INTRODUCTORY READINGS IN INFORMAL LEARNING - ANNOTATIONS

Learning

National Research Council (2000). How people learn: Brain, mind, experience, and school. Committe on Developments in the Science of Learning. J.D. Bransford, and A.L. Brown, and R.R. Cocking, (Eds.). Commission on Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.

How People Learn is a book produced by the National Research Council (NRC) with a single focus: incorporating research findings from advances in cognitive science into the work of shaping effective learning environments and contexts. The original volume, published in 1999, was a product of a two-year study conducted by the NRC’s Commission on Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education.

Scientific research of the past thirty years has provided us with a better understanding of memory, the structure of knowledge, problem solving, reasoning, the foundations of learning, the processes that regulate learning, learners’ metacognition, and the influence of a learner’s culture and community on his or her symbolic thinking. The Commission argues that education must be based on this research if it is to help students make sense of their surroundings and prepare them for the challenges of the technology-driven, internationally competitive world.

How People Learn draws on numerous research findings and provides concrete examples to support the committee’s assertion that learning is influenced fundamentally by the context in which it takes place, an assertion that is central to the work of CILS. The book also shows how decisions made at each stage in the shaping of learning contexts would be more effective if they were based on scientific research. To improve learning opportunities for all learners, the book provides seven recommendations that are well aligned with the CILS research agenda. Particularly relevant are the following five recommendations, paraphrased from the original text:

• build local and global communities of teachers, administrators, students, parents, and others interested in learning
  
• expand opportunities for teachers’ learning
  
• build learning environments that include tools of technology
  
• provide “scaffolding” support, such as scientific visualization and model-based learning
  
• increase opportunities for learners to receive feedback, to engage in reflection on their own learning processes, and to receive guidance toward progressive revisions that improve their learning and reasoning
  

Dewey, J. (1938) Experience and education. New York: Touchstone.

John Dewey is considered by many to be the most influential education theorist and philosopher of democracy of the twentieth century, as well as the original advocate for inquiry-based education. Dewey wrote Experience and Education twenty years after writing Democracy and Education, a book that helped to spawn the progressive education movement. In Experience and Education, Dewey describes how he reformulated some of his theories over the two decades that passed between these two books.

A staple of most teacher education programs’ canon, Experience and Education is Dewey’s most concise and final statement of his theories of education. In it, he analyzes “traditional” versus “progressive” education, and addresses the criticisms his previous theories received. Directly relevant to the work of CILS is Dewey’s philosophy of education, as represented in this book. The philosophy respects all sources of a learner’s experience, and suggests creating learning environments that are social, dynamic, and learner-driven, while still being well choreographed and orderly. For example, in chapter 4 Dewey asserts that planning such learning environments involves being “flexible enough to permit free play for individuality of experience and yet firm enough to give direction towards continuous development of power.” These assertions are foundations of inquiry-based education and informal learning.

The central focus of Dewey’s philosophical interests throughout his career would traditionally be described as “epistemology” or the “theory of knowledge.” However, Dewey expressly rejected the term “epistemology,” preferring instead to use “theory of inquiry” or “experimental logic” to describe his focus.

For more information on John Dewey, see the Center for Dewey Studies:
http://www.siu.edu/~deweyctr/index.htm

Museums

Falk, J.H. and Dierking, L.D. (2000). The museum experience. Walnut Creek, CA: Alta Mira Press.

In The Museum Experience, Falk and Dierking portray the museum visit from the perspective of the visitor. This book is relevant to the work of CILS for many reasons. In it, Falk and Dierking review and synthesize several modern learning theories and research from science centers, zoos, and museums around the globe, and integrate findings from their own original research to give a thorough introduction to what is known about why people go to museums, what people do at museums, what people learn at museums, etc. It also offers recommendations and guidelines to help museum staff understand their clientele and their interactions with them.

The authors intended for the book to be provocative and to encourage discussion and debate. Falk and Dierking suggest using the term “free choice learning” as an alternative to using the phrase “informal learning,” echoing the concerns of some CILS community members who feel “informal learning” is too broad a construct. The authors provide a new model for understanding and framing the museum experience, called the Interactive Experience Model, which connects personal, sociocultural, and physical contexts together, one of the goals of CILS. Falk and Dierking discuss the associative, object-based learning that takes place in museums; provide concrete examples; and relate this kind of learning to the sometimes-formal characteristics of exhibitions themselves. They then suggest that museums need to rethink how they plan exhibits, publicize and promote museums and exhibits, and, especially, how museums orient visitors.

The extensive footnotes serve as a helpful annotated bibliography for those interested in the field of museum studies.

Hein, G.E. (1998). Learning in the museum. London: Routledge.

Recognizing museums’ potential to provide extended learning opportunities, George Hein’s Learning in the Museum serves as a practical guide, and describes how, by applying the findings of learning research and museum visitor studies, museums can facilitate a meaningful or influential educational experience.

Hein is professor emeritus at Lesley University Graduate School of Arts and Social Sciences, and for over thirty-five years has had extensive experience in museum education, science education, and curriculum development. He is familiar to many CILS community members for developing qualitative evaluation systems for museum programs, as well as mathematics and science education programs. Hein has also worked directly with several fellow CILS colleagues through his positions as Fulbright Research Fellow at King’s College London (1990) and Osher Fellow at the Exploratorium in San Francisco (1999), to name just two. He serves on the advisory boards for several science museums and is a trustee of TERC.

First, Learning in the Museum draws on the educational theories of Dewey, Vygotsky, and Piaget, and provides a theoretical basis for learning in the context of the museum. In chapter 2, Hein reviews different learning theories and their influence on designing educational artifacts and environments. The core (chapters 3 through 6) of the book’s eight chapters describes the methodology, the theories that inform, and some findings from museum visitor studies. In chapter 5, Hein encourages researchers to apply network theories, as opposed to linear theories, to describe the learning process of visitors in museums. Chapter 7 discusses potential forms of evidence of learning in the museum. In chapter 8, Hein concludes that people learn best when they actively construct knowledge in physically and intellectually accessible environments and advocates the “constructivist” museum. Hein’s personalized endnotes are an informative overview of the history and seminal work in museum education, and are included immediately before the references section and index.

Hein’s focus on the interwoven, networked, and mutually influential nature of learning environments and experiences is highly relevant to the goals and work of CILS, and makes the book an appropriate companion to Falk and Dierking’s (2000) book, also CILS suggested reading.

Classroom Science

American Association for the Advancement of Science. (2000). (Minstrell, J., van Zee, H. (eds.) Inquiring into inquiry learning and teaching in science. Washington, DC.

This paper serves as the introduction to an edited book on inquiry teaching and learning in science. It begins by commenting on how inquiry is defined and recognized, and what the main components of inquiry learning are, including student-motivated learning, reasoning from observation and experiences, and reflection. A central point of the paper is that the goals of any inquiry lesson include addressing science content and the process of inquiry itself, and that while both goals are important they can’t be focused on simultaneously. The authors argue that learning science content through inquiry allows learners to gain a deeper understanding of the science content, feel increased ownership of the material, and build their scientific skills.

The paper concludes with a vignette describing an inquiry lesson in the authors’ class on Newton’s Laws of Motion, and illustrates how both goals can be part of an inquiry lesson: certain parts of the lesson can focus on content, while other parts focus on process.

National Science Foundation. (1999) Inquiry: thoughts, views and strategies for the K-5 classroom. In Foundations series (vol. 2). Arlington, VA: NSF

This is the second volume in the National Science Foundation’s (NSF’s) monograph series entitled Foundations. Each Foundations volume presents the perspectives and lessons learned by individuals whose projects received grant support through NSF’s Division of Elementary, Secondary, and Informal Education (ESIE). The goal of the series is to disseminate improvement strategies for science, technology, and mathematics (STEM) education.

Inquiry is a collection of pieces written by core members of the CILS community, who at the time of writing were researchers, directors, advisors, designers, and program staff for the Institute for Inquiry (IFI). IFI is a professional development program for educators, including teachers, administrators, and professional developers, based at the Exploratorium in San Francisco, California.

All thirteen chapters of Inquiry are directly relevant to the work of CILS and serve as discussion pieces for others designing and implementing inquiry-based science education reform efforts. The chapters address a range of topics including the philosophy and benefits of inquiry learning, the relationship between inquiry and the National Science Education Standards (NSES), practical examples of inquiry in action, suggestions for recognizing what is inquiry and was is not, and assessment in the inquiry classroom. Chapter 5, “Lessons Learned: Addressing Common Misconceptions About Inquiry,” can be a useful tool for responding to the concerns about and opposition to inquiry learning in that it describes how carefully designed and deliberately planned inquiry experiences can help achieve learning goals. The appendix to Inquiry provides useful background information on the authors and a compilation of recommended resources for more information on inquiry, including books, videos, and Web sites.

Driver, R, Leach, J., Millar, R., & Scott, P. (1996). Young People's Images of Science. Buckingham: Open University Press.

This book describes the design and findings of “The Development of Pupils’ Understanding of the Nature of Science,” a research project that focused on K–12 students’ comprehension of the nature of science. The study’s findings suggest potential areas where the work of CILS may be able to influence the work of K–12 science educators.

The first two chapters of the book argue for giving the nature of science a more prominent place in school science curricula, and for supporting students’ understandings of the work of scientists and the nature of scientific enterprise, in general. Chapter 3 reviews the major strands of the nature of science that this study was built upon. They are: (a) students’ views about the purposes of scientific work, (b) students’ understandings of the nature and status of scientific knowledge, and (c) students’ understandings of science as a social enterprise. A review of the literature, presented in chapter 4, suggests that students have an inductive view of science, do not differentiate between science and technology, have naïve interpretations of scientific theories and their relation to evidence, and view scientists as individuals who work to produce artifacts that will be of benefit to mankind.

In chapter 5, the authors describe the methods of their study. They designed a cross-age study and gave the same task to samples of students ages 9, 12, and 16. Raw data were the products of interviews usually done with pairs of students.

Chapters 6–9 are devoted to presenting and discussing the main findings of the study, while chapter 10 discusses the implications of these findings. The findings of this study illustrate that students saw the purpose of science to be addressing questions related to physical and biological phenomena but not social phenomena. Moreover, it became evident through this study that, for the most part, students held limited and stereotypical views of scientists, and that older students held beneficent views of scientists as people who work on important problems.

The results of this study also show that students held differing views of scientific inquiry, ranging from: (1) scientific inquiry is a process of making observations about the world, to (2) scientific inquiry is about making generalizations from observations, to (3) scientific inquiry involves the testing of models or theories. According to the authors, the second view was most commonly held, while the third view was not commonly held, even among 16-year-old students.

Evidence from this study suggests that students did not view science as a social enterprise; instead, they viewed individual scientists working in isolation. The implications of these findings are associated with the ways in which science is presented in the curriculum and taught in the classroom. More specifically, the implications call for portraying science in schools in a more rounded and authentic way, and for presenting science as a human endeavor that recognizes its limitations as well as its achievements.

School Organizational Issues

Ogawa, R. T., Crowson, R. L. & Goldring, E. B. (1999). "Enduring dilemmas of school organization." In J. Murphy and K. Louis (Eds.) Handbook of research on educational administration, second edition. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

This chapter explores what the authors consider to be an intrinsic feature of schools as organizations: the existence of “enduring dilemmas,” or irresolvable dichotomies. The authors describe seven dilemmas in theoretical and empirical ways to illustrate this key property of organizations. Four of these dilemmas concern social work and relations: (1) the dilemma of goals (organization versus individual interests), (2) the dilemma of task structures (formal versus informal), (3) the dilemma of professionalism (bureaucratic versus professional controls), and (4) the dilemma of hierarchy (centralization versus decentralization). The remaining three dilemmas focus on environmental relations: (5) the dilemma of persistence (certainty versus adaptability), (6) the dilemma of boundaries (internal management versus community interactions), and (7) the dilemma of compliance (technical versus institutional).

In view of the essential and irreconcilably dual characteristic of school organizations, the authors conclude that people developing educational reform efforts should aim to understand the implications and consequences of the choices they make when faced with this duality.

Rowan, B. (2002). "The ecology of school improvement." Journal of Educational Change, 3: 283-314.

This paper approaches the difficulties of educational reform in the United States from a new theoretical perspective. Aside from school organization and government policies, it focuses on the school-improvement “industry”: a group of organizations that provides schools and governing agencies with information, training, materials, and programmatic resources relevant to instructional improvement. These organizations include: (a) for-profit firms such as textbook publishers, school-management organizations, and instructional programs providers, which operate as suppliers and contractors to schools; (b) membership-based associations, which provide information through specialized education periodicals and training to their members; and (c) nonprofit organizations, mostly funded by grants, that provide a wide variety of “products,” such as educational research, technical assistance, information, and advocacy to the K–12 education sector.

Rowan analyzes how the school-improvement industry operates from an organizational ecology perspective, where the market forces acting upon the described organizations lead to competition for different “niches” or resources. The survival strategies that the organizations present are compared to ecological K- or r-strategies, where organizations are slow in change, uniform and stable, or actively changing, diverse and unstable, respectively.

The very nature of these strategies offers an explanation of the peculiar pattern of educational change in the United States: The innovation created by r-strategists (membership associations and nonprofit organizations) fades when confronted with the stable features of instruction of K-strategists (especially the nationwide textbook publishers). Therefore, the economic forces operating on this industry lead to the inalterability of American education. Understanding this market is essential to developing new policies directed to school improvement in the United States.