comps reading - Adaptation and Understanding: A Case (CSILE) for New Cultures of Schooling (excerpt)

This paper first dealt with the relationship between "adaptation" and "understandning" in classroom context, pointing out that the extant system/design/context of schooling constraints learners' understanding, due to the following factors:

Classroom work, even when it is meaningful in its underlying intent, is often characterized by arbitrariness in the standards and procedures that most immediately confront the student. Arbitrariness is only one of a number of factors that can undermine the urge to understand. Other conditions of school life that we place in this category include: product orientation, incomprehensible texts and explanations (unintelligibility), limited time for reflection coupled with competitive knowledge display (lack of opportunity for reflection), emphasis on reproducing authoritative statements of facts combined with disadvantages of producing interpretive accounts (emphasis on reproduction of information), overload, discontinuity of much of schoolwork with prior knowledge (remoteness from experienced reality), busywork, and powerlessness and low probability of success (P.150-154, Scardamalia & Bereiter, 1996).

Learners, in order to adapt the extant schooling and meet with the expected/scheduled performance, need to cut off time spent on understnadning so that to accelerate productivity. That's why the authors relate low understandning with adaptation. To address such issue, CSILE (Computer-supported intentional environment) system is developed. "Collective Knowledge" is the center of this system. Here are some characteristics regarding CSILE, mentioned in the paper:

CSILE (Computer-supported intentional learning environment) helps to make understanding adaptive in classroom. It is viewed as a discourse medium; providing a single, communal database into which students may enter various kinds of text and graphic notes. They can retrieve notes by others, comment on them, link notes to one another (like “concept map” in Knowledge Forum?) or create group discussion notes. CSILE0mediated discourse can be carried on in any or all academic areas, limited only by the availability of machine time. In CSILE’s communal database, collective knowledge—as contrasted with school exercises, activities, or private interests—is the center of attention (P.155-156, Scardamalia & Bereiter, 1996).

The strategy we (CSILE researchers Scardamalia & Bereiter) have used to address issues particular to the role of understanding is to present students with material that is, by age-adjusted standards (readability levels, problem-solving difficulty), more demanding than typically dealt with successfully at their age. We also looked for depth of explanations in students’ written reports. We would expect CSILE students to have beliefs about learning that reflect mature views of understanding. In summary, CSILE students consistently outperform control students in ways that suggest more understanding. The longer students spend working with CSILE, the better the results (P.158-159, Scardamalia & Bereiter, 1996).