John Bransford

Learning sciences, technology, and teaching and the overlap among the three.

What are the findings or theories from your area of expertise that we could apply to higher education?

Many of the things that I could talk about are mentioned in the National Academy of Science’s Report, How People Learn, which came out in 1999. This report provides a really good synthesis of what we know about learning and its implications for teaching.  It is focused mainly on K-12, but many of the implications could be applied to higher education.  A central component to this is what I could call “The How People Learn Framework” that suggests four lenses that you want to use in any classroom situation.

1. Knowledge-Centered.  The degree to which it is knowledge-centered, which means the degree to which the nature of the knowledge that is being taught is organized in a way that supports understanding and subsequent transfer.  In many courses what is really happening is memorization masquerading as understanding.
2. Learner-Centered.  The degree to which the classroom is learner-centered.  To what extent does one really know the preconceptions about the subject matter that people bring to the class as well as preconceptions that the students have of themselves as learners.  To what extent is that thinking made visible and worked with and honored.
3. Assessment-Centered.  The degree to which the class is assessment-centered, and by this I do not mean that you test the students to death.  But what you do, is provide frequent opportunities for the students to test their own knowledge and to see if they understand, and then you provide them with opportunities to revise.  This is assessment for purposes of feedback and revision and is probably the single most important thing that we could do to facilitate learning.
4. Community Environment.  The degree to which you have created a community where people feel free to say that they do not understand and the degree to which they feel free to collaborate with one another rather than compete with one another. There are a lot of things that can contribute to this, including how you structure the grading of the class.

You could then talk about the role that technology can play at each of these levels and how technology can be used to strengthen the framework.

What are the (most important) unsolved problems? What should be included in an agenda for research?

A huge one is the problem with assessment.  What we want are assessments that can really tell us about the quality of learning, yet many of the assessments that we have in place often just measure the ability to memorize information. We have some assessments that measure transfer, but the theories of transfer that underlie the assessments are really restricted.  They really are what I would call sequestered problem solving because students are only given information to solve the current problem, a much stronger way is to look at whether learners have enough to information to apply what they learned in a new situation.   The question becomes: how do we really assess in a way that fits new theories of transfer and is a better indicator of life-long learning?  We want transfer that facilitates future learning.  This is a different paradigm, looking at the assessment of transfer of knowledge rather than our current assessment of sequestered problem solving.

If you then work backwards from this perspective, you begin to ask questions relating to the way that the knowledge is structured.  How can we structure the nature of knowledge and organize this information both at the level of a single course and also across the span of a four-year college curriculum that will allow for future learning?  We can also look at how information is taught and how we can create the appropriate macro-structure for courses that will allow people the ability to tie the courses together.  Students often do not have a good concept of how different domains of knowledge are connected: how can we help to facilitate students in developing an understanding of these connections?

What prototypes can you point us toward where principles from the science of learning are already being applied?

Chapter 9 of How People Learn has a lot of great examples of prototypes.

Some examples of people that are doing this work include:

·        Jim Minstrell and Earl Hunt—strong work on using assessment and feedback.

·        Jose Mestre’s work and his use of the class talk system to provide instant feedback.

·        My website

What are the major problems with or barriers to redesigning higher education? Do you have any ideas for overcoming them?

The biggest one is time—faculty time—this is a huge problem.  The other one is faculty incentive, no matter what the rhetoric is, teaching is not considered as important as research.  For most of the people who will be at this conference though, the ability to do research on one’s teaching fits our research area.  If we could begin to build a community where it is valued by an academic community to combine strong domain specific-expertise with pedagogical content knowledge needed to help students learn and to assess their learning, then this would be a strong way to overcome some of the barriers.  Time and isolation are some of the major barriers.

The other problem is students.  You have to give students a reason for changing the structure. Some of the changes will require students to be more active and might disrupt the way that students have become accustomed to being successful, for example their mastery of multiple choice exams and such. Unless you provide students with an explanation for why you are changing the rules, they often get very upset.

What additional questions should we be asking?

How do we use technology to start to leverage all of the knowledge that is available about teaching and learning that is dispersed throughout the nation, but is not in a form that is easy for people to get and to learn from?  How can we start to communicate our ideas as learning scientists in ways that make contact with professors in other disciplines who don’t know our lingo?  Simply having them read our journal articles is not the best method.  We have begun a project that where we have talks on the Internet.  It is a whole new way of publishing that allows many different voices to be heard in a way that people are able to understand.  We really need to re-think how we communicate our knowledge and how we can share our resources with one another and we have a great opportunity to do that through technology.

What do we need to do so that one outcome of the retreat is to effect change (in ways that we want)?

We must do something other than just write a report.  It would be nice to have a place for people to go that takes them on a journey and that directs them to papers and resources.