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Area of expertise Discourse Processing What are the findings or theories from your area of expertise that we could apply to higher education? One of the big problems in education is the over-reliance on shallow knowledge. Students are often given key concepts and definitions of these concepts, but are not given a deeper level of understanding about these concepts or the ability to reason and problem solve. The knowledge students have is inert rather than active. The key question becomes what strategies can be applied that allow students to get to the higher level areas of thinking? What are the (most important) unsolved problems? What should be included in an agenda for research? There are several theories from cognitive psychology and discourse processing that provide very salient solutions to problems of learning and of facilitating higher reasoning abilities. One of the big challenges is to get these theories to the education, government, and industry audiences. Another big problem is “edutainment,” educational forms of media that focus more on the entertainment facet rather than on pedagogy. We need to be able to mix the sizzle of “edutainment” with pedagogical understanding. Not enough research has been done on how people process animation or multimedia sources of information. The issue involves not only how this information is initially processed, but additionally, how people are able to use this information later on. There is a need for more longitudinal research with these new modes of presentation. What prototypes can you point us toward where principles from the science of learning are already applied? These are 3 examples of multimedia-based technologies. 1) John Bransford and his interactive video series, i.e. Jasper and Beyond Jasper. Note: Little Planet is another more recent one, but check out his Vanderbilt site. These are videotapes of groups of people talking about how to solve a problem and managing the dialogue so that people are using it to solve problems. 2) Intelligent Tutoring Systems- University of Pittsburgh. Ande’s and Atlas tutor (Hurt VanLehn) teach adults physics using conversational dialogues. Automated computer conversations aid students in their problem solving abilities. Also Alan Lesgold’s SHERLOCK system trains military personnel on equipment repair and maintenance. At Carnegie Melon, the PACT tutor by John Anderson and Kenneth Koedinger teach students algebra and geometry. His recent system has a natural language and conversational dialogue facility. 3) Conversational agents- students have conversations with a computer; pedagogical agents talk to the learner. This will be helpful with lower literacy students; conversational presence will be helpful. James Lester’s system “Steve” has a virtual reality environment in which adults learn about operating mechanical and electronic equipment by interacting in VR. It is very conversational and gives hints. Also Art Graesser’s AutoTutor hold a conversation with a student in natural language as they learn about computer literacy; it has a talking head. What are the major problems with or barriers to redesigning higher education? The teacher workforce has not had access to multimedia and pedagogical strategies. Funding for teacher education on new types of teaching technologies is underwhelming. An estimate from the Wall Street Journal of what it would cost to update education with needed technologies is somewhere around $250 billion, with about half of that amount going towards educating teachers. State universities, in particular, are under-funded and do not have the most recent technologies. There needs to be a partnership between universities and corporate business to help bring this technology to the classroom. In addition, it is important that funding be provided not just for the technology, but also, for teacher training, instruction, and equipment and software maintenance. There is a schism that exists in education between those who want to use science as a model versus those who want to use a non-scientific model (building more on a cultural enterprise). In talking about what strategies work, it is a challenge to convince the non-science people to adopt the principles that science suggests. Cognitive science has real strategies that work, but there is often real resistance to using them--both in the education systems and in outside agencies. Do you have any ideas for overcoming them? There needs to be greater emphasis on longitudinal research. One of the problems with psychology is the “one hour studies.” These do not provide accurate information about learning. Often the learning strategies that we are interested in take time to evoke, and it is expensive to do research that can evaluate these long-term strategies. There is a real need to find a way get more sectors integrated; an attempt to bring big business, education, and government into the research that cognitive scientists are doing. There are not enough scientists to go around to report all of the work that they are doing. What additional questions should we be asking? How do we manage interdisciplinary research teams? There are some real difficulties with interdisciplinary research; it is often very hard to get people from different areas to work together without conflict. However, it is crucial that there be an interdisciplinary approach to questions of learning. What do we need to do so that one outcome of the retreat is to effect change (in ways that we want)? Bring someone in from Office of Educational Research and also pivotal people in Washington. It might be beneficial to encourage someone from the learning marketing area, someone that is planning on entering the “edutainment” industry in a big way to become involved (perhaps Disney or Microsoft). Cognitive scientists have some very tangible solutions to learning problems and they need to find a way to market and sell these ideas.
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