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Area of Expertise These days I have multiple hats; I am as much a higher education administrator (Dean of Arts and Science) as I am an experimental psychologist. In my administrative role, I care a lot about the progress of people learning, e.g., to write in freshman English or acquiring college math skills. I have thought some about how we can use the principles from cognitive science in a way that will help us to achieve these goals. Additionally, I am very interested in the teaching of foreign language. One thing that I would consider is hiring a cognitive engineer in a full time position to try to meet these goals, especially if it were part of an initiative with wider scope. What are the findings or theories from your area of expertise that we could apply to higher education? I am interested in the study of expertise and what it has to tell us about skill learning. I am fortunate because at Florida State there are people such as Anders Ericsson, for whom expertise is his area of expertise. I have tried to get myself “up to speed” on this area, as well as on the topic of transfer of training. I have had Robert Bjork come to Florida State to lecture on his findings and what he knows about this topic. I am personally a psycholinguist and have thought some about applications of psycholinguist research to second language acquisition, but I have not had the time to develop this as yet. What are the (most important) unsolved problems? What should be included in an agenda for research? There are many, but one that is on my mind is the issue of retention and transfer of training. For example, if students take a course in basic math and then take a course in physics, they should be able to reach back and build on their basic knowledge, but often they are not able to do so. The same can be seen in upper division psychology classes where we assume that students will have an understanding of the elementary statistics course they took, and frequently they do not. Additionally, both as a psycholinguist and as a Dean, I am interested in questions of skill acquisition and transfer in the writing process. Part of what we are supposed to be doing is giving people the skills to analyze complex issues and the abilities to write about them. It is an issue of teaching techniques that people can then use to generalize to other problems. This question of transfer is a classic problem, but one that I think still requires careful work. To begin with, we need more research on the above topics. Another area for research concerns: what are useful applications of technology in the educational settings of today? Almost every educational institution has invested millions of dollars in technology, and I am not sure if the trading of capital for labor has paid off. We have done some work here at Florida State where we have begun to examine the use of computer laboratory time in our beginning math courses. We are looking at the effect of offsetting the discussion sessions with computer-based laboratory time and asking questions about our ability to increase students comprehension and, at the same time, reduce the time spent on the task. This is an area that needs more research. Another topic has to do with motivation of students. How do you motivate students to devote time to the task? What prototypes can you point us toward where principles from the science of learning are already being applied? We have one here in our freshman math class at Florida State. I know that there are many others around, but this is the one I most familiar with. In some of these courses, we have substituted the recitation sections with computer-based problem solving sections. In these sections there are also people in the computer lab who are there to answer students’ questions. We have implemented this in a way that permits us do look at the results in a quasi-experimental way. We have not looked at the details of why this is working. One of my speculations is that this approach allows a much more individualized approach to the students’ problem solving. However, more research is needed before we can say much about why this is working. What are the major problems with or barriers to redesigning higher education? Do you have any ideas for overcoming them? I think that most people in most disciplines, including psychologists, have a slight disconnect between how they talk about these issues when they are wearing their research hats, and what they do in the classroom. Part of the problem is that we don’t have enough training for graduate students who will be teaching. There is a certain disdain for methodology in teaching. This may be diminishing in some places where they have developed training programs for graduate student teaching assistants. In speaking with teaching assistants in the math recitation sections here I have found that most do not think about the notion of analyzing what the students think and why they may have not been able to solve the problem. We need to train teaching assistants and one of the big problems involved with this is that we don’t having training of the trainers. It is very difficult to get these ideas to permeate through an institution. What additional questions should we be asking? Suppose that we are called in front of congress or in front of a judge and asked the question: what do you swear will work? What do we swear will work is the question that I think that we need to be asking. In this regard my target audience has been turned now to the training of graduate student teaching assistants. What training can we give them so that we know what they are doing is really affecting change in the students. What do we need to do so that one outcome of the retreat is to effect change (in ways that we want)? We need to get confident about one or two things that we want to accomplish and then to talk seriously about how to institutionalize it. This will require some organization, such as NSF, to provide incentives for universities or other educational organizations to adopt the principles that people have come to agree on.
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