Advances in instructional Psychology

Volume 4

Robert Glaser

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781317954415
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

The contributors to this volume address reasoning and problem solving as fundamental to learning and teaching and to modern literacy. The research on expertise and the development of competence makes it clear that structures of knowledge and cognitive process should be tightly linked throughout education to attain high levels of ability. The longstanding pedagogical assumption that the attainment of useful knowledge proceeds from lower level learning based on the practice of fundamental skills that demand little thought, to higher level competence in which problem solving finally plays an increasing role, is no longer tenable. It is now clear that thinking is not an outcome of basic learning, but is part of the basic acquisition of knowledge and skill. In learning to read, for example, decoding the printed word and understanding simple texts is an act of problem solving, requiring inference and elaboration by the reader. The prevalence of reasoning with information at all levels makes the details of its involvement a fundamental influence on learning and instruction -- a recurring theme in each of the chapters. A rich variety of topics is addressed including: *an analysis of the components of teaching competence *the evolution of a learner's mathematical understanding *the use of causal models for generating scientific explanations *the facilitation of meaningful learning through text illustrations *the competence of children in argumentative interaction that results in conceptual change.

1

On Teaching

Gaea Leinhardt

University of Pittsburgh

Teaching is a complex, dynamic, ill-structured process. In this process, known and valued information is newly built, jointly rebuilt, and passed from one source to another. There are multiple approaches to teaching and learning, each emphasizing different aspects of the process and each according the participants’ different roles. These approaches stretch along a continuum of who (the teacher, text, or learner) has which type of responsibility for which aspects of presentation and acquisition of knowledge. Conceptions of the learner vary from that of the rediscoverer and reinventor of human knowledge (Papert, 1980), to an apprentice in a socially situated system (Brown, Collins, & Duguid, 1989; Scribner, 1984a, 1984b), to an acquirer of well-designed stacks of information (Gagné & Brown, 1961). Related conceptions of the role of the teacher in teaching also vary from seeing the teacher as a relatively passive responder, to collaborator or facilitator (with the teacher as a problem poser and arranger of conditions for learning), to one that is primarily didactically directive. The fundamental nature of the teacher’s task and the knowledge base that he or she must have differ depending on how the role and activity are conceptualized. Arguments in support of a particular position are traditionally bolstered by a rich psychological conceptualization of learning. Comparably rich psychological explorations of teaching are somewhat rarer.¹ Almost never are the two studied in tandem. Although the systematic study of teaching has a long and rich tradition, considering the teacher as a complex, rational planner and organizer and presenting data to support that view is, by comparison, a newer enterprise (Shavelson & Stern, 1981; Yinger, 1980; Yinger & Dillard, 1987).

Models of Teaching

In the remainder of this section, three approaches to teaching are contrasted: (a) discovery, (b) facilitator, and (c) didactic director. Within the facilitator model, a distinction is made between task-centered learning that is anchored by life tasks and task-centered learning that is anchored by disciplinary tasks. The section concludes with a discussion of the stance towards teaching that is taken throughout the chapter, namely, that it is a complex web. Strands in the web help the teacher develop coherence for the complexity, dynamism, and ill-structured nature of the activity.

Discovery. The discovery model of teaching is fundamentally a discovery model of learning, where teaching is seen as the construction of a situation in which the learner has all the tools necessary for discovery; the learner’s personal interest both motivates and structures the task of learning (Dewey, 1963; Montessori, 1965; Neill, 1960; Piaget, 1954). The student selects the topics of inquiry, determines the path for finding out about the topic, and decides the end point. Unless a student knows to ask for them, the fundamental structure and epistemology of a discipline remain masked. A student has to discover, for example, that keeping notebooks and records of inquiry in some systematically but neutrally retrievable way is helpful in building up knowledge of more than one episode and in discovering patterns (Siegler & Liebert, 1975). The psychological support for the learner in this role is twofold: First, he or she builds new knowledge from existing intuitions and schemata and so remembers the new knowledge; second, the learner selects topics of inherent interest and value and works from his or her own motivations. The psychological criticism for this approach is pragmatic: First, the student may never discover the “right” thing (Ausubel & Schiff, 1954; Joshua & Dupin, 1987); second, the student does not have an opportunity to use conventional language and formations that aid recall of a correct piece of knowledge and link it to shared knowledge in a wider community (Leinhardt & Ohlsson, 1990). Under a strict view of discovery, teaching is considered good in those cases in which it facilitates but does not interfere with the student’s complete construction of the self-selected knowledge. The teacher is seen as librarian who serves as a repository of information that the student can tap. In a discovery model, the teacher must be astute about the student’s psychological development and capacity for insightful observation, as well as about the global pattern of a discipline.

Facilitator. The models in which the teacher is the arranger or collaborative facilitator have been well articulated by Montessori (1965) and Dewey (1963). In these collaborative models, the student constructs knowledge systematically under guided social conditions. Errors are corrected through public and private inspection of results and effects (Brown & Palincsar, 1984; Lampert, 1986). In these models, teachers watch and anticipate the thinking and reasoning of a child. They observe carefully how a particular pedagogical device is interpreted. Teachers pose questions and offer problems; they facilitate searches of knowledge repositories such as libraries or museums; they encourage natural experiments; they focus students’ attention on particular portions of the enterprise. They are guides and planners. To be effective within the discipline, they must have deep disciplinary knowledge. To be effective as teachers, they must have deep pedagogical knowledge. This tradition has two identifiable approaches, each treating the role of the teacher similarly but requiring different knowledge bases.

One approach assumes knowledge is most naturally acquired around tasks and projects. This tradition has its latest manifestation in the theories of activity-based learning proposed by such followers of Vygotsky (1978) as Brown and Reeve (1987); Bereiter and Scardamalia (1989); and Scardamalia, Bereiter, and Steinbach (1984). The context of learning in these theories is a relatively natural, “authentic life task” or project. In this setting, the teacher helps students to draw out the subject-matter knowledge content from tasks. For example, a class plans an investigation or writes a book about a specific topic. Roles are decided upon. Disciplinary knowledge is gained from multiple sources and pooled: in math, from planning the costs and estimating and projecting rates of change and growth; in science, from structuring the task and charting results; in writing, from writing about different aspects of the enterprise (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1989; Brown, 1992; Scardamalia et al., 1984). The knowledge is acquired in a situation that itself carries both the problem and the solution (Carraher, Carraher, & Schliemann, 1985; Schliemann & Acioly, 1989). The teacher’s task is to orchestrate, manage, and respond supportively.

In a second approach to the facilitation conception of teaching, the focus is less on project-based contextualization of problems than on the discipline’s own task space (see Nesher, 1992; White, in press). One example of this more abstract approach is Montessori’s didac...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• PREFACE
• 1 ON TEACHING
• 2 LEARNING: THE MICROGENETIC ANALYSIS OF ONE STUDENT’S EVOLVING UNDERSTANDING OF A COMPLEX SUBJECT MATTER DOMAIN
• 3 INTERMEDIATE CAUSAL MODELS: A MISSING LINK FOR SUCCESSFUL SCIENCE EDUCATION?
• 4 ILLUSTRATIONS THAT INSTRUCT
• 5 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MEMORY AND REASONING SKILL IN ARGUMENTATIVE CONTEXTS: EVALUATING, EXPLAINING, AND GENERATING EVIDENCE
• AUTHOR INDEX
• SUBJECT INDEX