spots for the various areas of psychology to concentrate on in
regard to why higher learning does not take place to the level
that we would expect.
What
prototypes can you point us toward where principles from the
science of learning are already being applied (e.g.,
activities, courses, fields of study, degree programs, or
entire systems)?
Alverno
College in Milwaukee, Wisconsin is an excellent prototype
of an entire system. This college applies assessment center
methods to undergraduate education. Assessment center methods
are derived from industry and military settings. Rather than
interviewing a student or giving a multiple-choice test, you
simulate situations and observe how the student performs in
these situations. This method has been the basis for
Alverno’s curriculum for over 25 years. I just reviewed
Learning That Lasts: Integrating Learning, Development, and
Performance in College and Beyond (Mentkowski and Associates,
Jossey-Bass, 2000) for Psychological Science. The review is in
press, and can be read at http://folios.bgsu.edu/Hakel.
Another prototype is a freshman seminar that I have been
working on for the last four years. The class is officially
called “Personal Development Seminar, but it is popularly
known as “Springboard.”
Twelve students are enrolled in each section, and each person
has his or her own coach. Last fall we ran 26 sections, about
9% of the incoming first year cohort. The students are engaged
in hands-on, active learning geared at developing
communication, critical thinking, and leadership skills. Many
activities are recorded on videotape, and coach and peer
feedback are used heavily. Retention rates of those who have
taken the class are higher than their cohort. Springboard
shows that students are eager to learn; we need to find ways
to overcome the barriers that inhibit learning among faculty
and students.
What
are the major problems with or barriers to redesigning higher
education?
Curricular gridlock--universities are optimized for getting funding through enrollment. Due to the class sizes, lecture formats are often used exclusively and students are being exposed to knowledge,
but are not engaged in applying that knowledge.
Other barriers include lots of inertia, and the large variety of stakeholders.
Do you have any ideas for overcoming them?
Having this conference is the first step. The fast sign-up of participants along with the excellence of their work makes me optimistic about very positive outcomes. This conference should help to
pinpoint specific areas to begin pilot projects, as well as possible sources for funding these ideas. It is heartening to know that there are a lot of basic researchers out there that are interested in
applying research.
People have sometimes said that if it is not broke, don’t fix it. However, there are more and more concerns about our education system and a lot of fears about being left behind as we enter into
world globalization.
What
additional questions should we be asking?
How
can we create networks and connections that will help to
continue the development of these ideas? What venues and to what audiences should we be
addressing these concerns?
What
do we need to do so that one outcome of the retreat is to
effect change (in ways that we want)?
Some ways to do this include being very clear about what are messages are and to aim high. Reforming education is something that can only happen if someone decides to try it. It would be good
to get at least half of the participants galvanized in some sense and working on these things either in their own labs and campuses or in teams working on demonstrations. This would be a good
benchmark. As Karl Weick has argued it in an article in American Psychologist (Small Wins: Refefining the Scale of Social Problems, 1984, vol. 39, 40-49), there is importance in the psychology of
small wins. Instead of waiting for all of the pieces to fall together, it is important to do things that can be done now in order to build confidence that will help lead to a major impact.
It will also be very beneficial to look at and display prototypes prior to and at the retreat.
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Arthur C. Graesser
Area of expertise
Discourse Processing
What are the findings or theories from your area of expertise that
we could apply to higher education?
One of the big
problems in education is the over-reliance on shallow knowledge. Students are often given key concepts and definitions of
these concepts, but are not given a deeper level of
understanding about these concepts or the ability to reason and
problem solve. The
knowledge students have is inert rather than active. The key question becomes what strategies can be applied
that allow students to get to the higher level areas of
thinking?
What
are the (most important) unsolved problems? What should
be included in an agenda for research?
There
are several theories from cognitive psychology and discourse
processing that provide very salient solutions to problems of
learning and of facilitating higher reasoning abilities. One of
the big challenges is to get these theories to the education,
government, and industry audiences. Another big problem is “edutainment,” educational forms
of media that focus more on the entertainment facet rather than
on pedagogy. We
need to be able to mix the sizzle of “edutainment” with
pedagogical understanding. Not enough research has been done on how people process
animation or multimedia sources of information. The issue involves not only how this information is
initially processed, but additionally, how people are able to
use this information later on. There is a need for more longitudinal research with these
new modes of presentation.
What
prototypes can you point us toward where principles from the
science of learning are already applied?
These are 3 examples of multimedia-based technologies.
- John Bransford and his interactive video series, i.e. Jasper and
Beyond Jasper. Note:
Little Planet is another more recent one, but check out his
Vanderbilt site. These
are videotapes of groups of people talking about how to solve a
problem and managing the dialogue so that people are using it to
solve problems.
- Intelligent Tutoring Systems- University of Pittsburgh. Ande’s and Atlas tutor (Hurt VanLehn) teach adults
physics using conversational dialogues. Automated computer conversations aid students in their
problem solving abilities. Also Alan Lesgold’s SHERLOCK system trains military
personnel on equipment repair and maintenance.
At Carnegie Melon, the PACT
tutor by John Anderson and Kenneth Koedinger teach students
algebra and geometry. His
recent system has a natural language and conversational dialogue
facility.
- Conversational agents- students have conversations with a
computer; pedagogical agents talk to the learner. This will be helpful with lower literacy students;
conversational presence will be helpful. James Lester’s system “Steve” has a virtual reality
environment in which adults learn about operating mechanical and
electronic equipment by interacting in VR. It is very conversational and gives hints. Also Art
Graesser’s AutoTutor hold a conversation with a student in
natural language as they learn about computer literacy; it has a
talking head.
What are the major problems with or barriers to redesigning higher
education?
The teacher
workforce has not had access to multimedia and pedagogical
strategies. Funding
for teacher education on new types of teaching technologies is
underwhelming. An estimate from the Wall Street Journal of what
it would cost to update education with needed technologies is
somewhere around $250 billion, with about half of that amount
going towards educating teachers. State universities, in particular, are under-funded and
do not have the most recent technologies. There needs to be a partnership between universities and
corporate business to help bring this technology to the
classroom. In
addition, it is important that funding be provided not just for
the technology, but also, for teacher training, instruction, and
equipment and software maintenance.
There
is a schism that exists in education between those who want to
use science as a model versus those who want to use a
non-scientific model (building more on a cultural enterprise). In talking about what strategies work, it is a challenge
to convince the non-science people to adopt the principles that
science suggests. Cognitive
science has real strategies that work, but there is often real
resistance to using them--both in the education systems and in
outside agencies.
Do you have any ideas for overcoming them?
There needs to
be greater emphasis on longitudinal research. One of the problems with psychology is the “one hour
studies.” These
do not provide accurate information about learning. Often the learning strategies that we are interested in
take time to evoke, and it is expensive to do research that can
evaluate these long-term strategies.
There is a real
need to find a way get more sectors integrated; an attempt to
bring big business, education, and government into the research
that cognitive scientists are doing. There are not enough scientists to go around to report
all of the work that they are doing.
What
additional questions should we be asking?
How do we
manage interdisciplinary research teams? There are some real difficulties with interdisciplinary
research; it is often very hard to get people from different
areas to work together without conflict. However, it is crucial that there be an interdisciplinary
approach to questions of learning.
What
do we need to do so that one outcome of the retreat is to effect
change (in ways that we want)?
Bring
someone in from Office of Educational Research and also pivotal
people in Washington. It
might be beneficial to encourage someone from the learning
marketing area, someone that is planning on entering the
“edutainment” industry in a big way to become involved
(perhaps Disney or Microsoft). Cognitive scientists have some very tangible solutions to
learning problems and they need to find a way to market and sell
these ideas.
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Don J. Foss
Area
of Expertise
These
days I have multiple hats; I am as much a higher education
administrator (Dean of Arts and Science) as I am an
experimental psychologist. In my administrative role, I care a lot about the
progress of people learning, e.g., to write in freshman English or acquiring college math
skills. I have
thought some about how we can use the principles from
cognitive science in a way that will help us to achieve these
goals. Additionally,
I am very interested in the teaching of foreign language. One thing that I would consider is hiring a cognitive
engineer in a full time position to try to meet these goals,
especially if it were part of an initiative with wider scope.
What
are the findings or theories from your area of expertise that
we could apply to higher education?
I am interested in the study of expertise and what it has to
tell us about skill learning. I am fortunate because at
Florida State there are people such as Anders Ericsson, for
whom expertise is his area of expertise. I have tried to get myself “up to speed” on this
area, as well as on the topic of transfer of training. I have had Robert Bjork come to Florida State to
lecture on his findings and what he knows about this topic.
I am personally a psycholinguist and have thought some about
applications of psycholinguist research to second language
acquisition, but I have not had the time to develop this as
yet.
What
are the (most important) unsolved problems? What should be
included in an agenda for research?
There
are many, but one that is on my mind is the issue of retention
and transfer of training. For example, if students take a course in basic math
and then take a course in physics, they should be able to
reach back and build on their basic knowledge, but often they
are not able to do so. The
same can be seen in upper division psychology classes where we
assume that students will have an understanding of the
elementary statistics course they took, and frequently they do
not.
Additionally,
both as a psycholinguist and as a Dean, I am interested in
questions of skill acquisition and transfer in the writing
process. Part of
what we are supposed to be doing is giving people the skills
to analyze complex issues and the abilities to write about
them. It is an
issue of teaching techniques that people can then use to
generalize to other problems. This question of transfer is a classic problem, but one
that I think still requires careful work.
To begin with, we need more research on the above topics. Another area for research concerns: what are useful
applications of technology in the educational settings of
today? Almost
every educational institution has invested millions of dollars
in technology, and I am not sure if the trading of capital for
labor has paid off. We
have done some work here at Florida State where we have begun
to examine the use of computer laboratory time in our
beginning math courses. We
are looking at the effect of offsetting the discussion
sessions with computer-based laboratory time and asking
questions about our ability to increase students comprehension
and, at the same time, reduce the time spent on the task. This is an area that needs more research.
Another
topic has to do with motivation of students. How do you motivate students to devote time to the
task?
What prototypes can you
point us toward where principles from the science of learning
are already being applied?
We have one here in our freshman math class at Florida State. I know that there are many others around, but this is
the one I most familiar with. In some of these courses, we have substituted the
recitation sections with computer-based problem solving
sections. In
these sections there are also people in the computer lab who
are there to answer students’ questions. We have implemented this in a way that permits us do
look at the results in a quasi-experimental way. We have not looked at the details of why this is
working. One of
my speculations is that this approach allows a much more
individualized approach to the students’ problem solving. However, more research is needed before we can say much
about why this is working.
What are the major
problems with or barriers to redesigning higher education? Do
you have any ideas for overcoming them?
I think that most people in most disciplines, including
psychologists, have a slight disconnect between how they talk
about these issues when they are wearing their research hats,
and what they do in the classroom. Part of the problem is that we don’t have enough
training for graduate students who will be teaching. There is a certain disdain for methodology in teaching. This may be diminishing in some places where they have
developed training programs for graduate student teaching
assistants. In
speaking with teaching assistants in the math recitation
sections here I have found that most do not think about the
notion of analyzing what the students think and why they may
have not been able to solve the problem. We need to train teaching assistants and one of the big
problems involved with this is that we don’t having training
of the trainers. It
is very difficult to get these ideas to permeate through an
institution.
What additional questions
should we be asking?
Suppose that we are called in front of congress or in front of a judge
and asked the question: what do you swear will work? What do we swear will work is the question that I think
that we need to be asking. In this regard my target audience has been turned now
to the training of graduate student teaching assistants. What training can we give them so that we know what
they are doing is really affecting change in the students.
What do we need to do so
that one outcome of the retreat is to effect change (in ways
that we want)?
We need to get confident about one or two things that we want to
accomplish and then to talk seriously about how to
institutionalize it. This
will require some organization, such as NSF, to provide
incentives for universities or other educational organizations
to adopt the principles that people have come to agree on.
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Alan Feldman
Area of Expertise
My area of expertise is in
teaching advanced placement psychology to inner city high
school students, and getting them to learn to love psychology,
and learning in general. I am certified as psychology, history
and mathematics teacher and am experienced in teaching all
three. Since I have taught at a local community college as an
adjunct for seven years (mostly introductory and child
development) I se the large discrepancies that exist between
college and high school students in motivation and attitude
toward learning. I believe that this has made me a better
teacher.
What are the findings or
theories from your area of expertise that we could apply to
higher education?
My first suggestion in regards
to this question deals with the university programs that train
elementary through high school level teachers. I firmly
believe (as does Diane Ravitch in Left Back) that teachers need far more content expertise. If there
is one thing I am certain of in education; it is that knowing
how to teach a subject comes more from knowing the material
than any other single factor. Even among some of the college
faculty that I have interacted with there seems to be a lack
of joy in learning about their subject. I think that at all
levels of education including higher levels there should
always be time for discussing what current experts
(scientists) in their respective fields are doing currently. I
will never forget when a bright sixth grade boy in a class I
was covering asked me if any scientists are alive! Yet, how
many college freshmen in chemistry, history, psychology,
biology-etc can name an important current scientist in the
subject? Students get excitement from an instructor who talks
about advances in their own areas of knowledge that are
currently being discovered.
To develop transfer of training
and to maintain attention, again I refer to the knowledge and
excitement level of the teacher. Asking difficult challenging
questions that create dissonance in students is an effective
way to do both. I usually start each section with a comment or
statement about a phenomenon in the world that is true but
outside the student’s ability to explain. Each of these
conundrums can be answered by selectively using the
information in the next section of the text or notes. In other
words I favor a guided constructivism.
Additionally for all students
(especially urban students) at all levels teaching and
assessing in a creative, analytic and practical fashion is
important. The inner city student thrives on practical
teaching strategies and tasks. This is validated by the
research of Robert Sternberg of Yale in numerous studies.
Students taught and assessed with all three approaches do
better even if they are only tested with analytical questions,
which is the norm.
What are the (most
important) unsolved problems? What should be included in an
agenda for research?
One important unsolved problem
is the establishment of better teacher education training
programs, including for college professors. Beginning teachers
at all levels should be enrolled in a mentorship with an
experienced colleague. I hope that some day local universities
and colleges would supply links between their staff members
and high school teachers to assist with content knowledge if
needed, and what they want beginning college student to know.
This also might encourage more students to attend that
university.
Another area that is lacking is
in the development of the effective use of heuristics in
education. General heuristics are often not that helpful to
student but specific content strategies are.
Teachers need to be shown what
some scholars have called the microstructure of teaching-what
behaviors they should specifically do to get an idea across
effectively. How does one use scaffolding and protocol
analysis in a particular
subject area?
A third area that is
problematic is he type of reading materials that are mandatory
in introductory English courses in high school and college. I
think that a major goal of teachers, in particular English
teachers, is to develop in students a love of reading prior to
forcing them to read great books of literature, which are
often beyond the student’s current ability. For example,
many high schools force students to read 5-7 Shakespeare plays
in one year. College freshmen are forced to read books for
which they have not developed the necessary prerequisite
skills.
What prototypes can you
point us toward where principles from the science of learning
are already being applied?
Activities based on giving
students analytic, practical and creative tasks are available,
as is the information on developing ones own curriculum to
establish such a model. The research and suggestions of
Lawrence Steinberg et al, as described in his book Beyond
The Classroom could greatly benefit the instruction of
inner city high school and college students.
I am fond of the writings and
research of Carol Dweck, Ellen Langer, John Bruer, Robert
Sternberg, Peter Gray, John Bransford, Diane Halpern and Roger
Schank. All have specific suggestions to improve education.
What are the major
problems with or barriers to redesigning higher education? Do
you have any ideas for overcoming them?
There is resistance to change
in quarters where the individuals in charge often do not read
or understand how to evaluate research. Every university
should have a leading cognitive scientist be the assistant to
the President. I am not kidding!
Due to a lack of funds many
universities can not help students that need extra
instruction. Many students want to do well, but often feel
they need extra assistance especially in science and
mathematics courses. The development of free web pages where
students could at anytime have access to extra material to
assist them with their course work. Establish programs where
each university senior is mandated to tutor underclassman for
a few hours per week possibly as a graduation requirement, or
for some incentive.
What
additional questions should we be asking?
How can the dissemination of
information from the conference be made most accessible to
those that can benefit from it?
How can the Internet best be
used to improve instruction. Web based courses seem to be on
the way in-what guidelines should be established?
What do we need to do so
that one outcome of the retreat is to effect change (in ways
that we want)?
Give specific task to
conference members with time lines.
The recommendations can not be
too global or vague.
Sending out information on
certain effective teaching strategies with the instructions on
how to do an in-service on the topic so that all professors or
teachers can benefit.
Get something published in a
number of venues with specific recommendations for the
improvement of education-from Early Childhood Education
to the Chronicle of Higher Education. Even having something in Psychology
today that has a wider readership. Sending a copy of specific
recommendations to every school of education in the United
States.
Create a well-publicized web
page with links to numerous content area specialists that list
materials and specific teaching strategies with
bibliographies.
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Howard T. Everson
What
is your Area of Expertise and what are the findings or
theories from your area that we could apply to higher
education?
- Educational Psychology
- Cognitive Psychology
- Metacognition, particularly around the issue of how to
measure certain aspects of metacognition and what measurements
look like and what the correlations look like with college
level learning. For
example, there is some work that we are doing in the area of
metacognition and self-regulated learning that suggests that
interventions early on (e.g., at the secondary school level)
may help students achieve more in college.
- Educational Measurement
- Correlates
of performance on academic cognitive abilities tests like the
SAT and success in academic settings and the workplace.
What are the (most important) unsolved problems? What should be
included in an agenda for research?
- Getting a better understanding of how expertise is
developed and nurtured through instruction.
- Transfer of learning across domains. From a measurement perspective, trying to understand
how to gauge student learning and achievement at the
postsecondary level has been very difficult and elusive. Getting professionals and academics and others to agree
on the forms of learning and academic achievement that are
really valued at the secondary and post-secondary level.
- The cognitive framework for understanding learning
styles and the interaction of learning styles with questions
of student aptitudes and abilities to learn from different
forms of instruction.
- We need theoretical help in understanding and
characterizing learning within specific domains so that we can
do a better job of providing diagnosis in those domain areas.
What prototypes can you point us toward where principles from the science of learning are already being applied?
We are making some progress with respect to understanding the
frameworks for learning from instruction. We are getting a better sense of what role prior
knowledge plays in learning and how to make learning more
active and a constructive process.
We also seem to understand what factors have been motivating
students to go on and develop their academic ability. The work on self-regulated and its effectiveness on
learning have been very insightful.
The area of cognitive neurosciences has also advanced our
knowledge of how our brain organizes information and how that
can help us to understand individual differences, but also how
to design learning environments to promote active learning. It is rather scattered and not well organized or
unified in the sense that somebody can put their hands on, but
that is part of the challenge to us.
What are the major problems with or barriers to redesigning higher
education?
Faculty attitudes. One of the major barriers has to do with the domain
specificity and control that faculty have over specific areas. Many people who are teaching at postsecondary level are
not good teachers. They
may understand their discipline very well or be expert in
their disciplines, but that does not mean that they have the
ability to organize the material, present it effectively, and
design instruction in ways that maximize learning. A lot of what goes on in higher education classrooms is
poor in the sense of having low quality instructional design.
Measure student learning. Many faculty have no understanding of how to measure
student learning. They
give examinations that are poorly constructed and they give
tests that are not well calibrated or easily scored. Faculty cannot articulate to the students the kinds of
standards or the knowledge, skills, and abilities that they
are looking to measure and that they want students to measure. So it is not uncommon to go into a large lecture course
in the first or second year of college and see poorly
constructed multiple choice exams or short answer kinds of
exams that place a heavy emphasis on short term memory
processes, but don’t value or measure very well deep
conceptual understanding on the part of the students.
Do you have any ideas for overcoming them?
Faculty need to be given exemplars of good instructional design looks
like. We need to
communicate to them the principles of effective instructional
design. We need
to share with them in a more systematic way theories of human
learning so they begin to approach their tasks with a stronger
theoretical framework of how humans learn.
What additional questions should we be asking?
We need to ask questions about how the various disciplines are
organized cognitively and conceptually, so that we are asking
about what contributes to the cognitive complexity within a
discipline. If we
had a better understanding of this we can be more prescriptive
with respect to instructional design.
We have to ask questions about the role of collaborative learning
activities and what they mean for instruction and assessment
in postsecondary education.
We should ask questions about the effects of school reform
initiatives at the secondary school level and what they imply
for the kinds of teaching that takes place at the
postsecondary school level. Many students in the future will emerge from secondary
schools where the teaching and learning practices in those
secondary schools will have been dramatically different than the teaching and learning
practices they will encounter at the colleges and
universities. They
may have trouble adapting and succeeding as a result.
What do we need to do so that one outcome of the retreat is to
effect change (in ways that we want)?
We need develop a strategic plan that emerges from the retreat,
where we have a set of research and implementation goals. I would like to see a strategic plan emerge that was
broad based and emphasized collaboration with other groups and
organizations interested in issues of student learning and
instructional design.
We also need strategies for seeking funding, so that we do not
loose momentum.
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Kevin Dunbar
Area of Expertise
- Research
on how scientists think and reason and how scientists
train graduate students and post-docs. Over the past
decade we have investigated the ways that scientists think
“live” at lab meetings and how students in the labs
are trained to conduct science. We have also gone back
into our own lab and conducted controlled experiments on
phenomena that we have identified in naturalistic
settings. This methodology I have labeled InVivo/InVitro
Cognition.
What are the findings or theories from your area of expertise that
we could apply to higher education?
Analogy is a key process used to both educate scientists and to help
scientists make discoveries. The classic findings in
psychology are that people have great difficulty at using
analogy; either in remembering analogs or using analogs to
solve problems. Experimenters have shown that people tend to
rely on superficial similarities between components of an
analogy, rather than the underlying structural relations. In my research, we have found that analogy both based
on superficial features and on deep structural features is
frequently used. What
is most important is the goal that the reasoner has.
Superficial similarities are good at fixing minor problems,
more structural analogies are good for formulating hypotheses,
and really far analogies are good for explaining things to
others. I have also found that analogy is a key to training
scientists and that it is key to helping scientists make
discoveries. Education must tailor the analogies to fit the
particular goal. In addition, there are inherent dangers in
making analogies, such as only seeing the similarities and not
seeing the differences that can lead people astray. These
problems with analogy also need to be confronted.
Distributed cognition. What
happens to thinking and problem solving in the group process? What type of interactions lead people to make new
discoveries and learn new things? The composition of the group is a key factor. Groups derived of people from the same background do
not solve problems as easily as groups with people from
different backgrounds with similar goals. One of the problems is that people from the same
background all draw from the same base of knowledge, those
with different backgrounds are able to pull in different types
of knowledge.
If you want
to use groups to learn, it is good to have groups with
different backgrounds. The key, however, is that the groups must have a common goal. If group members have different goals, the group will
not learn, and the results can be disastrous. I have studied groups with common goals and with
different goals and found that the reasoning and problem
solving strategies used by the groups differs widely. While
collaborative learning is a hot topic in education, it is
important to structure the groups in ways that will facilitate
learning. Overlapping goals and knowledge is the key factor.
Training Methods. We
have also been looking at how people plan experiments and have
found that the classic training in experimental design (using
control groups and experimental groups) is often too basic for
the work that current scientists are doing. When we are training scientists, we are often doing so
in very simple ways. Simple research designs are not
consistent with what scientists actually do. For the most part, scientists are currently trained in an
apprenticeship method. Students
are expected to learn experimentation by being in the lab, as
if through osmosis. This sort of training for future
scientists is very much a hit or miss process. It can result in a loss of some very talented students
that are just not given enough instruction or motivation to
continue to become scientists. Thus, we are faced with the problem of preventing
talented students from dropping out. This is a very large
problem all across the educational spectrum.
Unexpected findings in research. Unexpected findings account for about 50-80% of the
findings. There
is little explicit training on how to do this and scientist are very vague and
quasi religious about what they really do talking of the
goddess Fortuna and flashes of insight. We have found that
rather than being the victims of chance, scientists have well
developed strategies for dealing with the unexpected.
Professors tend to blame the method; post-docs and grad
students tend to think that they have found something new. The types of analogies used and distributed reasoning
strategies that are used vary as a function of how many
unexpected findings are obtained. Furthermore, there gender
differences in the way s that unexpected findings are treated:
Men are more likely to assume that they know what was wrong. Women are more likely to repeat the experiment with
different hypothesis and to systematically eliminate problems.
Dealing with the
unexpected should be a key component of our science education.
What
are the (most important) unsolved problems? What should be
included in an agenda for research?
Looking at
how distributed reasoning works in groups. If you want a group to work the group has to have not
only common goals, but also must have knowledge about the
problem. Much of the work that has been done demonstrating that groups
do not help in problem solving and reasoning has often given
the groups arbitrary problems to solve that they do not care
about. To
understand how groups work in thinking and reasoning
processes, research must look at groups that are involved in
solving problems that the individuals in the group care about
solving.
There is
also a problem with our culture of the individual. A great amount of science research is done in groups and in
lab settings. An
interesting occurrence is that someone working in the group
will come across an unexpected finding that they cannot
explain. They
will then bring this finding to the group and will begin the
process of discovering some meaning to the finding. If you then go back several months later and ask the
person about the discovery they will say that they did it all
on their own, even when you have the transcripts that
demonstrate that the group was actively involved in changing
the way that the person thought about the problem. This notion of the “lone researcher” is definitely
something that we need to move away from. One way to do this is implement group work earlier in
the educational experience.
What
prototypes can you point us toward where principles from the
science of learning are already being applied?
I don’t
think that there has been a lot of application of the science
of learning principles. Analogies
have been used quite a bit, but have shown mixed results in
their level of effectiveness. With analogies it really depends on how they are used. There is also the MIT media-lab approach that uses
computer programs to help guide learning, however unless you
give people underlying structure this is not going to be very
useful.
Some other
examples of prototypes include case-based reasoning approaches
and the work by John Anderson.
What
are the major problems with or barriers to redesigning higher
education? Do you have any ideas for overcoming them?
It is not
simple and it is not straightforward. There are no easy answers and there is no magic wand
that you can wave that will instantly make people better
learners. People
have unrealistic expectations about what can be done. Applying new techniques will generally only bring about
modest increases in performance.
We have
things such as drop out rates, especially among women in the
sciences. The limited numbers of women in sciences is a great
waste of talent and is an example of a problem that cannot be
solved by simply changing the cognitive approach to education. There are many things that intertwine to cause this
problem, issues related to the culture and to various social
issues. It is
important that we include motivation and social/cultural
issues in our research. Merely
making changes in the cognitive area of education will not
necessarily change things like drop out rates. We need to look at the cultural and social issues as
well. We need
both situational research and educational research. The divide between these two areas is a major barrier
that we need to overcome.
What
do we need to do so that one outcome of the retreat is to
effect change (in ways that we want)?
Break people
into small groups with a common goal. Want to avoid having the groups argue that their
specific solutions are right. What would be helpful is to get people to come up a list of
various options a number of different strategies that could be
used in small groups and then getting these lists out to the
larger groups.
(Back to top)
Frank Dempster
(Back to top)
Donald F. Dansereau
What are the findings or theories from your area of expertise that
we could apply to higher education?
- Teaching people
to use and understand non-linear representations (e.g., maps,
diagrams, flow charts, animations). We now have
a plethora of these non-linear presentations available to us. The linear presentation of text has been explored, but our
literacy for these non-linear presentations has lagged behind. We have been able to see the effectiveness of using
non-linear representations with students, and we have even
gotten better outcomes with people in drug abuse counseling
with map presentations, especially when their verbal skills
were not high.
- Entertaining multiple perspectives. Nowadays,
because of advances in technology, you can communicate with
just about anybody. Being
able to take the perspectives of others, for both
communication and creativity purposes, is something that needs
to be integrated into courses and curricula. We have worked with the concept of a Thought Team, a
set of imaginary consultants, and have found positive effects
on learning.
- Having people
improve their ability to work collaboratively or engage in
cooperative learning. I think more cooperative learning can be integrated in
the adult curricula (especially in the university and in
business training).
What are the (most important) unsolved problems? What should be
included in an agenda for research?
There are
a lot of principles and useful ideas out there, but the
challenge is to develop attractive packages or tools that
teachers and students can actually use and integrate into what
they already do. Having
some experience with school systems at the lower levels, I
know teachers get this stuff all the time and unless it is
packaged in a way that can be easily integrated it into what
they already do, they will just ignore it. This whole notion
of research on how to best get technology packaged and
transferred is lagging.
What prototypes can you point us toward where principles from the
science of learning are already being applied?
At the
lower educational levels, cooperative learning has been
something that has been pushed by getting commitments from
administrators. When
you get into universities, the whole transference process is
different, because there is no top down authority that is
going to adopt a curriculum or a practice and then make
everybody use it. In
universities, change has to be a grass roots kind of movement,
in which you have to influence the individual faculty members. So selling it to administrators is really not going to
work in the university setting. The people who have the best handle on how to get new
ideas incorporated into learning are the booksellers. They are in education for the competition and they have
to be very aware on how to transfer materials they develop (CD
ROMs, videos, supplements to their textbook). So I think they would be good people to bring on board
to find out what works.
Language learning has been a place where some of the principles have
been applied pretty well, but again I’m not sure if it helps
us much because many of the principles that have been applied
are fairly simple—extensions of key-word mnemonics, for
example.
What are the major problems with or barriers to redesigning higher
education?
One
barrier that needs to be overcome is the sort of “sage on
the stage” mentality that most of us have. Must of us that teach, like to be up there and be the focus
of attention. We
need to shift to more of a “guide on the side” kind of
mentality. In
some sense there is a barrier that has to be respected. First of all, staged presentations is what most of us
have grown up wanting to do and learning to do, so we have to
be very respectful of that sort of mentality. But on the other hand we also need to try to move
towards allowing more student-to-student activity and not just
instructor to student activity.
The main challenge is integrating any changes we may propose with
what is already being done. If we are going to try to make changes, no matter how
good the principles are and no matter how effective people
believe them to be, they can’t just overhaul the system. The
question that people would ask is what is broke? Why make
these changes? Is
education as we know it not working and do you have evidence
that is not working? And
that is what the consumer is going to be saying. To motivate people to change, the impetus has to be
something that does not challenge their very being. It has to be something that says here is some stuff
that will enhance what you are already doing. We have to have “plug and play” tools, rather than
programs.
Do you have any ideas for overcoming them?
How we
deal with this is important. Changing education is a bottom up process. We have to somehow make contact with the individual
faculty members. I
was thinking about some sort of electronic mail or newsletter
that could be created as a dissemination tool that gave best
practices or ideas, but in addition gave opportunities for
workshops and opportunities to receive videos on some of these
techniques. I
don’t think I have ever received a newsletter from a
non-profit organization that really tried to directly say here
are some new ideas, lessons, and materials that you can use in
your college teaching. I get plenty of that from booksellers, but not from somebody
that I would consider unbiased. Something maybe like a
consumer reports that gives some really good techniques and
details how they can get a hold of them. In
addition, I think that the packaging of whatever we come up
with is going to be critical and we are going to need advice
from marketing folks and not just psychologists.
What additional questions should we be asking?
Some
people are going to say what is wrong with what we are already
doing. Why do I
need new techniques? And
that leads to how do we evaluate what is going on now? How do we decide that things need to be improved?
It is okay to say I have all these principles, but a
lot of instructors, especially those not in psychology or
education, would say that all that psychologists do is verify
common sense and that they already do all this stuff. And they may say why do I need you coming in and
telling me this when I have had 20 years of experience
teaching and I have learned all these concepts. So we need to have something in place that says there is a
gap in what is going on already. So that’s why I try to look for instances where the
technology is changing or the culture is shifting (e.g., the
expansion of non-linear representations) and suggest that we
need to cope with this. Then
maybe we can sell teachers on those kinds of ideas because
these are tools that are for new or emerging problems.
What do we need to do so that one outcome of the retreat is to
effect change (in ways that we want)?
There are
probably three levels of research that should be put on agenda
by granting institutions. One is to pick a couple of well-developed packages or
tools or whatever we are going to call them and look at
transference strategies. I don’t think we know enough about how to transfer
things into colleges. So
pick something that has been well established and run some
regional transference studies to see if we can understand the
best way to do this (i.e., newsletters, websites, or whatever
it may be). The
second layer is to take some less developed tools and come up
with some palatable packages and evaluate them. This level would involve things that we already know to
be effective and now try to make them so that they would fit
into a university curriculum. The last level would be to develop new tools based on
issues that seem important and principles that seem promising
and test them.
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Rodney R. Cocking
Area of Expertise
Developmental science, specifically interested in learning processes,
symbolic functioning, representational thinking, and how you
can think in the abstract
What are the findings or theories from your area of expertise that
we could apply to higher education?
I think that the major findings come from following five targeted areas
each of which has been well researched.
- Structure of knowledge and memory
- Analyses of problem solving and reasoning
- From developmental psychology, we know about the early
foundations of learning and how early learning relates to
later learning
- Meta-cognitive processes
- A newer area that is gaining attention is looking at how
culture and cultural experiences mediate learning, memory,
and problem solving
These arefive areas that we know something about and that we are ready
to use for influencing programs and curricula in schools.
What are the (most important) unsolved problems? What should be
included in an agenda for research?
The biggest unsolved problem is in terms of the mediators of learning. For example, technology has become a major influence in
our lives, both in schools and in our homes. Technology is pervading our lives, and yet we do not
have a good understanding or knowledge base of how technology
is a mediator of learning and understanding. I could also say that is true of the issue of culture
and cultural experiences. I think that the mediators of learning are what we
really need more information about: culture and technology are
the two high-profile examples of this.
We need to know about conceptual change. We want research to
look at how mediators influence our concept formation. We
need to know how they are used to alter our preconceptions so
that we can change our beliefs and change our understandings
and change our behavior as we acquire more information. Cultural belief systems influence how we approach
problem solving. Children come to school with a lot of notions
that need to be corrected; those notions are mediated through
the culture. Teachers
also have their own conceptions of how children learn, as
teachers gain more experience in teaching and in teaching with
technology, they may need to change their conceptions of
children’s learning. The
big unsolved problems lie in our understanding of what it
takes to change people’s preconceptions, this is for both
students and for teachers. The big challenge is in the area of
conceptual change and what it takes for learning to occur.
What
prototypes can you point us toward where principles from the
science of learning are already being applied ?
The important prototypes are the ones that have been built from
what we know about meta-cognition. These prototypes come right out of basic developmental
research that demonstrates the role that self-awareness plays
in learning and in terms of appraising the learning processes. The prototypes that have taught children to how to ask
questions and how to develop self-awareness of their learning
process have been influential in many areas, including the
development of mathematical programs that are based in
meta-cognition. These
math programs teach students how to estimate and how to
diagram information and these are concepts that come out of
our understanding of meta-cognition.
What
are the major problems with or barriers to redesigning higher
education? Do you have any ideas for overcoming them?
I think the two areas of continuity and time on task combined
are the biggest problem that both teachers and school systems
are faced with. If
you have a curriculum that is set up with a certain fixed
number of units that a teacher has to work through in a
specific amount of time, then the goals and objectives are
built around the number of units and the amount of time
available. We know from effective learning that understanding and
competency cannot be rushed. I think a definite barrier is the way we conceptualize
time and continuity.
A big part of overcoming this barrier is by understanding that
competency and understanding are not off-the-shelf ideas that
can just be handed to the learner after a specified amount of
time. You achieve
that understanding, on the teachers’ part at least, by
changing the instruction that teachers receive in colleges of
education. We can
work on this problem by instructing future teachers in areas
of developmental psychology and developmental processes so
that they learn about skill acquisition and competency
development, and so that they develop an understanding that it
takes time and time on task to develop competency.
What additional questions should we be asking?
If we are looking at student performance and what it takes to
move students from being a novice in an area to being
competent in an area, we need to ask what the corollaries are
to moving from novice to competent performance. What are the support systems that influence this? What are aspects of the child’s family and background
that correlate with this learning process? Again, we really need to look at the mediators of
learning and the role that the culture and social influences
play. A major
correlate involves the role of transfer of learning. We need to do a better job of linking domains of
knowledge and linking knowledge from context to context. The role of prior knowledge and students background
knowledge and the role of culture as a mediator are all really
big unanswered questions that influence students’ learning.
What do we need to do so that one outcome of the retreat is to
effect change (in ways that we want)?
I think that we really need to think long and hard about what it
means to effect change in colleges of education. I mentioned that is one of the biggest barriers that we
face and I think that we need to spend some time talking about
the hardest problems to solve. The toughest problems are involved in changing the
training teachers get. Organizational
change is very hard and I would be very interested in hearing
other people’s perspectives on how to go about this.
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Alberto Cañas
Area of Expertise
- The use of technology in education
- Software tools in education
What are the findings or theories from your area of expertise that
we could apply to higher education?
- Fostering knowledge modeling to support learning both
for evaluation and collaboration between students. Having some kind of a medium by which students can
express what they know about a topic and share it with others.
- Using the Internet as means for collaboration, as
opposed to a means of just posting content for the students to
browse. Having
students be knowledge constructors instead of just information
consumers. One of
the problems that I have seen is the lack of tools that are
developed open environments for collaboration or knowledge
construction (both at K-12 and higher education).
What are the (most important) unsolved problems? What should be
included in an agenda for research?
Departments. One problem we have with the universities is that
departments are very compartmentalized and many departments
teach their courses and don’t really care that much about
the service courses they teach. You have a course in one topic that a department
teaches and it has nothing to do with the other courses from
other departments. This
makes it very difficult to create any kind of
interdisciplinary programs. It makes it difficult to take advantage of content from
different departments and put together courses.
Lectures. Another problem is that a number of students can’t
seem to get away from the professor standing up and lecturing. Most professors love to stand up and lecture. They assume that the students that sit down in the
class will learn from the professor lecturing and getting away
from this style of teaching will be somewhat difficult.
Linearity of the
Courses. Sometimes when I have a lot of students in my class, it is
hard to get away from the textbook. You have the linear sequence that the textbooks gives
you and you really cannot teach things in another order,
mainly because you cannot really base your teaching on
articles, change the order of the chapters, and because
textbooks are written in a linear way. Technology can help us if we use it wisely. In most cases we are taking the technology to just put
core courses on the network. The problem is that every university is coming up with
its own courses. How
many psychology 101 courses are we going to put on the
Internet before we find out that most of them are pretty bad? We are going back to what happened many years ago when
every university had to create their own textbooks because
nobody was willing to use somebody else’s textbook, until we
found out that most of the textbooks were useless. Then we started to share textbooks and now it is common
to use somebody else’s textbook. The online content will get to the point where we will
be able to pull online content from different places and
create our own courses the way we want them.
Lack of Software in Education. There is very little software to support any type of
collaboration or open environments for learning. Most of the tools that we use mostly come from the
business area. We
do not really develop many tools that foster a learning
environment. We
need software that allows students to create and construct a
model or a simulation of something.
What prototypes can you point us toward where principles from the
science of learning are already being applied (?)
We do a good job at the two extremes of education. Kindergarten is a good example because kids go and work
on their own and do research and there is somebody that
supervises what they are doing, but they are not into a very
tight curriculum. Teachers
make sure that the students get a balanced education. Students work in groups and collaborate. We do a very good job at the masters and PhD level,
where there is a supervisor that makes sure that the student
gets a balanced education and gets some research in some
topic. Graduate
seminars are not linear in the sense that you have a textbook
and it is followed, rather you have discussions and you read
and present articles. It
is somewhere in the middle where we have large lectures that
we have a big problem. Technology
can help us. We
can take advantage of technology to make the content of the
courses available in a modular way.
Like I said I work more with K-12 schools. There is one school that I work with in Brazil that
really broke down the curriculum. They do not have textbooks, math, science, or English
classes, but they have tried to integrate all the courses into
projects. It is
probably quite an extreme and we may not get to that, but it
shows some of the interesting aspects of what happens when you
are trying to integrate different areas (e.g., science, math,
and history together). Using
this method with these kids it has been very effective,
although there are some areas (e.g., algebra) that cannot be
integrate it as well as others.
There is a very interesting course that is taking place down at Brazil by
a colleague. She
is training, through distance learning, 500 teachers (or
support personnel) throughout the whole country. The distance learning is not putting all of the content
of the course on the web, but rather it involves having each
of the support personnel contact a teacher that has
established a group and have them come up with a project. The project is the basis of the course. One of the interesting things is that they did not know
what all these teachers were going to come up with as their
projects. So two
weeks before the course begins, they don’t really know what
the real topics that are going to be covered are, but they had
50 people to support each the 500 teachers. Most of what they would do is collaboration and
exchange through email and other tools. What I found interesting was that the ratio of
instructor to student was 10 to 1, which is completely the
opposite of what you find with distance learning courses. The ratio of most distance learning classes is much
larger because you assume that a single instructor can carry
on many students. I
like the approach that they were doing because they have
access to many people while they are teaching.
What are the major problems with or barriers to redesigning higher
education? Do you have any ideas for overcoming them?
The major
barrier is that the universities tend to be the most
conservative organizations in terms of change. The other problem is the faculty. We are going to have to get the faculty to change. Faculty are used to the lecture modality and they will
lecture as well.
What additional questions should we be asking?
I think one question we should ask is how do we evaluate whether
people have learned or not. One of the problems I have with higher-level education
is that a lot times classes only have one midterm and one
final and that takes up the majority of the grade. This approach assumes those tests are a good way to
evaluate whether people have learned or not and not everyone
is a good test takers and they don’t have a different
opportunity to show us what they have really learned.
What do we need to do so that one outcome of the retreat is to
effect change (in ways that we want)?
The main way to get change is to implement and show the results. You can write as much as you want, but it is not until
you can show it that you can achieve change.
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Merry Bullock
Area of Expertise
Early cognitive development (substantive); science policy and
program development (from perspective of a professional
association -American Psychological Association).
What are the findings or theories from your area of expertise that
we could apply to higher education?
Cognitive development, specifically the development of expert knowledge
and procedures. I am interested in looking at how the acquisition of new
knowledge and procedures interact with prior knowledge and how
we can use prior knowledge to design curricula. Some of the theories and findings from early cognitive
development that are applicable to higher education involve
the development of expertise in a content area, and the
development of expert procedures (“how to” strategies).
What is important in this regard is to use what we know about
what the person brings to the classroom in order to enhance
instruction techniques and content. For example, people form very strong views early on
about how the world works, including concept content and
assumptions about event structures. Sometimes this
understanding is incomplete, or skewed, or simply wrong –
but it is not a simple matter to simply teach what is right.
This entire field, labeled ‘cognitive misperceptions’
yielded some important insights about how curricula need to
keep both starting and end points in mind. And now there is
research that goes further and helps us understand not only
how to overcome cognitive misperceptions but also how to
integrate the development of expert knowledge and procedures
acquired in a formal setting with everyday contexts.
What are the (most important) unsolved problems? What should be
included in an agenda for research?
In thinking about the changes that are taking place in higher education two things come to mind
immediately. First,
there are substantial changes in the demographics of people
attending higher education. Secondly, there are huge changes that have taken place in the
technology that we have available. These two changes mean that
the “face” of education is changing. There are tools we
can use to think about these changes, and to think about how
to alter curricula.
As demographics change, the
structure and content of education may change as well. At an
organizational level, we probably need research on the
structures of higher education – to ask what sorts of models
(liberal arts, community college, technical schools,
apprentice models) are appropriate for what sorts of outcomes,
but this is beyond the scope of psychology! At a curricular
level, it would be interesting to have more comparative
studies like those currently available for mathematics and
reading – to be able to map out how different strategies in
different settings affect learning differently. And at a very
direct level, it is probably important to assure that our
curricula prepare students to live in an increasingly
international world – to “internationalize” the
curriculum. There is cross-cultural research that can be
useful here.
Technology is the current buzzword,
and for good reason. Technological advances are happening
incredibly rapidly – we will soon be able to have every
imaginable sort of classroom available to many more people –
through virtual classes, high speed cable links, and the like.
We will also be able to have every imaginable sort of study
materials – including all of the senses. But we don’t have
the research to know how this will impact learning, much less
longer term effects. We have a grand experiment going on right
now, and one priority I would assign is research on learning
in a technologically sophisticated environment. To think about
how education might best demographic changes, we can look at
the large corpus of cross-cultural research , I think that it
would be helpful to look at what cross-cultural psychology can
provide in terms of structuring curriculum. Cross-cultural psychologists have had to find ways to
communicate concepts across different cultures and have had to
find ways to transmit information to different cultures. It could be useful to look at the strategies of
cross-cultural psychology as we look at reforming higher
education.
An additional issue that is related
to research concerns collaboration. How do we get psychology researchers to work with
education researchers? Traditionally
there has been very little cross-pollination between
psychology research and education research. Funders and policy makers (such as NSF, NRC) have been
trying for about a decade to bring findings from cognitive
science to education, but the going is very slow. The two groups of researchers seem to speak different
languages, to read different literatures – and although
there are certainly many stunning exceptions, cutting edge
cognitive research does not inform education research.
What prototypes can you point us toward where principles from the
science of learning are already being applied (e.g.,
activities, courses, fields of study, degree programs, or
entire systems)?
There are certainly people that have programs where
principles from the science of learning are being applied. They are mostly in math and science education. Many of the people that are doing this kind of work are
people that are attending this conference.
What
are the major problems with or barriers to redesigning higher
education? Do you have any ideas for overcoming them?
One of the big problems is that the
application of cognitive science and the science of learning
is not wide spread. Single
schools and single schools systems are doing things
individually, but we are not at a point where all teachers are
aware of these principles. I really think that all science and math teachers
should have an understanding of “lay” conceptions of the
topics they teach (which give rise to cognitive
misconceptions), and should have some understanding of what we
know about conceptual change. In order to achieve this we need to have scientists
become better at translating their research into a form that
can be used by the practitioner. There needs to be a method or a format where current
research findings are translated into practical teaching
suggestions—a list of best teaching practices based on
scientific findings. There is a lag between what is being done
in research and what people use in practice. As a field, we
need to get better at translating current research findings
into practical approaches. We need a mechanism for getting the very best most
current research into a wide spread forum, such as, getting
this information into a PTA newsletter. I think that this is
an area where professional organizations can play a part. I have often spent time asking scientists to write
things in layman’s terms. Often though, this does not work and what you actually
need is someone who can write that way, but who also
understands the content area. Either way it is important to get the research into the hands
of those who practice.
Institutional problems- higher
education takes place in large institutions that have a
certain amount of inertia. Getting large structures to change is difficult. We might benefit from getting I/O psychologists
perspectives on the best methods for getting organizations to
change.
What do we need to do so that one outcome of the retreat is to
effect change (in ways that we want)?
A very, very concrete list of
recommendations with a specific list of tasks that need to be
accomplished is needed. We
need a taskmaster, and whether the tasks are given to
individuals or to organizations, we need to have someone who
can delegate these tasks. We need really concrete tasks with measurable outcomes. Additionally, publications that list the best practices
for whatever goal it is that one wants to achieve.
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John Bransford
Area of Expertise
Learning sciences, technology,
and teaching and the overlap among the three.
What are the findings or theories from your area of expertise that we could apply to
higher education?
Many of the things that I could
talk about are mentioned in the National Academy of
Science’s Report, How
People Learn, which came out in 1999. This report
provides a really good synthesis of what we know about
learning and its implications for teaching. It is focused mainly on K-12, but many of the implications
could be applied to higher education. A central component to this is what I could call “The
How People Learn Framework” that suggests four lenses that
you want to use in any classroom situation.>
- Knowledge-Centered. The degree to which it is knowledge-centered, which
means the degree to which the nature of the knowledge that
is being taught is organized in a way that supports
understanding and subsequent transfer. In many courses what is really happening is
memorization masquerading as understanding.
- Learner-Centered. The degree to which the classroom is
learner-centered. To
what extent does one really know the preconceptions about
the subject matter that people bring to the class as well
as preconceptions that the students have of themselves as
learners. To
what extent is that thinking made visible and worked with
and honored.
- Assessment-Centered. The degree to which the class is
assessment-centered, and by this I do not mean that you
test the students to death. But what you do, is provide frequent opportunities
for the students to test their own knowledge and to see if
they understand, and then you provide them with
opportunities to revise. This is assessment for purposes of feedback and revision
and is probably the single most important thing that we
could do to facilitate learning.
- Community Environment. The degree to which you have created a community
where people feel free to say that they do not understand
and the degree to which they feel free to collaborate with
one another rather than compete with one another. There
are a lot of things that can contribute to this, including
how you structure the grading of the class.
You could then talk about the
role that technology can play at each of these levels and how
technology can be used to strengthen the framework.
What are the (most
important) unsolved problems? What should be included in an
agenda for research?
A huge one is the problem with
assessment. What
we want are assessments that can really tell us about the
quality of learning, yet many of the assessments that we have
in place often just measure the ability to memorize
information. We have some assessments that measure transfer,
but the theories of transfer that underlie the assessments are
really restricted. They
really are what I would call sequestered problem solving
because students are only given information to solve the
current problem, a much stronger way is to look at whether
learners have enough to information to apply what they learned
in a new situation. The question becomes: how do we really assess in a way
that fits new theories of transfer and is a better indicator
of life-long learning? We
want transfer that facilitates future learning. This is a different paradigm, looking at the assessment
of transfer of knowledge rather than our current assessment of
sequestered problem solving.
If you then work backwards from
this perspective, you begin to ask questions relating to the
way that the knowledge is structured. How can we structure the nature of knowledge and
organize this information both at the level of a single course
and also across the span of a four-year college curriculum
that will allow for future learning? We can also look at how information is taught and how
we can create the appropriate macro-structure for courses that
will allow people the ability to tie the courses together. Students often do not have a good concept of how
different domains of knowledge are connected: how can we help
to facilitate students in developing an understanding of these
connections?
What prototypes can you
point us toward where principles from the science of learning
are already being applied?
Chapter 9 of How
People Learn has a lot of great examples of prototypes.
Some examples of people that are doing this work include:
- Jim Minstrell and Earl Hunt—strong work on using assessment and
feedback.
- Jose Mestre’s work and his use of the class
talk system to provide instant feedback.
- My
website
What are the major
problems with or barriers to redesigning higher education? Do
you have any ideas for overcoming them?
The biggest one is time—faculty time—this is a huge problem. The other one is faculty incentive, no matter what the
rhetoric is, teaching is not considered as important as
research. For
most of the people who will be at this conference though, the
ability to do research on one’s teaching fits our research
area. If we could
begin to build a community where it is valued by an academic
community to combine strong domain specific-expertise with
pedagogical content knowledge needed to help students learn
and to assess their learning, then this would be a strong way
to overcome some of the barriers. Time and isolation are some of the major barriers.
The other problem is students. You have to give students a reason for changing the
structure. Some of the changes will require students to be
more active and might disrupt the way that students have
become accustomed to being successful, for example their
mastery of multiple choice exams and such. Unless you provide
students with an explanation for why you are changing the
rules, they often get very upset.
What additional questions
should we be asking?
How do we use technology
to start to leverage all of the knowledge that is available
about teaching and learning that is dispersed throughout the
nation, but is not in a form that is easy for people to get
and to learn from? How
can we start to communicate our ideas as learning scientists
in ways that make contact with professors in other disciplines
who don’t know our lingo? Simply having them read our journal articles is not the
best method. We
have begun a project that where we have talks on the Internet. It is a whole new way of publishing that allows many
different voices to be heard in a way that people are able to
understand. We
really need to re-think how we communicate our knowledge and
how we can share our resources with one another and we have a
great opportunity to do that through technology.
What do we need to do so
that one outcome of the retreat is to effect change (in ways
that we want)?
We must do something other than just write a report. It would be nice to have a place for people to go that
takes them on a journey and that directs them to papers and
resources.
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Elizabeth L. Bjork
(Back to top)
Robert A. Bjork
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John R. Anderson
What are the findings or theories from your area of expertise that
we could apply to higher education?
Our research
has involved developing computer-based tutors to mathematics.
Our tutors are currently in use by about 100,000
students around the country. They use a cognitive model
of student problem solving that is capable of solving the
problems in the same way students do and making the same
errors. We use these models to interpret student
behavior and provide instructions appropriate to where the
student is in the problem-solving situation. They are also
used to implement a mastery-based system whereby students are
promoted through the material as they master it. This has
produced significant achievement gains. A similar
approach could be taken to instruction in higher education and
indeed a little of this is already done in my courses at CMU.
What are the (most important)
unsolved problems? What should be included in an agenda for
research?
To be able to apply this approach it is necessary to precisely define what
the goals of a course are and do a cognitive task analysis of
the competences involved. This is very time consuming
and is only practical when the cost of the effort can be
amortized over the benefit to many students. Developing
efficient cognitive task analysis is a major problem.
What prototypes can you point us
toward where principles from the science of learning are
already being applied (e.g., activities, courses, fields of
study, degree programs, or entire systems)?
There are the math tutors (see http://carnegielearning.com)
and at CMU we have tutors for programming an beginning parts
of cognitive modeling.
What are the major problems with
or barriers to redesigning higher education? Do you have any
ideas for overcoming them?
I think a
significant problem is coming to consensus on the goals.
There was an effort in Britain to deliver
computer-based instruction in psychology. I do not know
the ultimate outcome (I could find out) but I do know that
they suffered enormous problems because psychology faculty
could not agree on the objectives (or how to measure them) for
basic courses
What additional questions should
we be asking?
How can we be
precise in formulating our goals. Your current web site
speaks of "maximizing transfer to the real world",
"enhancing critical thinking abilities",
"encouraging the habit of life-long learning" and so
does everyone else. One would think psychologists would
bring some definition to these apple-pie goals.
What do we need to do so that one
outcome of the retreat is to effect change (in ways that we
want)?
There are
numerous efforts afoot to reform education involving things
such as new technology or new theories of instruction and
curriculum. These efforts are largely devoid of
any concern with psychological theory or good empirical
assessment of outcomes. Given that these efforts
have large constituencies and can command large amounts of
funding, I think it becomes important to figure out how
we can get psychological concerns represented at these tables.
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Franca Agnoli
Area of expertise
I teach statistics and experimental design as a member of a psychology faculty in
Italy. My areas of expertise are primarily in human reasoning,
problem solving, and related developmental issues.
What are the findings or theories from your area of expertise that
we could apply to higher education?
There is a large literature of
theories and findings in human reasoning and problem solving
that could be applied to higher education. Much of the
research has focused on the shortcomings or failures of human
reasoning. Some work, including my own, has shown that some
simple training sessions can improve reasoning in these
situations. For example, training with Venn diagrams helps
people avoid the conjunction fallacy (this has been done with
paper and pencil as well as computerized sessions).
What are the most
important unsolved problems? What should be included in an
agenda for research?
One of the major problems is
that what is known is not transferred into the teaching
curriculum, in part because university professors may not know
the relevant findings. Consider, for example, university
statistics courses. We know that people are better able to
deal with frequencies than probabilities (very large
differences in correct solution to problems dealing with
conditional probabilities according to whether they were
presented in a frequency format or in a probability format). I
doubt that many statistics teachers (or statistics book
writers) know about this result.
Even though we know a fair amount about statistical reasoning (what
are the difficulties, etc), very little has trickled down to
teachers of college students (or pre-college students). This
is true in both the US and Europe (I can talk about Italy, but
also there is recent evidence from Germany).
The same must be true for teaching many other subjects. Professors
of physics, chemistry, mathematics, history, and economics are
experts in their domains, but they are not experts in the
factors that enable students to learn most effectively.
Transferring that knowledge so that it can be used to make
education more effective in all fields is a major problem.
A second problem is that even
those things that are widely known and accepted are not
consistently applied. For example, it is well known that
people will not learn a problem solving method by watching or
listening to someone else applying the method. People learn by
applying the methods themselves. This is called learning by
doing.
Training effects are quite
large when “learning by doing” training is used in
teaching statistical reasoning. For example, students have a
lot of difficulty understanding probability distributions and
sampling distributions. Suppose that they actually removed
balls from urns or rolled dice instead of just reading about
these events. They would understand these concepts much
better.
The benefits of learning by
doing are well established. So why do we still teach 300
students at a time in large classrooms? (At least in Europe
this is the case, and at large US Universities the same). In
smaller classes, students could have more hands-on
experiences, either with physical objects or through use of
computer simulations.
A third major problem is that
we don’t teach students how to approach or solve problems
like those experienced in the real world. In university
classes we generally focus on controlled situations and
problems that have a single correct answer. Real world
problems are vastly more complex and may require making
tradeoffs among many ambiguous alternatives. Solving these
problems requires skills having to do with planning,
scheduling and coordinating. And large real-world problems are
solved by teams. But at the University rarely students learn
to collaborate on a team.
If people do not learn how to collaborate in college, why do we
expect them to do it effectively in the workplace? Possibly
the emphasis on grades and fairness in grading among
university students in the US works against collaboration in
the classroom. One colleague who has taught in both Denmark
and the US noted that students in Denmark preferred to work on
group computer science assignments, while students in the same
class in the US strongly resisted group assignments.
That brings me to note the increasing diversity of the workforce
and the need to prepare students to work in that kind of
environment. People from different cultural backgrounds will
have to solve problems working together in a team (one in 10
US residents is foreign born). We know that women experience
difficulties when entering professions viewed as culturally
appropriate to men; maybe university educational programs can
change this. The acceptance of different perspectives in the
workforce should start at the University.
What are the major
problems with or barriers to redesigning higher education? Do
you have any ideas for overcoming them?
In Europe some major revisions are in progress of the higher
education system at both the undergraduate and graduate
levels. The primary motivation for these revisions is to
create a more uniform system across Europe that will make it
easier for graduates of a university in one country to work or
continue their studies in another country. With so much
emphasis on this major restructuring, there may be little near
term interest in improving educational practices.
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Phillip L. Ackerman
What are the findings or theories from your area of expertise that
we could apply to higher education?
The investment prospective of adult intellectual development that
builds on work of Raymond Cattell – I call it “PPIK”
because it combines intelligence-as-Process, Personality,
Interests, and intelligence-as-Knowledge (Ackerman, 1996). The
PPIK approach builds on the interactions among traits that
people have as a basis for understanding individual
differences in knowledge as a function of the direction and
level of cognitive resources that people devote to acquiring
academic knowledge and information about the world around. This approach differs from “content-free”
approaches to adult intellect and knowledge acquisition (e.g.,
intelligence as “g” a general ability). That is, in this framework, intellectual abilities are
contextualized in particular domains – which differ between
individuals and within individuals over time.
What are the (most important) unsolved problems?
We have identified “positive achieving trait complexes” and a
“negative achieving trait complexes;” the right
configuration of ability-personality-interests leads to higher
levels of achievement. People
are more likely to fail at post-secondary education (or are
less likely to pursue educational opportunities in adulthood)
when they are characterized by the negative achieving trait
complexes. An
unsolved problem is the ability to identify these different
achievement trait complexes in people in order to create an
intervention that would lead to success in the education
system.
There
are substantial gender differences in knowledge and
achievement. An
example can be found in the College Board Advanced Placement
(AP) Exams. In
the last year, 574,000
men and 667,000 women took AP tests, however only 217,000
females compared to 225,000 men received passing scores of a 4
or 5. That is,
92,000 more females took the AP exams, but they got 8,000
fewer passing scores than males did. These are fundamentally important differences. It is difficult to understand the reasons for sex
differences in achievement because the female and male
students are coming from the same classes, have the same
education experience, and, we assume, the same amount of
motivation. This issue does not get addressed very often. These differences in AP scores are across most subject
domains (except, for example, in the foreign language
domains). Such
results have a knock-on effect when it comes to performance in
advanced levels of collegiate specialization, as can be seen
by gender differences in the GRE “subject” tests, and in
the subsequent “under-representation” of women at Ph.D.
levels of education in the United States.
A
third unsolved problem is in the area of motivational skills,
which are addressed in the work done by Ruth Kanfer (e.g.,
Kanfer & Heggestad, 1997). There are two types of motivational skills that promote
different types of educational outcomes. The first is “emotion-control skills;” these skills come
into play when individuals are confronted with different novel
tasks. These skills allow learners to keep frustration and
anxiety at bay while they work through the problem. This is often a major problem for middle-aged learners. People with high emotion-control skills are able to
better focus their attention on learning when struggling
through a new problem or skill to learn. The second type is called “motivation control
skills;” these skills allow students to push on past the
point of basic understanding of a problem. They allow for the
continued motivation to keep working through problems to get
an even deeper level of understanding. As psychologists, we do not pay adequate attention to
these motivational skills in the learning environment. These are motivational skills that can be trained, but
often are not because they tend to be content-domain
independent.
What should be included in an agenda for research?
First, we need to find better ways to answer questions about positive
and negative achieving trait complexes; how can we identify
people at risk, and give them the extra skills that they need
to succeed, and how do we identify those individuals with high
achievement trait complexes.
Second, we need to have a better understanding of why men and women
achieve different levels of domain knowledge. There is substantial folklore as to why this is true
(and a highly controversial body of empirical research on how
schools treat girls and women), but there is not a lot of
research that can help explain these differences in knowledge
acquisition. It
is not a question of whether women can acquire the knowledge,
but instead why they do not acquire the same level of
knowledge as men, especially within constrained environments.
Finally we need to have specific training interventions that include
issues concerning emotion control and motivation control that
can be developed to help students. This is especially important for at-risk students.
What prototypes can you point us toward where principles from the
science of learning are already being applied (e.g.,
activities, courses, fields of study, degree programs, or
entire systems)?
Within higher educational there is not a lot of intervention that
takes into account individual differences in combinations of
abilities-personality-interests. Earlier work by Lee J. Cronbach, Richard E. Snow, and
their colleagues suggested that aptitude-treatment
interactions were likely to be a function of trait complexes
(combinations of traits that facilitate or impede learning). However, because of the complexity of this kind of
work, few researchers in recent years have attempted to
address these important issues. With the increased availability of intelligent
computer-aided instruction, it is indeed possible to implement
theory-based interventions in an individualized fashion.
What are the major problems with or barriers to redesigning higher
education?
There is too large a focus on trendy things, like critical thinking. At the elementary and secondary school level, educators
are attending too much to issues such as self-esteem or, for
example, interpersonal and intrapersonal intelligence. In contrast, they spend far too little time on
developing knowledge and expertise. Skills such as critical thinking require a basic
foundation of content knowledge, which is too often lacking at
this level. In post-secondary educational settings, students are often
confronted with the need to acquire extensive content
knowledge without the necessary skills for acquisition and
retention. Moreover, educational institutions make too little use of
potentially available information about the students. SAT scores, for example, are generally ignored subsequent to
initial matriculation. Personality
and interest assessments typically never enter into advising
and curricular decision-making.
Another
problem that is particularly applicable to non-traditional
students is our inability to build on students’ existing
knowledge. Non-traditional students come to the university with a large
base of knowledge, but we do not build on it; at traditional
4-year institutions, we treat them the same as any other
student. There is
a real need to identify students’ base knowledge profiles in
order to further build on them. We need to structure
instruction that builds on the domain knowledge that students
have.
Do
you have any ideas for overcoming them?
If we focus more on what our students know, we can substantially
improve their learning.
We spend too much time studying “maximal” performance
situations, such as the SAT, when what we are really
interested in is long term knowledge retention and use, which
is better represented in “typical” performance situations. Predicting whether a student succeeds beyond the first
year of college/university study, remains very much uncharted
territory.
What do we need to do so that one outcome of the retreat is to
effect change (in ways that we want)?
There is a real disconnect between “cognitive/experimental”
psychology and education. In many ways, cognitive/experimental psychology has
failed to concern itself with real-world learning and
performance issues. Bringing
educators, policy makers, and applied-oriented cognitive
psychologists together may yield an important increment to
both basic and applied research concerns.
Gender differences in educational settings – especially at the
level of higher education are currently understudied. It is an easily identified problem that needs more
research, especially in light of the well-researched basis for
gender differences in basic cognitive and affective traits.
Unfortunately, though, many of the findings from empirical research suggest
that there are no “easy fixes” to problems of education
and achievement. There
is no single button to push or medium in which to present
information that represents the perfect educational
environment for everyone. Methods must be found that orient students toward
knowledge acquisition, and incrementally improve educational
outcomes. Such
solutions are not flashy – they cannot readily be
encapsulated in slogans on phrases. Empirical research aimed at increasing student
achievement and retention in higher education must be
carefully scaffold in the same way that principled knowledge is.
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