Richard L. Coulson

Cognitive Flexibility, Constructivism, and Hypertext: Random Access Instruction for Advanced Knowledge Acquisition in Ill-Structured Domains

Introduction: The Complex Context of Learning and The Design of Instruction A central argument of this paper is that there is a common basis for the failure of many instructional systems. The claim is that these deficiencies in the outcomes of learning, are strongly influenced by underlying biases and assumptions in the design of instruction which represent the instructional domain and its associated performance demands in an unrealistically simplified and well-structured manner. We offer a constructivist theory of learning and instruction that emphasizes the real world complexity and ill-structuredness of many knowledge domains. Any effective approach to instruction must simultaneously consider several highly intertwined topics, such as: • the constructive nature of understanding; • the complex and ill-structured features of many, if not most, knowledge domains; • patterns of learning failure; • a theory of learning that addresses known patterns of learning failure. Based on a consideration of the interrelationships between these topics, we have developed a set of principal recommendations for the development of instructional hypertext systems to promote successful learning of difficult subject matter (see Spiro, Coulson, Feltovich, and Anderson, 1988; Spiro and Jehng 1990). This systematic, theory-based approach avoids the ad hoc character of many recent hypertext-based instructional programs, which have too often been driven by intuition and the power of the technology

Two Epistemic World-Views: Prefigurative Schemas and Learning in Complex Domains

Epistemic world-views are beliefs about learning and, relatedly, about the phenomena of the world that prefigure the form knowledge schemata will take for an individual. Features of two kinds of epistemic world-views are presented: one is associated with various kinds of oversimplification of complexity known to be related to learning failure in ill-structured domains (e.g., belief in the orderliness and teleological homogeneity of phenomena, and adherence to strategies of analytic decomposition and compartmentalization); the other is characterized by opposing features more conducive to the processing of complexity. An assessment instrument intended to identify these epistemic world-views, the Cognitive Flexibility Inventory (CFI), is discussed. A factor analysis of the CFI scores of a sample of medical students provided support for the hypothesis that the features of the two world-views form correlated constellations. The importance of having a more expansive and flexible underlying cognitive stance in an increasingly complex world is addressed.

Cognitive Flexibility in Medicine: An Application to the Recognition and Understanding of Hypertension

Various forms of conceptual complexity and case-to-case irregularity in ill-structured knowledge domains (such as medicine, biology, and history) pose serious problems for traditional theories of learning and instruction (Spiro, Feltovich, Jacobson and Coulson, 1991a). Cognitive and instructional neglect of problems related to content complexity and irregularity in patterns of knowledge use leads to leaming failures that take common predictable forms (Spiro, Feltovich, Jacobson and Coulson, 1991b). These forms are characterized by conceptual oversimplifi-cation (Coulson, Feltovich and Spiro, 1989) and the failure of transfer of existing knowledge to new cases of knowledge application (Feltovich, Coulson, Spiro and Dawson-Saunders, 1992). Examples of topics that appear to be particularly mis-understood by professionals in medicine (Coulson et al., 1989; Dawson-Saunders et al., 1990) are those that include non-linear relationships such as between: (1) central venous filling pressure and cardiac output; and, (2) vascular compliance and total vascular impedance. Also, continuous processes are frequently misrepre-sented by practitioners as static and discrete, for example, as is often done in the (mis)understanding of the cross-bridge cycle of muscle contraction. Cognitive Flexibility Theory (Spiro, Feltovich, Jacobson and Coulson, 1991b; Spiro et al., 1988) inculcates learning processes that remedy learning deficiencies related to domain complexity (Feltovich, Spiro and Coulson, 1993). According to Cognitive Flexibility Theory, knowledge understanding and application require a constructivist approach (Spiro, Feltovich, Jacobson and Coulson, 1991b): this includes the ability to represent knowledge from different conceptual and case perspectives, and then when knowledge must later be used, the ability to construct from those multiple representations a knowledge ensemble tailored to the needs

Routine activities and the spatial‐temporal variation of calls for police service: the experience of opposites on the quality of life spectrum

People call the police and want them to handle a variety of matters besides criminal ones. The city is divided into various communities with different functions and routine activity patterns. This paper examines how calls for police service vary with routine activities and time between two residential areas that are opposites on the quality of life spectrum. The study site is Charlotte, North Carolina, and the data are the calls for service received by the police department during 1986.

Electromyographic Evidence of a Multiple Motor System: Implications for Apraxia

Geschwind (1975) postulated that a multiple motor system accounts for a discrepancy in apraxias in response to commands for truncal and limb movements. Kuypers (1968) provided experimental evidence of a multiple motor system in primates. We present evidence of this multiple motor system in the form of Fourier-transformed electromyographic data in humans of the predominantly short duration motor units for discrete control in hand musculature and the predominantly longer duration motor units in the truncal musculature. Furthermore, the right and left erector spinae muscles had different Fourier-transformed electromyographic data which, in our opinion, represent the medial motor system used by apraxias.