Earl Woodruff

Collaborative Knowledge Building: Preservice Teachers and Elementary Students Talking to Learn

Two target groups, one composed of six preservice teachers and one of six Grade 5/6 students, are videotaped as they meet over a six-month period to conduct their collaborative groupwork. We take a socio-constructivist stance towards knowledge building, and as such, we are interested in how students collaboratively assist one another by pushing for deeper understanding and relating back to what the group already knows. Groups are given strategies to help them develop working norms and discourse structures in an effort to promote inquiry. We argue for a distinction between argument for inquiry and argument for persuasion in order to assess knowledge-building collaboration discourse. Language and social issues are addressed along with the cognitive issues of managing problem finding and problem solving. Analyses suggest that as the Grade 5/6 group learned to discuss and argue ideas explicitly as a means of inquiry they were better able to help each other advance their understanding. The preservice teachers,...

The impact of distributed and ubiquitous computational devices on the collaborative learning environment

Recent advances in small, personalized computing devices have made possible distributed and ubiquitous computing within the classroom. This creates a fundamentally different environment from one that has 4 or 5 desktop machines per classroom (Soloway et al., 2001). In this paper we sketch out the impact that Thinking Tags can have on the teaching and learning environment.

New ways of learning mathematics: are we ready for it?

In this paper, we report on a research project in progress in which we are attempting to establish and maintain an ICT-mediated math knowledge-building community. The paper first identifies why math knowledge-building communities are very difficult to establish and maintain and then provides evidence to support that these difficulties can be overcome by the inclusion of model-eliciting problems and new iconic math representation tools into the computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) environment.

Thin-Slice Measurement of Wisdom

Objective Measurement of Wisdom within a short period of time is vital for both the public interest (e.g., understanding a presidential election) and research (e.g., testing factors that facilitate wisdom development). A measurement of emotion associated with wisdom would be especially informative; therefore, a novel Thin-Slice measurement of wisdom was developed based on the Berlin Paradigm. For about 2 min, participants imagined the lens of a camera as the eyes of their friend/teacher whom they advised about a life dilemma. Verbal response and facial expression were both recorded by a camera: verbal responses were then rated on both the Berlin Wisdom criteria and newly developed Chinese wisdom criteria; facial expressions were analyzed by the software iMotion FACET module. Results showed acceptable inter-rater and inter-item reliability for this novel paradigm. Moreover, both wisdom ratings were not significantly correlated with Social desirability, and the Berlin wisdom rating was significantly negatively correlated with Neuroticism; feeling of surprise was significantly positively correlated with both wisdom criteria ratings. Our results provide the first evidence of this Thin-slice Wisdom Paradigm’s reliability, its immunity to social desirability, and its validity for assessing candidates’ wisdom within a short timeframe. Although still awaiting further development, this novel Paradigm contributes to an emerging Universal Wisdom Paradigm applicable across cultures.

Cognitive Work Analysis and Design Research: Designing for Mobile Human-Technology Interaction Within Elementary Classrooms

This paper discusses how Cognitive Work Analysis (CWA) can be seen as a critical element of the design research methodology. CWA has been shown to be an effective approach to adopt in analyzing, designing, and evaluating complex sociotechnical systems. Within design research, CWA can be seen as an integral precursor to any design iteration, as key constraints are identified and considered in collaboration with the classroom teacher in order to design effective innovations that optimize human-technology interactions. CWA may enable us to surmise why new mobile technologies may fail in their implementation in schools or do not have the level of impact on student learning they purport. We suggest how CWA informs the interpretation of the results of a study involving the introduction of handhelds in an elementary classroom, our understanding of the human-technology interaction in this context, and directions for iterations of design.