10.30.06
Posted in Cognitive, Annotated References - Class readings at 4:10 pm by youngsah
Phillips, D. C., & Soltis, J. F. (1991). Problem solving, insight, and activity. AND Phillips, D. C., & Soltis, J. F. (1991). Piagetian structures and psychological constructivism.
Chapter 4 Problem Solving, Insight and Activity, focused on Gestalt theory and Köhler but brought in Dewey as well.
Chapter 5 Piagetian Structures and Psychological Constructivism focused mainly on Piaget going over his stages, cognitive structures, and criticism of Piaget.
I liked the criticism of Piaget in part because the way that I’ve read of him before has either been through textbooks, which generally support his approach, or through the books he wrote, which of course support his theories though the books themselves are rather dense in them he is very often not very clear. As far as brining Gestalt and Dewey together, I liked that too. Since I have a psychological background (with little educational experience or knowledge to speak of) it’s nice when authors bring the two disciplines together. It helps me put things in better perspective.
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Posted in Achievement, cooperative context, Collaborative Learning, motivation, Cognitive, Cooperative Learning, Annotated References - RDP readings at 1:54 pm by youngsah
Gillies, R.M. (2003). The behaviors, interactions, and perceptions of junior high school students during small-group learning. Journal of Educational Psychology, 95(1), p. 137-147.
This study examined over one hundred 8th grade students from multiple schools while participating in structured or unstructured group work in heterogeneous achievement groups over three semesters. Gillies focused on helping (both helping behavior and receiving help), task structure, and student perception. Students were less cooperative in unstructured groups than structured ones, but students showed similar learning outcomes. Students in structured group work also thought that group work was more fun and produced better quality work.
It would have been more interesting to have the structured and unstructured groups compared with competitive or control groups on these measures. But that wasn’t the author’s intent or line of inquiry. She wanted to look at whether there was a difference (looking at lots of measures) between structured and unstructured group learning experiences. She found a couple. Interestingly enough, although the interactions might be different the academic benefit was similar or the same. Students may feel differently about their group experiences but they were still educational experiences either way.
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Posted in Achievement, Meta-Analysis, Tutoring, Cooperative Learning, Annotated References - RDP readings at 11:18 am by youngsah
Rohrbeck, C.A., Ginsburg-Block, M.D., Fantuzzo, J.W., and Miller, T.R. (2003). Peer-assisted learning interventions with elementary school students: A meta-analytic review. Journal of Educational Psychology, 95(2), p. 250-257.
This study is a meta-meta-analysis that looks at the effectiveness of peer assisted learning (PAL) methods in elementary schools. The authors state that it’s important to look at PAL in this age range because this is when children are forming their ideas about school and assimilating into the school culture. They then go on to criticize the PAL literature. They point out that many pieces are atheortical, that old meta-analyses are not as good as newer ones, and that there is often little ecological validity. Articles were found using searches on PsycINFO and ERIC. Results were then categorized and analyzed. The authors addressed publication bias by calculating the number of studies with no effect to negate the effects that the authors were finding, the results were nearly 200. Their results both summarized the literature and discussed it’s results. Most studies did not report the age, gender, or ethnicity of the subjects. Math, science, and social studies were the most popular content areas (this study only looked at PAL used to teach academic subjects). Generally PAL had an effect on student achievement outcomes. It was more effective for younger students, students in urban areas, and low income families.
Interesting overview of the literature. I don’t think I’ve read a meta-analysis that talks about other meta-analyses before. Though this study does analyze non-meta studies, it does discuss them a lot. It discusses the method and limitations of meta-analyses. This is certainly a study full of citations and data analysis. I’m somewhat impressed by the size of the data. I found their end caps of theory (they only mentioned it at the beginning and the end without going into any depth) a little sparse and not as useful or intriguing as they could have been.
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10.23.06
Posted in competitive, Intergroup competition, Achievement, Meta-Analysis, motivation, Annotated References - RDP readings at 1:54 pm by youngsah
Tauer, J.M., and Harackiewicz, J.M. (2004). The effects of cooperation and competitions on intrinsic motivation and performance. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 86(6), p. 849-861.
This paper looks at four studies. Three are behavioral and the other is survey based. All studies look at how competition and cooperation affect motivation and performance. The authors favor a combination of the two approaches: intergroup competition. The authors assert that intergroup competition, found in such circumstances as sports, work, and school, is something that is under researched and relevant to understanding of cooperation and competition. One experiment focused on free throw shooting at a basketball camp. There was a competitive condition (make more baskets than another person), cooperative condition (there is a goal of how many baskets to make) and intergroup competition (make more baskets than another team). Subjects in the intergroup competition condition enjoyed the task more and made more free throws than subjects in other groups. Studies 2 and 4 were behavioral studies similar to the first one with tweaks to test the explanatory influence of other variables. Results were similar. Study 3 asked subjects what kind of circumstances they might like better.
This article covered two concepts that I’ve been meaning to find out more about. First, there’s some debate as to how to evaluate cooperative/collaborative learning. Individual grades can often make people competitive while cooperative evaluation is very complicated. Second, many of the studies I have been reading have been on student opinions and feelings about cooperative learning and this study measures that but it also measures achievement. Now basketball achievement may not be affected in the same way as scholastic achievement but I’ll have to see that from my future readings. I liked the way that the authors kept modifying the first study to try to see if there was anything else going on.
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10.22.06
Posted in Cognitive, Annotated References - Class readings at 11:52 pm by youngsah
Phillips, D. C. (1995). The good, the bad, and the ugly: The many faces of constructivism. Educational Researcher, 24(7), 5-12.
This article focuses on the diversity of perspectives in the constructivism perspective. Phillips attempts to organize the perspective of constructivism along three axes. These axes were “individual psychology versus public discipline”, “humans the creators versus nature the instructor”, and “individual cognition” vs. “social and political processes”. The author gives examples from different disciplines of different theorists/researchers and their ideas and how they fit into these categories.
A good overview. Helpful not only in untangling the constructivism perspective but also in placing persons from diverse disciplines into the constructivist framework. I don’t know that there aren’t better categories for parsing these things out but it’s a helpful start. It was odd that the author bifurcated the second axis. It seems that would be reason enough to rethink an axis when it’s different than another axis. Putting together these three axes and mapping people on a three dimensional plane would be fine and dandy if the author hadn’t split the second axis. It just doesn’t make sense to me. Though I didn’t’ know all of the people Phillips talked about I knew some and that I think was helpful enough.
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Posted in Cognitive, Annotated References - Class readings at 11:51 pm by youngsah
Bruner, J. (1960). The Process of Education. Chapters 1 and 2.
The first chapter introduced Bruner’s theory on how education should be reformed and the things we should focus on in educating students. He had four themes he wished to explore: “structure, readiness, intuition, and interest”. The second chapter focused on the idea of structure. He anchored the section with four points. These were: students must understand fundamentals to understand a subject well, details are better remembered when they are put in a preexisting structure, understanding fundamentals in a subject can lead to transfer of knowledge or skills to another subject, ideas should be taught and built on to get students from “elementary” knowledge to “advanced” knowledge. Interesting. My first official exposure to Bruner. My first impression is that these chapters generally made sense. He also acknowledged that pragmatically this approach requires a balance between new discovery-based techniques and the old techniques where students are told something and then forced to test it. Knowing what I know about the memory system (in an information processing way) focusing on structure makes absolute sense. It’s difficult if not impossible to connect ideas to anything if there isn’t an underlying structure to ground them.
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Posted in cooperative context, cooperative orientation, competitive, Annotated References - RDP readings at 6:01 pm by youngsah
Stapel, D.A. and Koomen, W. (2005) Competition, cooperation, and the effects of others on me. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 88(6), p. 1029-38.
This study talks about several studies comparing competitive and cooperative strategies. The authors focused on social comparison effects hypothesizing that cooperation would make people compare themselves more with peers and their self-view while competition would lead them to compare themselves less using their self-view to others. The authors also hypothesized that this effect may occur outside of actual competition when merely the concept of competition is activated. In study 1 they treated cooperation/competition as an individual difference variable. They measured the cooperation or competition orientation of the subjects. In study 2 they measured the cooperativeness or competitiveness of the context. Study 3, looked at whether the competitive frame of mind could be primed from words when a person the subject was competing with wasn’t present. Study 4 compared competitive v. cooperative contexts with competitive v. cooperative people. In general, they found that people did more differential thinking when either primed with a competitive context or when they had a competitive mindset. People did more integrative thinking and assimilation when they were exposed to cooperative contexts or when they had a cooperative mindset.
In general interesting. Not specifically cooperative learning but a bit outside the field. So even thinking in a competitive way or being in a competitive context (like many schools) can lead to people distancing themselves from others in their thinking processes. This certainly wouldn’t be the way to create a community of learners. It’s interesting that the subject can show this effect if he or she is merely primed for this context and that they can have a general mindset of cooperation and competition. Different methods certainly work for different people. I liked that the researchers explored these problems separately then brought them together in later studies.
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Posted in cooperative context, Healthcare, Collaborative Learning, Annotated References - RDP readings at 6:00 pm by youngsah
Panik, A., Bokovoy, J., Karoly, E., Et. Al. (2006). Research on the frontlines of healthcare: A cooperative learning approach. Nursing Research, 55(2S), pp. S3-S9.
The Panik article tried to help emergency department staff conduct research on the department by using cooperative learning. The group of investigators consisted of both researchers/scientist and clinical staff. The advantage to this was that the researcher knew how to do research and the clinical staff knew the department so together they knew what questions to ask and how to get the answers to those questions in the most scientifically valid manner possible. They surveyed patients (or people with patients) in the Emergency Department waiting room. The questionnaire was collaboratively created by researchers and staff.
This article was more about cooperative functioning than cooperative learning per se. But sometimes groups are groups. So why did they use this perspective here? The answer reminds me of an article I read way back in the day (possibly high school or early undergrad) that talked about optimum group composition, brainstorming, and creativity. That article talked about how the world has increasingly specialized knowledge and in order for new ideas and creativity to thrive in a group process you have to have people with different kinds of “bits” of information. It’s good to have them from different fields but they still need to be able to communicate with each other in some fashion but the diversity leads to new combinations of “bits” and therefore the possibility for new and better ideas than would come of any of the separate collections of “bits” of the participants. So that’s what they had happening here. They had the scientists with their research “bits” and the staff with their pragmatic context/medical “bits”. Together they designed a study and a questionnaire that could be used in a working emergency department. This is something that either group probably could have done on their own but it would likely have been more difficult.
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Posted in Collaborative Testing, Healthcare, Annotated References - RDP readings at 5:58 pm by youngsah
Mitchell, N., and Melton, S. (2003). Collaborative testing: An innovative approach to test taking. Nurse Educator, 28(2), pp. 95-7.
This is about the use of collaborative testing to decrease anxiety and increase learning among nursing students. Students take the test then have a period of time (10 minutes in this case) where they can discuss answers with a partner and change answers if they see fit. The exams are graded in such a way that any answers changed in the collaboration period are not worth as much as original answers. They tried this cooperative method because of the author’s reading of educational research, the anxiety, and poor results of nursing students on certain subjects, and the cooperative nature of being a nurse. The authors found increased performance, decreased anxiety, and increased study time when collaborative testing was employed. The authors go on to talk about cooperative testing in other disciplines.
So, healthcare learning, yes. This article takes me back to my days as a grader in a dental school. Yes, those students would have liked a collaborative test. I know I did. I actually had a collaborative math test once in high school. I had always wondered whether anyone else did that sort of thing. It does certainly take down the anxiety. There’s always the problem of student evaluation (which pops up in all cooperative learning). Interestingly enough we were just discussing this issue in TE 150. I had our class discuss whether it was more, less, or just as important to know what a student could do on his/her own (Piaget) or to know what a student could do with help (Vygotsky and ZPD). Evaluation does center on this debate
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10.09.06
Posted in Team-Assisted Individualization, Collaborative Learning, Achievement, Student Centered Learning, motivation, Cognitive, Cooperative Learning, Tutoring, Annotated References - RDP readings at 2:05 pm by youngsah
Slavin, R.E. (1996). Research for the future: Research on cooperative learning and achievement: What we know, what we need to know. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 21, 43-69.
A general overview of what this author thinks needs to be addressed in further studies in Cooperative learning. The author talks about the problem of different researchers agreeing that cooperative learning can improve learning but differing on how they explain these effects. The author also covers 4 theoretical perspectives (Motivational, Cognitive, Cognitive Elaboration, and developmental) and talks about their implications for further research. A couple minor perspectives are also discussed including Social cohesion (in motivational). The author talks about how tasks based on different perspectives are often hard to compare because they often use different methodologies (pairs, groups of 4, different kinds of tasks, etc.). The paper also covers the topics of individual and group accountability, and group goals.
Ha, ha, page 50 of this paper (and reiterated on page 58), “One of the most effective means of elaboration is explaining the material to someone else.” Then the author goes on to cite several studies. On the other hand, this paper does mention that advocates for gifted students sometimes make the complaint that cooperative learning is not as beneficial to them as it is to other students. More research needed. Other than the general good overview of the field, this article is for me hopeful because it shows that there are still a lot of problems and angles left to cooperative learning.
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