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In this course students worked through a series of six problems designed to teach them about contemporary learning theory and also how to apply theory to analyze and solve common teaching and learning dilemmas.
The first problem involved a 7th grade science teacher whose pupils were performing poorly. After analyzing the problem, students developed strategies intended to help the science teacher improve learning in her classroom. My students showed an overriding tendency to base their strategies on personal models of learning rather than on new course concepts, and many could not use the new model of learning. In a second problem, the class had to explain why the Reciprocal Teaching method improves reading comprehension. Most students incorporated relevant learning principles but had difficulty explaining how Reciprocal Teaching affects the way children interact with text and influences comprehension processes.
The third problem presented episodes of flawed thinking in which children or adults demonstrated poor cognitive performance due to lack of effective metacognitive activity. About 40% of the class was able to explain that metacognition was the concept behind the flawed thinking episodes, but most relied to some extent on their own "common sense" notions to analyze the episodes. In the fourth problem the class analyzed the learning strategies of two 12-year-olds who were trying to learn material from a science text. Overall performance in the class was very strong and a large majority of students successfully interpreted the youngsters' learning activities in terms of relevant course concepts.
Two problems came at the end of the semester. One depicted a college classroom in which the instructor was having mixed success with a group learning exercise. My students had to recommend ways to modify the class in order to promote better understanding of the subject. Nearly 60% of the class proposed reasonable strategies to develop understanding in the group setting. However, 40% of the class interpreted the group learning activity as an instance of poor cooperative learning, and focused on ways the instructor could make the groups work better even though such changes would not necessarily produce better understanding of the subject matter.
The final problem in the sequence was a teaching for understanding project. Students designed instructional materials and activities to teach a topic for understanding, and wrote a companion paper to explain how and why their project would build understanding. Students were adept at designing materials and activities, but only a small number adequately explained why these would promote understanding. In some cases, students seemed to resort to their prior knowledge of teaching methods and proposed materials that were not conducive to building understanding.
What do the results of these episodes say about the development of student understanding? Did students advance their understanding of learning theory? Did they learn how to apply theory to classroom learning dilemmas? Did the PBL approach help students overcome their prior and inert knowledge?
In general there are some encouraging signs that students did learn something in the course. First, in the daily writing assignments and class discussions students demonstrated they were familiar with the course material and could "think about" the theoretical principles of learning they had studied. Based on this traditional measure of learning, one could conclude that students did a lot of work and acquired a large body of information during the semester. Second, PBL fostered better understanding of the subject than my previous approach to teaching the course; the PBL students used the course material as a basis for their thinking much more than the non-PBL students, who relied more extensively on their personal theories. Moreover a follow-up study with PBL students four months after the course demonstrated that most were still able to think with the course concepts.
On the other hand, "thinking with" the course material proved to be a formidable challenge. Even the best students did not consistently incorporate relevant course concepts in the problem solving episodes. There is no detectable linear progression of learning across the problem episodes in the course; student performance varied from underdeveloped to relatively sophisticated. For example, the solutions to the 7th grade science problem were quite limited and underdeveloped. In contrast, the analysis of learning strategies in the 12-year-olds was quite well developed. It also seemed that students revised their understanding of individual concepts but these were isolated changes resulting from encounters with specific problems rather than fundamental conceptual changes in their models of learning. Consequently, a student could produce an advanced explanation in one instance and a naïve one in another.
The road to deep understanding is a long one. The ability to use complex ideas develops in degrees rather than suddenly and all at once. Student performance in the course is consistent with the way people develop complex skills. As novices, students used new concepts tentatively and fell back on previous models and strategies. Most advanced beyond a purely naïve perspective, but did not fully develop expert understanding. They went beyond what they already knew, and employed disciplinary concepts in new contexts some of the time, but often produced underdeveloped and fragmented ideas.
Students came to the course with a model of learning quite different from the one they were expected to learn during the semester. As they read and discussed the course material, students could talk about the new model, but were not always able to use it to analyze and solve learning problems. Sometimes—even at the end of the semester—they resorted to their personal models. It seems that their experience in the course altered their conceptual understanding of individual concepts, but it is not clear to what extent students' models of learning now include the disciplinary concepts and principles they encountered during the semester. |