Target Paper for Knowledge Building Session 7
Tailoring undergraduate student instruction to individual student needs

NSF REC PI Conference, May 15-17, 2002
Submitted by Loretta L. Jones

A. Introduction to the session

"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes." Marcel Proust

Higher education is rich in tradition and history. We value those who have gone before and require our students to read the classics and distill their value. However, the teaching methods commonly used to teach science and mathematics courses in higher education--lecture combined with verification labs--were designed for a world with different technologies. In fact, the word "lecture" comes from the Latin lectare, to read aloud. Because books were scarce in the Middle Ages, students would gather in large halls to listen to a reading of a text passage followed by commentary. Today students read their own texts and our growing understanding of the teaching and learning process in higher education has led us to value student?centered instructional strategies. In addition, while advances in technology have allowed the sizes of lecture classes today to far exceed those of the Middle Ages, the same advances make it possible for us to give individual feedback and assess individual work in a more personalized way than has ever been possible before. Visualization tools also allow us to help students develop "new eyes." However, learning is hard work and students still need to be motivated. Our goals at this meeting will be to assemble research results that inform work in this area, to consider how best to apply current knowledge to meet individual student needs, and to make recommendations on future directions in this area to NSF.

At the NSF K-12 Math, Science, and Curriculum Implementation Projects Conference in Reston, VA, last February, James Pellegrino (2002) pointed out the importance for education of a cognitive science perspective on how people learn. He noted that, in his view, the major areas of cognitive science that impact curriculum, instruction, and assessment are the nature of expertise, assessing and recognizing prior knowledge, meaningful learning, metacognitive skills, learning styles ("multiple paths to competence"), and situated cognition. I would add to that list the cognitive apprenticeship model, which is being used with increasing frequency to teach problem solving (Collins, Brown, & Newman, 1989). Fruitful methods of addressing student needs need to take these aspects of learning into account, whether classroom-based, such as cooperative learning and discovery laboratories, or technology-based, such as virtual reality simulations.

The growing number of applications of advanced technologies to learning rely on a synergy among science, art, and technology to create new ways of seeing the world and thinking about matter (Gordin and Pea, 1995). These visualization and modeling tools have the potential to make a profound difference in how the concepts of science and mathematics are learned and understood (Jones, 1996). In these novel learning environments students can visualize, design, and construct complex or invisible phenomena while engaging in authentic activities that follow the paradigms of science. However, technologies developed for scientific research generally involve interfaces that were optimized for research purposes and may be difficult for beginners to use (Edelson and Gordin, 1997). New interfaces may be required in order for scientific visualization tools to be useful in education and the characteristics of optimal interfaces need to be determined.

Other learning environments that promote active student involvement in learning, such as inquiry laboratories, design challenges, and cooperative learning teams, have also shown great promise, but need to be explored further for the promise to be realized. For example, how can cooperative groups require individual accountability and how can inquiry laboratories be designed so that students conduct real scientific research in a cost-effective manner? We need to consider at our meeting how research on novel learning environments and methods can be used to inform development projects and to set directions for new research.

B. Things to do prior to the meeting

1. Read through the questions posed in part C, as they will be the focus of our discussion.
2. Read the chapter from Joel Michael and Harold Modell's new book listed under part D below. This reading will provide important background for our discussion. You may also want to take a look at the Pellegrino article, which is available on the Internet.
3. Bring with you relevant citations, ideas, contacts, sample materials, and any other information that may be of use in addressing these issues.

C. Questions for our discussions at the meeting

1. How can we best find out what students know, what mental models they form, what learning and problem-solving strategies they use, and if we have succeeded in tailoring undergraduate instruction to individual student needs?
2. How can we help developers to incorporate findings from cognitive science and educational research into the design of instructional materials and learning environments?
3. How can technology be used to enhance the learning experience in meaningful ways?
4. What are the gaps in the research and knowledge base needed to answer the first three questions?
5. What recommendations for the directions of the ROLE program in these areas should we make to NSF?

D. Document to be read before the PI meeting

Chapter 4 from Michael, J., & Modell, H. (in preparation). Active Learning in the Secondary and College Science Classroom.

E. Additional References

Biswas, G., Katzlberger, T., Bransford, J., Schwartz, D. & TAG-V (2001). Extending intelligent learning environments with teachable agents to enhance learning. In J. Moore, C. Redfield & W. Johnson (Eds.). AI in education. IOS Press.

Collins, A., Brown, J. S., and Newman, S. E. (1989). Cognitive apprenticeship: Teaching the crafts of reading, writing, and mathematics. In L. B. Resnick (Ed.), Knowing, learning, and instruction: Essays in honor of Robert Glaser (pp. 453-494). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. See also http://www.21learn.org/arch/articles/brown_seely.html.

Edelson, D. C., and Gordin, D. (1997) Creating science learning tools from experts' investigation tools: a design framework, Annual Meeting of the National Association for Research in Science Teaching, Oak Brook, IL, March 20-24, 1997.

Gordin, D. N., and Pea, R. D. (1995) Prospects for scientific visualization as an educational technology, Journal of the Learning Sciences, 4(3), 249-279.

Guzdial, M., and Soloway, E. (2002). Teaching the Nintendo generation to program:Preparing a new strategy for teaching introductory computer programming, Communciations of the ACM, 45(4), 17-21.

Guzdial, M., and Turns, J. (2000). Effective Discussion through a computer-mediated anchored forum, Journal of the Learning Sciences, 9(4), 437-470. Also see http://www.catchword.com/erlbaum/10508406/v9n4/contp1-1.htm and click on the article's page number.

Jones, L. L. (1996). The role of molecular structure and modeling in general chemistry, New Initiatives in Chemical Education: An On_Line Computer Conference, Summer, 1996. http://www.inform.umd.edu:8080/EdRes/Topic/Chemistry/
ChemConference/ChemConf96/Jones/Paper3.html

Jones, L. L. (1999). Learning Chemistry through Design and Construction, Uniserve News, 14, November, 1999: http://science.uniserve.edu.au/newsletter/vol14/jones.html.

Lovett, M. C. (2000). "Issues in the design of instructional scaffolds". Presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association.

Pellegrino, J. (2002). Understanding how students learn and inferring what they know: Implications for the design of curriculum, instruction, and assessment, Annual NSF K-12 Math, Science, and Curriculum Implementation Projects Conference, Reston, VA, Feb. 1, 2002. http://www.agiweb.org/education/nsf02/Pellegrinopaper.pdf.

Yore, Larry (2001), What is meant by constructivist science teaching and will the science education community stay the course for meaningful reform? Editorial in the Electronic Journal of Science Education 5(4), http://unr.edu/homepage/crowther/ejse/yore.html.