My daughter Brittany just turned 15 and a half. In Oklahoma, she’s now eligible to get her driver’s permit. She did - and is now driving whenever she gets the chance. It is quite interesting (and exciting) to ride with someone first learning to drive - especially from a learning point of view. The novice driver has to concentrate on several tasks…
- Planning the trip, where to turn, …
- Steering the car to maintain the correct position on the roadway.
- Working the accelerator / brakes to maintain a proper speed and following distance.
- Watching for other cars and determining how they affect your path, speed, …
- Listening to the advice of the adult driver who is helping you learn. And arguing with them occasionally
According to Cognitive Load theory, all of our problem solving goes on in short term memory - and short term memory is very limited in capacity. One can keep only about 7 different items in short term memory. I’d suggest that learning to drive takes up much of one’s cognitive capacity.
Contrast the novice driver with an adult who has driven for years… probably yourself! The skills the novice struggles with have become automatic (just watch your hands on the steering wheel sometime when you are driving… mine seem to make tiny adjustments to keep the car moving in a straight path without any conscious thought). These automatic skills get “chunked” together as 1 item in short term memory and driving takes up a minor part of one’s cognitive capacity.
This automaticity allows us “experts” to do many things without having to labor over the parts of the process. And it also makes it very hard for us to explain what and why we do what we are doing. Brittany asked for help with an Algebra II problem a couple of weeks ago. As we started to work on it, I wrote the next step… She blurted out, “How did you know to do that?” There was no answer. I knew the correct step to take - but had no idea what the clues were that told me to take that step. So how can we help someone move from being a novice to an expert?
Lately I’ve been reviewing a few articles on Cognitive Apprenticeship. Three good articles are Cognitive Apprenticeship as an Instructional Model (good examples), Cognitive Apprenticeship: Making Thinking Visible, and Situated Cognition and the Culture of Learning (emphasizes both Cognitive Apprenticeship and the theory that learning is situated in the context in which it is learned). The 5 central themes of Cognitive Apprenticeship are Modeling, Scaffolding, Coaching, Articulation, and Reflection. When it comes to helping a novice driver, these can be implemented in numerous ways. A few examples are:
- Modeling - provide an expert example for the learner to emulate
- Model proper driving habits when the learner is present.
- Talk through your thought processes as you encounter various problems to solve (4-way stop, entering the highway, waiting to make a left turn).
- Accept criticism from the learner gracefully… you may have picked up many ”legally challenged” driving habits over the years (and those have also become automatic!).
- Scaffolding - decrease learner cognitive load by handling some of the tasks, fade out as the learner becomes more competent
- Work controls that the learner may be unfamiliar with (the learner may have encountered the need to use the windshield wipers - turn them on for her and then review their operation later). Work the radio.
- Handle the trip planning task, tell the learner where to turn…
- Coaching - provide feedback and instructions as the learner drives
- Tell the learner when she should turn on the headlights, when to activate the high or low beams.
- Advise the learner about her speed as she approaches a corner.
- Articulation - encourage learner to talk through her mental processes of driving situations; provide feedback
- Encourage learner to talk through the steps of merging onto the highway, navigating a 4-way stop, … Provide feedback on possible missing steps. Although this would be more situated if done while the learner is driving, it would also increase cognitive loading. You may want to do this while the learner is not driving, at least in the early stages of learning.
- Reflection - encourage the learner to think about a performance to better assimilate learning into appropriate shema (sorry that this came out so technical… it appears that I need to reflect on this so that I can describe it in a more “human” format)
- Given an “unplanned white-knuckle moment” (i.e. a close call), ask the learner describe the events that led up to the event and propose different actions that she could take to avoid such excitement in the future.
- After a successful driving experience, ask the learner to list 3 times during the drive when something could have gone wrong (a careless driver could have turned in front of her, a small animal - suicidal opossums around here - could have run across the road near the bridge, another driver could have changed lanes cutting her off while she was merging onto the highway).
Obviously, Cognitive Apprenticeship can be used to teach / learn many tasks. I’ve provided just one example - that happens to be on my mind at this time.
OK, I haven’t done very well connecting this entry with educational technology. Oh well, next time back to Scratch!
My daughter’s high school biology class is studying cell biology, specifically the names and functions of the organelles. She said they were simply memorizing all this stuff, and wanted to know if there was a better way to learn it. I assured her that since rote memorization is probably the worst method possible, I was positive that there were better ways.
I suggested she try to organize the organelles by functionality and hierarchy (some are a part of, or in other organelles) and learn that way. Unfortunately, I didn’t see a constructive approach to this task (simply learning the names and functions of the organelles). But I did see see this as an opportunity to see if something could be done in Scratch that was in line with my idea of kids building tools and simulations as part of their understanding of school concepts. Ideas that came to mind include:
- simple 2 player review game (not really as constructive as I would like, but something I believe a high school student could do)
- simulation of the cell (sounds pretty tough to me!)
I picked the simpler, the game. See the project here. Download the project file here.
Play the game as follows:
- Click the green flag (not shown in picture) to initialize the game.
- Clicking the cat generates a question and fills in the organelle the question is about.
- A team representative presses the A key (team 1) or the L key (team 2). The question is reshown for the team who pressed first and displayed for “Host’s Answer Time” seconds (defaults to 5 but can be changed by the players).
- After the time has expired, the teams are asked if the selected team answered the question correctly. If they answered correctly, they are given a point.
- Click the cat to generate another question and continue as above.
Implementation notes:
- Starting with a cell picture with the organelles numbered was very convenient. Background picture is from http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Image:Biological_cell.svg and licensed as Gnu Free Documentation License (GFDL) and Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license.
- I simply used random to decide the organelle to choose and the type of question (name the organelle or tell the function of the organelle).
- To simplify the program and also make it better for reviewing, I included both the name and function of the organelle in the answer feedback.
Some of the things I want to consider for these projects was mentioned in a previous post…
- Estimate the grade level of students who I believe could generate a comparable program.
- I think Junior High level kids could generate a comparable project. I think a 6th grader could create most of the project with a little help here and there.
- Estimate the grade level of students who I believe could understand the program, discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the program, and possibly improve it.
- I think 5th and 6th graders (10 - 12 year olds) could understand the scripts and discuss the project. Those with some Scratch experience could probably improve the game.
- Estimate the amount of time I spent putting the demo together.
- I spent about 2 -3 hours playing with this. Additional time was spent reading / learning about the organelles.
- Provide sample discussion questions.
- What would make the game more fun? Can you change the project to implement your ideas?
- Are there bugs in the game? Can you find a way to exploit the bugs for your advantage? Better yet, can you fix the bugs?
In conclusion, the cell game is not the kind of constructive project I want to examine in this series. But since I had put it together, I thought it made sense to discuss and reflect on it in this post.
Winners and losers, Democrats and Republicans, guns and butter, good and evil… The world appears to be locked in competition.
OK, I’m straying off my Scratch demo plan for this post. What made me start thinking about this? I’ve started getting some “spam” comments on my blog here… not a lot… no big problem… just a nuisance. I remembered that I had to enter some sort of code when I posted a comment over on Wesley Fryer’s ”Speed of Creativity” blog. By the way, I strongly recommend Wes’ latest blog entry about President Bush’s comments on NCLB during his State of the Union Address - read it here. Anyway, I browsed over to Speed of Creativity and found that Wes uses reCAPTCHA to block spam comments.
My first thought was, I wonder how much this costs? So I checked it out at http://recaptcha.net/. It’s free… and beyond that it’s a 2-way win! Carnegie Mellon provides reCAPTCHA free - to help people avoid spam and to aid in the digitization of old books. When you post a comment, you are presented with images of 2 words. These words have been scanned during the process of scanning books. The left is known to reCAPTCHA. The right is not known (i.e. The Optical Character Recognition process could not decode the word and it needs to be manually corrected). If you enter the first word correctly, reCAPTCHA believes you are a person (not some sort of bot program) and allows your post to go through. It also assumes you have entered the second word correctly. After the second word has been decoded by a certain number of people (on various websites using reCAPTCHA), it is considered to have been corrected. Assuming there are thousands (maybe millions?) of words that need to be manually corrected, how much time is saved by reCAPTCHA? I’m glad to both be helped by reCAPTCHA and to help them in their efforts by implementing it on this blog!
School is not centered on cooperation (IMHO) - school is more centered around competition. (Alfie Kohn has several good articles on Competition and Cooperation on his web site… read them here.) Are there ways that educational technology can be used to generate (or encourage) a win-win situation - like reCAPTCHA does - in the classroom? I’ll be thinking about this some… and hopefully come up with some good ideas. If a reader has any ideas, I’d love to hear them!
