For whatever reason, I am having a hard time of being convinced that all learning occurs within the context of an activity or social situation. Maybe it is just me; maybe there is something that I am missing or not understanding. I think that pairing activities with lessons in the classroom can help to reinforce the content knowledge for the students, but I don’t think that it is necessary in all cases. It just seems to me that there is some knowledge that students can learn just by connecting it to previous knowledge that they have.
Greeno has taken two schools of thought on learning theory and synthesized them and built upon them to formulate what he calls “situative.” He synthesizes cognitive science with interactional studies; he saw some merits in both groups. The cognitive group had done extensive research in the formation of “information structures” but they “had very little to say about the interactions that people have with each other and with technological resources.” On the other hand, the interactional group had done extensive research in “coordination of activity but had little to say about the information structures that are involved in the contents of joint activity, for example, what the conversations people have are about.”
I like this approach in that it looks at all aspects that may be involved in learning. However, I still don’t think that it is possible to accurately measure “learning” or “knowledge.” I haven’t seen any convincing methods as of yet; and I can’t come up with any on my own. I don’t think there is one. How can you truly get inside someone’s head and know what they are thinking and how they got there? We talked about this being a chicken and egg scenario; in the head to out of the head, or out of the head to in the head. Maybe these connections are formed at the same time.
Either way, I think the most important thing that I have gained form these readings is that the more you assess your students, and the more techniques you use to assess them, the better you are able to understand what their knowledge looks like. The same thing goes for the way that lessons are presented to students, the more variety, the more learning styles you will reach.
I think that any assessment of learning comes with a definition of learning. Otherwise, what are you measuring? The situated perspective leaves me with a lot of questions about assessment. What does it mean when a student “does well” on an exam? Have they learned the material or have they learned how to succeed on an exam after having taken them for most of their lives? What does it mean if a student does well in an AP Chemistry class, but bombs the AP exam or bombs their first college chemistry course? Does that mean that they didn’t learn or they didn’t learn how to do well in those situations? What about people who do well in an REU or some other lab setting, but do poorly in the classroom? I think it’s true that something is going on inside the mind when learning occurs, no matter how you define it, but I also think their is a strong situated bias to a person’s knowledge. In other words, I don’t think the knowledge gained by the average school student transfers very easily to drastically different environments (such as a laboratory or a job). This would indicate a connection between the learning and the situation in which that learning took place. That’s my understanding anyways.
I think saying that all learning has to occur in social context really depends on how you define social context. If it is defined as involving other people directly, then I would say that learning does not always have to occur in the social context. However if people define social context as anything involving people directly, as in discussion groups or lectures in a classroom, and also anything that people have created, such as books, websites, etc., then I think most learning would be considered to occur in the social context. I think a lot these issues exist because researchers are not clear on what they consider certain terms to include.