Water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink

I'll try to keep this short as it is a synthesis on education, and not commentary on the new readings for this week.

As I am S-L-O-W-L-Y getting my essay finalized, I am feel like I'm making random connections all over the place, and at a very rapid pace. I want to put them ALL in my essay, which of course is completely ludicrous, because then my essay would be all over the place. So I need an outlet for some of the things jumping around in my head that I haven't quite found a home for yet.


Herbart to Kolb?
Herbart's five-step lesson - preparation, presentation, comparison, abstraction, generalization
Kolb's experiental learning cycle - abstract conceptualization, active experimentation, concrete experience, reflective observation

Notice a common thread of learning occurring as a cycle. This could also be linked to the constructivist camp, as once you have been through one cycle you add another "layer" and repeat the process, and thus "construct" knowledge.

Side note: Svinicki & Dixon [1] expand on Kolb's model to add degrees of active learning where student is actor (i.e. laboratory experiment or journaling) and passive learning where student is receiver (i.e. lecture or viewing film). FYI: This is a really good paper on incorporating active learning in the classroom.

Piaget to Perry?
From the first introduction to Piaget (along with others in constructivist camp such as Kohlberg and especially Vygotsky who focused on "social constructivism") I thought of Perry's [2] stages of intellectual development. While I won't say that Perry builds directly from Piaget, they do align somewhat, with Paiget focusing on early development and Perry on early adulthood. Perry uses specific stages of development to implicate what a student may or may not be "ready" for in an educational environment. For example, if a student in Perry's position 1 of duality (thinks in terms of right and wrong, solves problems by following instructions of Authority) is given an authentic, ill-formed, open-ended problem, the likely result is that the student will "freak out" and not succeed in coming to a solution. If the same problem was given to a student in Perry's position 5 of relativism (which is also referred to as "turning the bend" - where the student sees everything as relative and absolutes are the exception) the student would not feel as intimidated by the divergence of possibilities and would likely be successful in reaching a reasonable solution.

Today in some searching for information, I discovered that I am not the only one to make this connection. Below is an excerpt from Chapter 14 of "Teaching Engineering" by Philip Wankat* and Frank Oreovicz [3]. The authors add that while Piaget and Perry do have some common threads the also have pronounced differences in concentration.


"It would be convenient if Perry’s scheme started where Piaget’s theory stops. Chronologically, the two theories do fit this way, but in other more important ways the theories are not a match. Perry does use Piaget’s ideas of how students learn. That is, a certain amount of disequilibration is necessary for accommodation to occur. However, Perry’s theory is not concerned with problem solving and the applications of logic as are the concrete and formal operational stages of Piaget’s theory. Briefly stated, Perry’s model is concerned first with how students move from a dualistic (right versus wrong) view of the universe to a more relativistic view, and second, how students develop commitments within this relativistic world. There is a strong learning connotation in Perry’s model since students cannot understand or answer questions which are in a developmental sense too far above them."

(*Note Dr. Wankat is a professor in Purdue School of Chemical Engineering and has recently won ASEE 2010 best paper award for ChE Division - you can download full copy of this book from ChE website, see URL link at the end of my post)


Dewey (and a few others) to How People Learn [4]

HPL: Knowledge Centered - The aim of teaching is learning, specifically, what should be taught and why?
Dewey - Students should play active role in setting their own learning objectives
Schon: New scholarship requires new epistemology
Dall'Alba: Ontology should not be neglected in favor of epistemology

HPL: Learner Centered - Includes understanding of student's prior experience and how that experience will affect their learning
Dewey - "The more a teacher is aware of the past experiences of students, of their hopes, desires, chief interests, the better will be understood the forces at work [of the students] that need to be directed and utilized for formation of reflective habits" (Noddings pg 50)
Dall'Alba - Everydayness of becoming - as a teacher/expert you forget and perhaps take for granted what is a crucial and incremental step for a novice.

HPL: Community Centered - Focus on norms and modes of operation
Dewey: Learning is something that must be initiated by the student, teacher is a guide
Palmer: "By 'space' I mean a complex of factors: physical arrangement and feeling of the room, the conceptual framework that I build around the topic my students and I are exploring, the emotional ethos I hope to facilitate, and the ground rules that will guide our inquiry." (pg 73)
Buber: Education is relation - learning via community and dialogue

HPL: Assessment Centered - All successful learning environment must also be assessment-centered - using combinations of formative (designed for feedback and to inform future instruction) and summative (to "index" what has been learned) assessments
Dewey: not enough to stop at awareness, teach must follow up to see what student has learned beyond initial awareness through inquiry.
Palmer: A little more abstract - but his personal anecdotes about his dialogues with his students sound very assessment-centered (formatively) in that he is constantly adjusting his guidance of a particular lecture to the response of his students.


Well so much for short, but I feel better!


In case you are interested, here are references to readings that were not part of H&Ph class:
[1] Svinicki, M. D., & Dixon, N. M. (1987). The Kolb model modified for classroom activities. College Teaching, 35 (Fall 1987), 141-146.
[2] Culver, R. S., & Hackos, J. T. (1982). Perry's Model of Intellectual Development. Engineering Education, 73(Dec), 221-226.
[3] Wankat, P. C., & Oreovicz, F. S. (1993). Teaching Engineering. New York: McGraw-Hill.
URL: https://engineering.purdue.edu/ChE/AboutUs/Publications/TeachingEng/index.html
[4] Bransford, J., Vye, N., & Bateman, H. (2002). Creating High-Quality Learning Environments: Guidelines from Research on How People Learn. In P. A. Graham & N. G. Stacey (Eds.), The Knowledge Economy and Postsecondary Education: Report of a Workshop. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.
URL: http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=10239&page=159