Howard T. Everson

• Educational Psychology

• Cognitive Psychology 

o    Metacognition, particularly around the issue of how to measure certain aspects of metacognition and what measurements look like and what the correlations look like with college level learning.  For example, there is some work that we are doing in the area of metacognition and self-regulated learning that suggests that interventions early on (e.g., at the secondary school level) may help students achieve more in college.

• Educational Measurement

o        Correlates of performance on academic cognitive abilities tests like the SAT and success in academic settings and the workplace.

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

1)   Getting a better understanding of how expertise is developed and nurtured through instruction.

2)   Transfer of learning across domains.  From a measurement perspective, trying to understand how to gauge student learning and achievement at the postsecondary level has been very difficult and elusive.  Getting professionals and academics and others to agree on the forms of learning and academic achievement that are really valued at the secondary and post-secondary level. 

3)  The cognitive framework for understanding learning styles and the interaction of learning styles with questions of student aptitudes and abilities to learn from different forms of instruction.

4)   We need theoretical help in understanding and characterizing learning within specific domains so that we can do a better job of providing diagnosis in those domain areas.

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

We are making some progress with respect to understanding the frameworks for learning from instruction.   We are getting a better sense of what role prior knowledge plays in learning and how to make learning more active and a constructive process. 

We also seem to understand what factors have been motivating students to go on and develop their academic ability.  The work on self-regulated and its effectiveness on learning have been very insightful.

The area of cognitive neurosciences has also advanced our knowledge of how our brain organizes information and how that can help us to understand individual differences, but also how to design learning environments to promote active learning.  It is rather scattered and not well organized or unified in the sense that somebody can put their hands on, but that is part of the challenge to us.

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

Faculty attitudes.  One of the major barriers has to do with the domain specificity and control that faculty have over specific areas.  Many people who are teaching at postsecondary level are not good teachers.  They may understand their discipline very well or be expert in their disciplines, but that does not mean that they have the ability to organize the material, present it effectively, and design instruction in ways that maximize learning.  A lot of what goes on in higher education classrooms is poor in the sense of having low quality instructional design.

Measure student learning.  Many faculty have no understanding of how to measure student learning.  They give examinations that are poorly constructed and they give tests that are not well calibrated or easily scored.  Faculty cannot articulate to the students the kinds of standards or the knowledge, skills, and abilities that they are looking to measure and that they want students to measure.   So it is not uncommon to go into a large lecture course in the first or second year of college and see poorly constructed multiple choice exams or short answer kinds of exams that place a heavy emphasis on short term memory processes, but don’t value or measure very well deep conceptual understanding on the part of the students.

Do you have any ideas for overcoming them?

Faculty need to be given exemplars of good instructional design looks like.  We need to communicate to them the principles of effective instructional design.  We need to share with them in a more systematic way theories of human learning so they begin to approach their tasks with a stronger theoretical framework of how humans learn.

What additional questions should we be asking?

We need to ask questions about how the various disciplines are organized cognitively and conceptually, so that we are asking about what contributes to the cognitive complexity within a discipline.  If we had a better understanding of this we can be more prescriptive with respect to instructional design.

We have to ask questions about the role of collaborative learning activities and what they mean for instruction and assessment in postsecondary education. 

We should ask questions about the effects of school reform initiatives at the secondary school level and what they imply for the kinds of teaching that takes place at the postsecondary school level.  Many students in the future will emerge from secondary schools where the teaching and learning practices in those secondary schools will have been  dramatically different than the teaching and learning practices they will encounter at the colleges and universities.  They may have trouble adapting and succeeding as a result. 

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

We need develop a strategic plan that emerges from the retreat, where we have a set of research and implementation goals.  I would like to see a strategic plan emerge that was broad based and emphasized collaboration with other groups and organizations interested in issues of student learning and instructional design.

We also need strategies for seeking funding, so that we do not loose momentum.