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Area of Expertise Cognitive Psychologist, Cognition and Instruction What are the findings or theories from your area of expertise that we could apply to higher education? At the most general level I would say that we need a theory of learning, an understanding of how people learn if we want to design instruction that will help people learn. We need findings and theories that tell us how people learn. Essentially what we need is an educationally relevant theory of learning. What are the (most important) unsolved problems? What should be included in an agenda for research? There are very few solved problems, which leaves just about everything else as an unsolved problem. The question that I am most interested in is how can you teach in ways that promote transfer. What kinds of learning experiences allow people to take what they have learned and apply it in situations? Transfer is a classic issue in psychology and in education, but I think that it is really the fundamental unsolved problem. We really want to know how to teach for transfer. I think that we know how to teach facts and procedures, what we don’t know is how to teach higher-level concepts and strategies. An agenda for research needs to include an educationally relevant theory of learning. What prototypes can you point us toward where principles from the science of learning are already being applied? We can all point to our own work. At this point in our research in learning we have decided that it does not make sense to have a general theory of learning and what we have are much more domain-specific models of learning. The theories that we are going to develop are going to have to be domain specific to a certain extent. What are the major problems with or barriers to redesigning higher education? One of the barriers is that we don’t have a good concept of what “good instruction” is and we don’t have good theories of what “good instruction” is. Another barrier involves the use of technology in education. I have been interested in educational technology. I think that sometimes people confuse media and method. This is kind of a traditional issue in instructional technology. At the level of higher education people sometimes think that innovation means using technology. We know from many, many years of research on educational technology that technology does not create learning; it is instructional methods that cause learning. Just inserting technology into higher education is not really a viable solution. We need to find the instructional methods that help people learn and then see how technology can be used to serve that purpose. Many people take a technology-centered approach rather than a learning-centered approach. Do you have any ideas for overcoming them? To overcome these barriers we need more research. Research on what constitutes “good instruction” and research on how to use technology to improve learning. What do we need to do so that one outcome of the retreat is to effect change (in ways that we want)? Until we know what constitutes “good teaching” I am not sure that we are ready for change. I am interested in what do we know about how people learn that would let us know what the change should be. Do we have a theory of learning that is relevant and what are its implications? I get nervous about people talking about change before we have really looked at what should be changed.
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