Project
description | This presentation summarizes a new software shell called STAR-Legacy (STAR stands for Software Technology for Action and Reflection) that is designed to help instructional designers, instructors and learners organize their thinking. We find that well designed macrocontexts (e.g., cases, problems and stories) provide a rich opportunity for students to engage in sustained inquiry. We try to make the situations as authentic as possible to help students undestand the utility of new knowledge. However, people also require well-designed learning activities to help them explore concepts in depth and to evaluate how well they’ve learned. As part of this presentation we will discuss how microcontexts, like simulations, can be used to help students and teachers accomplish this goal. We wish to share STAR-Legacy’s method for organizing resources to illustrate one method of helping instructors and learners engaged in sustained inquiry of complex challenges. We also request ideas on various simulations that could be used with STAR-legacy to promote learning and self assessment of the content. Discussion Our work focuses on creating guided generative learning environments that use rich macro contexts as anchors for learning. The complexity of these macrocontexts, or challenges, requires the teacher and students to engage in a process of sustained inquiry that can last several days or weeks. As they decompose the problem into manageable subproblems they begin to see the concepts embedded in the challenge. Carefully designed activities provide an opportunity to explore isolated concepts in more depth. As students begin to understand these concepts they can start to solve the larger problem. Through this process they begin to see the utility of the knowledge they are learning and how the concepts relate to one another. The combination of well designed anchors coupled with meaningful learning activities provides a rich learning environment for students and teachers. Part of the motivation for the visual design of STAR-Legacy derives from research by the CTGV that included the use of charts depicting the various stages of learning required to solve a problem. This conceptual map of the problem solving process gives the teachers and students a method of tracking their inquiry process. By overtly displaying the process it becomes possible for the class to monitor their own thinking and problem solving process. Eventually, this process becames internalized. We’ve created a new software shell based on this premise to help organize and manage learning activities in a meaningful way. This program, called STAR-Legacy (Software Technology for Action and Reflection) helps manage the complexity of macrocontexts by organizing various resources ranging from CDs, the web and other applications, like simulations. The interface uses a visualization of a learning cycle as its main organizational scheme (see Figure 1). Based on models of problem solving and inquiry, this interface helps instructional designers, instructors, and learners organize their thinking. Each Legacy cycle consists of a series of interrelated challenges, each with its own unique learning cycle. The learning cycle begins with the presentation of a challenge in either video, audio or text format. Then students are asked to reflect on the challenge and to “Generate Ideas”. Once they’ve articulated their thoughts, then they listen to “Multiple Perspective” from various experts. These experts provide hints about things to think about when solving the problem. However, these hints do not provide a specific solution to the problem. This allows users to compare their naive first impressions with the experts to help them notice their lack of differentiated knowledge. Now they are prepared to engage in a process of “Research and Revise.” This stage of the learning cycle organizes resources into meaningful learning activities designed to help them focus on issues related to the initial challenge. Once they feel they’ve learned enough they can go to “Test your mettle.” Here they engage in a set of activities that helps them explore the depth of their knowledge. The goal is to create assessment situations that help them evaluate what they do not know so they can return to the “Research and Revise” section to learn more. Student progress to the “Go Public” stage after proving to themselves that they understand the content well enough to express a solution to the challenge. This cyclical process of active research and reflection on the process provides an excellent opportunity for students to generate their own understanding of the content knowledge. Simulations can provide a mechanism to help students make the invisible visible. This could be making microscopic worlds large, or bring places that can not be visited into the classroom. Simulations allow students to safely manipulate physical properties of the world to explore interdependencies. Basically, they help students develop a deeper conceptual undestanding of specific content by interacting with it. Therefore, simulations are excellent resources for STAR Legacy to link to in its “Research and Revise” and “Test Your Mettle” stages of the learning cycle. In these sections a designer can define learning activities that help students make connections between the current challenge and what they should learn from the simulation. Then students can use Legacy to launch the simulation and work with it. Once they quit the simulation control returns to where they left off in STAR-Legacy. Visualizations, like simulations, provide a mechanism to help students learn more about specific concepts embedded in the macrocontext (i.e., challenge). One example of how simulation can be used within STAR-Legacy comes from our work with the Office of Navel Research (ONR) to help new technicians become better troubleshooters. As one possible challenge we ask students to troubleshoot a flashlight with a dim bulb. Students often can do the math to solve for the current in a circuit and appropriately describe a voltage drop across components like a light bulb. However, they appear to lack differentiated knowledge when given situations that require a more physical interpretation of the problem. For example, students find it difficult to describe why there is a voltage drop across a switch when the switch is open but then the voltage goes to zero when the switch it closed. This dilemma can easily be remediated using a simulation of a fluid system consisting of a water tower, a valve, and a water wheel (to do work). If we relate the potential energy of the water tower, called pressure, with the potential energy of the battery, called voltage, it starts to help students visualize how voltage works in a circuit. Students appear to easily grasp that when a valve stops flow the pressure is high on one side of the valve and low on the other. They also understand that the pressure equalizes when the switch valve is opened to allow fluid to pass. This is directly analogous to a switch controlling the voltage in a circuit. This simple lesson helps students begin to understand voltage as a potential energy source and why there is a potential energy change throughout a circuit (i.e., “voltage drop”). |
Theoretical
background | See Description and Schwartz, D. L., Lin, X., Brophy, S., & Bransford, J. D. (in press). Toward the development of flexibly adaptive instructional designs. In Reigeluth (Ed.), Instructional Design Theories and Models: Volume II. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. |