Paul Kirschner
Open University of the Netherlands, Heerlen, Netherlands
Center for Learning Sciences and Technology, CELSTEC

http://www.ou.nl/eCache/DEF/11/780.html

http://www.ou.nl/eCache/DEF/5/071.html

Educational Urban Legends: Busting Persistent Myths in Education, Educational Innovation and ICT in Education

Mark Twain once said that “In religion and politics, people's beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second hand and without examination”. Unfortunately this appears also to be true in present day education, educational innovation and use of ICT in education. Educational technologists, educational reformers, instructional designers, local and federal politicians, school managers, and advisory groups are all jockeying to show how innovative and up to date they can be, based not upon good science but upon commonly held but often either unproven or untrue beliefs. As a result of this, we now find teachers, parents and students revolting against many of these so called innovations and students becoming the dupes of it all. And what is the root of all of this? The reforms that we often see are most often not based on good science (and specifically the cognitive sciences) and/or good scientific research, but rather upon beliefs, plausible sounding rationale and/or arguments, poorly designed research and the strange idea that ‘stagnation means decline’. The reaction to these reforms - though it uses the word evidence - is also based upon beliefs about how education and educational research is and should be carried out. Paul Kirschner will look at a number of these urban legends from the perspective of what cognitive science and good research in the field has to say about them.

Shaaron Ainsworth
University of Nottingham
Learning Sciences Research Institute

http://www.psychology.nottingham.ac.uk/staff/sea

http://www.lsri.nottingham.ac.uk

Exploring the Roles of Psychology in Technology Enhanced Learning: A Chronological Perspective

Psychologists are often drawn to the area of Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) as it offers a way to test and refine their theories of learning; I know I was! However, over the last two decades the theories, technologies, methods, and contexts in which I research have all changed, often fairly dramatically. In this talk, I want explore how the field is changing by exploring how my own research has changed: from its beginnings in cognitively inspired individualised learning environments tested in the artificial contexts to today where I work with a plethora of technologies from handhelds to large screen displays, in contexts which range far from the laboratory and explore theories which take into account social, emotional, motivational, personality factors as well as cognitive ones. I want to end by reflecting on how we can manage these complex inter-relating factors (theoretically and methodologically) so that the symbiotic relationship between psychology and TEL can continue to be a relevant and fruitful one.

Peter Gerjets
University of Tübingen
Knowledge Media Research Center

http://www.iwm-kmrc.de/www/de/mitarbeiter/ma.html?dispname=Peter+Gerjets&uid=pgerjets

Bridge over troubled water: From Cognitive Science to designing digital instruction

In recent years, research on designing digital instruction (e.g., materials to be used in multimedia or hypermedia environments) has been dominated by theories like the Cognitive Load Theory (Sweller, 1999) or the Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning (Mayer, 2002). These theories can be characterized as "framework & principles" approaches as they compile theoretical building blocks from research on memory and mental representation into comprehensive frameworks that are used to derive general and simple instructional-design principles recommended as practical guidelines. Based on examples from our own research program, I will argue that this "framework & principles" approach to designing digital instruction has its limitations and needs theoretical and methodological augmentations at three different levels of explanation in order to be theoretically and practically satisfactory: (1) Augmentations at the "framework level": Causal chains that are specified within the frameworks to explain instructional-design effects need to be substantiated more thoroughly by measuring the postulated processes and mediators and by directly testing the hypothesized relations. (2) Augmentations at the "foundational level": When theoretical or empirical inconsistencies occur that can not be resolved at the framework level, structures and processes at a more fundamental level of explanation than the one used by the framework itself have to be addressed for clarification. (3) Augmentations at the "representations in context level": When realistic materials for authentic instructional contexts are to be designed, the roles of external representations with regard to domain contents and learning objectives need to be specified by means of task analyses at a level of explanation that can be considered "above" the framework level. Based on the structuralist view of theories, a methodological perspective for future research on designing digital instruction will be proposed that allows to integrate these three levels of explanation into a comprehensive approach.