Sharon J. Derry

Learning from Examples: Instructional Principles from the Worked Examples Research:

Worked examples are instructional devices that provide an experts problem solution for a learner to study. Worked-examples research is a cognitive-experimental program that has relevance to classroom instruction and the broader educational research community. A frame- work for organizing the findings of this research is proposed, leading to instructional design principles. For instance, one instructional design principle suggests that effective examples have highly integrated components. They employ multiple modalities in presentation and emphasize conceptual structure by labeling or segmenting. At the lesson level, effective instruction employs multiple examples for each conceptual problem type, varies example formats within problem type, and employs surface features to signal deep structure. Also, examples should be presented in close proximity to matched practice problems. More- over, learners can be encouraged through direct training or by the structure of the worked example to actively self:explain examples. Worked examples are associated with early stages of skill development, but the design principles are relevant to constructivist research and teaching.

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?

Designing Systems that Train Learning Ability: From Theory to Practice

Empirical and theoretical evidence is presented to support the conclusion that improvement of learning ability is an important and viable educational goal. However, the improvement of learning ability necessitates development not only of specific learning skills, which we know how to teach, but also an executive control mechanism that automatically accesses and combines learning skills whenever they are needed. Metacognitive theorists are currently investigating evidence that some executive skills can be imparted through direct training. However, a theme that emerges repeatedly in our review is that executive learning skills cannot be trained easily or by direct instruction alone, but must be developed gradually and automated over an extended period of time. It follows that genuine improvement of academic aptitude is not likely to result from anything less than a thoughtful, systematic curriculum that complements direct training in learning strategies, and thereby “engineers” the gradual evolution of important executive control skills.

Cognitive schema theory in the constructivist debate

Cognitive constructivism is not a unique theoretical framework, pedagogical approach, or epistemology, but a general, metaphorical assumption about the nature of cognition that virtually all cognitive educational researchers accept. Despite this unifying assumption, there are many different cognitive constructivist research programs and theories within the community at large. This article contrasts cognitive constructivism with several other forms of constructivism in the educational research community. It then attempts to represent the range of theoretical approaches within cognitive constructivism, pointing to examples and potential educational applications of cognitive constructivist ideas. Cognitive schema theory receives special attention as an important theoretical perspective that has been relatively neglected in recent theoretical discussions. It is believed to have significant potential for building conceptual bridges between information processing and radical constructivist viewpoints.

Individual and Distributed Cognitions in Interdisciplinary Teamwork: A Developing Case Study and Emerging Theory

We present a developing distributed cognition theory of interdisciplinary collaboration that incorporates concepts from both situated cognition and information-processing theory. This theoretical framework is being refined as it is used for analyzing interdisciplinary collaboration within the National Institute for Science Education (NISE). Our analyses are intended to improve scientific understanding of collaborative processes that influence productivity and quality of interdisciplinary work within the NISE and beyond. A critical group meeting in the early development of one interdisciplinary working team is analyzed using language and ideas from our theoretical perspective.

Cracking the Resource Nut with Distributed Problem-Based Learning in Secondary Teacher Education

In this article, we focus on the features and functions of the STEP pbl system that enable us to support novice tutors and thereby address the human resource challenge that implementing a PBL course in a typical undergraduate setting poses. We describe the activities that students in our course engage in and present preliminary findings from our first trial of the system. We then describe our strategies for distributing the functions of the tutor based on the first trial and previous course implementations. We conclude with a description of the research methodology we are using to shepherd our site development efforts.

Individualized tutoring using an intelligent fuzzy temporal relational database

The student record (SR) is a major source of input for any decision making done by an Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) and is a basis of the individualization in such systems. However, most ITSs still have “generalized” student models which represent a type of student rather than a particular one. Until the SR becomes truly representative of each individual student, the goal of providing individualized tutoring cannot be attained. In this paper we describe an Intelligent Fuzzy Temporal Relational Database (IFTReD), an intelligent system-independent SR which allows for almost any degree of individualization the designer wishes to incorporate. It is anticipated that this IFTReD will provide a significant improvement over standard AI storage techniques for the SR. These improvements will be realized in terms of: (1) intelligence; (2) greater storage efficiency; (3) greater speed in retrieval and query; (4) ability to handle linguistic codes, ranges, fuzzy possibilities, and incomplete data in student models; (5) friendliness of query language; (6) availability of temporal knowledge to give a history of past performance; and (7) a more holistic view of the student, permitting greater individualization of the tutor.

How Tutors Model Students: A Study of Personal Constructs in Adaptive Tutoring:

Studies of tutoring are producing rich descriptions of tutorial dialogue but have not identified constructs that tutors use to classify and discriminate among students for the purpose of adapting tutoring to student differences. This study investigated five experienced tutors’ personal constructs about students tutored over a significant period of time. Several tutoring settings and domains were represented. Constructs used by tutors to discriminate among tutees were identified with repertory grid interviews and interpreted with the aid of cluster analysis. All tutors judged and classified students in terms of two underlying dimensions that were similarly defined, though not exactly alike, across tutors: motivation and intellectual ability. Tutors’ personal constructs and tutorial decisions informed by those constructs are reported, and implications for programming computer-based tutors are discussed.

Beyond symbolic processing: expanding horizons for educational psychology

Mayer (1992) believes that fractionation in educational research is now giving way to a unified cognitive approach based on subject-matter psychologies, the study of learning strategies, and the learning-as-knowledge construction metaphor. Yet, the paradigm described by Mayer is now being strongly challenged by a number of educational research communities, as different forms of the knowledge construction metaphor vie with one another for dominance. Challengers argue that schools must focus on preparing students for participation in complex multidisciplinary thinking activities that characterize life outside of school and that the dominant U.S. cognitive paradigm has been inadequate for examining those kinds of processes

Distributed leadership in online groups

We conducted research within a program serving future mathematics and science teachers. Groups of teachers worked primarily online in an asynchronous discussion environment on a 6-week task in which they applied learning-science ideas acquired from an educational psychology course to design interdisciplinary instructional units. We employed an adapted coding system to determine that group leadership was highly distributed among participants. We illustrated that leadership emerged through different forms of participation described in this paper and that, in some cases, individuals specialized in specific leadership roles within groups. Findings helped validate the theoretical concept of group cognition and led us to suggest an approach to online asynchronous learning for college students that depends more on students’ emergent leadership skills than on prescriptive assignment or scripting of participant roles.