CTGV (Cognition and Technology Group at Vanderbilt) (1993). Anchored instruction and situated cognition revisited. Educational Technology 33(3), 52-70.

This article is a follow-up to a piece the group wrote three years earlier, in which they discussed the use of  information-rich videodisc environments (The Young Sherlock Program and The Jasper Woodbury Problem Solving Series) to anchor or situate instruction. Here, they clarify and expand on their initial ideas by addressing certain FAQs and discussing implications for transfer and assessment.

Summary of 1990 thinking: video-based anchors that created interesting realistic contexts could serve as “macrocontexts” for active construction of knowledge by learning. Purpose was to “recreate some of the advantages of in-context learning that are available to young children and to people participating in apprenticeships” (p.52)

From FAQ section:

• Anchors are designed to promote but not guarantee the kinds of activities that are emphasized by constructivist approaches to learning.
• One of the greatest challenges that anchored curricula pose for teachers is that is requires a change in role from “provider of information” to a coach and often a fellow learner (p.54)
• Jasper teachers engage in “just-in-time teaching” by first encouraging students to use their intuitions about how to approach a problem and then providing them with the resources necessary to make progress (p.55)
• The opportunity to work through an anchored adventure helps equalize the preparation of the students for the projects that they eventually undertake (p.57)
• Anchored instruction encourages cooperative learning: Problems depicted in the anchors are complex, hence any individual student is unlikely to be able to solve them completely; the visual  nature of the anchors makes it easier for students to contribute even if they are not good readers. Another possible strategy: having students adopt particular roles (p.58)
• Simulations appear to be highly motivating and excellent for engaging students in “what-if thinking.” Also, they help students learn to organize their work in a systematic manner (p.58)[Molecules and Minds]
• “What if” analog questions are designed to promote flexible transfer by helping students re-think optimal solutions in light of key changes in parameters

CTGV — Changes in thinking section:

• Broader view of situatedness: now better  understand the need to explicitly consider cultural contexts in which we situate our anchors. Challenging to change the culture of the classroom (teacher role as “teller” vs coach or fellow learner). Best to use simple technology first; provide planning and support for technology.
• Greeno et al.’s definition of learning: “…an improvement in the ability to interact with things and other people in a situation.” Transfer is related to “…how learning to participate in an activity in one situation can influence (positively or negatively) one’s ability to participate in another activity in a new situation”  (p.64).
• Group feels that “comprehensive theories of learning need to be based on analyses of a wide variety of settings rather than solely on learning as it currently occurs in schools” (p.64)
  • School-learning (teacher-directed) strategies: 1) what will be on the test; 2) taking notes; 3) remembering information from textbooks.
  • Non-school-learning (self-directed) strategies: 1) identifying important problems and opportunities; 2) setting and meeting one’s learning goals.
• Important to develop material that can make thinking visible and hence afford opportunities for elaboration and for repair when necessary (p.65)
• Interested in capturing some of the advantages that sports contests or musical performances create for coaches and for music teachers and their students. By facing common challenges posed from outside the classroom, teachers and students are united in their efforts to continually improve.

*Spiro, R.J., & Jehng, J.C. (1990). Cognitive flexibility and hypertext: Theory and technology for the nonlinear and multidimensional traversal of complex subject matter. In D. Nix & R. Spiro (Eds.), Cognition, education and multimedia: Exploring ideas in high technology. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

The authors discuss the necessary application of cognitive flexibility theory when promoting knowledge acquisition and application in ill-structured domains. The complexity of such domain are best addressed through nonlinear learning aids, such as random access media. The Cognitive Flexibility Hypertext approach applies tenets of CFT in a computer learning environment. A hypertext program called KANE is used throughout to illustrate important principles.

The authors limit their discussion to situations of advanced knowledge acquisition in a content area, what they refer to as “ill-structured domains.” Hallmarks of such domains include (p.168):

• non-uniformity of explanation across range of phenomena to be covered
• non-linearity of explanation
• non-additivity following decomposition
• context-dependency
• irregularity of overlap patterns across cases (reducing effectiveness of prototypes and simple analogies)
• absence of wide scope defining features for category application

Learning of complex content material in ill-structured domains:

• Requires multiple representations (e.g., multiple explanations, analogies, and dimensions of analysis)
• Mental representations must be open
• Nonlinear instructional sequences need to be followed
• Irregularity and heterogeneity must be acknowledged

Cognitive flexibility: being able to restructure one’s knowledge spontaneously, in many ways and in an adaptive fashion. Function of the way knowledge is represented (along multiple rather than single conceptual dimensions) and the process that operate on those mental representations (schema assembly rather than retrieval) (p.165-6).

“Learning that has these characteristics of openness and plurality produces cognitive flexibility: the ability to adaptively re-assemble diverse elements of knowledge to fit the particular needs of a given understanding or problem-solving situation” (p.169).

CFT leads to a reconceptualization of instructional incrementalism (p.185). “…instruction starts with complex treatments but situates them in cognitively manageable mini-cases…So the student learns from the outset that the cases they will have to apply their knowledge to are complex (in that they require that multiple aspects of their knowledge representations be simultaneously and interactively superimposed) and they receive an easily graspable set of lessons about how some specific conceptual themes get instantiated in a particular context” (p.185). Use of mini-cases helps to avoid any reductive bias (p.187).

“Theories of cognition and instruction too often focus either on introductory learning or advanced learning in well-structured domains…many of the strategies of learning and instruction that are most successful in introductory learning (e.g., the use of analogy) form impediments to the eventual development of more sophisticated understandings” (p.169).

The central metaphor of CFT is the “criss-crossed landscape,” originally from Wittengenstein’s Philosophical investigations (1953).  “One learns by criss-crossing conceptual landscapes; instruction involves the provision of learning materials that channel multidimensional landscape explorations under the active initiative of the learner (as well as providing expert guidance and commentary to help the learner to derive maximum benefit from his or her explorations); and knowledge representations reflect the criss-crossing that occurred during learning” (p.170).

[The authors claim that "highly connected, web-like knowledge structures" are built via this process. I'm curious to know how this was determined...]

“Because one cannot have a prepackaged knowledge structure for every situation that might be encountered, the emphasis must shift from intact shcema retrieval to flexibility of situation-specific schema assembly” (p.170-1). Random access instruction (via hypertext program for instance) is an ideal medium for criss-crossing ill-structured domains.

Knowledge transfer is facilitated by having a large number of wide-scope interpretive schemas available, allowing students to access them flexibly.

Hypertext learning environments have tended to be designed without any theoretical basis. Instead, driven by technology capabilities rather than reflection upon which stages and purposes of learning this technology may best be suited; nor with any understanding of the cognitive psychology of nonlinear learning (p.166-7).

Hypertext systems are best suited for:

• Advanced learning
• Transfer/application learning
• Complex and ill-structured domains

KANE uses mini-case scenes/cases:

• Permit rapid studies
• allow for interplay of multiple themes
• each scene “unit” coded with a vector specifying which theme and symbolic perspective has a relevant role in a given scene

[The example scene text felt somewhat didactic to me; glad to know that the program allows students to add themes they identify as important and relevant.]

The authors admit that mini-cases are no substitute for actual experience in general, though mini-cases are helpful in conveying “the criss-crossed, multidimensional representation of the structure of case-based knowledge” because:

• the conceptual structure is highlighted for the case, rather than having to be inferred
• optional expert guidance is available
• one is not dependent on serendipitous occurrences of instructionally useful cases in fortuitous sequences

Cognitive Flexibility Hypertexts

• consolidate the process of experience acquisition
• mini-cases allow one to see examples of rich case analysis and complex thematic analysis
• concepts are embedded in “practice”
• more cases can be covered via mini-cases; allows for cognitive manageability of the complex case instruction required for ill-structured domains
• prevents overreliance on prototype cases
• allows for easier situation-dependent knowledge assembly. Large number of mini-cases permits a greater range of potential precedent-case assemblies
• increases power and efficiency of the program
• easier to link mini-cases than “nonadditive” cases
• by helping the student fully cover each case by pluralistically covering it, transfer is fostered in several ways:
  • student learns how to fully interpret cases, facilitating full interpretation of new cases in the future
  • multiple coding of cases provides more access routes for their later retrieval from memory (when needed in face of new cases)
  • the interaction of conceptual perspectives is illustrated
  • allows for more flexibility in tailoring for schema assembly
• use of repetition is non-replicative. Repeated presentations aim to point out for students how the same case information can take on importantly different shades of meaning at different times and how each case has many facets.
• this approach is intended to “effect an integration of conceptual and situational learning, in which each is appropriately thought about in terms of the other” (p.192). Concepts and cases are both essential. Conceptual knowledge must be taught in the contexts of actual cases of its application (not in the abstract)

Collins, A., Brown, J.S., & 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.

The authors describe the cognitive apprenticeship model, which advocates a “master-apprentice” relationship for successful learning. Though the spirit of cognitive apprenticeship stems from Lave and Wenger’s work observing traditional apprenticeship practices, the CA framework extends beyond traditional apprenticeship in significant ways, primarily by being focused on the higher-order metacognitive skills and problem solving/task completion strategies employed by experts. Teachers, playing the role of experts in a domain, must make such usually implicit processes visible for their students and use appropriate scaffolding to guide students toward mastery.

Many complex and important skills, such those required for language use and social interaction, are learned informally through apprenticeship-like methods (not involving didactic teaching): observation, coaching, and successive approximation (p.453)…”Apprenticeship embeds the learning of skills and knowledge in their social and functional context” (p.454).

Problem with schools in terms of acquiring expert practice:

• Few resources are devoted to higher-order problem solving activities that require students to actively integrate and appropriately apply subskills and conceptual knowledge
• Conceptual and problem-solving knowledge acquired in school remains largely unintegrated or inert

“…Cognitive and meta cognitive strategies and processes are more central than either low-level subskills or abstract conceptual and factual knowledge. They are the organizing principles of expertise, particularly in such domains as reading, writing, and mathematics. Further, because expert practice in these domains rests crucially on the integration of cognitive and metacognitive processes, it can best be taught through methods that emphasize what Lave calls successive approximation of mature practice, methods that have traditionally been employed in apprenticeship to transmit complex physical processes and skills” (p.455).

Traditional Apprenticeship:

• Apprenticeship focuses on the specific methods for carrying out tasks in a domain.
• Apprentices learn these methods through what Lave calls observation, coaching and practice (teachers: modeling, coaching, and fading).
• Because learners are embedded in a subculture in which most, if not all, members are participants in the target skills, they have continual access to models of expertise-in-use against which to refine their understanding of complex skills. Moreover, it is not uncommon for apprentices to have access to several masters and thus to a variety of models of expertise.
• Observing others with varying degrees of skill encourages apprentices to view learning as an incrementally staged process.
• Observation also aids learners in developing a conceptual model of the target task or process prior to attempting to execute it [Molecules and Minds]. This provides learners with:

1. An advanced organizer for learners’ initial attempts to execute a complex skill
2. An interpretive structure for making sense of the feedback, hints, and corrections
3. An internalized guide for the period of independent practice
4. A way to reflect and continuously update their internal understanding; conceptual models encourage autonomy. (Reflection- the ability of learners to compare their own performance, at both micro and macro levels, to the performance of an expert.)

Cognitive Apprenticeship:

• Aimed primarily at teaching the processes that experts use to handle complex tasks.
• Conceptual and factual knowledge are exemplified and situated in the contexts of their use (used to solve problems or carry out tasks).
• Focus of the learning-through-guided experiences is on cognitive and metacognitive (rather than physical) skills and processes.
• Requires the externalization of processes that are usually carried out internally.
• CA teaching methods are designed to bring the tacit processes that comprise expert cognitive and metacognitive functioning into the open, so that students can observe, enact, and practice them.
• Requires extended techniques to encourage development of self-correction and monitoring skills. This is done by:
  • Encouraging reflection on differences between novice and expert performance by alternation between expert and novice efforts and via abstracted replay.
  • Developing and externalizing a producer-critic dialogue that studens can gradually internalize (accomplished through discussion, alternation of teacher-learner roles and group problem solving).
• Emphasis on decontextualizing knowledge (by contrast, traditional apprenticeship emphasizes teaching skills in the context of their use).
• Extends situated learning to diverse settings so that students learn how to apply their skills in varied contexts.

“Active listeners or readers, who test their understanding and pursue the issues that are raised in their minds, learn things that apprenticeship can never teach. To the degree that readers or listeners are passive, however, they will not learn as much as they would by apprenticeship, because apprenticeship forces them to use their knowledge. Moreover, few people learn to be active readers and listeners on their own, and that is where cognitive apprenticeship is critical–observing the processes by which an expert listener or reader thinks and practicing these skills under the guidance of the expert can teach students to learn on their own more skillfully” (p.459). [Brown and Adler's "Minds on Fire": "The building blocks provided by the OER movement, along with e-Science and e-Humanities and the resources of the Web 2.0, are creating the conditions for the emergence of new kinds of open participatory learning ecosystems that will support active, passion-based learning: Learning 2.0."]

Three models for cognitive apprenticship:

• Palincsar and Brown’s Reciprocal Teaching of Reading
• Scardamalia and Bereiter’s Procedural Facilitation of Writing
• Schoenfeld’s Method for Teaching Mathematical Problem Solving

“Textbook solutions and classroom demonstrations generally illustrate only the successful solution path, not the search space that contains all the dead-end attempts. Such solutions reveal neither the exploration in searching for a good method nor the necessary evaluation of the exploration. Seeing how experts deal with problems that are difficult for them is critical to students’ developing a belief in their own capabilities. Even experts stumble, flounder , and abandon their search for a solution until another time. Witnessing these struggles helps students realize that thrashing is neither unique to them nor a sign of incompetence” (p.473).

“Successful problem solving requires that one assume at least three different, though interrelated, roles at different points in the problem-solving process: that of moderator or executive, that of generator of alternative paths, and that of critic of alternatives. Small-group problem solving differentiates and externalizes these roles: Different people naturally take on different roles, and problem solving proceeds along these lines. Thus, group discussion and decision making models the interplay among processes that an individual must internalize to be a successful problem solver” (p.474).

Abstracted replay – process recapitulation designed to focus students’ attention on the critical decisions or actions. The alternation between expert and student postmortem analyses enables the class to compare student problem-solving processes and strategies with those of the expert; such comparisons provide the basis for diagnosing student difficulties and for making incremental adjustments in student performance. Moreover, generating abstracted replays involves focusing on the strategies as well as the tactical levels of problem solving: This aids students in developing a hierarchical model of the problem-solving process as the basis for self-monitoring and correction, and in seeing how to organize local (tactical) processes to accomplish high-level (strategic) goals.

Framework for designing learning environments:

Content:

• Domain – conceptual and factual knowledge and procedures explicitly identified within a particular subject matter.
• Heuristic strategies – generally effective techniques and approaches for accomplishing tasks; “tricks of the trade.”
• Control strategies – control the process of carrying out a task. Require reflection on the problem-solving process to determine how to proceed; operate on many different levels; have monitoring, diagnostic, and remedial components.
• Learning strategies – strategies for learning the other types of knowledge.

Methods:

“A major direction in current cognitive research is to attempt to formulate explicitly the strategies and skills underlying expert practice, to make them a legitimate focus of teaching in schools and other learning environments” (p.480).

• Modeling – involves an expert’s carrying out a task so that students can observe and build a conceptual model of the processes that are required to accomplish the task. In cognitive domains, this requires the externalization of the heuristics and control processes by which experts make use of basic conceptual and procedur al knowledge.
• Coaching – involves observing students and offering hints, scaffolding, feedback, modeling, reminders, and new tasks.
• Scaffolding – supports (suggestions or help, cue cards, etc.) the teacher provides to help the student carry out a task. Fading – gradual removal of supports.
• Articulation – includes any method of getting students to articulate their knowledge, reasoning, or problem-solving processes in a domain.
• Reflection – enables students to compare their own problem-solving processes with those of an expert, another student, and ultimately, an internal cognitive model of expertise.
• Exploration – pushing students into a mode of problem solving on their own. Natural culmination of the fading of supports (in problem solving and problem setting).

Sequencing

• Increasing complexity
• Increasing diversity – wider and wider variety of strategies or skills are required. As students learn to apply skills to more diverse problems and problem situations, their strategies acquire a richer net of contextual associations.
• Global before local skills – allow students to build a conceptual map before attending to the details.

Sociology

The ready availability of models of expertise-in-use, the presence of clear expectations and learning goals, and the integration of skill improvement and social reward help motivate and ground learning. Presence of other learners provides apprentices with calibrations on their own progress, helping them identify their strengths and weaknesses and thus to focus their efforts for improvement. Availability of multiple masters may help learners realize that even experts have different styles and ways of doing things and different special aptitudes. Helps develop in the learner the belief that learning involves using multiple resources in the social context to obtain scaffolding and feedback. Structuring the social context to encourage the development of these productive beliefs sets the stage for the development of cooperative learning styles (Levin, 1982) and of collaborative skill generally.

• Situated learning – helps with development of “problem finding” (Getzels & Csikszentmihalyi, 1976) and of pursuing “emergent goals” (Scardamalia & Bereiter, 1985).
• Culture of expert practice – experts must be able to identify and represent to students the cognitive processes they engage in as they solve problems. Drawing students into a culture of expert practice in cognitive domains involves teaching them how to “think like experts.” Include focused interactions among learners and experts for the purpose of solving problems and carrying out tasks.
• Intrinsic motivation - important to create learning environments in which students perform tasks because they are intrinsically related to an interesting or at least coherent goal, not for a good grade or praise (extrinsic).
• Exploiting cooperation - powerful motivator and mechanism for extending learning resources. Cooperative learning and problem solving provides students with an additional source of scaffolding, via knowledge and processes distributed throughout the group.
• Exploiting competition – perhaps best to organize group competitions.

Appropriately designed computer-based modeling, coaching, and fading systems can make the apprenticeship model of learning cost effective and widely available. Such computer systems need to only augment the master teacher in a way that amplifies and makes her efforts more cost effective. Designing these learning environments may help us better understand the processes and knowledge that students require for expertise and that teacher require to effectively diagnose student difficulties, give useful hints, sequence learning activities, etc.

Brown, J.S., Collins, A. and Duguid, P. (1989). Situated Cognition and the Culture of Learning. Educational Researcher. v18 n1, pp. 32-42.

Knowledge is situated, a product of the activity, context, and culture of the community in which it is being used. Conventional schooling often ignores this view of knowledge, as well as the influence that “school culture” has on what students learn. The authors also discuss cognitive apprenticeship as an improved model for learning.

Brown, Collins, and Duguid use vocabulary teaching to illustrate how situations structure cognition. All words are at least partly indexical, and so it is essential that learners have access to the “extralinguistic props that would structure, constrain, and ultimately allow interpretation in normal communication…Because it is dependent on situations and negotiations, the meaning of a word cannot, in principle, be captured by a definition, even when the definition is supported by a couple of exemplary sentences.”

“All knowledge is, we believe, like language. Its constituent parts index the world and so are inextricably a product of the activity and situations in which they are produced. A concept, for example, will continually evolve with each new occasion of use, because new situations, negotiations, and activities inevitably recast it in a new, more densely textured form. So a concept, like the meaning of a word, is always under construction.”

To explore this further, the authors recommend considering conceptual knowledge as similar to a set of tools: “They can only be fully understood through use, and using them entails both changing the user’s view of the world and adopting the belief system of the culture in which they are used.”

“It is quite possible to acquire a tool but to be unable to use it. Similarly, it is common for students to acquire algorithms, routines, and decontextualized definitions that they cannot use and that, therefore, lie inert…People who use tools actively rather than just acquire them, by contrast, build an increasingly rich implicit understanding of the world in which they use the tools and of the tools themselves. The understanding, both of the world and of the tool, continually changes as a result of their interaction. Learning and acting are interestingly indistinct, learning being a continuous, life-long process resulting from acting in situations.”

“Conceptual tools similarly reflect the cumulative wisdom of the culture in which they are used and the insights and experience of individuals. Their meaning is not invariant but a product of negotiation within the community. Again, appropriate use is not simply a function of the abstract concept alone. It is a function of the culture and the activities in which the concept has been developed. Just as carpenters and cabinet makers use chisels differently, so physicists and engineers use mathematical formulae differently. Activity, concept, and culture are interdependent. No one can be totally understood without the other two. Learning must involve all three.”

However, “teaching methods often try to impart abstracted concepts as fixed, well-defined, independent entities that can be explored in prototypical examples and textbook exercises. But such exemplification cannot provide the important insights into either the culture or the authentic activities of members of that culture that learners need.”

The authors feel that academic disciplines, professions, and manual trades are really communities of practitioners, who are “connected by more than their ostensible tasks. They are bound by intricate, socially constructed webs of belief [great phrase!], which are essential to understanding what they do (Geertz, 1983). The activities of many communities are unfathomable, unless they are viewed from within the culture. The culture and the use of a tool act together to determine the way practitioners see the world; and the way the world appears to them determines the culture’s understanding of the world and of the tools. Unfortunately, students are too often asked to use the tools of a discipline without being able to adopt its culture. To learn to use tools as practitioners use them, a student, like an apprentice, must enter that community and its culture. Thus, in a significant way, learning is, we believe, a process of enculturation.”

Enculturating is “what people do in learning to speak, read, and write, or becoming school children, office workers, researchers, and so on. From a very early age and throughout their lives, people, consciously or unconsciously, adopt the behavior and belief systems of new social groups…The ease and success with which people do this (as opposed to the intricacy of describing what it entails) belie the immense importance of the process and obscures the fact that what they pick up is a product of the ambient culture rather than of explicit teaching.”

“Although students are shown the tools of many academic cultures in the course of a school career, the pervasive cultures that they observe, in which they participate, and which some enter quite effectively are the cultures of school life itself. These cultures can be unintentionally antithetical to useful domain learning. The ways schools use dictionaries, or math formulae, or historical analysis are very different from the ways practitioners use them. Thus, students may pass exams (a distinctive part of school cultures) but still not be able to use a domain’s conceptual tools in authentic practice.“

“[Students] need to be exposed to the use of a domain’s conceptual tools in authentic activity — to teachers acting as practitioners and using these tools in wrestling with problems of the world. Such activity can tease out the way a mathematician or historian looks at the world and solves emergent problems.”

Authentic activities are defined as the ordinary (expert and non-expert) practices of the culture. “Archetypal school activity is very different from…authentic activity, because it is very different from what authentic practitioners do. When authentic activities are transferred to the classroom, their context is inevitably transmuted; they become classroom tasks and part of the school culture.”

“In the creation of classroom tasks, apparently peripheral features of authentic tasks — like the extralinguistic supports involved in the interpretation of communication — are often dismissed as “noise” from which salient features can be abstracted for the purpose of teaching. But the context of activity is an extraordinarily complex network from which practitioners draw essential support. The source of such support is often only tacitly recognized by practitioners, or even by teachers or designers of simulations. Classroom tasks, therefore, can completely fail to provide the contextual features that allow authentic activity. At the same time, students may come to rely, in important but little noticed ways, on features of the classroom context, in which the task is now embedded, that are wholly absent from and alien to authentic activity. Thus, much of what is learned in school may apply only to the ersatz activity, if it was learned through such activity.”

The authors next discuss the activities of students, practitioners, and just plain folks (JPF). When JPFs aspire to learn a particular set of practices, they can (1) enculturate through apprenticeship; or (2) enter a school as a student. The second option, however, will require a qualitative change in behavior. “The general strategies for intuitive reasoning, resolving issues, and negotiating meaning that people develop through everyday activity are superseded by the precise, well-defined problems, formal definitions, and symbol manipulation of much school activity.”

JPF, Practicioner, and Student Activity

(*note the dissimilarity btw JPFs/practitioners and students)

The importance of situations/environment:

“Hutchins’ (in press) study of intricate collaborative naval navigation records the way people distribute the burden across the environment and the group as well. The resulting cognitive activity can then only be explained in relation to its context. ”[W]hen the context of cognition is ignored,” Hutchins observes, “it is impossible to see the contribution of structure in the environment, in artifacts, and in other people to the organization of mental processes.”

“Authentic activity…is important for learners, because it is the only way they gain access to the standpoint that enables practitioners to act meaningfully and purposefully…The perceptions resulting from actions are a central feature in both learning and activity. How a person perceives activity may be determined by tools and their appropriated use. What they perceive, however, contributes to how they act and learn. Different activities produce different indexicalized representations not equivalent, universal ones. And, thus, the activity that led to those representations plays a central role in learning.”

“Knowledge, we suggest, similarly indexes the situation in which it arises and is used. The embedding circumstances efficiently provide essential parts of its structure and meaning. So knowledge, which comes coded by and connected to the activity and environment in which it is developed, is spread across its component parts, some of which are in the mind and some in the world much as the final picture on a jigsaw is spread across its component pieces.” [Related to Perkins' "person-plus"]

“As Hutchins (in press), Pea (1988), and others point out, the structure of cognition is widely distributed across the environment, both social and physical. And we suggest that the environment, therefore, contributes importantly to indexical representations people form in activity. These representations, in turn, contribute to future activity. Indexical representations developed through engagement in a task may greatly increase the efficiency with which subsequent tasks can be done, if part of the environment that structures the representations remains invariant. This is evident in the ability to perform tasks that cannot be described or remembered in the absence of the situation. Recurring features of the environment may thus afford recurrent sequences of actions. Memory and subsequent actions, as knots in handkerchiefs and other aides memoires reveal, are not context-independent processes. Routines (Agre, 1985) may well be a product of this sort of indexicalization. Thus, authentic activity becomes a central component of learning.”

“One of the key points of the concept of indexicality is that it indicates that knowledge, and not just learning, is situated. A corollary of this is that learning methods that are embedded in authentic situations are not merely useful; they are essential.”

Cognitive apprenticeship:

“Cognitive apprenticeship methods try to enculturate students into authentic practices through activity and social interaction in a way similar to that evident — and evidently successful — in craft apprenticeship.”

“Cognitive apprenticeship supports learning in a domain by enabling students to acquire, develop, and use cognitive tools in authentic domain activity…the term apprenticeship helps to emphasize the centrality of activity in learning and knowledge and highlights the inherently context-dependent, situated, and enculturating nature of learning. And apprenticeship also suggests the paradigm of situated modeling, coaching, and fading, whereby teachers or coaches promote learning, first by making explicit their tacit knowledge or by modeling their strategies for students in authentic activity. Then, teachers and colleagues support students’ attempts at doing the task. And finally they empower the students to continue independently.”

Characteristics of cognitive apprenticeship within an exemplary classroom lesson:

• By beginning with a task embedded in a familiar activity, it shows the students the legitimacy of their implicit knowledge and its availability as scaffolding in apparently unfamiliar tasks.
• By pointing to different decompositions, it stresses that heuristics are not absolute, but assessed with respect to a particular task — and that even algorithms can be assessed in this way.
• By allowing students to generate their own solution paths, it helps make them conscious, creative members of the culture of problem-solving mathematicians. And, in enculturating through this activity, they acquire some of the culture’s tools — a shared vocabulary and the means to discuss, reflect upon, evaluate, and validate community procedures in a collaborative process.

“In the terms of cognitive apprenticeship, we can represent the progress of the students from embedded activity to general principles of the culture. In this sequence, apprenticeship and coaching in a domain begin by providing modeling in situ and scaffolding for students to get started in an authentic activity. As the students gain more self-confidence and control, they move into a more autonomous phase of collaborative learning, where they begin to participate consciously in the culture. The social network within the culture helps them develop its language and the belief systems and promotes the process of enculturation. Collaboration also leads to articulation of strategies, which can then be discussed and reflected on. This, in turn, fosters generalizing, grounded in the students’ situated understanding. From here, students can use their fledgling conceptual knowledge in activity, seeing that activity in a new light, which in turn leads to the further development of the conceptual knowledge.”

For example, “advanced graduate students in the humanities, the social sciences, and the physical sciences acquire their extremely refined research skills through the apprenticeships they serve with senior researchers. It is then that they, like all apprentices, must recognize and resolve the ill-defined problems that issue out of authentic activity, in contrast to the well-defined exercises that are typically given to them in text books and on exams throughout their earlier schooling. It is at this stage, in short, that students no longer behave as students, but as practitioners, and develop their conceptual understanding through social interaction and collaboration in the culture of the domain, not of the school.”

Social interaction:

Within a culture, ideas are exchanged and modified and belief systems developed and appropriated through conversation and narratives, so these must be promoted, not inhibited. Though they are often anathema to traditional schooling, they are an essential component of social interaction and, thus, of learning. They provide access to much of the distributed knowledge and elaborate support of the social matrix (Orr, 1987). So learning environments must allow narratives to circulate and “war stories” to be added to the collective wisdom of the community.

A great description of the process: “In language learning, for instance, the original frail understanding of a word is developed and extended through subsequent use and social negotiation, though each use is obviously situated. Miller and Gildea (1978) describe two stages of this process. The first, in which people learn the word and assign it a semantic category (e.g., the word olive is first assigned to the general category of color words), is quickly done. The second, in which distinctions within this semantic category (e.g., between olive and other colors) are explored as the word occurs again and again, is a far more gradual process, which “may never be completely finished” (p. 95). This second phase of word learning corresponds to the development through activity of all conceptual knowledge. The threadbare concepts that initially develop out of activity are gradually given texture as they are deployed in different situations.”

It is only within groups that social interaction and conversation — and thus learning — can take place. Salient features of group learning include:

• Collective problem solving. Groups accumulate the individual knowledge of their members and give rise synergistically to insights and solutions
• Displaying multiple roles. Successful execution of most individual tasks requires students to understand the many different roles needed for carrying out any cognitive task. Getting one person to be able to play all the roles entailed by authentic activity and to reflect productively upon his or her performance is one of the monumental tasks of education. The group, however, permits different roles to be displayed and engenders reflective narratives and discussions about the aptness of those roles.
• Confronting ineffective strategies and misconceptions. Students have many misconceptions about qualitative phenomena in physics. Teachers rarely have the opportunity to hear enough of what students think to recognize when the information that is offered back by students is only a surface retelling for school purposes that may mask deep misconceptions about the physical world and problem solving strategies. Groups however, can be efficient in drawing out, confronting and discussing both misconceptions and ineffective strategies.
• Providing collaborative work skills. Students who are taught individually rather than collaboratively can fail to develop skills needed for collaborative work.

Considerations for future research:

“One of the particularly difficult challenges for research is determining what should be made explicit in teaching and what should be left implicit. A common strategy in trying to overcome difficult pedagogic problems is to make as much as possible explicit. Thus, we have ended up with wholly inappropriate methods of teaching. Whatever the domain, explication often lifts implicit and possibly even nonconceptual constraints (Cussins, 1988) out of the embedding world and tries to make them explicit or conceptual. These now take a place in our ontology and become something more to learn about rather than simply something useful in learning. But indexical representations gain their efficiency by leaving much of the context underrepresented or implicit. Future work into situated cognition, from which educational practices will benefit, must, among other things, try to frame a convincing account of the relationship between explicit knowledge and implicit understanding.”

Also, “there remains major theoretical work to shift the traditional focus of education. For centuries, the epistemology that has guided educational practice has concentrated primarily on conceptual representation and made its relation to objects in the world problematic by assuming that, cognitively, representation is prior to all else. A theory of situated cognition suggests that activity and perception are importantly and epistemologically prior — at a nonconceptual level — to conceptualization and that it is on them that more attention needs to be focused. An epistemology that begins with activity and perception, which are first and foremost embedded in the world, may simply bypass the classical problem of reference — of mediating conceptual representations.”

Results from a new simulation suggest the model also correlates with event-related brain potentials elicited by the immediate use of visual context for linguistic disambiguation (Knoeferle, P., Habets, B., Crocker, M. W., & Münte, T. F. (2008). Visual scenes trigger immediate syntactic reanalysis: Evidence from ERPs during situated spoken comprehension. Cerebral Cortex, 18(4), 789–795). Finally, we argue that the mechanisms underlying interpretation, visual attention, and scene apprehension are not only in close temporal synchronization, but have co-adapted to optimize real-time visual grounding of situated spoken language, thus facilitating the association of linguistic, visual and motor representations that emerge during the course of our embodied linguistic experience in the world.

from Brain and Language

Empirical evidence demonstrating that sentence meaning is rapidly reconciled with the visual environment has been broadly construed as supporting the seamless interaction of visual and linguistic representations during situated comprehension. Based on recent behavioral and neuroscientific findings, however, we argue for the more deeply rooted coordination of the mechanisms underlying visual and linguistic processing, and for jointly considering the behavioral and neural correlates of scene–sentence reconciliation during situated comprehension. The Coordinated Interplay Account (CIA; Knoeferle, P., & Crocker, M. W. (2007). The influence of recent scene events on spoken comprehension: Evidence from eye movements. Journal of Memory and Language, 57(4), 519–543) asserts that incremental linguistic interpretation actively directs attention in the visual environment, thereby increasing the salience of attended scene information for comprehension. We review behavioral and neuroscientific findings in support of the CIA’s three processing stages: (i) incremental sentence interpretation, (ii) language-mediated visual attention, and (iii) the on-line influence of non-linguistic visual context. We then describe a recently developed connectionist model which both embodies the central CIA proposals and has been successfully applied in modeling a range of behavioral findings from the visual world paradigm (Mayberry, M. R., Crocker, M. W., & Knoeferle, P. (2009). Learning to attend: A connectionist model of situated language comprehension. Cognitive Science). Results from a new simulation suggest the model also correlates with event-related brain potentials elicited by the immediate use of visual context for linguistic disambiguation (Knoeferle, P., Habets, B., Crocker, M. W., & Münte, T. F. (2008). Visual scenes trigger immediate syntactic reanalysis: Evidence from ERPs during situated spoken comprehension. Cerebral Cortex, 18(4), 789–795). Finally, we argue that the mechanisms underlying interpretation, visual attention, and scene apprehension are not only in close temporal synchronization, but have co-adapted to optimize real-time visual grounding of situated spoken language, thus facilitating the association of linguistic, visual and motor representations that emerge during the course of our embodied linguistic experience in the world.

from Brain and Language