Carl Bereiter

Computer Supported Intentional Learning Environments.

CSILE, which stands for Computer-Supported Intentional Learning Environments, is an educational knowledge media system. CSILE allows information in several media (text, drawings, graphs, timelines, etc.) to be entered into a common database where it is available to be retrieved, linked, commented on, rated, and so forth. The environments and operations of CSILE are designed to support students in more purposeful and mature, or intentional, processing of information. In this article eleven principles, based on recent cognitive research, are suggested for designing computer environments that support intentional learning. These principles include making knowledge-construction activities overt, maintaining attention to learning goals as opposed to other goals of an activity, providing process-relevant feedback, and giving students responsibility for contributing to each others learning. Applications of these principles in CSILE are described, as well as observations from the first year of school try-out.

Technologies for knowledge-building discourse

T here are pervasive strategies for school work that may be broadly characterized as knowledge reproduction strategies. They have limited potential for advancing knowledge, and often are not even very effective for purposes of memorization and organization of knowledge. Their most conspicuous failure, however, is in the development of understanding. Knowledge building strategies are, by contrast, focused centrally on the development of understanding. These strategies, however, are comparatively rare among school children [6]. Worse yet, they seem destined to remain so because school discourse effectively excludes them. Educational computing, unfortunately, tends to support knowledge reproduction strategies rather than knowledge-building ones. While this is obvious regarding much of the courseware on the market, in a more subtle way it is equally true of the software tools that are popularly thought to encourage more active learning. An explanation may be found in the origins of these software tools and in the evolution of the personal computer as a workstation. This evolution has been toward meeting the needs of a business community concerned with storing and retrieving information (hence, the saliency of files and folders), transferring it (hence, cut-and-paste, import-export, and communications software), displaying it (hence, graphing, graphics, desktop publishing, and multimedia presentation software), and making plans and decisions based on it (hence, spreadsheets, accounting, and projectmanagement software). Put it all together, and you have the desktop metaphor. It is not a metaphor for the construction and advancement of understanding. It represents activities that are important in any kind of information processing environment. We propose that these activities-copying, deleting, storing, retrieving, entering, displaying, and sending-be thought of as first-order knowledge-processing activities. In order to serve the purposes of knowledgebuilding, however, they must be subordinated to a second-order system of activities that has understanding as its primary purpose. In this article we discuss second-order computing facilities and a system we are developing that aims to foster and support knowledge building in school. The system is computer-supported intentional learning environments (CSILE). It aims to engage students in the same sorts of intellectual and cultural processes that sustain realworld scientists in efforts at knowledge advancement.

Toward a Solution of the Learning Paradox

Efforts to explain learning as a constructive process run into the paradox of having to attribute to the learner prior knowledge that is at least as complex as the new learning to be explained. Although no full solution of this paradox is in sight, it is argued that progress is possible through examination of the wide range of mental resources available to human learners, only a limited range of which are taken account of in current theories. This paper considers 10 relatively neglected resources for the “bootstrapping” of cognitive growth, including chance plus selection, the affective boosting of relevant schemas, the operation of innate biases, and use of spare mental capacity. Implications for educational research are illustrated with reference to recent work on the development of complex composition strategies.

Aspects of an Educational Learning Theory

Contemporary cognitive science has created the possibility of an educational learning theory closely related to existing cognitive theories but operative at a higher level of description. Issues that must be addressed in developing such a theory are: How much of the external world should be included in cognitive descriptions, how to avoid degenerate functionalism, what needs explaining by an educational learning theory, and what its units of analysis should be. It is proposed that a constitutive problem for educational learning theory is the explanation of difficult learning. A unit of analysis called a contextual module is proposed and applied to this problem. An advantage of contextual modules is that they treat environmental situatedness as an emergent property resulting from reasonably well understood processes.

Student communities for the advancement of knowledge

nowledge building—the creation of knowledge as a social product—is something that scientists, scholars, and employees of highly innovative companies do for a living. It could also be a significant activity of schools, though it is rarely seen there. The central purpose of computer-supported intentional learning environments (CSILE) is to make such knowledge building an integral part of schooling. In order for this to occur, the character of classroom discourse needs to undergo radical change. CSILE has been designed as a computer-supported environment in which collaborative discourse is the primary medium for knowledge advancement. Students identify and pursue issues of understanding and engage in the kinds of dialogue used by workers in the sciences and in other dynamic, knowledgeadvancing organizations. Knowledge building, as thus conceived, can be distinguished from most of school learning that focuses on individual assignments and various other individual displays of knowledgeability. In CSILE, the focus is on collective responsibility and continual advancement of ideas in a student-generated database. In this context, students’ conflicting views and contradictory methods can be rethought for their potential to complement and expand shared knowledge. The goals of the enterprise are emergent, with consensus representing but a provisional synthesis—an advance, but more importantly, a new starting point.

An Architecture for Collaborative Knowledge Building

Conscious, cooperative development of shared knowledge is the focus of the CSILE (Computer Supported Intentional Learning Environments) project. Results to date, both from our own work and from similarly-motivated work, convince us that elementary school students can profitably make knowledge construction the focus of their efforts, although it is a novelty to them (and to their teachers) and requires a great deal of support. On the basis of what has been learned from four years of experimentation with an initial version, CSILE 1.0, we are designing a much more powerfully supportive system, which will be embodied in a second generation of CSILE. A major change in CSILE 2.0 will be the inclusion of distinct environments for different kinds of knowledge-building operations. In this paper we set out the principal features of the new knowledge-building architecture and the design principles that are guiding its development-principles that we believe are applicable to any technology aimed at restructuring classrooms as places for sustained, collaborative inquiry.

Implications of Connectionism for Thinking about Rules

Although the “new connectionism” is causing a great stir in cognitive science and artificial intelligence, it has been difficult for people outside these fields to grasp. Through use of a concrete analogy, this article attempts to provide a nontechnical explanation of what connectionism is like and to show how it constitutes a radical alternative to the classical view of cognition based on implicit rules.

An Attainable Version of High Literacy: Approaches to Teaching Higher-Order Skills in Reading and Writing

ABSTRACTOne way of criticizing contemporary literacy education is to credit it with trying to do the right things, but to argue that the means could stand improvement. With great variation in the amount and kind of improvement recommended, this seems to be the line of criticism taken by almost everyone from alarmist critics (e.g., Cooperman 1978; Flesch 1981) to blue-ribbon panelists (e.g., Anderson, Hiebert, Scott, and Wilkinson 1985; National Commission on Excellence in Education 1983). A quite different line of criticism, however, attacks the aim of contemporary literacy education, charging it with being oriented toward the development of a low form of literacy. In their historical analysis of literacy instruction. Resnick and Resnick (1977) identify high literacy and low literacy as distinct educational traditions. High literacy has been a tradition in education of the elites in Europe and America. It has been aimed at developing the linguistic and verbal reasoning abilities, the literary standards an...

Constructive Activity in Learning From Text

This study examined the constructive cognitive activity of children listening to text and assessed the contribution of this activity to learning. Informative statements were read to 109 children (in grades 1 to 6) who were asked to think aloud about each statement. Analysis of the protocols led to a scale identifying five levels of constructive activity, with three subtypes at each level. The five levels were prefactual confabulation, knowledge/detail retelling, assimilation, problem solving, and extrapolation. The three subtypes were declarative, interrogative, and evaluative responses. Measures of prior knowledge and new learning were also obtained. A path analysis suggested that the level of activity identified by the scale exerted a direct effect on learning and mediated the effects of age and prior knowledge on learning.

Three Levels of Goal Orientation in Learning

Sixteen adult volunteers provided thinking-aloud protocols while undergoing a 10-hr individually administered course in BASIC (beginners all-purpose symbolic instruction code) programming. Three levels of goals were identified as operative in the learning situation: task-completion goals, instructional goals, and personal knowledge-building goals. Although protocol statements indicating knowledge-building goals were infrequent, students exhibiting a relatively high proportion of them were distinctive in several ways. They did significantly better on a posttest. Their performance in goal cue selections differed from that of other participants in ways consistent with their orientation: They responded more often to learning goal cues than to task goal cues. They actively related new learning to prior knowledge and they posed and tried to solve problems and questions. Students oriented toward instructional goals tended to focus on what was explicitly taught. Students oriented toward task-completion goals ten...