Reflection on Goal-Based Scenarios

There’s no question but that the Goal-Based Scenario approach is more interesting than chalk-and-talk. There’s also no question but that we lose young people somewhere between elementary school and high school due to the inability/unwillingness of school systems to relinquish its use of traditional teaching methodologies. Furthermore, GBS adapts wonderfully to internet applications, allowing the creator of online instruction to employ flash animation into a learning module.

So why am I less than totally enthusiastic about GBS? Well, to be totally honest, I can see how GBS would be of tremendous benefit in, say, an American History or World Civilization class, or perhaps as a supplement to home economics or biology. But would it work in a music, foreign language, or mathematics class? And how might one evaluate a student using this approach? Would we be able to prove to the state board that the students have learned the curriculum sufficiently to give them passing grades? And if we’re talking about “learning by doing”, isn’t that exactly what Cognitive Apprenticeship is all about? Will students remember what they have learned long after the class is over? These are unresolved issues that one must consider before employing GBS.

Some of the models I have seen of GBS presuppose that the student has gained a sufficient understanding of economics, mathematics, and the like to be able to make the intelligent decisions required of them. How did they gain this expertise in the first place? By role-play? That seems a bit far-fetched to me.

In many ways, however, this approach makes all the sense in the world. We are, after all, goal-directed by our very nature, and our goals carry along with them certain expectations. We need to learn how to make plans to achieve our goals, otherwise our goals are nothing more than daydreams. Plus, in the process of achieving our goals, we may just fail at first. GBS does not condemn the erring student to failure, but allows him/her to learn from his/her error. This is where explanation comes in. There’s nothing like positive feedback from a mentor to help us understand why we failed, and encourage us to get back on our feet and try again.

Schenk makes a comment that rather annoys me: “you cannot really teach anyone anything unless they are ready to receive new information.” This reminds me of psychedelic humanism, which suggests that we are not to teach a child anything unless he/she has expressed a felt need to learn. That’s when I usually “wax third reich” and tell the student that he is about to explain his unwillingness to learn to the school principal!

Schenk does make one profound statement: “Commonly, learners do not understand the relevance of what they learn, and the lessons do not apply to an intrinsically motivating goal. The effect of these shortcomings is that learners do not index the lessons learned effectively, and thus cannot retrieve them when they need them.” Schenk’s final statement in this week’s reading really sums up his approach: “One can maximize the effectiveness of GBS learning environments when the domain and the scenario are interesting to the student. When students are pursuing goals in a topic that they care about, they are motivated to pay attention to the information that is required to accomplish that goal. They are unlikely to forget what they learn, because the lessons will be indexed with other memories of other experiences in the domain. When they work within the domain again, they are likely to retrieve the relevant memories. GBSs allow the students to do target skills by doing them. Each experience provided within the GBS environment helps the learner to build a domain-relevant case library, complete with many lessons learned. This is how novices become experts.”

Sounds like Dr. Schenk just answered one of my questions.

Reflection on Cognitive Apprenticeship

Having studied music and drafting, I could not be more enthused with any other educational methodology as I am with cognitive apprenticeship.

The teacher who uses this approach doesn’t teach inert musical, mathematical, historical, or engineering facts divorced from real world situations:  (s)he teaches the student how to think like a musician, a mathematician, a historian, or an engineer.  By doing so, according to DeBruijn (1995), the instructor allows the student to acquire “cognitive and metacognitive knowledge and skills by means of observation and guided practice.”

In its most basic form, cognitive apprenticeship begins with four teaching strategies:  modeling, scaffolding, coaching, and then fading.  This is precisely what the music teacher does when he shows the young music student how to play an instrument.  He demonstrates how it is done, explaining all of the “how’s and why’s”, after which it is the student’s turn to begin to follow the lead of the teacher, and as (s)he gains more and more confidence with his/her newly acquired skill, the teacher begins to withdraw his/her pedagogical presence, until finally the student is able to perform in public without the need of being coached by the instructor.

Once the student has achieved an acceptable degree of competence at the newly acquired skill, (s)he then has an opportunity to articulate his/her problem solving strategies to the instructor, who in turn reflects on the student’s cognitive processes, making the student’s problem solving process perceivable.  Finally the cognitive apprenticeship enters into the exploration phase, where the student is able to create and solve his/her own problems.

Also, interestingly enough, evaluation is frequently done by means of nonconventional testing methods, most popularly portfolios.  Rather than matching and multiple-choice items, the apprentice is responsible to submit samples of his/her work for instructor approval.  This, too, is related to real-world situations, where the test of one’s competence is determined by the quality of the product.

Debruijn cites Resnick (1987) as saying that “(l)earning at school is considered to be an activity in which knowledge and skills are isolated from their practical uses, whereas, in normal life, knowledge cannot be isolated from the activities in which it is required.”  Hopefully cognitive apprenticeship will enable us to steer away from antiquated methodologies having little if anything to do with real world situations and towards those which are transferable and relevant to situations outside the halls of academe.

I am personally extremely impressed with this methodology and find it very usable in an online situation.  In particular, as a drafter, I can envision a situation where I would be able to create a drawing in, say, Google Sketchup, explaining why I am using the commands available in the program to create a 3-D drawing.  A collaborative website such as Dimdim, which would allow me to see the drawing as it is being produced would easily allow me to coach my student.  Once the student has demonstrated an acceptable level of skill,  I could send him/her a drawing, say “here’s your project, good luck” and have him/her submit the results for evaluation.  The student would eventually have the opportunity to create his/her own drawings with all of the problems that the drawing entailed, and would be able to synthesize the problem-solving strategies previously learned for use in their own drawings.  What an exciting concept!  The only problem I see with this is having a superabundance of apprentices.  There are only so many hours in the day.  I suppose that the simple solution to that would be to have master drafters under my supervision who could help me with all the Sketchup artists trying to achieve greatness at the craft! :P

Reflection on Problem-Based Learning

Refection on Problem-Based Learning

Deja-Vu.

Seems like I’ve seen this somewhere before.  Students are broken up into groups and have been given a strategy with which to solve a problem.  The instructor acts more like a facilitator than a grand exalted disseminator of knowledge.  Learning is collaborative.  Students are responsible for their own learning.  Oh yeah…that’s Guided Design!

But, wait…we’re in a new chapter now, aren’t we?  It appears to me that Problem-Based Learning is pretty much the same thing as Guided Design, but with greater emphasis on beginning with open-ended, ill-defined and ill-structured problems.  Such an approach is ideal for subjects where divergent thinking is symptomatic of the field of interest, such as health sciences, education, and engineering.  It occurred to me as I was reading about PBL that this kind of thinking is what detectives thrive on.  PBL should be enormously popular in criminal justice classes.

Let’s face it, the traditional approach to education is coming under greater fire as time goes on.  Educational approaches are like tools….we can mold them to fit our particular need, and considering how PBL has caught on since the 50’s, it is obvious that, for some academic areas at least, it is of enormous benefit to the students.

PBL also resembles Cooperative Learning in that the group is responsible for the material that is being learned.  The learning process is organized and directed with support from an instructor or tutor.  Students are asked what they do not know, and are required to do research to find any number of possible solutions.  Such an approach is easily transferable to real-life situations beyond the halls of academe.

Hung, Bailey, and Jonassen (2003) state that “a primary goal of PBL is to prepare students to be self-directed, life-long learners and practical problem solvers.”  They go on to say that such preparation “contrasts with the need to prepare students for standardized tests.”  This statement resonated with me due to a situation posed in a previous class at NSCU:  that of the ethicalness of teaching to a test.  It must be remembered that college is NOT the real world, and that students must pass standardized tests before becoming licensed professionals.  Still, I think that the transfer of problem-solving skills that PBL affords ameliorates the doubts of most of the skeptics.

Koschmann (1995) forward PBL as a means of fostering “hypothetico-deductive reasoning, which “has been described as hypothesis generation followed by inquiry (Elstein, Shulman, & Sprafka, 1978.)”  There are several ways in which students develop this reasoning, also referred to as “the clinical reasoning process. (Barrows & Feltovich, 1987, cited in Koschmann, 1995.)  Firstly, ill-structured problems resemble real-life situations faced by health professionals;  they are examined in small-group settings, allowing for collaboration among team members; and students must be proactive in doing the necessary research to find the best solution to the problem.  All things considered, I think this would qualify PBL as a superior means of teaching health science or engineering.

Reflection on Cooperative Education

As I am reading about Cooperative Education, I cannot help but to be tormented by ambivalent feelings about this philosophy, overall.  On the one hand, cooperative education has an enormous amount of empirical evidence to suggest that symbiotic relationships between group members greatly facilitates the learning process:  once again we are told that education does not take place in a vacuum, and in the real world, we cooperate with others as we delve into educational experiences.

On the other hand, one notices that evaluation is norm-referenced rather than criterion-referenced.  This adds fuel to the fire of the distracters of cooperation who point out that under cooperative education, it’s about the group, not about the individual learner.  Some go as far as to say that cooperative education furthers a socialist agenda.  That, to me, is a bit extreme:  parts of cooperative education make too much sense, such as shared understanding, to dismiss it in such a manner.  Years ago I learned more about architecture from fellow classmates than I did from the instructor.  Then again, taking the instructor into consideration, I had to learn from my fellow classmates.

In many ways, this approach seems too good to be true.  I am thinking of classes where there were a couple of disenfranchised students who sat at the back of the room, apathy written all over their faces.  I am wondering how these students would interact with their fellow classmates if given the chance to share their insights and experience.  Who knows, I might be pleasantly surprised.

There appears to be several effective techniques for handling students of varying degrees of  motivation.  I would have to see them in operation to pass judgment.

One of the concepts that has been mentioned in relation to this approach is that of students teaching other students, and the powerful effect doing so has on the student’s own learning.  Stephen Covey wrote an immensely popular book in 1989 called The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.  After presenting and elaborating on the habits, he recommends that the reader teach others what he/she had learned, reasoning that when we teach something, we learn it twice.  This is excellent advice for anyone in the educational or business world, and I am delighted to see its inclusion in the Cooperative Learning approach.

I would not hesitate to use this method to teach aspiring drafters, at least not if they were all together in the same room and therefore able to gauge each others’ reactions.  I have seen this approach used before first hand, and it works.

My gut instinct is that Cooperative Education could be a nightmare if used in an online environment.  Previous experiences have afforded me the opportunity to notice how people interact when meetings are held strictly online.  It was certainly be interesting to observe the group dynamics involved as normally introverted personalities transform into more extroverted ones in an online environment.  One sometimes needs a referee to control the competitive member and encourage the unmotivated.

The old standbys such as Elluminate and Skype would be essential to provide an ambience in which 2-5 students could cooperate online and share with each other as they engage in a group project.