The readings this week around Learning Progressions brought up some discussions we had earlier in the semester for me, and I’d like to use this post to try and sort out some of these disconnected thoughts. The specific concepts that came up for me were misconceptions, coherence, and the idea from Vygotsky that we shouldn’t just focus on the outcome, but on the process toward getting to the outcome. I’ll talk through these one at a time:
Misconceptions
This one is probably the hardest to tie to a specific reading, but there was a sense of deja vu as I read through the Stevens et al article (developing an LP for the structure of matter) and the Steedle et al article — it seemed like there was a motivation that if we can just map out all the learning progressions, and figure out the paths from one place to the other (the learning trajectories that are mentioned in Steedle et al), we’d be done with educational research. In the margins of the conclusion to the Stevens et al article, I wrote: “catalog the full collection of LP’s, determine appropriate LT’s, build robot teachers, and take over the world!”.
That takes the whole thing too far, but this sense of collection reminded me of some of the earlier research we heard about around misconceptions, where there were goals of cataloging the full set of misconceptions a student could have around a topic and ways to undo those misconceptions, and bingo — you’re done. Learning progressions seem to offer more than misconceptions as a concept did, however, since they offer a specific structure to student concepts, and the notion of movement from one set of concepts to a different set of concepts. That seems more useful as a notion of learning than the idea that you either have one of a ton of possible misconceptions, or you have the right answer, which was the sense I had from the misconceptions discussions we had in class.
Coherence
diSessa brought up the whole idea of coherence when looking at different conceptual change theories of learning, and the Steedle et al reading made me think about this as well. Part of my concern around developing hypothetical learning progressions is that they will be biased toward coherent sets of beliefs — for example, the whole set of physics around the assumption that a constant force is required for an object to move with a constant velocity. From Steedle et al: “…exploratory model results provided no evidence of systematic reasoning beyond that which was identified by the confirmatory model.” I’m interpreting this to say that learners aren’t building an entire physics around a misconception — they can pretty effectively separate that notion from the rest of their ideas about how things move if it gets in the way. This gets to their next point, which is that students don’t always fit within one of the available learning progressions.
Studying the Learning Process
I don’t remember if there was a nifty single word for this, but the last idea that this brought up for me was Vygotsky’s comment that it seems pointless to study the way that someone reacts after they have already learned the behavior — instead we should be looking at how they are learning the behavior. What I like about Learning Progressions after these readings is that they dive into that place and try to open up discussions about exactly what it is that students are thinking when they’re having trouble with a concept. This was certainly available in the misconception research as well, but here it seems like we’re thinking of these models cumulatively moving toward the upper anchor of the learning progression, rather than being a stumbling block on the way to the concept. That way of looking at it seems like it is likely to be more fruitful, since teachers are usually working with students who don’t already know the concept they’re teaching — so ignoring anything outside of mastery seems counterproductive.
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I also got the feeling that researchers are looking for some convenient progression that can be turned into a cookie-cutter teaching plan. I guess the situativists don’t love this idea? It seems very cognitivist or behaviorist to me.
This is not to say that I think LPs are BS. 😉 I think they could be used effectively, just not in the hands of robot teachers, and not as a srict blueprint of learning. As always, I’m arguing for flexible use of this concept as a TOOL and nothing more. It certainly isn’t the holy grail of science education.