Situated Learning in a Computer Lab?

What is Situated Learning?

Situated learning is placing your learner in an authentic environment that mimics the thought processes and actions of a real-life task.  We do our best to recreate authentic learning environments so our students can easily transfer learning from the discrete tasks taught in class to the real world.  But that is a difficult goal to accomplish because you have taken your students outside of the actual, authentic task in your attempt to recreate it in the lab or in the classroom.

Can you really recreate an authentic task?

Brown, Colllins, & Duguid (1989, p. 7) state that the classroom cannot fully recreate an authentic environment because the classroom, itself, has its own culture and environment.

“School activity too often tends to be hybrid, implicitly framed by one culture, but explicitly attributed to another.  Classroom activity very much takes place within the culture of schools, although it is attributed to the culture of readers, writers, mathematicians, historians, economists, geographers, and so forth.  Many of the activities students undertake are simply not the activities of practitioners and would not make sense or be endorsed by the cultures to which they are attributed.  This hybrid activity, furthermore, limits students’ access to the important structuring and supporting cues that arise from the context. What students do tends to be ersatz activity.”

So how can we solve this huge problem in the computer lab when teaching technology?  We spend a great deal of resources setting up computer labs with the correct hardware and software in an attempt to mimic the workplace environment for our students.  But is that enough? No.

I have taught technology classes for a lot of years in some very good computer labs, yet many students still have a hard time transferring their new skills and knowledge to the workplace.  This is the major reason for my research choice in my doctoral program:  Just how can we effectively teach technology so learners can leave with nearly automated skills and problem solving capabilities?  I believe that our technology can be used as a tool for effective teaching but we must use sound, effective teaching methods to get students to actually LEARN the skills.

Part-Whole Training

The biggest problem that I see is that we teach from technology books that have very few if any authentic-task projects.  I think we should create curricula that demonstrates the whole task, not just a bunch of parts.  Technology education should use teaching methods taken from effective teaching techniques.  One terrific technique that works well with my students is part-whole training. Part-whole training is a common method of teaching involving breaking a task into various components to simplify the information.  Each component is then taught in isolation; this is the “part” portion of the training.  Following teaching each component separately, the task is practiced in its entirety.  This is the “whole” part of the training.

For example, Mané, Adams, & Donchin (1989) found performance improvement when subjects learned a video game using part-whole training.  The comparison group learned with adaptive training where the time pressure of the whole task was continually adjusted to conform to the subject’s performance level until the subject showed proficiency.  Mané et al. found that the part-whole training group outperformed the adaptive training group.  Subjects not only did well on concepts specifically taught in isolated lessons, but they showed better knowledge transfer when dealing with novel tasks in the game.

In essence, you will present a project that will enable your students to learn by doing.  Just remember that your part-tasks should have a purpose beyond just learning a skill.  How will your students use the skills you are teaching them?  Show them while they are creating a whole project.

Problem Solving

You cannot teach a real authentic task without throwing in some problems.  Using technology is fraught with problems, just face it.  You must teach your students how to solve the inevitable problems that will arise when you are not with them.

This is another argument for using part-whole training: You can add or count on problems arising when you are teaching completion of a whole project.  This may be why so many technology educators don’t use part-whole training; it can be very taxing on the instructor.  However, this is the only method I have found that my students can transfer their learning to the workplace.

Steps to Improving the Authentic Task

1. Keep your computer lab’s software and hardware fairly up-to-date
2. Know your subject very well so you can deal with the problems you are throwing into your lesson plan.
3. Create a final project your students will create with the part-skills you are teaching
4. Teach your students how to solve problems with the software or coding that you are teaching.  Otherwise, why are your students really there if they can only do the exact skills you have taught in class?

References

Brown, J. S., Collins, A., & Duiguid, P. (1989). Situated cognition and the culture of learning. Educational Researcher, 18(1), 32-42.

Mané, A. M., Adams, J. A., & Donchin, E. (1989). Adaptive and part-whole training in the acquisition of a complex perceptual-motor skill. Acta Psychologica, 71, 179-196.