Sue E. Berryman
Institute on Education and The Economy
Teachers College, Columbia University
New York, New York 10027
Too often, schools--not only elementary and secondary
schools, but also college classrooms, adult literacy classes, and
corporate training courses--fail to capitalize on what is known
about how people learn most effectively. To design effective
school-based learning, we need to rethink the assumptions that
underlie formal schooling.
Using cognitive science as the knowledge base for the
discussion, this Brief reviews why many school learning
situations are ineffective and introduces cognitive
apprenticeship models that suggest what effective learning
situations might look like.
Five Assumptions About Learning--All Wrong
What makes many school learning situations so ineffective
is that they are based on mistaken assumptions about learning.
1. That people predictably transfer learning from one situation
to another.
The ultimate point of education is to prepare students for
effective functioning in nonschool settings. Yet research,
extensive and spanning decades, shows that individuals do not
predictably transfer knowledge to new situations where transfer
should occur:
o From school knowledge to everyday practice.
o From everyday practice to school endeavors.
o From one discipline to another within school.
2. That learners are passive receivers of wisdom--vessels into
which knowledge is poured.
This assumption arises from a notion that the purpose of
education is to transmit society's knowledge and culture from one
generation to the next--an assumption that encourages a lecture
mode of teaching, with the teacher as controller of the learning
process.
Control over learning in the hands of the teacher undercuts
the student's development of cognitive management skills,
including goal-setting, strategic planning, monitoring,
evaluating, and revising--capabilities critical for effective
learning. Students develop no confidence in their own ability to
learn or in their own sense-making abilities, and their
opportunities to learn from experience are highly constrained.
Another consequence of passive learning is that since
students are not drawn into the learning process, they adopt a
"waiting-it-out" attitude, investing minimal attention and
involvement in the learning process. Waiting-it-out often
translates into discipline and crowd-control problems. Further,
passive learning places a premium on reproducing the "right
answers" to teachers' or test questions, but often without real
learning. Passive learning thus encourages "veneers of
accomplishment"--changes in ways of talking, but not in behavior.
3. That learning is the strengthening of bonds between stimuli
and correct responses.
Instruction based on this assumption arises out of a
behavioral theory of learning and results in a curriculum of
disconnected items, subtasks, and subskills, without an
understanding of the context in which they fit. This approach
misses the point that human beings are quintessentially
sense-making, problem-solving animals. Instruction that is
fractionated and out of context fails to mobilize this powerful
property of human beings. As Farnham-Diggory (1990) says,
"Today's school programs could hardly have been better designed
to prevent a child's natural learning system from operating."
4. That learners are blank slates on which knowledge is
inscribed.
Yet the evidence is that learners carry into every
situation ideas and constructs that they have acquired elsewhere.
If these are not fully examined in school, students tend to
revert to their old ideas when confronted with out-of-school
situations.
5. That skills and knowledge, to be transferable to new
situations, should be acquired independent of their contexts of
use.
Context, however, is critical for understanding and thus
for learning. Context, in fact, gives meaning to learning.
Brazilian street vendor children, for example, solve
context-embedded problems much more easily than ones without a
context (Carraher et al., 1985).
Since school practice is based on these mistaken
assumptions, it is not surprising that we find no predictable
transfer to new situations. Knowledge and procedures not well
learned or understood will not transfer appropriately.
Designing Effective Learning Environments
To design more effective learning environments, cognitive
scientists have been drawing on a wide array of knowledge and
experience, including: the work of 19th century and early 20th
century educators, analyses of apprenticeship learning and of the
rapid learning of young children, and cognitive research.
Early Inspirations. John Dewey, drawing on Francis Parker's
ideas, founded a laboratory school with a curriculum that
progressed from practical experiences (planting a garden) to
formal subjects (botany) to integrated studies (the place of
botany in the natural sciences).
The Child as Spectacular Learner. Analyses of the conditions for
spectacular learning by the young child offered clues for
designing effective learning environments (Pea, 1989).
o Learning takes place in context. Children learn during their
first five years in the midst of meaningful, ongoing
activities and receive immediate feedback on the success of
their actions.
o Parents and friends serve as models for imitative learning
and provide structure to and connections between their
experiences.
o Learning is functional. Concepts and tools are acquired as
tools to solve problems.
o The need for and purpose of the learning are often
explicitly stated for the child.
Traditional Apprenticeship Learning. Another source for ideas
about effective learning environments is how individuals learn in
traditional apprenticeships. Whereas school curricula tend to be
a specification of practice, apprenticeships arrange
opportunities for practice (Lave et al, 1988).
Jordan (1987) identified several characteristics of
traditional apprenticeship learning including:
o Work is the driving force. The progressive mastering of
tasks by apprentices is appreciated not as a step towards a
distant, symbolic goal (such as a certificate), but for its
immediate value in getting the work done.
o Apprentices start with skills that are relatively easy and
where mistakes are least costly.
o Learning is focused on bodily performance. It involves the
ability to do rather than the ability to talk about
something.
o Standards of performance are embedded in the work
environment. What constitutes expert execution of a task is
obvious, and judgments about the learner's competence emerge
naturally and continuously in the context of the work. The
apprentice "owns the problem" of moving on to the
acquisition of the next skill.
o Teachers and teaching are largely invisible. In
apprenticeship learning--and informal job training in
American workplaces--it looks as though little teaching is
going on. Whatever instruction the apprentice receives,
originates not from a teacher teaching, but from a worker
doing his or her work that the apprentice observes.
In short, apprentices are inducted into a community of
expert practice in which the "teacher" continuously engages in
and is a master at the practice being learned. His or her
performance constitutes the standard for the apprentice.
Actual Trials. Clearly, traditional apprenticeships are not
entirely transferable to a modern society where many skills, such
as mathematics, law, or computer-based machining, are at best
only partly visible. Because of this, cognitive scientists have
conducted a number of trials of effective learning situations and
curricula appropriate for learning today's less visible
practices. These efforts span a number of subjects~mathematics,
physics, reading, writing, and interior design.
Cognitive Apprenticeship Models
These precedents--nineteenth century innovations, analyses
of traditional apprenticeships and of the spectacular learning by
the young child, actual attempts by cognitive scientists to
create different kinds of learning environments, and an extensive
body of cognitive science research--add up to a solid foundation
for designing effective learning environments. Collins, Brown,
and Newman (1989) have proposed a model of "cognitive
apprenticeship" incorporating key elements of those environments.
The model ignores the usual distinctions between academic
and vocational education, its objective being to initiate the
novice into a community of expert practice. The model presumes
that learning is learning, however we label the subject. In fact,
as the American economy and its skill requirements restructure,
many "vocational" domains involve substantial amounts of symbolic
activity, and the distinction between vocational and academic is
rapidly becoming less useful.
Ideal Learning Environments. The Collins, Brown, and Newman model
has four building blocks--"content," "methods," "sequence," and
"sociology." Many parts of this model are not new, but together
they define an effective learning situation, with very different
classrooms and roles for teachers and students.
Content
Schools usually focus exclusively on the concepts, facts,
and procedures of a subject. To operate effectively in any
setting, however, students also need three other types of
content:
1. "Tricks of the trade"--problem-solving strategies that experts
pick up with experience.
2. Cognitive management strategies--goal setting, strategic
planning, monitoring, evaluation, and revision.
3. Learning strategies--knowing how to learn, including exploring
new fields, getting more knowledge in a familiar subject, and
reconfiguring knowledge already possessed.
Methods
Teaching methods should give students the chance to
observe, engage in, invent, or discover expert strategies in
context. The Collins, Brown, and Newman model includes a variety
of methods that systematically encourage student exploration and
independence. Teachers coach--offering hints, feedbacks, and
reminders; provide "scaffolding"--support for students as they
learn to carry out tasks; and "fade"--gradually handing over
control of the learning process to the student.
Sequencing
Learning should be staged so that the learner builds the
multiple skills required in expert performance and discovers the
conditions under which they apply. This requires a sequence of
increasingly complex tasks, increasingly diverse problem-solving
situations, and the staging of learning so that students develop
a feel for the overall terrain before attending to details.
Sociology
The learning environment should reproduce the
technological, social, time, and motivational characteristics of
real world situations where what is being learned will be used.
It is only through encountering subject matter knowledge in
context that most students will learn when, where, and how the
knowledge applies to other situations. For example, in the real
world, people have to work with others; this model calls for
students to work together to solve problems and carry out tasks.
An Example of Cognitive Apprenticeship. There are instances of
such apprenticeships in high school courses and projects,
designed by high school teachers.
Students from Conval High School in Peterborough, New
Hampshire, built and raced a solar-powered car as an applied
science project. The project evidenced all four blocks of the
cognitive apprenticeship model. The project extended over nine
months, an unusually long time frame for a school, but a
realistic one for real world tasks. The project required the
students to acquire and use a wide variety of skills spanning
many academic and practical disciplines, including physics and
mathematics, solar engineering, hydraulics, electronics,
drafting, model fabrication, metal working, and welding.
The students also had to acquire business skills to manage
grant funds, and English, journalism, and graphics skills for a
public relations effort. To the surprise of the students, they
also had to acquire leadership, management, and interpersonal
skills to divide the labor rationally and keep the project moving
forward.
How Do Cognitive Apprenticeship Ideas Fit Current Policies and
Programs?
How do these ideas fit into policy discussions about (1)
integrating academic and vocational education, (2) work-based
apprenticeship, (3) technical preparation ("tech prep") and 2+2
programs, and (4) cooperative education?
1. Models for Integrating Academic and Vocational Education
(Grubb and Plihal, 1990).
The curricular (what) and pedagogic (how) principles of
cognitive apprenticeship are not only consistent with integration
ideas. They in fact rigorously define what a vocationally and
academically integrated learning environment looks like.
The best of vocational education reflects several of the
pedagogic principles of cognitive apprenticeship; the best of
academic education, its content principles. Thus, cognitive
apprenticeship can function as the model for integrating academic
and vocational education--the model for what to teach and for how
to teach it.
Good vocational education is more apt than academic
education to use some of the methods of cognitive apprenticeship
(such as modeling and coaching) and contextualized and
cooperative learning. However, it is generally weaker on the
content side--in academic knowledge and the higher-order
cognitive skills. The principles of cognitive apprenticeship
systematically preserve and integrate the best of academic and
vocational education into a single model that can be used to
teach either academic subjects like mathematics or vocational
subjects like interior design.
We now see elements of cognitive apprenticeship in
integrated programs, but these elements are often implicit or
accidental; they are rarely the result of explicit design, and
they are not routinely found.
2. Work-Based Apprenticeship.
At least two factors have sparked the interest in
work-based apprenticeships. One is the lack of a national system
to move young people from school into the workplace. The other is
the recognition that most school-based programs--even many
vocational ones--are divorced from the needs of the workplace.
But must apprenticeships be work-based? One assumption is
that the best way to move youth into the workplace is to put them
there. Another seems to be that if schools are bad learning
places for work, workplaces must be good places--which may turn
out to be true, but is bad logic. In fact, evidence on informal
on-the-job training and on employers' training investment
patterns suggests that workplaces are not good learning places
for the young or the less educated (Scribner and Sachs, 1990;
Tan, 1989). Unless work-based apprenticeships are deliberately
designed for learning, they will have potentially serious holes
and inefficiencies.
A cognitive apprenticeship strategy should be able to
deliver powerful learning relevant to the workplace in a
school-based environment. The principles of cognitive
apprenticeship were derived from school-based programs. And
recent work indicates that cognitive apprenticeship is compatible
with learning the generic skills of the modern workplace
(Berryman, 1990; SCANS, 1991; Stasz et al., 1990).
3. Technical Preparation ("Tech Prep") and 2+2 Programs.
In federal law, technical preparation denotes a four-year
curriculum, starting in the last two years of high school and
culminating in a two-year associate degree in a technical field
of work--hence "2+2." The courses are expected to integrate
academic and vocational content and to be vertically integrated
across the four years and across high schools and community
colleges. The relationships between these programs and cognitive
apprenticeship are the same as those for integrated
academic/vocational models, discussed above.
4. Co-Operative Education.
Co-operative education is a school-based effort to
facilitate learning at work. The classroom instructor arranges
job placements, writes a training plan detailing what each
student is expected to learn on the job, and visits job sites to
monitor the training. Job supervisors evaluate students'
performances in terms of training objectives (Stern, 1990). In
theory, cognitive apprenticeship principles could be built into
co-op programs. In reality, however, co-op programs have to take
the workplace as they find it, fitting training plans around the
uneven training skills of supervisors and the uneven (and often
limited) authority of supervisors to alter the work process to
support learning.
In the Final Analysis: How Effective is Cognitive Apprenticeship?
We do not yet know, especially if the question is whether
cognitive apprenticeship is effective in routine, as opposed to
hothouse, learning situations. However, the ideas are unusually
well-grounded. Cognitive apprenticeship strategies build on
traditional apprenticeships, a tested, cross-cultural strategy
for effectively acquiring visually observable skills. They also
build on and incorporate the ideas and findings of a community of
serious thinkers and researchers, from John Dewey to today's
cognitive scientists.
However, there are very few learning situations that
reflect cognitive apprenticeship principles. Extending the ones
that exist and creating new ones requires dealing with
regulatory, institutional, curricular, pedagogic, assessment, and
professional training issues. The model itself will change as we
gain experience with it in the bruising real world of teaching
and learning.
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REFERENCES
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