Showing papers in "Cognition and Instruction in 2002"
TL;DR: In this article, the authors suggest that productive disciplinary engagement can be fostered by designing learning environments that support problematizing subject matter, giving students authority to address such problems, holding students accountable to others and to shared disciplinary norms, and providing students with relevant resources.
Abstract: This article suggests that productive disciplinary engagement can be fostered by designing learning environments that support (a) problematizing subject matter, (b) giving students authority to address such problems, (c) holding students accountable to others and to shared disciplinary norms, and (d) providing students with relevant resources. To provide empirical support for this suggestion, we use these 4 guiding principles to explain a case of productive disciplinary engagement from a Fostering Communities of Learners classroom. We use the principles to understand 1 group of students' emergent and sustained controversy over a species' classification. The students became passionately engaged, used evidence in scholarly ways, developed several arguments, and generated questions regarding biological classification. We propose the controversy as an example of productive disciplinary engagement, and show how it was supported by: the treatment of the classification as a legitimate problem by the students and...
982 citations
TL;DR: Sourcer's Apprentice as discussed by the authors is a computer-based tutorial and practice environment for teaching students to source and corroborate while reading history texts, and it has been shown that students who used the Sourcer's apprentice in place of regular classroom activity or a textbook-centered version of the same content improved at sourcing, contextualization, and...
Abstract: Sourcing, contextualization, and corroboration are document-level literacy skills that experts routinely use when working with history documents. These are also skills that educators and curricula planners expect students to acquire. We examine high school and college students' current degree of proficiency with these skills and describe our development and evaluation of a computer-based tutoring system designed to teach these skills. We observed that high school and college students who were asked to read multiple documents did not spontaneously attend to source information. Based on analyses of expert and intermediate behavior, we developed the Sourcer's Apprentice, a computer-based tutorial and practice environment for teaching students to source and corroborate while reading history texts. In 3 evaluation studies we found that students who used the Sourcer's Apprentice in place of regular classroom activity or a textbook-centered version of the same content improved at sourcing, contextualization, and...
441 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors compared the use of mental images by the two types of visualizers in solving problems and found that high-spatial visualizers constructed more schematic images and manipulated them spatially.
Abstract: Sixty participants were administered spatial ability tests, a verbal ability test, and a visualizer-verbalizer cognitive style questionnaire. Although verbalizers tended to be a homogeneous group with an intermediate level of spatial ability, there were 2 groups of visualizers, 1 with high spatial ability (the spatial type) and another with low spatial ability (the iconic type). To compare the use of mental images by the 2 types of visualizers in solving problems, interviews with 8 high-spatial visualizers and 9 low-spatial visualizers were conducted. The students were presented with graphs of motion and were asked to visualize and interpret the motion of an object. Whereas low-spatial visualizers interpreted the graphs as pictures and mostly relied on visual (iconic) imagery, high-spatial visualizers constructed more schematic images and manipulated them spatially. In addition, we compared problem-solving strategies used by verbalizers to those of visualizers. In contrast to visualizers, verbalizers of l...
292 citations
TL;DR: This paper examined the role of teachers' content knowledge during the implementation of mathematics education reform and found that teachers negotiate among three areas of their content knowledge: their understanding of the subject matter, view of the curriculum materials, and knowledge of student learning.
Abstract: This research examines the role of teachers' content knowledge during the implementation of mathematics education reform. Current mathematics education reform efforts require teachers to learn in the act of teaching. I claim that this learning occurs as teachers negotiate among 3 areas of their content knowledge: their understanding of the subject matter, view of the curriculum materials, and knowledge of student learning. The data for this study come from observations and videotapes of 2 teachers implementing a reform-based linear-functions unit in a high school algebra class. The focus of the article is a detailed analysis of 1 lesson that illustrates the process through which these negotiations occur and the learning that takes place as a result.
246 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present fine-grained analyses of three videotaped fragments of naturally occurring interaction among medical teachers and students participating in tutorial meetings in a problem-based learning curriculum.
Abstract: Learner articulation, studied under a variety of names (e.g., self-explanation, self-directed, and generative summarization), has been shown to contribute to new learning. Whereas prior research has focused on measuring the effects of various forms of articulation on learning outcomes, this article focuses on how such articulation may be accomplished, moment to moment and turn by turn, in learning settings. It documents some of the ways in which participants use their bodies and, in particular, their hands while displaying what they know. It presents fine-grained analyses of 3 videotaped fragments of naturally occurring interaction among medical teachers and students participating in tutorial meetings in a problem-based learning curriculum. Within these 3 exhibits evidence was found of recipient design with regard to gesture production and recipient response with reference to its performance. Also found was evidence of gesture reuse as a mechanism for cohesion across turns at talk and as a display of mutu...
110 citations
TL;DR: This paper examined how varying levels of geographic expertise facilitate reasoning with maps as representations of the earth's surface and found that experts performed significantly better than novices and preservice teachers on both maps.
Abstract: Part of being able to reason geographically means having a deep understanding of maps as specific, albeit limited, representations of the surface of the earth. In this investigation, we examine how varying levels of geographic expertise facilitate reasoning with maps as representations of the earth's surface. A total of 30 participants (tenured geography professors, undergraduate geography majors, geography undergraduates currently enrolled in their first cartography class, and preservice teachers) were asked to draw a series of lines indicating the shortest actual distance between 2 locations, as they would be on the earth's surface. Participants completed these tasks among 3 pairs of locations on a map of the world and 2 pairs of locations on a map of North and South America. As expected, geography experts performed significantly better than novices and preservice teachers on both maps. More important, however, is that experts' performance can be differentiated by the reasoning in which they engaged. Ex...
95 citations
TL;DR: This article investigated the influence of a visible author (one who writes in the first person, revealing personal beliefs and self) on adolescent students engaged in a historical reading-to-write task.
Abstract: This study investigated the influence of a visible author (one who writes in the first person, revealing personal beliefs and self) on adolescent students engaged in a historical reading-to-write task. Thirty high school sophomores and juniors were divided into 2 groups: 1 that read a passage from a textbook that featured an anonymous author (one who writes in the third person, revealing little about personal beliefs or self) and another that read a similar text featuring a visible author. Both groups then wrote a 1- to 2-page essay using information from the introductory passage and 6 additional historical documents. A subgroup of 6 of these students (3 from each condition) "thought aloud" through the entire process. Data from student essays and think-aloud protocols were analyzed to determine the influence of various levels of authorial presence on the ways students read, thought, and wrote about history. Students whose task began by reading a visible author tended to hold mental conversations with text...
89 citations
TL;DR: This article explored how adolescents use their knowledge of history when interpreting current affairs during an everyday activity of political and cultural life, and found that students expressed their thoughts with the aid of background narratives that contrasted how things were at some point "back then" and how things are now.
Abstract: Academically able history students (n = 10) from 2 high schools reflecting different ideological commitments and approaches to academic excellence were asked to think aloud as they read current newspaper articles on 2 topics: school prayer and Starbucks' treatment of its Guatemalan coffee workers. The purpose was to explore how adolescents use their knowledge of history when interpreting current affairs during an everyday activity of political and cultural life. Principal findings are: (a) Students expressed their thoughts with the aid of background narratives that contrasted how things were at some point "back then" and how things are now, (b) the 2 groups used different historical events and ideas to simultaneously enunciate their background narratives and contextualize each news-story case, and (c) students with different background narratives represented the facts of the same news story differently. Conclusions address cultural resources students exploited (common frameworks of historical eras and of ...
81 citations
TL;DR: Cardiologists' recall and pathophysiological explanations contained more high-level inferences than those of neurologists and were in line with the predictions made on the basis of the theory of knowledge encapsulation.
Abstract: This article is concerned with the role of so-called encapsulated knowledge and biomedical knowledge in the process of diagnosing clinical cases within and outside the medical specialist's domain of expertise. Based on the theory of knowledge encapsulation, we predicted that subexperts (i.e., medical specialists diagnosing a clinical case outside their specialty) could not diagnose a clinical case in an encapsulated mode, and therefore they would relapse into an elaborate biomedical processing approach to understand the described signs and symptoms. Cardiologists (the experts) and Neurologists (the subexperts) were instructed to study 2 clinical case descriptions for a period of 3 min per case. After each case they were asked to provide a diagnosis, write down everything they remembered of the case, and finally to explain the signs and symptoms displayed in the case. The results show that cardiologists achieved a higher diagnostic accuracy than did neurologists. Furthermore, the cardiologists' recall and ...
64 citations
TL;DR: In this article, a classroom study of third-grade students was conducted to support and document the emergence of multiple senses of mathematical similarity, including magnification, scale, magnification, and classification.
Abstract: The goal of this classroom study of third-grade students was to support and document the emergence of multiple senses of mathematical similarity. Beginning with grounding metaphors of scale, magnification, and classification, the classroom teacher helped students redescribe their perceptions of these everyday experiences with the mathematics of similarity. Each sense of similarity was mediated by a distinct form of mathematical inscription: a ratio, an algebraic "rule," and a line in a Cartesian system. These forms of inscription were tools for externalizing and structuring children's perceptions of magnification and scale ("growing") and of classification ("same shape"). Children's interpretations of the mathematical meanings of the notational systems employed were supported by successive forms of signification, which Peirce (1898/1992) described as iconic, indexical, and symbolic. We tracked student sense making through 2 sequences of lessons, first involving 2- and then 3-dimensional forms. The shift i...
57 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors used a questionnaire to explore whether adults benefit from gesture instruction when making assessments of young children's knowledge of conservation problems, and they used a similar questionnaire, but asked adults to make assessments of older children's mathematical knowledge.
Abstract: The spontaneous hand gestures that accompany children's explanations of concepts have been used by trained experimenters to gain insight into children's knowledge. In this article, 3 experiments tested whether it is possible to teach adults who are not trained investigators to comprehend information conveyed through children's hand gestures. In Experiment 1, we used a questionnaire to explore whether adults benefit from gesture instruction when making assessments of young children's knowledge of conservation problems. In Experiment 2, we used a similar questionnaire, but asked adults to make assessments of older children's mathematical knowledge. Experiment 3 also concentrated on math assessments, but used a free-recall paradigm to test the extent of the adult's understanding of the child's knowledge. Taken together, the results of the experiments suggest that instructing adults to attend to gesture enhances their assessment of children's knowledge at multiple ages and across multiple domains.
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examine two visions of what constitutes an effective hypermedia case for teachers' professional development: 1) cases are episodes of classroom teaching and learning that are used to exemplify the big ideas of a domain.
Abstract: Despite the growing popularity of case-based hypermedia approaches for teachers' professional development, there seems to be little agreement about such fundamental issues as the nature of a case. I examine 2 visions of what constitutes an effective hypermedia case for teachers' professional development. In 1 view, cases are episodes of classroom teaching and learning that are used to exemplify the big ideas of a domain. In the second view, cases are narratives that structure the episodes to tell stories of classroom teaching and learning. This latter view highlights the history and development of learning and the causal relations between episodes. To examine the different learning afforded by these 2 views of case I developed 2 hypermedia tools to help preservice teachers understand measurement pedagogy in elementary school classrooms. One of the hypermedia tools afforded access to episodes only. The other included the same episodes but enhanced instruction with additional narrative cases. Twelve preserv...
TL;DR: This article examined adults' ability to distinguish necessary deductive and indeterminate inductive forms of argument in mathematics and found that only 30% of a sample of college students distinguished deductive or inductive arguments and experienced deductively derived conclusions as necessary and inductively derived concluding as uncertain.
Abstract: In this study, I examined adults' ability to distinguish necessary deductive and indeterminate inductive forms of argument in mathematics. Only 30% of a sample of college students distinguished deductive and inductive forms of argument and experienced deductively derived conclusions as necessary and inductively derived conclusions as uncertain. Forty percent failed to distinguish deductive and inductive forms and experienced inductively derived and deductively derived conclusions as necessary. Thirty percent distinguished deductive and inductive arguments but experienced deductively derived and inductively derived conclusions as uncertain. As observed in other reasoning domains, the introduction of personal beliefs or knowledge about the argument content appeared to affect adult reasoners' application of knowledge about forms of argument and judgments of necessity. The results suggest the following conclusions. Adults' experience of the conclusions from mathematical inductive and deductive arguments as pr...