Mark's thoughts on Seel 2002

WITH ANY OF THESE PAPERS THAT REFER BACK TO PIAGET AND OTHER "CLASSICAL PSYCHOLOGY" RESEARCHERS: Our reading from last week's GAME-THEORY FOLKS (Shaffer and Prenskey) told us that STUDENTS/YOUNG LEARNERS NO LONGER THINK LIKE THIS, BECAUSE THE DIGITAL AGE HAS CHANGED THE RULES (THE WAY THEY THINK)! SO, how much of this should we believe? I suppose whatever stuff they have solid research results from, huh?! Much of it seems theoretical though, so I'm not sure we can believe much of it.

Seel does make some interesting points though, and I found myself reading slower often; partly because I'm still retraining myself to read faster, partly because the concepts were complex, and partly because I found it so interesting.

Around pages 60-64 of this paper, Seel worked to convince us of the differences in models (discussed in his and other papers). That is, Piaget's "schema" is an interpretation network that is used to classify/organize incoming data, but couldn't actually be represented; the "constructed model" is an actual representation that can be used to prescribe or predict input from the world (an externalization of the internal world, or an internalization of an external system). p66 goes on to state there is a third system....external systems that are experienced in nature or artifacts of systems created by other humans!! The differences seem so subtle as to not matter (especially b/w second and third), and even by the end of this paper I wasn't quite sure I understood.

page 70 described a dichotomy I could understand more easily: the difference between "instructionally guided model-centered learning" and "self-organized discovery learning for the construction of effective mental models." I also appreciated and agreed with the note that "self-guided discovery learning is very ambitious insofar as the learners must have previously achieved adequate problem-solving and metacognitive skills to guide their learning process. Therefore, for novice students it can be argued that self-organized discovery learning is closely associated with learning by trial-and-error but not by insight." So perhaps the shift should happen to insight learning through self-guided discovery learning AS THE SEMESTER progresses with upper secondary and undergraduate education. I could see this happening with more "lecture/content" and term introduction towards the first of the semester, then shifting to putting more weight on the students; this seems to naturally happen in classes as larger individual or group projects are assigned/due at the end of the semesters.

I also appreciated Seel's quotation of Stewart et al. (1992, p.318) concerning science education that "these instructional approaches should do more than instruct students with respect to the conclusions reached by scientists; it should also encourage students to develop insights about science as an intellectual activity."

However, I feel like I need more application/examples of this. Hopefully my further reading can provide some (if we don't just assume that the Game-theory folks are right, and all of this is based on "old research" that doesn't apply!).