comps reading - The Jasper Experiment: An Exploration of Issues in Learning and Instructional Design

This article described "The Jasper Woodbury Problem Solving Series," an illustration of "anchored" approach to instructional design, whereby instruction is situated in realistic, problem-rich settings. The theoretical framework underlying the series includes the following assumptions:

• Assumptions about goals: students learn to become independent learners
• Assumptions about learning:

1. constructive theories
2. generative learning
3. argumentation+reflection+refinement+sense-making
4. knowledge that is not acquired and used generatively tends to become what Whithead (1929) called "inert knowledge"-knowledge that is used spontaneously even though it is relevant (e.g., Bransford et al., 1986; Gick & Holyoak, 1980, 1983; Scardamalia & Bereiter, 1985). Data indicate that knowledge is less likely to remain inert when it is acquired in a problem-solving mode rather than in a factual knowledge mode (Adams et al., 1988; Lockhart, Lamon, & Gick, 1988)

• Assumptions about instruction: cooperative learning setting

1. form community of inquiry
2. monitor one another
3. one of the differences between expert and novice is that experts can experience the changes in their own thinking that these ideas afford
4. self-generated information is better remembered than passively received information

• Assumptions about learning materials: concept of affordances

1. James Gibson (1977)
2. different types of instructional materials afford different kinds of learning activities

Based on these assumptions, there are seven design features underlying the Jasper Adventure Series. They, together with their respective hypothesized benefits, are listed below:

However, notice that whether these features are utilized depends on the teaching model at work in the classroom. In this article, three teaching models are mentioned:

• Model 1: basic first, immediate feedback, direct instruction
• Model 2: structured problem-solving

1. focus on the need to help students minimize errors and feelings of confusion
2. the greater the degree of guidance, the higher the probability that the students will not make errors
3. the strong point of this model is that students only work on correct plans; the tradeoff is that they do not engage in problem generation and monitoring

• Model 3: the "guided generation" model

1. emphasize the importance of generative activities on the part of students
2. make maximum use of the features afforded by the Jasper series
3. scaffolding concept: ZPD, Vygotsky

comps reading - The Role of Assessment in a Learning Culture

Written by Lorrie A Shepard, this article is about classroom assessment, the kind of assessment that can be integrated with instruction and be used to enhance learning.From historical perspectives Shepard first elaborated the transformation and relationship between curriculum, psychology, and measurement. Shepard finally summarized briefly some specific assessment strategies to make assessment more informative and more insightfully tied to learning steps. All the strategies serve a social, motivational purpose as well as a cognitive, informaitonal one.

For assessment itself, the transformation of assessment practices cannot be accomplished in separate tests and measurement courses, but rather should be a central concern in teaching methods courses. Assessment practices should change to be consistent with and support social constructivist pedagogy.

Regarding the historical perspectives, it can be divided into three phases:

1. curriculum: social efficiency vs. reformed vision
2. learning theory: Hereditarian (behaviorist, associationist) vs. cognitive & constructivist
3. measurement: scientific vs. classroom

Objective test is the realm of scientific measurement, and its dominance in classroom practices has not only affected more than the form of subject-matter knowledge, but also shaped beliefs about the nature of evidence and principles of fairness.

Classroom measurement is associated with "social-constructivist" conceptual framework, borrowing from cognitive, constructivist, and sociocultural theories. Within such framework, learning is viewed as an active process of mental construction and sense making, and both development and learning are primarily social processes. School learning, under such framework, should be authentic and connected to the world outside of school, not only to make learning more interesting and more motivating to students, but also to develop the ability to use knowledge in real-world settings.

In terms of the form and content of assessments, they should match challenging subject matter standards and serve to instantiate what it means to know and learn in each of the discipline. Good assessment tasks are interchangeable with good instructional tasks. However, under intense political pressure, test scores are likely to go up without a corresponding improvement in student learning, and external accountability testing leads to the de-skilling and de-profressionalization of teaching. These issues should be addressed.

Finally, with regards to assessment strategies, none of the 7 strategies listed below by themselves will be effective if they are not part of a more fundamental shift in classroom practices and expectations about learning. These strategies are:

1. dynamic, on-going assessment: ZPD, Activity Theory
2. assessment of of prior knowledge
3. the use of feedback: Lepper, Drake and O'Donnell-Johnson (1997) found that the most effective tutors do not routinely correct student errors directly; instead, they ignore errors when they are inconsequential to the solution process and forestall errors that the student has made previously by offering hints or asking leading questions
4. teaching for transfer: true understanding is flexible, connected, and generalizable.
5. explicit criteria
6. student self-assessment: serve cognitive purpose, increase students' responsibility (ownership) for their own learning, and make the relationship between teachers and students more collaborative
7. evaluation of teaching

comps reading - Computer Criticism vs. Technocentric Thinking

Written by Seymour Papert, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

• The purpose of computer criticism is not to condemn but to understand, to explicate, to place in perspective.

• Technocentrism refers to the tendency to give a similar centrality to a technical object, for example, LOGO. When questions like "what is the effect of LOGO on cognitive development" are asked, such turns of phrases often betray a tendency to think of "LOGO" as "agents" that acts directly on thinking and learning.

• The context for human development is always a culture, never an isolated technology.

• People from humanities are often the most vulnerable to the technocentric trap. Insecurity sometimes makes a technical object loom too large in their thinking.

• Everyone realizes that it is carpenters who use wood, hammers and saws to produce houses and furnitures, and the quality of the product depends on the quality of their (i.e., carpenters) work. But when it comes to computers and LOGO, critics seem to move into abstractions and ask questions like "is LOGO goof for cognitive thinking of children."

• Technocentrism is often supported by a certain model of what a "rigorous" experiment in educational psychology consists of. I (Papert) will call this "the treatment model." The use of this model requires care, and technocentrism places unskilled users at risk, and the risk is greatest in the interpretation of negative results.

• Technocentric thinking favors the "treatment" methodology, which leads to a danger that all experiments with computers and learning will be seen as failures: either they are trivial because very little happened, or they are "unscientific" because something real did happen and too many factors changed at once.

• At the core of the process of design is the art of trade-off.

• Each choice is a reflection of cultural affiliation. The individual's taste is never purely individual but a reflection of culture.

• LOGO practitioners must learn to integrate the larger social movement into their thinking. To do so, two steps need to be followed:

1. pay attention to the individual manifestations of cultural movement around computers
2. use the interest they might arouse

comps reading - Designing Organizational Memory: Preserving Intellectual Assets in a Knowledge Economy

Written by Jeff Conklin, this paper introduced some computer systems such as Quest Map, Organization Memory System, Short Term Store, Display System, and IBIS (Issue-Based Information System), all of which are designed to preserve intellectual assets in a knowledge economy. According to Conklin, the key component of such project memory system that can capture informal knowledge is the use of a display system that captures the key issues and ideas during meeting.

The whole society is gradually turning itself into a knowledge economy, whose basis is knowledge work, and the workforce of this economy is the knowledge worker. Some characteristics a knowledge worker possess include :

1. scarcity
2. fluidity
3. expertise
4. collaboration

Conklin talked about formal and informal knowledge. While the former usually refers to books, manuals, documents, and training courses, the latter is created and used in the process of creating the formal results (knowledge). To put metaphorically, if formal knowledge is the foreground, informal knowledge is the background. Informal knowledge, being wild and process-oriented, is hard to capture and to keep. Reasons for the failures to capture informal knowledge are as follows:

1. artifact-oriented culture: (Western) culture has come to value results - the output of the work process - far above the process itself, and to emphasize things over relationship.
2. the tools of knowledge work - based on computer and communication technology - little recognize or support the process of knowledge work. Tools for knowledge work in a sense reflect the artifact-oriented ontology of the culture.

What follows are four barriers to effective organizational memory:

1. making informal knowledge explicit: informal organizational knowledge, like a wild animal, resists capture
2. documents without context: the usual approach to project and organizational memory, preserving documents, fails to preserve context
3. relevance and size: knowledge loses its relevance, and thus its value, over time
4. litigation and organizational amnesia: the current litigious environment may create an economic incentive for "organizational amnesia," the systematic destruction of all unneeded personal notes and documents at regular intervals

In a word, the obstacles to an effective organizational memory system fall into two categories: cultural and technical.

In describing steps toward organizational memory, Conklin provided three metaphors to demonstrate the operation of how memory is mediated between both short term and long term memory. The four metaphors, together with the illustrations, are as follows:

• computer architecture

• human cognition

• living cells

For the pattern of mediated memory in information system and the proposed model of the project memory, the illustration looks almost the same, as follows:

The display system proposed in this article has three components that fits the criteria for project memory system:

1. capture of information into the system
2. a structure by which the information is organized
3. a representation and display of that information, usually to a group

(for criteria details, refer to pg. 26-27 in the paper)

Such display system aims to promote collaboration, for a central assumption of this paper is that most knowledge work happens in groups, and that group work is largely conversations.

(for article summary, refer to pg 38-39 in the paper)

comps reading - What Good is Polarizing Research into Qualitative and Quantitative?

The purpose of this paper co-written by Kadriye Ercikan and Wolff-Michael Roth is twofold:

1. to demonstrate that this polarization is not meaningful or productive for education resarch
2. to propose an integrated approach to education research inquiry

To achieve such integration, the authors argued that the research questions asked should determine the modes of inquiry that are used to answer them.

First the authors believed that polarization in research is confusing to many people and tends to limit research inquiry, often resulting in incomplete answers to research questions and potentially inappropriate inferences based on findings. To demonstrate such polarization, the authors unfolded from four aspects:

1. The problem
2. Existence of qualitative and quantitative characteristics in phenomena: as data are representations of phenomena in nature, society, education, and cultures, the main determining factor of the classification of research activities into qualitative and quantitative is the nature of the data.
3. Objectivity and subjectivity in constructing data: both types of research activities (qualitative and quantitative) involve subjective judgments. Basically, the subjectivity involved in data construction phase depends on "who is involved in scoring," "their level of experiencing in scoring," "the scoring rules," and "the students response or products." Any data that are constructed arise through an interpretation model that involves subjective judgments. The processes involved in constructing data may be quantitative or qualitative in nature and include three dimensions: data sources, interpretation model, and data.
4. Generalizability

Based on the following three reasons, the authors concluded that polarization in research is problematic.

1. All phenomena and all knowledge simultaneously have quantitative and qualitative dimensions
2. The distinction between objectivity and subjectivity, normally associated with that between quantitative and qualitative research, is neither accurate nor useful
3. Generalizability is not a feature of mathematization but a description for the tendency of inferences to go beyond the context and participants involved in the research.

To counter these problems, the authors proposed moving beyond polarization by:

1. using a different classificatory continuum based on the relational terms "low inference" and "high inference"
2. emphasizing a focus on the research questions
3. encouraging the collaboration of researchers with expertise in forms of research formerly labeled quantitative and qualitative

comps reading - Higher Level of Agency for Children in Knowledge Building: A Chellenge for the Design of New Knowledge Media

Written by Marlene Scardamalia and Carl Bereiter, though there's no ZPD mentioned in the title, this paper does talk about Vygotsky's theory and ZPD (Zone of Proximal Development). ZPD is not exclusive to children's learning, that is, both adults and children have ZPD where more knowledgeable others play essential role. However, according to our authors, there is a difference in executive control that is most salient in question-answer dialogue.

"Adults learners typically ask questions based on their perceived knowledge needs, whereas with school children, questions are typically asked by the teacher, based on the teachers' perception of the children's needs"

In the paper, the authors, based on evidence that children can produce and recognize educationally productive questions and can adapt them to their knowledge needs, introduced CSILE (Computer Supported Intentional Learning Environments), a computer supported knowledge medium that aims to design environments for students to use questions to guide their learning, so that they can higher their level of agency in learning.

CSILE is a networked system that gives students simultaneous access to a database that is composed of text and graphical notes that the students produce themselves and a means of searching and commenting on one another's contributions. Three models of teaching are described:

1. task model: student as doer or worker, students as the agent
2. knowledge-based model: Vygotsky's thinking
3. similar to knowledge-based model, with more emphasis on students to take over: both LOGO and CSILE employ this model; more of Piaget's thinking

The authors asked a key question: who is in charge of the zone of proximal development? To answer this question, we first need to know "what gos on in the ZPD." Two kinds of development need to be taken into account:

1. growth in the competencies directly involved in the activity
2. growth toward children's takeover of executive functions

As to who is in charge of ZPD, generally there are three different viewpoints: 1) mutual takeover; 2) learner takeover; and 3) more capable peers takeover. CSILE not only aims to scaffold learners to acquire the executive control in ZPD but also to achieve the goal of knowledge transforming, instead of mere knowledge telling.

Followed by the theoretical explanation, the authors introduced CSILE as to the interface and how to use it. To address whether or not children ask educationally productive questions in CSILE, the authors analyzed questions, be it their representation formats or questions type. In general, text-based questions facilitate bottom-up process, while knowledge-based questions help top-down process. Questions can also be categorized to basic info questions (uneducated guessing) and wonderment questions. Basic questions such as what are fossil fuels have a text-based quality and get quite directly at the kinds of information normally conveyed in basic text-based or encyclopedia treatments of a topic. Uneducated guessing questions are usually yes-no questions that have similar motivation to obtain basic orienting information, except that they take the form if shots in the dark at possible answers. As for wonderment questions, they reflect curiosity, puzzlement, skepticism, or a knowledge-based speculation, in contrast to a grouping for basic orienting information. Some examples of wonderment questions could be "Is everything either a fuel or needs a fuel?" "Can you make different fossil fuels by mixing other fossil fuels?" What kind of questions students are capable of asking depends on whether they have prior knowledge on that topic.

comps reading - Criteria for Assessing the Trustworthiness of Naturalistic Inquiries

Written by Egon G. Guba, this paper deals with what suggests in the title "Criteria for assessing the trustworthiness of naturalistic inquiries," starting from defining what naturalistic inquiry is, describing the differences between naturalistic and rationalistic paradigms, explaining questions of trustworthiness should be addressed, bringing about methods that researchers can employ to guard trustworthiness, and the implications.

To begin with, the term "naturalistic" describes a paradigm for inquiry, not a method. There are many different paradigms used in research inquiry, and the chief ones are naturalistic and rationalistic paradigm. They differ on certain key assumptions: (rationalistic vs naturalistic)

• The nature of reality: single and converge reality vs multiple and diverge reality
• The nature of the inquirer / object relationship: independent vs interrelated
• The nature of "truth statements": nomothetic (generalization, similarity) vs idiographic (differences)

The two inquiry paradigm also differ in some research approaches taken:

• Methods: quantitative vs qualitative
• Quality criterion: rigor (internal validity) vs relevance (external validity)
• Source of theory: priori theory vs grounded theory
• Knowledge types used: propositional knowledge vs tacit knowledge
• Instruments: layers of instruments vs inquirers as instruments
• Design: preordinate design vs emergent design
• Setting: laboratory (best) vs real world (nature, worst)

Here is the four questions of trustworthiness should be addressed, and from this we come up with for aspects of trustworthiness appropriate to scientific (rationalistic) and naturalistic terms, and different methods that naturalistic inquiry can employ to guard each aspect of trustworthiness, respectively.

Finally, five implications were drawn from the preceding analysis by Guba. Now they are listed as follows:

• Naturalistic inquiry has its own set of criteria for adequacy
• The proposed criteria, like scientific criteria, have utility at several stages in the inquiry process
• The statement of criteria is not equivalent to the statement of decision rules for applying these criteria
• The use of the naturalistic paradigm is fraught with special risks for an investigation
• The methods suggested cannot be viewed as an orthodoxy.