Is There Still a Lack of Information?

(photo of an internet cafe in Peru, provided by jocularme)

I recently finished reading The Children's Machine by Semour Papert (1993). A very interesting read yet somewhat narrow in its scope. While he does talk about education in general, Papert talks mostly about mathematics education and even calls learning mathetics. While he gives justification in his book for using this term, I don't think it will catch on. Some of the thoughts about education are brilliant though.

On page 165 he talks about a student, Debbie whose problem is not a lack of bits of knowledge, but a lack of connections between the knowledge that she has. Papert asserts that perhaps this is a very common problem (1993). most computer aided instruction assumes that a lack of knowledge is present and tries to give instruction to fill in this gap. As I have looked at many different types of CAI, I have seen much of the same thing, the computer tells or shows you something. It gives you information assuming that this information will change your conceptual understanding or behavior about a certain subject. Then it asks you to regurgitate that information to find out if you know it.

But to me building conceptual understanding or changing behavior is much bigger than that. It involves much more than being told something, such as application and experience. The rise of the Internet has given us information that was unimaginable in the past and has provided instant access to that information. The assumption should not be that people do not have the information or knowledge they need, it should be that they don't know how to connect it to other relevant information and experience to make it applicable. If we knew exactly what to do with the information and how to organize it, then anyone who has read about rock climbing should be able to rock climb well, and anyone who has looked up information about a fixing a car should be able to fix it.

In the business world, Performance technologists have been talking about this for years. They explain that most performance problems cannot be fixed with training. Training assumes a lack of knowledge.

This does not mean that the information on the internet is useless, certainly it is far from it. According to Bloom's Taxonomy you must have knowledge before you can comprehend it apply it, synthesize it or evaluate it. Knowledge is necessary but not sufficient. I think that the real trick is not to figure out what information someone needs to know, but how to help learners connect new information to existing information in their mental models of a domain. So far things that have been suggested include microworlds, authentic tasks, experiential learning, cognitive tools, situated learning. Perhaps there are more effective ways not yet discovered....

Reference

Papert, S. (1993). The Children's Machine: Rethinking School in the Age of the Computer. Seymour Papert. New York: BasicBooks.

Games, Simulations, Microworlds

I recently found out that much of my research and practice interests lie along the same lines as Lloyd Rieber at the University of Georgia. I read several articles and chapters written by him and have come to realize that I feel the same way about a lot of things.

Rieber (2005) talks about two main cognitive theories that relate to the use of games, simulations and microworlds in education. The first is dual-coding theory and the second is mental models. Mental models is the theory that I am interested at the moment because M. David Merrill, who I now work closely with at BYU-Hawaii also talks about this in his work.

Mental models are a personal theory of some domain. They are our conception of what a domain is like including what we think are the rules the domain must follow and how we can manipulate these. Rieber (2005) mentions that a mental model is believed to be loosely organized and subject to continual refinement.

I think that an important distinction in the use of mental models is how much or how little of a student's current mental model we find out about and use when we teach. Merrill (2002) would call this the activation principle in his first principles which states:

Learning is promoted when learners activate relevant cognitive structures by being directed to recall, describe or demonstrate relevant prior knowledge or experience.

Merrill indicates that Mental models will not develop well if the learner is not provided with the appropriate guidance, practice and demonstration. I believe activation to be the most important of the first principles besides the task-centered principle because students need to place information into their own mental models for it to create lasting effects on their learning. Integration depends on it, and Application and Demonstration support it.

But I don't think that learners are limited in activating relevant cognitive structures to recalling, describing or demonstrating. When students work with a microworld, they can activate their mental model without doing any of these.

In Microworlds, the user can change a variable and see how the domain reacts. The variable that the user changes is an item in their own mental model that they want to test out. It is not something that their teacher thinks is in the student's mental model, nor is it something that is in a fellow student's mental model. The student herself tests something she wants to know to determine if her mental model is correct. When something unexpected happens, then the student finds out what the discrepancy is and quickly tunes her mental model to fit. this is a very individual and personal process that takes into account many of the differentiating characteristics that students have with regard to learning.

So this is activation without requiring any of the students to recall, demonstrate or describe what they already know. Perhaps the best verb for this type of activation is testing.


References:

Merrill, M. D. (2002). First Principles of Instruction. Educational Technology Research and Development, 50, 43.

Rieber, L. P. (2005). Multimedia Learning in Games, Simulations, and Microworlds. In The Cambridge Handbook of Multimedia Learning. Cambridge, U.K. ; New York: Cambridge University Press.