Randi A. Engle

Conducting Video Research in the Learning Sciences: Guidance on Selection, Analysis, Technology, and Ethics

Focusing on expanding technical capabilities and new collaborative possibilities, we address 4 challenges for scientists who collect and use video records to conduct research in and on complex learning environments: (a) Selection: How can researchers be systematic in deciding which elements of a complex environment or extensive video corpus to select for study? (b) Analysis: What analytical frameworks and practices are appropriate for given research problems? (c) Technology: What technologies are available and what new tools must be developed to support collecting, archiving, analyzing, reporting, and collaboratively sharing video? and (d) Ethics: How can research protocols encourage broad video sharing and reuse while adequately protecting the rights of research participants who are recorded?

Framing Interactions to Foster Generative Learning: A Situative Explanation of Transfer in a Community of Learners Classroom

This article develops a situative approach to explaining the transfer of learning, illustrating it using a challenging-to-explain case from a Fostering Communities of Learners classroom. The case involved a group of 5th graders who learned and then transferred a more sophisticated way of explaining species survival and endangerment despite participating in a unit in which many activities designed to foster transfer were short circuited. The explanation included 2 kinds of analyses: (a) how students participated in the learning of relevant content, and (b) how learning contexts were framed interactionally. The content analysis took a situative perspective on commonly investigated transfer mechanisms such as quality of initial learning, engagement with multiple examples, comparison between examples, and formation of generalizations. There was strong evidence for a few of these mechanisms and weak or inconclusive evidence for others. The context analysis explored 2 aspects of the relatively new hypothesis that transfer is more likely to occur when learning contexts are framed as part of a larger ongoing intellectual conversation in which students are actively involved. First, the analysis showed that the teacher worked to frame learning contexts as being temporally connected with other contexts in which the students could use what they were learning. Second, it showed that the teacher worked to frame the students as contributing members of a larger community of people interested in what they were learning about. These and other forms of framing may have encouraged the students to expect that they would be generatively using what they were learning, thus leading them to make better use of the content-based supports for transfer that were available. Thus, this study suggests that coordinating analyses of content with the framing of contexts may be a particularly fruitful approach for developing more comprehensive explanations of how and why the transfer of learning occurs.

How Does Expansive Framing Promote Transfer? Several Proposed Explanations and a Research Agenda for Investigating Them

When contexts are framed expansively, students are positioned as actively contributing to larger conversations that extend across time, places, and people. A set of recent studies provides empirical evidence that the expansive framing of contexts can foster transfer. In this article, we present five potentially complementary explanations for how expansive framing may promote transfer and outline a research agenda for further investigating them. Specifically, we propose that expansive framing may: (a) foster an expectation that students will continue to use what they learn later, which may affect the learning process in ways that can promote transfer; (b) create links between learning and transfer contexts so that prior learning is viewed as relevant during potential transfer contexts; (c) encourage learners to draw on their prior knowledge during learning, which may involve them transferring in additional examples and making generalizations; (d) make learners accountable for intelligently reporting on the specific content they have authored; and (e) promote authorship as a general practice in which students learn that their role is to generate their own solutions to new problems and adapt their existing knowledge in transfer contexts.

Toward a Model of Influence in Persuasive Discussions: Negotiating Quality, Authority, Privilege, and Access within a Student-Led Argument.

It is commonly observed that during classroom or group discussions some students have greater influence than may be justified by the normative quality of those students’ contributions. We propose a 5-component theoretical framework in order to explain how undue influence unfolds. We build on literatures on persuasion, argumentation, discourse, and classroom discussions to develop a framework that models how each participant’s level of influence in a discussion emerges out of the social negotiation of influence itself and the following 4 components that interact with it: (a) the negotiated merit of each participant’s contributions; and each participant’s (b) degree of intellectual authority, (c) access to the conversational floor, and (d) degree of spatial privilege. We then illustrate how the framework works by explaining how 1 student became unduly influential during a heated, student-led scientific debate. Finally, we close by outlining how our framework can be further developed to better understand and address differences in influence in classrooms and other learning contexts.

The Resurgence of Research Into Transfer: An Introduction to the Final Articles of the Transfer Strand

We are in the midst of a resurgence of research into the transfer-of-learning. This is essential because transfer is arguably one of the most important issues in the learning sciences. The success of the educational enterprise requires that students are able to transfer what they have learned to future classes as well as to their professional, personal, and civic lives. Otherwise instruction is wasted. Therefore, knowing how to design learning environments to foster transfer is crucial if education is to be successful. One reason for the resurgence of research into transfer has been expanded contemporary understandings of what counts as transfer. Although transfer has been broadly conceptualized for many years as occurring in any situation in which a learner uses what he or she previously learned, prior research often operationalized transfer much more narrowly. Transfer was considered to have occurred only if the learner could completely and immediately use procedures or principles derived from prior learning to successfully perform a task in selected ways that were predefined by the researcher. Four key expansions of what counts as transfer have fostered this resurgence. First, what can be transferred has been expanded to include not just procedures and abstract principles, but also representations (Barnett & Ceci, 2002; Novick