This thesis is about "authentic learning": learning from life-like contexts. The construct derived from the social situated approach (Lave & Wenger, 1991), has surprisingly no counterpart in cognitive psychology. The first objective of this thesis is to develop a cognitive formulation of authentic learning from classical cognitive works and recent neuroscience studies findings. The characteristically cognitive feature posited is "n-coding", the encoding of multimodal input (verbal, visual, kinesthetic, social...). To test quasi-experimentally the effectiveness of this cognitive definition, a review of the instructional literature identified Collaborative Group Problem Solving (Heller et al., 1992) as an appropriate candidate for authentic instruction in physics. / The study design was comprised of one control and three treatment conditions varying in degrees of n-coding: (high, medium and low) while controlling for each treatment group's "participatory framework". All students were assessed before and after instruction on the FCI (Hestenes et al., 1992). Confidence levels were measured with each FCI question resulting in four new measures (gain in mean: confidence, right answer confidence, wrong answer confidence and weighted FCI). Procedural problem solving skills were measured through final exam grades. / Two empirical questions are posed. First, does increasing n-coding enhance learning? Second, since cognitive n-coding is unaccountable from the social perspective, does the situated perspective "subsume" the cognitive (Greeno, 1998)? Here, a quasi-experiment was not only used to test interventions but paradigm effectiveness, a methodological first. / Results shows that high and medium n-coding groups were significantly more effective than the situated low n-coding group (p=0.003) showing the effectiveness of increasing n-coding and refuting the claim that social approaches must subsume cognitive ones. No significant difference was found between high and medium n-coding groups (p=0.74) whereas all treatment groups differed from the control (p=0.0497), replicating findings on the effectiveness of non-traditional instruction (Hake, 1998). / Competing cognitive and social perspectives (Schoenfeld, 1999) may be better replaced by cross-paradigm symbioses such as importing authentic learning from situated approach into cognition. A model for reflecting on cross-scale symbioses is developed through the presence of self-similar patterns across scales (from micro-cognitive to macro-social). The fractal is put forward as a metaphor for the field of education and may serve to unify paradigms and yield optimal pictures of learning.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.100642 |
| Date | January 2006 |
| Creators | Lasry, Nathaniel. |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Doctor of Philosophy (Department of Educational and Counselling Psychology.) |
| Rights | © Nathaniel Lasry, 2006 |
| Relation | alephsysno: 002484183, proquestno: AAINR25191, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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