Upload
lev
View
40
Download
0
Tags:
Embed Size (px)
DESCRIPTION
Human Information Behavior in Educational Institutions. Nora Duffy Susannah Goldstein Danica taylor. Situated Cognition. Background. In Brown, Collins, and Duguid’s study (1989), the gap between classroom instruction and real, acquired knowledge is addressed. - PowerPoint PPT Presentation
Citation preview
Background
In Brown, Collins, and Duguid’s study (1989), the gap between classroom instruction and real, acquired knowledge is addressed.
Many methods of didactic education separate learning and use as separate entities, resulting in students who memorize formulae, historical timelines, or vocabulary – but who have no real sense of what they mean in a greater context.
In language acquisition, new words are learned most effectively in their natural contexts – by reading, or talking, or listening – not by rote memorization.
“ Words and sentences are not islands, entire unto themselves.”
Situated Cognition
Learning and Context
• The authors contend that all learning is much like language acquisition – it must happen in context.
Much like Dervin’s assessment that one swims in context “like a fish,” the authors believe that when a student is separated from the real-life applications of the desired concepts, the student is, in essence, flopping around on dry land.
Additionally, like Dervin’s theory of time/space bound knowledge, the authors contend that “a new concept, for example, will continually evolve with each new occasion of use, because new situations, negotiations, and activities inevitably recast it in a new, more densely textured form.”
Situated Cognition
So how, then, to view knowledge? As “Conceptual Tools”
Just as it might be possible to own a screwdriver and have no idea how to properly use it, so too are mathematical formulae or vocabulary.
Here the authors invoke Whitehead and his position on the difference between “mere acquisition of inert concepts and the development of useful, robust knowledge.”
It is useless to acquire a tool without learning how exactly to use it – gathers dust inside a toolbox.
Finally, just as two craftspeople might own the same exact tool and never use it the same way as each other, a physicist and an engineer might use the same formula to very different ends.
Situated Cognition
Enculturation as the key to learning
The way to properly acquire conceptual tools is to see them in their authentic activity.
School culture is a culture unto itself, with its own rules and knowledge-based goals, which in no way relates to the real world – the authors use the example of math word problems, whose language is only applicable to… math word problems. Thus, math students don’t really understand what math is *actually* used for.
In the real world, former students try to find the classroom cues, which are obviously, now absent.
The way to accomplish this daunting task of ensuring that students are embedded in the culture of the conceptual tools? Cognitive Apprenticeship.
Situated Cognition
Cognitive Apprenticeship
A concept attributed to Collins, Brown & Newman
Attempts to emulate in classroom learning what is so successful about the thousands-year-old practice of craft apprenticeships
Some might argue that students aren’t *ready* for this, but just as a tailor’s apprentice learns about fabric through ironing, there are always ways “at the ground floor” to see a cognitive tool in action
Schoenfeld: teaches strategy rather than subject matter
Process of cognitive apprenticeship Begins by teachers “providing
modeling in situ” and providing the structure of the authentic activity
When students gain more confidence, they start to become more autonomous, and dip a toe into the culture of the knowledge themselves
The students become more autonomous as the process continues
Situated Cognition
Characteristics of Cognitive Apprenticeship
Begin with a task embedded in a familiar activity Shows students that what they are studying is, in fact, useful Shows students that they can apply this knowledge to unfamiliar
situationsShow many applications and uses outside of the current one
Shows students that there isn’t one path or one application for anything – no learning is absolute
Give students the autonomy to “generate their own solution paths”
Allows students to develop the shared vocabulary of the culture, and to learn to work collaboratively
Allows students to become active participants in their intellectual growth
Situated Cognition
Benefits to Cognitive Apprenticeship in a Group Setting
Collective Problem Solving
aggregate knowledge group think allows for
new insights/solutionsDisplaying Multiple
Roles allows students to see
each other in the various roles, allowing for more reflection than one person playing every role
Confronting Ineffective Strategies and Misconceptions
groups can be more effective at drawing out misconceptions and ineffective strategies, and correcting them
Providing Collaborative Work Skills
vital to the workplace and individual growth
Situated Cognition
Background
Shirley Brice Heath is a MacArthur genius and a renowned scholar on linguistics, education, and many other cross-disciplinary topics
Heath was doing field work in “Trackton,” a predominantly poor African American community in the Southeast, and some of the community members asked her to study why their children weren’t performing in school (1970-1975)
Heath set out to discover why the black children and the white children responded so differently to the same classroom methods, where some of the classrooms were newly integrated, and the majority of teachers were white
Questioning at Home and at School
The Role of Questions in Development
Questions are often used in different societies to train children from a young age to interact verbally, and to direct their attention
Studies have found that when middle-class mothers speak to their preschool children, much of the utterances are questions
What Heath found is that much of the difference in performance between the black students and the white students was linked to questioning, and the types of questioning each student was used to at home, and in the student’s community
For Heath’s study, she looked at the Trackton children, and then how the classroom teachers were raising their own children for comparison
Questioning at Home and at School
Questioning in the Homes of Classroom Teachers
Many children were alone with caregivers/parents all day, so the questioning was also for the parent to make conversation with another person
When speaking to preverbal children, adults not only asked questions, but also answered them, to teach the children
“Do you want your diaper changed? Yes, you want your diaper changed.” “Did you lose your toy? Yes, you did- let’s find it.”
To teach a politeness formula, parents used interrogatives “Can you say thank you?” “What’s the magic word?”
Adults used questions as a means of teaching their children about the world, and to instruct them on formulaic responses
“What does a duck say?” Who is this in the picture?” “This is a dog. You’ve never seen a dog before, have you?”
Questioning at Home and at School
Effects of the Questioning in the Homes of Teachers
The questions posed by the parents trained the children to act as question-answerers, and to be “experts” about their own environments
Sometimes the children would feel like they simply needed to give an answer, and would invent one.
Adults used corrective questions more in public “Johnny! Do we act like that in a museum?”
Trained children to ask the “right” kinds of questions
Children were trained not to ask about sickness, not to ask too many questions, etc.
Questioning at Home and at School
Types and Frequency of Questions at the Homes of Teachers
Q1: When the questioner knows the information, and is asking it of the answerer (“How many bananas are on the table?” What color is grass?”)
A1: When the answerer has the information that is being requested (“What would you like for lunch?”)
U1: When no one has the information (“Look at the sky. I wonder what’s up there?”)
Types of Questions and Their Fre-
quency
Q1A1U1
Questioning at Home and at School
Questioning in the Homes of “Trackton” children
In many Trackton families, other adults were always present, so the adults made conversation with other adults
Most utterances were imperatives, and most questions were rhetorical
Children were taught not to answer questions from outsiders
Children were not seen as either reliable sources of information or conversational partners
Questioning at Home and at School
Common Training Techniques in Trackton
Analogies were the most commonly used training technique, in distinction to questioning.
“Your shirt looks like my cousin’s shirt” “Your eyes are the color of honey.” Trackton children were trained to see the likenesses and differences
between objects, people, and the world around them.Story Starters were used as a conversational technique,
both to elicit a story from the adult, and to train story telling techniques in the child.
Virtually no Q1 questions were used, which led to the classroom disconnect- the children were unfamiliar with the techniques, and the desired responses.
Questioning at Home and at School
Using Different Classroom Instruction Techniques
When classrooms simply relied on Q1 questions to teach, the Trackton children were unresponsive.
When opening up the pedagogy and using more open-format discussion, the Trackton children were very responsive, because they could use their skills of analogy and story-telling, and were less fearful of the line of questioning.
“What’s happening in this picture?” “Tell me what that was like.”
Moved from who, what, when questions to how and why questions
Questioning at Home and at School
Background of Study
ELIS: Everyday Life Information-Seeking Type of info-seeking that “people employ to orient themselves in
daily life or to solve problems not directly connected with the performance of occupational tasks.” (Savolainen, 1995)
Inner-city teens face so many issues (poverty, prejudice, etc.), and information can help make the process easier
Dr. Agosto (a Rutgers alumna!) and Dr. Hughes-Hassell wanted to find out where urban teens are getting their info from, and develop an empirical and a theoretical model
Everyday Life Information Needs of Urban Teens
Why aren’t they using information in libraries?
Urban youth view the library as “uncool and uninviting” (Yohalem & Pittman, 2003)
Teen girls turned to libraries last (after family/friends/teachers) – didn’t believe that libraries could help. (Poston-Anderson & Edwards, 1993)
When teens were offered assistance, they often didn’t know what to ask, and encountered problems using information systems (Julien, 1999)
Everyday Life Information Needs of Urban Teens
About the Study
27 high school students in inner-city Philadelphia Students were either in the Boys and Girls Club or were Free Library
Teen Leaders, so it was a bit of a skewed sample, which the authors acknowledged
Phase 1 of data collection involved written surveys, audio journals, written activity logs, and digital camera tours
Phase 2 of data collection involved group interviewsData conclusions: teens always consulted humans first,
and the ELIS needs of the urban teens surveyed matched up with identified ELIS needs of non-urban teens – need to study further to confirm
Everyday Life Information Needs of Urban Teens
Theoretical Foundations
Among the many authors whose work Agosto & Hughes-Hassell drew upon, one of the most important was Robert Havighurst, and his 1972 model of tasks of development in adolescence.
The tasks of development in adolescence are: adjusting to a new physical sense of self, adjusting to new intellectual abilities, adjusting to increased cognitive demands at school, expanding verbal skills, developing a personal sense of identity, establishing adult vocational skills, establishing emotional/psychological independence from parents, developing stable and productive peer relationships, learning to manage sexuality, adopting personal value systems, developing increased impulse control and behavioral maturity.
Everyday Life Information Needs of Urban Teens
Everyday Life Information Needs of Urban Teens
Urban Teen ELIS
Supports
The Emotional Self
The Reflective Self
The Physical
Self
The Creative
Self
The Cognitiv
e Self
The Social Self
The Sexual Self
Everyday Life Information Needs of Urban Teens
Empirical Model of Urban Teens’ Everyday Life Info Needs (correlated with Havighurst’s Developmental
Tasks)
Est. emotional and psychological independence
from parents
Dev. increased impulse control & behavioral maturity
Dev. stable & productive peer relationships
Dev. personal sense of identity
Establishing adult vocational goals
Adopting a personal value system
Everyday Life Information Needs of Urban Teens
Empirical Model of Urban Teens’ Everyday Life Info Needs (correlated with Havighurst’s Developmental
Tasks)
Adjusting to a new physical sense of self
Adjusting to new intellectual abilities
Adjusting to increased cognitive demands at school
Expanding verbal skills
Learning to manage sexuality
Information Needs for “Selves”
Social Self Friend/peer/romantic
relationships, pop culture, social activities, fashion, social/legal norms
Emotional Self Familial relationships, emotional
health, religious practiceReflective Self
Self image, philosophical concerns, heritage/cultural identity, civic duty, college, career
Physical Self Daily life routine, physical
safety, goods and services, personal finances, health, job responsibilities
Creative Self Creative performance, creative
consumptionCognitive Self
Academics, school culture, current events
Sexual Self Sexual safety, sexual identity
Everyday Life Information Needs