Donald F. Dansereau

1)       Teaching people to use and understand non-linear representations (e.g., maps, diagrams, flow charts, animations).  We now have a plethora of these non-linear presentations available to us.  The linear presentation of text has been explored, but our literacy for these non-linear presentations has lagged behind.  We have been able to see the effectiveness of using non-linear representations with students, and we have even gotten better outcomes with people in drug abuse counseling with map presentations, especially when their verbal skills were not high.

2)       Entertaining multiple perspectives.  Nowadays, because of advances in technology, you can communicate with just about anybody.  Being able to take the perspectives of others, for both communication and creativity purposes, is something that needs to be integrated into courses and curricula.  We have worked with the concept of a Thought Team, a set of imaginary consultants, and have found positive effects on learning.

3)       Having people improve their ability to work collaboratively or engage in cooperative learning.  I think more cooperative learning can be integrated in the adult curricula (especially in the university and in business training).

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

There are a lot of principles and useful ideas out there, but the challenge is to develop attractive packages or tools that teachers and students can actually use and integrate into what they already do.  Having some experience with school systems at the lower levels, I know teachers get this stuff all the time and unless it is packaged in a way that can be easily integrated it into what they already do, they will just ignore it. This whole notion of research on how to best get technology packaged and transferred is lagging.

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

At the lower educational levels, cooperative learning has been something that has been pushed by getting commitments from administrators.  When you get into universities, the whole transference process is different, because there is no top down authority that is going to adopt a curriculum or a practice and then make everybody use it.  In universities, change has to be a grass roots kind of movement, in which you have to influence the individual faculty members.  So selling it to administrators is really not going to work in the university setting.  The people who have the best handle on how to get new ideas incorporated into learning are the booksellers.  They are in education for the competition and they have to be very aware on how to transfer materials they develop (CD ROMs, videos, supplements to their textbook).  So I think they would be good people to bring on board to find out what works.

Language learning has been a place where some of the principles have been applied pretty well, but again I’m not sure if it helps us much because many of the principles that have been applied are fairly simple—extensions of key-word mnemonics, for example.

What are the major problems with or barriers to redesigning higher education?

One barrier that needs to be overcome is the sort of “sage on the stage” mentality that most of us have.  Must of us that teach, like to be up there and be the focus of attention.  We need to shift to more of a “guide on the side” kind of mentality.  In some sense there is a barrier that has to be respected.  First of all, staged presentations is what most of us have grown up wanting to do and learning to do, so we have to be very respectful of that sort of mentality.  But on the other hand we also need to try to move towards allowing more student-to-student activity and not just instructor to student activity.

The main challenge is integrating any changes we may propose with what is already being done.  If we are going to try to make changes, no matter how good the principles are and no matter how effective people believe them to be, they can’t just overhaul the system. The question that people would ask is what is broke? Why make these changes?  Is education as we know it not working and do you have evidence that is not working?  And that is what the consumer is going to be saying.  To motivate people to change, the impetus has to be something that does not challenge their very being.  It has to be something that says here is some stuff that will enhance what you are already doing.  We have to have “plug and play” tools, rather than programs.

Do you have any ideas for overcoming them?

How we deal with this is important.  Changing education is a bottom up process.  We have to somehow make contact with the individual faculty members.  I was thinking about some sort of electronic mail or newsletter that could be created as a dissemination tool that gave best practices or ideas, but in addition gave opportunities for workshops and opportunities to receive videos on some of these techniques.  I don’t think I have ever received a newsletter from a non-profit organization that really tried to directly say here are some new ideas, lessons, and materials that you can use in your college teaching.  I get plenty of that from booksellers, but not from somebody that I would consider unbiased. Something maybe like a consumer reports that gives some really good techniques and details how they can get a hold of them.  In addition, I think that the packaging of whatever we come up with is going to be critical and we are going to need advice from marketing folks and not just psychologists.

What additional questions should we be asking?

Some people are going to say what is wrong with what we are already doing.  Why do I need new techniques?  And that leads to how do we evaluate what is going on now?  How do we decide that things need to be improved?  It is okay to say I have all these principles, but a lot of instructors, especially those not in psychology or education, would say that all that psychologists do is verify common sense and that they already do all this stuff.  And they may say why do I need you coming in and telling me this when I have had 20 years of experience teaching and I have learned all these concepts.  So we need to have something in place that says there is a gap in what is going on already.  So that’s why I try to look for instances where the technology is changing or the culture is shifting (e.g., the expansion of non-linear representations) and suggest that we need to cope with this.  Then maybe we can sell teachers on those kinds of ideas because these are tools that are for new or emerging problems.

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

There are probably three levels of research that should be put on agenda by granting institutions.  One is to pick a couple of well-developed packages or tools or whatever we are going to call them and look at transference strategies.  I don’t think we know enough about how to transfer things into colleges.  So pick something that has been well established and run some regional transference studies to see if we can understand the best way to do this (i.e., newsletters, websites, or whatever it may be).  The second layer is to take some less developed tools and come up with some palatable packages and evaluate them.  This level would involve things that we already know to be effective and now try to make them so that they would fit into a university curriculum.  The last level would be to develop new tools based on issues that seem important and principles that seem promising and test them.