2009 Ninth IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies
Reference curricular structures and pedagogical flexibility in encouraging reflective practice in technology-enhanced learning Chien-Sing Lee*1, Glenn David Blank2 Computer Science and Engineering Department, Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA.
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[email protected] activities, means to allow flexibility in approaches to teaching and learning and last but not least, suitable models to assess student competencies [2]. This paper addresses three questions: 1) What type of curricular structures is needed to cater to various pedagogical approaches? 2) How can we allow flexibility in approaches to teaching and learning and yet encourage adaptation and innovation? 3) How can we enable teachers to strategize their information needs? The answers to these questions can be used as an experimental testbed from which further adaptation can take place in other learning contexts. The Lehigh Valley Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (LV STEM) project [3], funded by the National Science Foundation, is used as a case study in answering those three questions. The LV STEM [4] project has the following goals: 1) developing novel curricula and resources and disseminating these to the region and nationally; 2) reaching out to at-risk students through funds from the Pennsylvania Infrastructure Technology Alliance (PITA), school districts, and corporate sponsors; 3) extending participation of corporate partners in the provision of funds and dissemination of the novel curricula and resources to other schools in the region; 4) including parents as partners of learning with their children. The project will be extended to other schools in the Lehigh Valley, starting with the Allentown and Bethlehem Area school districts as part of Lehigh University’s Academic Outreach program. Each team consists of a professor, two teachers and a fellow. The question of curricular structures and flexibility in teaching-learning approaches arose because: 1) professors and teachers’ priorities and goals were different, resulting in different information needs;
Abstract This paper is concerned with the design of curricular structures and flexible teaching and learning approaches targeted at improving learning performance and enriching learning experiences. The Lehigh Valley Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (LV STEM) project is used as a case study. Findings indicate that reference curricular structures should be pre-instruction, during instruction and post-instruction at the first level; analysis, design, development and evaluation at the second level; instructional goals at the third level and relevance at the fourth level. Relevance is created through instantiations from this reference curricular structure, through identification of core and supplementary factors and by strategizing flexibility in navigation through derivation of best practices. Best practices in turn form the foundation for collaborative adaptations that provide tremendous potential for sharing and improving knowledge about technology-enhanced learning. Implications to the design of technologyenhanced learning are subsequently presented.
1. Introduction Technological advances have seen much research in personalizing learning contents and learning paths to cognitive-physical abilities and social environments as well as enable interoperability among learning resources [1]. However, for e-learning purposes, these technologies need to be grounded on pedagogical foundations. Furthermore, pedagogy in technologyenhanced learning should not be prescriptive, in order to encourage innovation. As expectations that technology will improve learning performance and enrich learning experiences increase, some of the issues raised are the type of curricular structures needed, means to transfer from new curriculum topics to programmatic learning 1
While the first author was a Fulbright scholar at LU
978-0-7695-3711-5/09 $25.00 © 2009 IEEE DOI 10.1109/ICALT.2009.114
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leading to errors, differences in doing things and inconsistencies with the higher level of structure or schema; and in order to facilitate communication with the user.
2) teachers in schools have different practices and different states have different standards The methodology of investigation is teacher-driven, as only teachers know what is useful and relevant to them in terms of curriculum. A pilot study was first carried out. Interview surveys were carried out with five Technology and Science teachers at Harrison Morton Middle School teaching and two Mathematics teachers at Broughal Middle School, in order to understand their information needs. Interview questions covered what their priorities and goals were, whether the teachers were willing to share knowledge, whether they found evaluation of learning materials useful and their perception towards the usefulness of the designed interfaces simulating the current workflow. All scores were scaled from 1 (very negative) to 5 (very positive). The results were then presented to the LV STEM professors for feedback. One professor was from the Mathematics department, one from the College of Education and one (who evaluated the LV STEM project) from the Center for Social Research. Three associate professors from the College of Education were also interviewed. The objectives of these survey interviews were: 1) to determine how to balance rigor and relevance in instructional planning so as to derive a possible reference model; 2) to determine common criteria for derivation of best teaching and learning practices and performance evaluation in the evaluation phase. The results of the pilot study were then presented to all LV STEM project members for feedback during one of its face-to-face monitoring workshops.
2.2 Reflective practice Initiated by [6], reflective practice is fundamental to any pre-service or in-service teachers as it enables teachers to reflect, refine and improve on how they are applying knowledge learnt, to actual teaching and learning situations in the classroom and why they are teaching the way they do, i.e. whether there are any conceptual beliefs that need to be modified. There are however, concerns that reflection processes are detached from theoretical frameworks and because it is part of the pre- and in-service evaluation, may not encourage teachers to question teaching practices. To address this concern, [7] suggests that teacher mentors should create a collaborative environment of trust and develop a context that would provide suggestions from peers how to improve teaching practices.
2.3 Context reference modeling Realizing that there are too many context models giving rise to doubts as to which context model is most suitable for a particular situation, [8] have synergized the most popular context models to form a context reference model. The internal profile consists of learner model based on specifications from the IMS learner information package, interaction model, learning object standards, service profile, instructor model and content representation model (IMS content package). The external profile on the other hand is related to the physical, temporal, hardware and software environments; activity, learning path and experience profiles. As for instructional design, [8] map Merrill’s First Principles of Instruction with Gagne’s Nine Events of Instruction, Learning activity reference model and Kolb’s experiential learning in order to derive an instructional design reference model.
2. Related work 2.1 Task analyses Task analyses look at what a user needs to do in terms of actions and/or cognitive processes in order to achieve a task. Understanding what users need translates to more accurate system design and more effective human-computer interaction. Steps in cognitive task analysis are [5]: 1) elicit task and identify task decomposition by interviewing or observing and taking notes; 2) represent the decomposed tasks through diagramming to identify the range of activities and how users interact with the system; 3) ask users to review the representation; 4) input to design. Task flow diagrams are drawn in order to identify areas for improvement such as misunderstood flows
2.4 Other related e-learning systems Wikis and blogs are popular Web 2.0 technologies for the capture and collaborative editing of knowledge but they address only the social dimension. Learning management systems (LMSs) enable the capture of knowledge and administrative data. Learning content management systems (LCMSs) integrate authoring functions with the management of course administration. Both however, do not incorporate
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other teachers in other schools/districts/region/nation (average rating of usefulness: 5/5). Similarly, they looked forward to sharing knowledge with other teachers if doing so could enable them to adapt from others’ ideas and help their students perform better and meet state standards (average rating of usefulness: 5/5). Hence, factors that needed to be considered should be reduced only to what was relevant to them. In contrast, professors were very concerned with schemas. As such, it was noted that the solution to the search for a common ground actually pointed back to balancing rigor in instructional planning and assessment, and what was relevant to the teachers. Besides relevance, teachers wanted flexibility to decide what was best for their class based on their experiences in the classroom. The following were comments derived from interviews with professors: 1) In terms of setting of goals, all professors were agreeable with the inclusion of standards, as these were what teachers needed to achieve. 2) In terms of instructional planning, professors agreed with the alignment of students’ prior knowledge and future target knowledge (specified in terms of standards) with the objective (specified in terms of standards). Professors were also concerned that there should be indications of how differentiation in terms of cognitive, social and/or physical abilities would be addressed so that education is truly for all. 3) Two professors from the College of Education suggested checkboxes and hierarchical menus in order to provide options and ease of use. From these findings, we regarded schema as relevant at the first level with pre-instruction, during instruction and post-instruction stages and at the second level, analysis, design and development (preinstruction) and evaluation (post-instruction). At the third level, goals and standards. From the interviews, it became clearer that the most important schema in encouraging reflective practice that stretches across instructional planning phases and required highlighting was the alignment of standards and goals with learning activities and assessments. The resulting workflow and interface screenshots for the proposed e-learning system are shown below in Figures 1 to 3 (figures are in MS Powerpoint to facilitate communication with the users). The proposed workflow assumes that the database consists of many resources and data. Each structure/figure is a design pattern, which can be instantiated for different needs.
evaluation of the courses or the resources by students or peers, essential to derivation of best practices, which knowledge management systems allow. MERLOT [9], a Web-based repository with knowledge sharing, contains peer evaluation and peer reward but does not include national and state standards.
3. LV STEM’s current workflow A workshop was conducted in the summer before new fellows and teachers joined the team [3]. The workshop started with team building among the professors, teachers and fellows, followed by familiarization with various instructional planning models, lesson plan formats, and several forms of evaluation rubrics that teachers could use in their classrooms. The instructional planning workshop provided information on how to teach more effectively such as five key behaviors for effective teaching - lesson clarity, instructional variety, task orientation, and engagement. Learning materials were categorized based on the various disciplines i.e., Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. These materials are easily accessible at the LV STEM website [3] as HTML links. However, the website did not have search, knowledge sharing and peer evaluation functions.
4. Findings and discussion 4.1 Reference curricular structures From the interviews, all LV STEM teachers indicated that their priority was primarily to meet national and state standards, as all schools would be evaluated based on their achievement with regards to these standards. As such, they would prefer a simplistic user interface, workflow and system, which simulated their current LV STEM workflow so that they would not have a steep learning curve and so that they could focus on teaching. They would also like to have access to a Web-based repository of learning materials in order to add, download and edit learning materials developed by
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The assessment criteria were derived from the teachers’ concerns: a) How well have the objectives been achieved? b) How sound are the procedures in the lesson plan? c) How engaged were the students? d) How well does the assessment correspond to objectives? e) How well would teachers recommend the lesson plan to their friends? Some professors however, would like assessment to be more holistic. To address both concerns, core and supplementary (optional) assessment criteria were suggested in the post-instruction phase. To further enhance the value of assessment, it was proposed that these criteria be rated on a scale of 1 to 5 with 1 being very negative and 5 very positive in order to derive best practices. A comments box (also optional) was also included to encourage teachers to comment or add relevant links to websites such as rubric websites or sites that could provide more accurate, or more unbiased and more current information (Figure 4). Clicking on the next button would display these supplementary (optional) assessment criteria (Figures 5 and 6).
Pre-instruction (schema): Analysis - goal setting
Figure 1. Aligning objectives with national and state standards Pre-instruction (schema): Analysis - learners’ needs
Figure 2. Aligning learner needs with standards (search for prior lesson plans)
Post-instruction (schema): Aligning assessment with activities and goals (core assessment criteria)
Other schematic designs are shown in Figures 4-6 where checkboxes allowed variations and other allowed additions.
4.2 Flexibility in teaching-learning approaches First, enabling teachers to download lesson plans recommended highly by peers was projected to facilitate reflective practice. Teachers could learn from these good practices and reflect on areas for improvement if the self and/or peer review score in Figure 3 was below 3. Ranked assessment was projected as the means to enable teachers to strategize their search for and adaptation from relevant teachinglearning approaches.
Figure 4. Deriving best practices Post-instruction (schema): Aligning assessment with activities and goals (supplementary optional assessment criteria)
Pre-instruction (schema): Aligning search results with objectives and enabling reflection and learning from others’ good practices
Figure 3. Search for prior lesson plans rated by self and peers
Figure 5. Content assessment
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can subsequently be derived if there is sufficient data to derive from. Second, teachers can use the commonalities and the ratings for activities to navigate, determine what is best suited for their students and adapt from there.
6. Acknowledgement The Fulbright Commission funded this research. NSF grant number 639664 and PITA grants have sponsored LV STEM. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation or PITA. The authors also express thanks to LU professors: Alec, Tom, MJ, Lynn and Susan; the teachers: Kurt, Dave, Jennifer, Jessica, Ms. Kristin and Linda; and NSF fellows: Isaac and Mike.
Figure 6. Classroom delivery assessment
4.4 Feedback from LV STEM project members Feedback from all the project members indicated they were agreeable with the overall concept. They appreciated most the proposed availability of resources or links to resources at the website. A review committee was set up to consider how to customize the proposal to the various schools that they represented.
7. References 5. Implications to technology-enhanced learning
[1] R. Hartley, Kinshuk and K. Koper, “Preparing coming generations of educational technologists: Technology, pedagogy and curricula - changes and challenges”, International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies, July 18-20, Niigata, Japan, 2007, pp. 890-892. [2] D. Sampson, C. Karagiannidis and Kinshuk, “Personalized learning: Educational, technology and standardization perspective”, Interactive Educational Multimedia, 4, 2002, pp. 24-39. [3] LVSTEM http://www.lehigh.edu/stem [4] D. B. Glenn, “2008 LV STEM Annual report”, http://lvstem.cse.lehigh.edu/documents/AnnualReportDec2008.pdf [5] B. Crystal, and B. Ellington, “Task analysis and humancomputer interaction: approaches, techniques, and levels of analysis”, Americas Conference on Information Systems, New York, August 5-8, 2004, pp. 15-55. [6] D. A. Schon, Educating the reflective practitioner: Toward a new design for teaching and learning in the professions, Jossey-Bass, Inc., San Francisco, 1996. [7] L. Syrjala, “The teacher as a researcher”, In Childhood Education: International Perspectives. Ed. Eeva Hujala. Finland: Association for Childhood Education International, Oulu University, ED 403 069, 1996. [8] S. B. Y. Lau and C. S. Lee, “Methodology and system design for implementing context-adaptive service-oriented web-based learning”, International Journal on Mobile Learning and Organization, 2009 (in press). [9] Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Teaching Online. http://www.merlot.org/merlot/index.htm [10] D. A. Kolb, “Experiential Learning: Experience as the Source of Learning and Development”, Prentice-Hall Inc., New Jersey, 1984.
Three implications are derived. First, curricular structures that are pedagogically schematic can be used to function as reference models. These reference models can be instantiated to meet the needs of different teachers, schools and states once teachers agree what is relevant to them. Second, pedagogical schema needs to be relegated higher priority than variations in implementations. Third, it is crucial to assess the problems and solutions shared by teachers to design big picture questions aimed at helping learners to make meaning out of what they are learning and to help them evaluate, reflect and self-regulate their own learning. Benefits from this study are first pedagogical context derived from the four layers of pedagogical schema form the context attributes that recommender systems can use to recommend suitable pedagogies. For example, if the pattern of user interaction shows that the learning style is that of a converger [10], then learning objects that provide multiple opportunities to experiment hypotheses will be recommended. On the other hand, for a diverger, learning objects dealing with case studies and role-plays will be recommended. A sample expert system rule is “If the learner is a diverger, then display case study on water management in (their area)”. Hence, different pedagogies can be generated for different contexts. Heuristics for the design and development of context-aware applications
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