I don’t know what I think about learning progressions and these reading, to be honest, didn’t really clear much up. The idea, as I understand it, involves looking at how students learn a concept of an extended period of time (several months to several years). The analogy to a spiral was frequently brought up in the readings to suggest that ideas are revisited several times adding greater detail with each successive revolution. As a theory of learning, I think this idea is pretty sound. I am willing to buy the notion that any given scientific topic has aspects which are too complex for a young mind to grasp. It makes sense to start out with a vague, incomplete description of a concept or idea and make it increasingly more complex as the student progresses and their understanding develops. Further, it makes sense to study what students can understand and figure out how best to present certain topics. In other words, figuring out how to design and implement a learning progression.
Learning progressions, good idea or another mechanism for standardization?
What concerns me, however, is how learning progressions might be incorporated into a public education system like the one in the United States. How closely should they be tied to instruction and pedagogy. This seems to be the central question surrounding the idea at this time? How do you feasibly do it (connect the notion of learning progressions to formal teaching) without a standardized national curriculum? Say school A decides that they will teach concept X as a learning progression that spans three years. What if Billy starts going to that school two years into that learning progression? I suppose it would be logical to assess his abilities and place him somewhere in the progression that makes sense, but what about the learning progressions of which was a part prior to moving to school A? What if he leaves and goes to another school? I don’t really see how this could work in a system where individual schools act independently of one another and I certainly wouldn’t advocate for a national curriculum either.
On the other hand, I guess one could argue that the theory of learning progressions could be applied to each individual. An instructor could measure each students progress along the progression in terms of some element of content and then design their instruction accordingly. While this makes more sense to me, I am not clear on how different this is from what we are doing already. The NSES and other standards define where they feel a student should be at a certain point in their educational career and those standards are used (in theory) to inform teaching. How is that different? I kind of get the feeling that this could morph into another justification for standardization and testing. I’m not sure how comfortable I am with that.