Building a teacher learning network - For developing the capability to teach for learning. | |
If you do not know, ask someone else! Metacognition, epistemological beliefs and the division of cognitive labor | |
Understanding collaborative knowledge construction in communities of learners: Are we there yet? | |
Research on instructional design for lifelong learning. | |
What do we now know about the relationship between dialogue, cognitive development and learning that is useful for education? | |
Achievement emotions: Origins, functions, and implications for educational practice | |
The role of spontaneous focusing on numerosity (SFON) in the mathematical development: Uniting perspectives from educational psychology and neuroscience | |
Tribute to Ann Brown | |
Community of learners: a viable concept for educational practice? |
Building a teacher learning network – for developing the capability to teach for learning
LO Mun Ling The Hong Kong Institute of Education
In this paper, I report on a network of learning that connects teachers and researchers for the main purpose of improving student learning—using Learning Study as a platform—and analyze the critical conditions that support its development. The term teachers’ professional development, and what teachers’ should have learnt as a result, may be interpreted in many different ways. The network that I describe focuses on one specific aspect of teachers’ work: helping students to learn specific objects of learning, and so, here, teachers’ professional development means the enhancement of teachers’ capability to teach for better student learning. The Learning Study takes its inspiration from Japanese lesson studies and teaching studies in China, and derives its conceptual framework from the Variation Theory. Through a series of projects over the last six years, the research team at the HKIEd has supported over 200 schools in Hong Kong in developing over 260 Learning Studies, with a direct involvement of over 1000 teachers. Although the main aim of the Learning Study is to improve student learning, in the process, it is found that the Learning Study has become a platform for professional learning of all who participated, i.e. students, teachers and researchers. The Learning Study team facilitates the development of a network of learning in schools and across schools by working simultaneously at three levels, firstly, focusing on improving students’ learning of specific objects of learning; secondly, facilitating teachers’ learning in authentic situations and in collaboration with other teachers and with researchers; thirdly, influencing the discourse and context in which teachers work. The network has now grown beyond Hong Kong and is connecting up with many other teacher research groups all over the world through the World Association of Lesson Studies and the web-based www.learningstudies.hk forum. The most important achievement of such a network is that teachers themselves are developing the knowledge base of their own profession.Personal website: http://www.ied.edu.hk/clasp/staffinfo/staff001_e.htm
If you do not know, ask someone else! Metacognition, epistemological beliefs and the division of cognitive labor.
Rainer Bromme, Munster University
Due to the division of labor in modern societies, knowledge is distributed and used unevenly. Most of the knowledge we acquire through lifetime (within education as well as in our everyday life) has been produced by specialized experts, is provided by specialized experts, and it is organized into disciplines, reflecting such specialization. I will discuss implications of the division of cognitive labor for our understanding of learning, epistemological beliefs and metacognition. Recent approaches on learning (especially those inspired by constructivist ideas) as well as the main strand of research on epistemological beliefs undervalue the division of cognitive labor. Instead, they are in favor of personal knowledge construction, of first hand experiences as the main ways of learning. The implicit assumption 'own knowledge is better than knowledge attained from others' is underlying many approaches in educational research. In contrast to this normative assumption, we all remain laypersons with regard to the most domains of knowledge in modern societies. Therefore we will have to cope with experts and with specialized expert knowledge for the whole lifetime. It is necessary to learn how to evaluate knowledge which we do attain from experts. Such judgments are necessary even when they are based on a fragmentary understanding of the knowledge claims. At first I will review such positions held within research on epistemological beliefs and on learning. Secondly I will sketch a research program on students' capacities to understand how specialized knowledge is distributed (who knows what?) and to evaluate expert sources (whom to believe?). Such capacities entail epistemological beliefs about expert knowledge and metacognitive awareness about ones' own knowledge. I will then resume some empirical evidence from developmental psychology about children's intuitive understanding of the division of cognitive labor and I will ask how schooling fosters and impedes such understanding. Finally, some of our own studies about the cognitive division of labor will be sketched. This research focuses on laypersons' capacities for the evaluation of health related expert knowledge found in the Internet. Based on our research the relationship between metacognition and such capacities will be discussed.Facilitating social knowledge construction in communities of learners: Are we there yet (and how will we know)?
Cindy Hmelo-Silver, Rutgers University
It has been quite some time that educational researchers have recognized the social nature of learning and the importance of creating learning communities. Ann Brown’s (1994, 1997) idea of communities of learners has been influential in that thinking. But getting there remains a challenge and knowing when we have gotten there even more so. An important aspect of communities of learners is understanding how to facilitate social knowledge construction and the kinds of participant structures that promote social knowledge construction. Communities of learners is an approach that has its basis in shared discourse and social negotiation in a community of practice. It requires that learners take responsibility for their own learning as well as others in their group. But facilitating learners to engage in productive discourse is not easy and it is not always clear when that discourse is productive. There are still many questions that educational researchers need to address to better understand how to create and recognize productive learning communities:• How do groups engage in social knowledge construction?
• What kinds of instructional and discourse practices engage students in social knowledge construction?
• What kinds of shared knowledge is constructed (and how can we measure it)?
• What is the relation between individual learning and group cognition or collaborative knowledge building?
Addressing these questions will be important if we are to address the gaps between research and practice in understanding how to orchestrate communities of learners beyond small-scale research and development projects.
Research on Instructional Design for Lifelong Learning
Jeroen J. G. van Merrienboer, Open University of the Netherlands
Due to ever more rapid societal, technological and organisational innovations, the knowledge and skills usually acquired during initial education concomitantly become increasingly obsolete. The potential problems arising from this situation are amplified by the proportional increase of the aging in the larger population as a whole, due to demographic factors and a continuous increase of life expectancy. Thus, lifelong learning is essential for individuals to keep up with their world and, more in particular, for professionals to keep pace with the constantly changing global job market and technology. Recent instructional design models stress the importance of real-life tasks as the driving force for learning, and thus suggest that professional tasks or leisure activities provide a good starting point for lifelong learning. An example is the four-component instructional design model (4C/ID), which describes learning environments as built from (1) authentic tasks, (2) supportive information that helps learners to perform the reasoning and problem-solving aspects of those tasks, (3) procedural information that helps learners to perform the routine aspects of those tasks, and (4) part-task practice for routine aspects that need to be developed to a very high level of automaticity. This presentation will discuss three lines of research that aim to make design models such as 4C/ID more responsive to the specific requirements of lifelong learning. First, self-directed learning skills of lifelong learners should be explicitly supported, for example, by providing them with development portfolios that help to assess own task performance and plan future learning activities (i.e., p/reflection). Second, flexibilisation of learning activities by time, setting and contents is necessary to give lifelong learners easy and on-demand access to the components (supportive information, procedural information, part-task practice) that sustain meaningful learning from particular real-life tasks. Third, instructional methods should take the enormous heterogeneity of lifelong learners into account, and be adapted to their prior knowledge and skills, age, and other personal characteristics.
What do we now know about the relationship between dialogue, cognitive development and learning that is useful for education?
Neil Mercer, University of Cambridge
Several lines of research in recent decades have contributed to the study of how talk in educational settings can contribute to children’s learning and cognitive development. Taking a sociocultural perspective, I will discuss the cumulative findings of this research and their implications for our understanding of educational processes and of how to improve the practice of classroom education.Achievement emotions: Origins, functions, and implications for educational practice
Reinhard Pekrun, University of Munich
Emotions are ubiquitous in achievement settings at school and university. Students frequently experience emotions such as enjoyment, hope, pride, anger, anxiety, shame, hopelessness, and boredom in these settings. Despite the tremendous importance of these emotions for students’ learning, achievement, and well-being, they did not receive much attention by researchers, test anxiety studies and attributional research being the only major exceptions. During the past ten years, however, there has been growing recognition that emotions are central to students’ learning and achievement. In this presentation, I will provide a state-of-the-art overview of this nascent field of research. Using Pekrun’s (2006) control-value theory of achievement emotions as a conceptual framework, the presentation will focus on the following issues. (1) Which emotions are experienced in academic achievement settings, how can these emotions be organized conceptually, and how can they be measured? (2) How can we explain the development of these emotions? What are their individual and social origins, and how do they develop over the school years? To provide answers, the emotional implications of cognitive appraisals, achievement goals, and educational environments will be discussed. (3) Are achievement emotions functionally important for students’ learning and achievement? Test anxiety research has shown that anxiety can exert profound effects on performance; is this true for other achievement emotions as well? (4) Are achievement emotions and their functions universal, or do they differ between content domains, genders, cultures, and individuals? (5) How can achievement emotions be regulated and treated, and what are the implications for educational practices in the classroom? In closing, open research problems will be addressed, including the development of more sophisticated measures and modelling methods, the prospects and limitations of neuroscientific research on achievement emotions, strategies to integrate idiographic and nomothetic methodologies, and the need for educational intervention studies targeting emotions.The role of spontaneous focusing on numerosity (SFON) in the mathematical development: Uniting perspectives from educational psychology and neuroscience
Hannula, Minna M., University of Turku, Finland
During recent years brain imaging methods have become increasingly debated among educational scientists, and yet, there are still quite few research projects utilizing these methods. A puzzling question is what is the added value of combining a neuroscientific approach and educational psychology?
The presentation will detail both the theoretical and methodological steps of uniting perspectives from educational psychology and neuroscience in a series of studies on mathematical skills. The context will be a set of longitudinal and cross-sectional studies on 2-12 -year-old children’s and adults’ Spontaneous Focusing On Numerosity (SFON) and its relation to mathematical skills. The specific goals of the studies were to capture in method and theory the distinct process by which children and adults focus on numerosity as a part of their activities involving exact number recognition, and the individual differences in this process that may be informative in the development of numerical skills. Over the course of conducting the research projects, two-dozen novel tasks were designed for the SFON assessments, the latest developments being the measures of SFON with EEG in children and fMRI in adults.
The results of the studies assert that within a person’s existing mathematical competence, it is possible to distinguish a separate process, the tendency to spontaneously focus on numerosity. Furthermore, the results show that there are significant and stable individual differences in SFON tendency that are related to other mathematical skills. The distinct nature of focusing on number can also be captured by brain imaging methods, such as EEG and fMRI.
Finally, the possible added value of now understanding the phenomenon of SFON better, as a result of combining both educational psychology and neuroscientific approaches, will be described in terms of both direct and indirect gains of interdisciplinary research. Educational implications of the findings may lead to improvements in the diagnoses and promoting of mathematical skills.
Communities of Learners: Core Principles and New Possibilities
John Bransford
Approximately a decade ago, colleagues and I had the opportunity to work with a large school system in Nashville to create a corridor forlearning that blended the Communities of Learners work from Ann Brown and Joe Campione with two other research-based programs. Looking back,I am able to see the timeless brilliance of many of Ann and Joe's principles, and also see new opportunities for improvement made possible by advances in theories of both human and organizational learning, leadership, technology and the diffusion of innovations. I will discuss the core principles of their work plus suggest some new possibilities that have emerged during the last 10 years.
Community of learners: a viable concept for educational practice?
Geert ten Dam and Monique Volman, University of Amsterdam & Free University
The concept of ‘communities of learners’ has become increasingly popular in educational discourse. For educational researchers as well as educational practitioners, the classroom as a ‘community of learners’ seems to be an inspiring vision which invokes images of harmonious collaboration, vivid dialogue, and motivated students shaping their own learning process that result in meaningful and deep learning. The virtue of communities of learners for enhancing the learning process seems to be self-evident. The side effect of the broad and uncontested use of the concept of ‘communities of learners’, however, is that it dilutes. The different and sometimes even contradictory theoretical traditions from which the concept has emanated, have dropped out of sight. We think that ‘communities of learners’ is becoming a fuzzy concept, which diminishes the power of the concept for understanding and improving educational practice.
In our keynote we will look at the various ways in which the concept of ‘communities of learners’ has been theoretically framed. In particular, we will consider socio-constructivist and socio-cultural traditions. We will focus on two central issues. First, the interplay between individual and social aspects of learning, and second, the issue of students’ social identities and power relations. Socio-constructivist and socio-cultural approaches of these issues lead to different theoretical views on the nature of learning processes within the communities of learners, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. Our discussion of these issues will be illustrated with examples from empirical studies that show how the educational implications of both approaches may differ and/or converge. This theoretical and empirical exploration will result in an agenda for fostering communities of learners.
