What Makes Authentic Learning Effective? Authentic learning aligns with research into the way the human mind turns information into useful, transferable knowledge. Cognitive scientists are developing a comprehensive portrait of the learner. Three principles illustrate the alignment between learning research and authentic learning:
7
Authentic Learning for the 21st Century
• Learners look for connections: When we approach a subject for the first time, we immediately try to perceive the relevance of the new concept to our lived experience. When a new piece of information simply doesn’t fit in any of our existing knowledge structures (or “schemas”), it is often rejected. This means that the more encouragement a learner has to become invested in material on a personal level, the easier it will be to assimilate the unfamiliar. • Long-lived attachments come with practice: Concepts need to be “aired” repeatedly and regularly, defended against attack, deployed in new contexts, and associated with new settings, activities, and people. Otherwise, the attachment is broken and the information lost.15 • New contexts need to be explored: The concepts being learned are always part of a much larger “learning event” and are directly linked in the learner’s mind with social circumstances—the setting, the activities, the people.16 Along with this emerging learner profile, cognitive scientists are studying the mind-set of the educator or subject matter expert, with some illuminating results. • Experts have blind spots:17 Most faculty receive little or no training in the art and science of instruction and tend to rely on their intuitions about how novices learn. Current learning research demonstrates that those intuitions are commonly faulty simply because the instructor is an expert in the field. The longer experts continue to work in their discipline, the further removed they become from the perspective of the novice. Known as “the expert’s blind spot,” this inability to recognize (or empathize with) beginning students’ difficulties can lead expert instructors to teach in a manner that makes sense from their perspective but not necessarily from the student’s perspective.18 • Educators evoke feelings: The teacher-as-facilitator can make or break a learning event. Learning methods evoke feelings in students that reinforce, support, or detract from knowledge construction.19 Since even the cleverest team of students dealing with complex, sustained investigations may have difficulty making good judgments in the absence of appropriate “scaffolding,” it is the educator’s role to design appropriate comprehension checks and feedback loops into the authentic learning exercise, preferably the very kinds of interventions commonly exhibited in real-world settings. For example, students engaged in publishing a peer-reviewed journal will evaluate each other over the course of the project and may receive additional guidance from the educator in the role of publisher or editorial board member. • Higher education should include the conative domain: Instructors that provide engaging activities supported by the proper scaffolding can help students develop expertise across all four domains of learning: • Cognitive capacity to think, solve problems, and create • Affective capacity to value, appreciate, and care • Psychomotor capacity to move, perceive, and apply physical skills • Conative capacity to act, decide, and commit Researchers warn that higher education has focused for too long on inculcating and assessing those cognitive skills that are relatively easy to acquire—remembering, understanding, and applying—rather than the arguably more important skills of analyzing, evaluating, and creating.20 Moreover, in developing these lower-order thinking skills, educators have largely ignored the other major learning domains, particularly the conative,
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Authentic Learning for the 21st Century
which determines whether a student has the necessary will, desire, commitment, mental energy, and self-determination to actually perform at the highest disciplinary standards. By engaging students in issues of concern to them, from global warming to world hunger, authentic learning awakens in learners the confidence to act. Those who adopt innovative learning strategies must be ready to adjust their assessment strategies accordingly. Otherwise, the purpose of the entire enterprise may well be defeated. There are eight critical factors that researchers say must be aligned to ensure a successful learning environment: • goals • content • instructional design • learner tasks • instructor roles • student roles • technological affordances • assessment An educator can introduce authentic content, replacing textbooks with historical documents and scientific data from remote sensors. She can design problem-based activities to replace lectures. She can expect students to collaborate with one another (despite student resistance to these active requirements). She can even surrender some of her own power as an expert to join students as a colearners. And she can support all this innovation with visualizations, simulations, and interactive technologies. Still, she may not achieve her goals if she neglects to rethink her assessment strategies. After all, what is the use of adopting loftier goals for yourself and your students if you continue to use multiple-choice tests that seek the “right” answer, capturing only the lowerlevel knowledge that is easiest to measure? Rather than relying on a single assessment method, instructors who adopt authentic learning methods must analyze multiple forms of evidence to measure student performance, including observations of student engagement and artifacts produced in the process of completing tasks.21
สิ่งที่ทำให้เรียนรู้ที่แท้จริงมีประสิทธิภาพหรือไม่ อาหารจัดเป็นลักษณะจิตใจมนุษย์จะเป็นความรู้ที่เป็นประโยชน์ โอนข้อมูลกับงานวิจัยการเรียนรู้ นักวิทยาศาสตร์ที่รับรู้จะพัฒนาภาพพจน์ของผู้เรียนครอบคลุม หลักการสามแสดงการจัดตำแหน่งระหว่างวิจัยเรียนรู้และเรียนรู้ที่แท้จริง: 7 แท้จริงการเรียนรู้สำหรับศตวรรษที่ 21 • Learners look for connections: When we approach a subject for the first time, we immediately try to perceive the relevance of the new concept to our lived experience. When a new piece of information simply doesn’t fit in any of our existing knowledge structures (or “schemas”), it is often rejected. This means that the more encouragement a learner has to become invested in material on a personal level, the easier it will be to assimilate the unfamiliar. • Long-lived attachments come with practice: Concepts need to be “aired” repeatedly and regularly, defended against attack, deployed in new contexts, and associated with new settings, activities, and people. Otherwise, the attachment is broken and the information lost.15 • New contexts need to be explored: The concepts being learned are always part of a much larger “learning event” and are directly linked in the learner’s mind with social circumstances—the setting, the activities, the people.16 Along with this emerging learner profile, cognitive scientists are studying the mind-set of the educator or subject matter expert, with some illuminating results. • Experts have blind spots:17 Most faculty receive little or no training in the art and science of instruction and tend to rely on their intuitions about how novices learn. Current learning research demonstrates that those intuitions are commonly faulty simply because the instructor is an expert in the field. The longer experts continue to work in their discipline, the further removed they become from the perspective of the novice. Known as “the expert’s blind spot,” this inability to recognize (or empathize with) beginning students’ difficulties can lead expert instructors to teach in a manner that makes sense from their perspective but not necessarily from the student’s perspective.18 • Educators evoke feelings: The teacher-as-facilitator can make or break a learning event. Learning methods evoke feelings in students that reinforce, support, or detract from knowledge construction.19 Since even the cleverest team of students dealing with complex, sustained investigations may have difficulty making good judgments in the absence of appropriate “scaffolding,” it is the educator’s role to design appropriate comprehension checks and feedback loops into the authentic learning exercise, preferably the very kinds of interventions commonly exhibited in real-world settings. For example, students engaged in publishing a peer-reviewed journal will evaluate each other over the course of the project and may receive additional guidance from the educator in the role of publisher or editorial board member. • Higher education should include the conative domain: Instructors that provide engaging activities supported by the proper scaffolding can help students develop expertise across all four domains of learning: • Cognitive capacity to think, solve problems, and create • Affective capacity to value, appreciate, and care • Psychomotor capacity to move, perceive, and apply physical skills • Conative capacity to act, decide, and commit Researchers warn that higher education has focused for too long on inculcating and assessing those cognitive skills that are relatively easy to acquire—remembering, understanding, and applying—rather than the arguably more important skills of analyzing, evaluating, and creating.20 Moreover, in developing these lower-order thinking skills, educators have largely ignored the other major learning domains, particularly the conative, 8 แท้จริงการเรียนรู้สำหรับศตวรรษที่ 21 which determines whether a student has the necessary will, desire, commitment, mental energy, and self-determination to actually perform at the highest disciplinary standards. By engaging students in issues of concern to them, from global warming to world hunger, authentic learning awakens in learners the confidence to act. Those who adopt innovative learning strategies must be ready to adjust their assessment strategies accordingly. Otherwise, the purpose of the entire enterprise may well be defeated. There are eight critical factors that researchers say must be aligned to ensure a successful learning environment: • goals • content • instructional design • learner tasks • instructor roles • student roles • technological affordances • assessment An educator can introduce authentic content, replacing textbooks with historical documents and scientific data from remote sensors. She can design problem-based activities to replace lectures. She can expect students to collaborate with one another (despite student resistance to these active requirements). She can even surrender some of her own power as an expert to join students as a colearners. And she can support all this innovation with visualizations, simulations, and interactive technologies. Still, she may not achieve her goals if she neglects to rethink her assessment strategies. After all, what is the use of adopting loftier goals for yourself and your students if you continue to use multiple-choice tests that seek the “right” answer, capturing only the lowerlevel knowledge that is easiest to measure? Rather than relying on a single assessment method, instructors who adopt authentic learning methods must analyze multiple forms of evidence to measure student performance, including observations of student engagement and artifacts produced in the process of completing tasks.21
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