Development: What We Talk About When We

Talk About Learning

William S. Moore, Ph.D.

Policy Associate, Assessment, Teaching & Learning

WA State Board for Community & Technical Colleges bmoore@sbctc.edu

360-704-4346

National Learning Communities Institute

June 2007

Basically, you learn two kinds of things in college:

•Things you will need to know in later life (2 hours)…

•Things you will NOT need to know in later life (1198 hours).

These are the things you learn in classes whose names end in ‘-ology’, ‘-osophy’, ‘-istry’, ‘-ics’, and so on. The idea is, you memorize these things, then write them down in little exam books, then forget them. If you fail to forget them you become a professor and have to stay in college the rest of your life. Dave Barry, 1981

College Learning?

“Do you mean ‘really learning’ or ‘just

learning’?”

Student quoted in Bill Perry’s “Sharing in the cost of growth,”

from C.A. Parker, 1978

…Being able to repeat facts and plug numbers into formulae to get the right answers is handy, even essential. But it is not what education is fundamentally about…

Learning should be about changing the ways in which learners understand, or experience, or conceptualize the world around them…

‘Real’ Learning as Transforming Understanding

Paul Ramsden

Historical Understanding:More than Knowledge

Study:• Set of 8 written & 3 pictorial documents related to the Battle of Lexington

in the Revolutionary War• 8 historians (4 specialists In American history, 4 not) & 8 high-achieving

high school students asked to review materials, evaluate pictures, rank texts in terms of quality of sources for understanding the Battle of Lexington

Sam S. Wineburg, 1991

Findings:Able high school students can know a lot of history but still have little idea of how historical knowledge is constructed…What seemed to distinguish historians from students [in this study] was not [knowledge] but broader, more sweeping ways of knowing and thinking about historical evidence…

Diversity, social problems, environmental issues, and the changing geopolitical situation all require minds that can grapple successfully with uncertainty, complexity and conflicting perspectives and still take stands that are both based on evidence, analysis and compassion and deeply centered in values.Craig Nelson, 1994

Why Does it Matter?

Explanations for Individual Differences in Learners

• Intelligence/

aptitude

• Skills/expertise

• Learning styles

• Motivation

• Culture

• Dispositions

• Socialization process

• Cognitive strategies

• DEVELOPMENT

Development

• Reflects “the organization of increasing complexity” (Sanford)

• Involves the whole individual

• Is progressive in that there is an order to the succession of developmental changes that take place

• Driven by an interaction between the individual and the environment

Role in Understanding Learning

• Focuses attention on the intimate connections between the individual learner, subject matter, and process of understanding

• Provides a rich heuristic for the growing attention to new and more complex approaches to student learning outcomes assessment

Moments of Meeting

“…[For] providing students with opportunities to discover and refine their own powers…the first prerequisite is the student’s experience of being met…. If a model of development helps portray the successive shapes of students’ worlds, we can state a primary issue this way: what assessments, applications and contexts contribute toward such moments of meeting, and what distinguishes them from others that may detract from this potential?”

Bill Perry, 1985

Issues/Concerns

• The assumption of universality

• Alleged inevitability of development as depicted by such models

• Lack of specific attention to historical and socio-cultural contexts

• Potential for pigeonholing learners with labels

A Developmental Perspective on

Instruction

Design learning environments, don’t “develop” students”

Help make learning accessible—“building a

bridge” for students

Balance challenge and support in the learning

process

SUPPORTOpportunities for

structuring and/or organizing those challenges

Encouraging students to take risks involved in new understandings

CHALLENGEOpportunities for

engagement with complexity & ambiguity

Diversity of material, questions, perspectives, ways of thinking, etc.

Balancing Challenge & Support

Whose Meaning Matters?

Look! Do I sound crazy in saying that the students are the source of the meanings they will make of you? All right, so you feel you are making meaning for them; you know your subject matter, they do not. But it is the meaning they make of your meaning that matters! Obviously. Why am I shouting? After all, it is the meanings you make of my meanings that matter, and shouting will not help…

William Perry, from The Modern American College, A. Chickering &

Associates, 1981

Some Formal Perry Scheme Assessment Approaches

• Interviews– Perry– RJI (Reflective Judgment)

• Production measures– MID (Measure of Intellectual

Development)– MER (Measure of Epistemological

Reflection)

• Forced-choice/recognition measures– LEP (Learning Environment Preferences)– RCI (Reasoning about Current Issues)

Role of Self-Assessments in ‘Real’ Learning

• Fostering meta-thinking

• Promoting active inquiry

• Developing self-evaluation skills

• Integrating learning/ making connections

The best assessment tools are the

minds of teachers and

learners

LC Learning Outcomes:What Students Say

• Thinking critically, reasoning

• Making connections

• Teamwork/group skills

• Becoming responsible for own learning

How Does Development Inform our Understanding of Learning?

Students have differing personal epistemologies, and these conceptions matter in terms of learning

‘Real’ learning is more about transformation than transmission

Both assessment and teaching approaches reflect and reinforce epistemologies

‘Real’ learning thus involves risk-taking and courage on the part of students

Hope & Loss: Development (Learning)

Takes Courage

…It may be a great joy to discover a new and more complex way of thinking and seeing, but what do we do about the old simple world? What do we do about the hopes that we had invested and experienced in those simpler terms? When we leave those terms behind, are we to leave hope, too?

Bill Perry, 1978“Sharing in the cost of growth”