Margot van Wermeskerken

The Role of Affordances in the Evolutionary Process Reconsidered A Niche Construction Perspective

Gibson asserted that affordances are the primary objects of perception. Although this assertion is especially attractive when considered in the context of evolutionary theory, the role that affordances play in the evolution of animals’ perceptual and action systems is still unclear. Trying to combine the insights of both Gibson and Darwin, Reed developed a selectionist view in which affordances are conceived as resources that exert selection pressures, giving rise to animals equipped with action systems. Reed’s advocacy of selectionism, however, has been criticized on several grounds, among which is an inconsistency with recent trends in evolutionary thinking. Current developments in evolutionary biology indeed ask for a reconsideration of the role of affordances in the evolution of perceptual and action systems. Adopting a niche construction perspective, we reexamine the role of affordances in the evolutionary process. It is argued that affordances and their utilization, destruction, and creation are central elements in evolutionary dynamics. The implications for ecological psychology and evolutionary theory are explored.

Measuring teacher sense making strategies of learning analytics: a case study

ABSTRACT Teacher orchestration of the classroom is a demanding task because of the multitude of activities and the rapid pace at which these activities occur. Teachers must constantly be aware of the activities students engage in and the progress students are making, in order to be able to make informed decisions. Recent years have seen the development of learning analytics (LA) to support teachers, in the form of interfaces that capture and visualise data about learner activities. LA are hypothesised to deliver actionable knowledge, because the provided information would enable teachers to immediately translate the information into concrete intervention of some kind. This paper provides a short discussion of the hypothesised affordances of LA for supporting teachers, and subsequently, a case study is presented in which a teacher’s sense making strategies of LA were investigated within a digital environment, which enabled the teacher to monitor and regulate the activities of five collaborating groups of students. Besides automatically logged teacher behaviour, eye tracking was used to examine eye movements, and cued retrospective reporting was used to evaluate the choices and decisions made by the teacher. The case study is used to discuss directions for future research concerning learning analytics to support teachers.