Contextual Theories in Learning and Cognition: Enhancing Educational Practices

2. Chapter 8 Learning and Cognition in Context

3. Contextual Theories • Learning and development are inextricably dependent on and bound to various physical, social, and cultural contexts.

4. Basic Assumptions of Contextual Theories

5. Basic Assumptions • The brain functions in close collaboration with the rest of the body. • Acquired knowledge/skills often tied to a limited set of activities/environments. • situated learning/cognition • Learners often think and perform more effectively when they can offload some of cognitive load. • distributed cognition/intelligence

6. Basic Assumptions • Learners sometimes learn more effectively when they collaborate with others to co-construct meaning. • social constructivism • With the help and guidance of more knowledgeable individuals, learners benefit from the accumulated wisdom of their cultural group. • sociocultural theory

7. Social Interactions as Contexts

8. Social Interactions • Interactions with more advanced individuals • Mediated learning experiences • Cognitive and metacognitive strategies

9. Social Interactions • Interactions with peers may facilitate • clarification/organization of thoughts • elaboration on material learned • exposure to the views of others • discovery of inconsistencies in one’s own thinking • modeling of effective ways of thinking/ studying • practice in learning, reasoning, argumentation, and social skills • more advanced epistemic beliefs

10. Creating a Community of Learners • All students actively participate • Goal is to acquire body of knowledge • Draws on many resources • Discussion/collaboration are common • Diversity in students expected/respected • Students and teacher coordinate efforts • Everyone is resource for others • Regular sharing/critiquing of work • Process as important as product

11. Cultures as Contexts

12. Culture • Behaviors and beliefs that are passed from old members of a social group to new ones, from generation to generation. • Facilitates survival and progress • Both concrete and abstract

13. Schemas and Scripts • Schema • organized set of facts about a specific topic • Script • schema involving predictable sequence of events related to a common activity

14. Worldviews • General sets of beliefs and assumptions about reality • culturally transmitted • often encompass implicit knowledge • may conflict with academic subject matter

15. Communities of Practice • Groups of people, both professional and other, who share common interests and goals and regularly interact and coordinate their efforts in pursuit of those interests and goals • Transmission of procedural knowledge • Legitimate peripheral participation by novices

16. Society and Technology as Contexts

17. Society • A very large, enduring social group that has fairly explicit social and economic structures, as well as collective institutions and activities. • Influences its members’ learning through the resources it provides, the activities it supports, and the general messages it communicates. • Distributed knowledge

18. Authentic Activities • Similar or identical to activities students will encounter in outside world • Allow student to accomplish more • Promote meaningful learning • Facilitate transfer to other situations • Problem- or project- based learning • Service-learning

19. Technology in Learning & Teaching • Integrates multiple media and pedagogical strategies. • Instruction can be delivered from afar. • Distance learning • Instruction can be individualized to meet students’ unique needs. • intelligent tutoring systems

20. Technology in Learning & Teaching • Learners can manipulate data while also keeping their cognitive load within reasonable limits. • Diverse bodies of knowledge are within easy reach. • Facilitates communication/collaboration. • Offers means of providing authentic activities. • Blurs lines between “work” and “play.”

21. Academic Content Domains as Contexts

22. Content Domain As Contexts • Different content domains require different thinking skills. • Different content domains depend more or less heavily on different parts of the brain. • Content domains are thus contexts for learning.

23. Literacy

24. Reading and Writing • Emergent Literacy • Language Arts • Domain specific reading and writing skills

25. Skilled Reading • Sound and letter recognition • phonological awareness • Word decoding skills • Automatic word recognition • Meaning construction • Metacognitive oversight

26. Promoting Reading Development • For novice readers, provide multimedia books. • Remind students of what they already know. • Have students summarize what they’ve read. • Have students ask one another teacher-like questions. • Provide outlines or graphics that students can use to organize what they’re reading. • Explicitly teach strategies for comparing, contrasting, and evaluating multiple texts that give competing messages.

27. Skilled Writing • Goal setting • Identification and organization of relevant knowledge • Focus on communication rather than mechanics • knowledge transforming vs. knowledge telling • Revision • Metacognitive regulation of writing effort

28. Promoting Writing Development • Ask students with limited writing skills to dictate rather than write their stories. • Ask students to set specific goals for their writing, and help them organize their thoughts before beginning to write. • Help students brainstorm ideas for communicating effectively. • Provide an explicit structure for students to follow as they write.

29. Promoting Writing Development • Suggest that children initially focus on communicating clearly and postpone attention to writing mechanics until later drafts. • Provide specific questions that students should ask themselves as they critique their writing. • Encourage use of word processing programs, voice recognition software, and other writing software that can support effective writing. • Have students work in small groups to either (a) critique one another’s work or (b) co-write stories and essays.

30. Technological Literacy • Knowledge and skill needed beyond traditional reading and writing skills. • Use of common functions • Use of device-specific operating systems • Use of specific computer applications • Effective search for relevant and credible Internet websites

31. Scaffolding Online Research • Use a data base or search engine that restricts the websites to which students have access. • Provide specific questions students should try to answer as they read. • Provide questions students should consider in evaluating the credibility of a website’s content. • Give students structured practice in comparing and contrasting websites that present diverse and possibly contradictory perspectives. • Ask students to write summaries of what they’ve learned from multiple websites.

32. Mathematics

33. Mathematics • Essential knowledge and skills include: • Understanding numbers and counting. • Understanding central concepts and principles. • Mastering problem-solving procedures. • Encoding problems appropriately. • Metacognitive oversight and regulation of problem solving.

34. Misconceptions About Mathematics • Mathematics is a collection of meaningless procedures that must simply be memorized and recalled as needed. • Math problems always have one and only one right answer. • There’s only one correct way to solve any particular math problem. • Mathematical ability is largely a genetically endowed gift.

35. Promoting Learning in Mathematics • When introducing addition and subtraction, encourage students to use strategies they’ve constructed on their own, but foster gradual automaticity for addition and subtraction facts. • Foster conceptual understanding. • Use a number line to help students understand how numbers relate to one another. • Combine problems requiring different strategies into a single practice set. • Present problems that include irrelevant as well as relevant information.

36. Promoting Learning in Mathematics • Present complex, real-world problems with multiple possible answers. • Encourage students to use calculators and computers to assist them in solving problems, after they’ve mastered the procedures they’re now offloading onto technology. • Present worked-out examples to illustrate multistep problem-solving procedures • Teach/scaffold metacognitive processes • Have students tutor classmates or younger children in math.

37. Science

38. Science • Key to scientific reasoning: • Hypothesis formation and testing • Careful, objective documentation of observations • Construction of theories and models • Metacognitive reflection • Advanced epistemic beliefs about the nature of scientific knowledge • Conceptual change when warranted

39. Promoting Learning in Science • Ask students to explain current beliefs/theories about a phenomenon; look for both elements of truth and unproductive misconceptions. • Illustrate relationships among concepts and principles with live demonstrations, physical models, etc. • Present phenomena that are inconsistent with students’ current understandings. • Have students design and carry out experiments to test various hypotheses about cause–and–effect relationships.

40. Promoting Learning in Science • When experiments with real-world objects and events are impractical or impossible, have students test their hypotheses in computer-simulated environments. • Scaffold students’ efforts to separate and control variables and to draw appropriate conclusions. • Explicitly draw students’ attention to results that contradict their predictions and expectations; ask students to explain and in other ways make sense of those results.

41. Social Studies

42. History • A solid mastery of history requires several abilities and processes: • Comprehending the nature of historical time • Perspective taking • Drawing inferences from historical documents • Identifying possible cause–and–effect relationships among events • Evaluating the credibility of various documents and interpretations

43. Promoting Learning in History • Early elementary grades, focus on students’ personal histories and on recent, local events. • Upper elementary grades, introduce students to primary historical sources. • Middle/secondary grades, have students read multiple accounts of events and then draw conclusions about what definitely happened and about what might have happened. • Have “journalists” (2-3 students) interview people (other students) who “participated” in various ways in a historical event.

44. Promoting Learning in History • Role-play family discussions and decision making during critical times. • Have students write fictional diary or journal entries from the perspective of a particular time period or historical figure. • Ask students to consider how things might have been different if certain events had not taken place.

45. Geography • Key elements of knowledge and thinking in geography: • Understanding maps as symbolic representations • Identifying interrelationships among people and their environments • Acknowledging cultural differences and their implications for human behavior patterns

46. Promoting Learning in Geography • Have students create maps of their school building. • Provide explicit instruction in common map symbols. • In the middle school grades, introduce the concept of scale in maps. • Emphasize complex, dynamic interrelationships among the earth’s physical features and human. • Teach students how to use age-appropriate mapping websites and software.

47. Promoting Learning in Social Studies • Focus on key principles—big ideas—that underlie social studies. • adaptation, interdependence, globalization, etc. • Relate concepts and principles to students’ everyday experiences. • Avoid characterizing individuals/groups as simplistic figures, and combat stereotypes. • Assign works of fiction that realistically depict people living in particular times and places. • Engage students in authentic activities.

48. Taking Student Diversity Into Account

49. Diversity • Many special needs students have difficulties with reading and writing. • Chronic difficulties with literacy can affect self-esteem. • Address reading and writing deficits early, with deliberate and intensive training in both basic skills • Help students with disabilities find joy in literacy activities—ideally with authentic reading and writing activities.

50. The Big Picture