Thursday, August 5, 2010

The Wave is DEAD! Long Live the Wave!

There was a time in each of our careers when our minds were more free, more in touch with the creative, with the possibilities. Now I'm bringing it back. 

Enjoy the best of Learning Science Lab riding the Wave! 

Lots of Links for the Soul

A.R.:
Links for the lab (I need a better way of organizing and managing organization...)

Getting Academic Dialogues Moving

A.R.:
Adversarial Collaboration, from a Nobel laureate

"One line of work that I hope may become influential is the development of a procedure of adversarial collaboration, which I have championed as a substitute for the format of critique-reply-rejoinder in which debates are currently conducted in the social sciences.1 Both as a participant and as a reader I have been appalled by the absurdly adversarial nature of these exchanges, in which hardly anyone ever admits an error or acknowledges learning anything from the other. Adversarial collaboration involves a good-faith effort to conduct debates by carrying out joint research - in some cases there may be a need for an agreed arbiter to lead the project and collect the data. Because there is no expectation of the contestants reaching complete agreement at the end of the exercise, adversarial collaborations will usually lead to an unusual type of joint publication, in which disagreements are laid out as part of a jointly authored paper. I have had three adversarial collaborations, with Tom Gilovich and Victoria Medvec (Gilovich, Medvec and Kahneman, 1998), with Ralph Hertwig (where Barbara Mellers was the agreed arbiter, see Mellers, Hertwig and Kahneman, 2001), and with a group of experimental economists in the UK (Bateman et al., 2003). An appendix in the Mellers et al. article proposes a detailed protocol for the conduct of adversarial collaboration. In another case I did not succeed in convincing two colleagues that we should engage in an adversarial collaboration, but we jointly developed another procedure that is also more constructive than the reply-rejoinder format. They wrote a critique of one of my lines of work, but instead of following up with the usual exchange of unpleasant comments we decided to write a joint piece, which started by a statement of what we did agree on, then went on to a series of short debates about issues on which we disagreed (Ariely, Kahneman, & Loewenstein, 2000). I hope that more efficient procedures for the conduct of controversies will be part of my legacy."

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/2002/kahneman-autobio.html


One Spy per Child

Matt:
Please show some rage
http://www.boingboing.net/2010/02/17/school-used-student.html

A.R.:
**is showing rage**

Matt:
You know your procrastinating when you respond to a 10 day old wave :-D

A.R.:
I'M NOT PROCRASTINATING I'M THINKING

Matt:
You know your thinking when you are raging! 


Textbooks & Texas

Nate:
This is my battle.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/14/magazine/14texbooks-t.html

There's even mention of Adam's home town!!! ;)


This is a Call to Arms, TO FIGHT!

Matt:
I thought you might enjoy this call to arms in visual design

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgUBvsW9ZQU

Matt:
I actually love this series: if you liked that one let me show you the vid that made me respect scrabble in new ways

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1aq6sJEuVU

Nate:
http://www.cracked.com/article_18386_7-mind-blowing-easter-eggs-hidden-in-famous-works-art.html

Check that shit out. Unicorns fucking has never been so real! AND MORE!!
Your game should obviously have easter eggs in it! ;)


On Beyond Zebra

Nate:
So the book is: "On Beyond Zebra!" by Doctor Seuss

The quote goes something like this:

"In the places I go there are things that I see
That I never could spell if I stopped with the Z.
I'm telling you this 'cause you're one of my friends.
My alphabet starts where your alphabet ends!

So, on beyond Z!
It's high time you were shown
That you really don't know
All there is to be known."

I think I shall acquire this work upon my successful employment. :D 


Discovery vs. Direct Instruction

A.R.:
Here is a wave for hashing out the varieties available in the garden between Discovery Learning and Direct Instruction
To be populated later (or when you guys start it).
Also, you can add in notes directly inline with the text! Double click on what you'd like to respond to.

Nate:
Mastery vs. Performance + GAMES
http://www.pixelpoppers.com/2009/11/awesome-by-proxy-addicted-to-fake.html

A.R.:
A potential quote from this future paper:

"Although studies have shown that pure discovery learning is terribly inefficient when it comes to content knowledge gains in the short term--although what is learned correctly will be retained for far longer and understood more deeply--there still exists a place for it in science curriculum. We are not just in the business of teaching science content, after all, but also teaching science inquiry skills and especially trying to provide students with knowledge of the Nature of Science as defined by XX.

"What are inquiry skills but a special set of process skills? And cognitive science has repeatedly shown that the only way to acquire process skills is through direct practice and application. But heavily guided labs have still proven insufficient for teaching science inquiry skills. There is a close mapping between science inquiry skills and important metacognitive skills, and it's for this reason that only pure discovery learning is sufficient for teaching them.

"The processes that science inquiry skills practice are not just the act of 'doing science,' but are also a way of thinking about science--further, they are a way of thinking about and approaching the environment. Because of this, the only real guidance an activity designed to teach science inquiry skills can provide is guidance aimed at encouraging certain ways of thinking. Guidance in terms of what the student is doing physically bypasses the thinking stage and allows him to simply execute an algorithm unthinkingly, even if it's one he's guessing about. An activity that only gives students a goal and no process-instructions, instead replacing them with encouragement to consider certain facts or think in certain ways--this may not be the purest of discovery learning, but it's close enough that to many students and teachers the difference is arbitrary.

"Certainly students, teachers, and researchers oriented towards performance motivations will find such an activity frustrating and perhaps incomprehensible, but evidence shows that learning science inquiry skills--and thus the Nature of Science--tolerates only guidance of thinking. This makes sense in light of how actual scientists approach their work. After all, on the edges of scientific work there is no authority other than the evidence to provide correct answers and a comprehensive model with which to understand it all. To that end, it makes sense to withhold activity guidance and instructor assessment for as long as possible in order to better simulate the conditions in which scientists work, and thus increase the probability that a student will come to a better understanding of the Nature of Science and thus the rational foundations and applications of science inquiry skills.

"The last argument is not a new one, to be sure, but it is the first time that evidence is lent more than cursory support by it. While most science curricula to date focus on accumulation of science facts accompanied with a prayer that science inquiry skills might get picked up on the way, and some reactionary curricula instead seem to forego an interest in proven facts in order to increase the chances that a student ends up better understanding the Nature of Science, there exists other ways to fill a student's brain with facts and provide them with the opportunity to learn science inquiry skills. One possible way is to devote a period of the curriculum to only science inquiry skills. Rather than attempting to double-dip by teaching students content and inquiry at the same time, do not rely on a period of discovery learning in a certain domain to teach domain knowledge--and don't see time spent not focused on obtaining domain knowledge as time wasted. It is well and good to speak about science inquiry skills as the highest goal for science education, of critical importance for our students to learn, and to bemoan the fact that it is not being taught, but if there are no serious attempts to incorporate its teaching into existing curricula, can it be said that anyone really takes their propaganda seriously?"

Now we just need to run an experiment and see if reality backs me up here. XD

A.R.:
I'm aware this is something of a divorce from previous thinking on this issue, but the argument I make above seems logical to me. I'd be happy to get picked apart.

To be sure, the real argument I'm making is not that "DL is great lol" (evidence says that pure DL is pretty retarded for almost everything, after all) but that because of the NoS, learning inquiry is resistant to anything but pure-like DL. I think this intuitive conjecture combined with the fact that we work with compys is why JG is trying to push her NoM stuff.

I think it's possible that there are scaffolded methods for teaching inquiry skills, else our lab is doomed to failure. I think there might be a series of such activities, much like *gasp* a real curriculum. But I also think that the final activity will have to look like pure-esque DL for the reasons above.

Rather than activities, we have to look at curricula? That seems hard to run an experiment on... At least, with the way we do things in the lab.

Right now, we're doing inquiry-oriented stuff and trying to show how there's content knowledge gains, which is fine and dandy and may even have some results, but feels to me ultimately like a dog chasing a car. Sometimes we even measure inquiry gains. But why aren't we taking an inverse approach: trying different approaches and measuring inquiry gains? Our grants say that teaching inquiry is our business.

I'm getting off-track now. And my mother is walking in every five minutes to distract me, so my thinking isn't as coherent as it normally is. Sorry. :/

Hm. Hmelo's paper outlines two mediated approaches... the medical one requires a person to act much like a DM, which is resource intensive. What was the other approach?

Also, I'm getting away from our original goal: show how both "camps" were being retarded and not at all different from each other? Or, at least, both trying to get at the same thing. Instead, I'm coming across here as yet another tard. Somebody take some fresh eyes at this and align it with our original goals. I'm going to go crazy from trying to work around family now.

Nate:
I basically agree that we should be trying to operationalize inquiry more than anything else.

Nate:
Actually, I was dreaming (literally) about posting a white paper on this topic. There is a certain meta-skill I want to try to measure and I feel more inclined to doing it now since all the people who have been here pre summer 2009 will be screwed at AERA if someone doesn't fix our situation. Instead of posting it directly to our lab list, I will write it here!

Nate:
One-to-One Self Efficacy

Students are presented a Likert-scale questionnaire asking them to describe the degree to which they possess certain fine-grained skills. They are then given a questionnaire where they are asked to demonstrate these skills.

The measure in question is not whether they possess the skill or not, but whether they realize this or not / if they are being honest with the questionnaire / themselves.

The purpose of such a measure is to serve as a parameter of how much scaffolding they get and more specifically, what variety of scaffolding they receive. This is important because we claim to scaffold students based on their learner characteristics, but as of yet we don't even have multiple types of scaffolding - or rather even a single variety of scaffolding!

One pair of scaffolds that should mix well with this measure of meta-cognition is Assistment's scaffolding and normal worked examples where Assistment Scaffolding is really the interactive presentation of a worked example piece-by-piece.

As a closing note, where does this leave other varieties of self efficacy? One way of looking at this is asking how students model skills. If we say, are you good at math? What is their model of math skill? If we say are you good at calculus or differentiation, what are their models here?? The new question becomes, how specific do we have to be with words before our models of a skill are synched with student's models? The parameters of this relation are particularly important for anyone in the tutoring business because we cannot rework material for everyone who uses it (what we currently do cf. would a teacher in a classroom have this problem?).




Philosophy of Science & Theories of Knowledge 
(Science-Technology-Society)

Nate:
Here is another cool sub-discussion:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_demarcation


Disruptive Technology

A.R.:
Disruptive Technology: Student Brings Typewriter to Class
http://www.openculture.com/2009/12/student_brings_typewriter_to_class.html

The real question, of course, is who is actually disrupting whom. The students with internet-attached computers? The one with the noisy typewriter? To what ends are the affordances of these lexical technologies driving the classroom?


The 12 Days of Learning Science Lab

Matt and A.R.:
I fully admit how silly this is but. . . I am procrastinating (spelling hero!)

Feel free to delete, change, etc

12 days of labiin'

1. One kid who knows how to think
2. Think Alouds
3. hours gaming
4. canceled classes
5. fiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiive THOUSAND LOOOOOOOOOOOOOGS
6. days in schools
7. files a-coded
8. bubbles a-herded
9.
10.
11.
12. 


Presuppositions

Matt:
Anyone have any idea what janice means when she says
"What presuppositions underlie the learning environment?"

What it says to me is "what assumptions does the learning environment make."

A.R.:
I agree.

Matt:
but . . . that does not mean very much . . .

A.R.:
It means everything! If you don't know your assumptions, how can you make any inferences about your model? Or what the student is learning?

As Sun Tzu says, "If you know yourself and your enemy, you can fight one hundred battles without a single loss. If you know yourself and not your enemy, you may win or lose. If you do not know yourself, then you put yourself in danger with every battle."

Matt:
OH FUCk
I GOT IT.

Thanks!

A.R.:
Do svidania.
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1 comment:

  1. NateAugust 5, 2010 at 3:25 AM

    I'm thinking we might need some kind of link repository. . . .

    ReplyDelete

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