Learning, collaboration, and Group work in the classroom

Question 1

What are behaviourist approaches at school?

Answer 1

Often regarded as ‘out of favour’, but still a major focus in schools - rewards and punishments for performance/behaviour including attention, approval, praise, telling off, sanctions. And learning through observation - modelling by teachers and more advanced peers.

Question 2

What are ambiguities in group learning?

Answer 2

Children have different perspectives which allow them to arrive at a more sophisticated answer (group work). Does the correct answer have to be in the group before you start, or can they work together through a source of competitive competence and arrive at the answer, even if they didn’t have the skills to begin with.

Question 3

What is the implication from group work?

Answer 3

If you need someone in the group to have the skills first, improvement is merely a matter of imitation - not anything to do with cognitive competence, it’s just imitation (very different picture to learning)

Question 4

What are the views behind peer interaction?

Answer 4

Do the benefits of peer interaction arise from spontaneous cognitive conflict and equilibration process, or are they the outcome of effective guidance?

Question 5

What did Bruner (1961) find?

Answer 5

Highlighted the need for ‘discovery’ methods rather than simple receptive learning - places cognition of the child at the centre of the learning process. It is the child’s representation of the work that is changing, and that is what we need to pay attention to.

Question 6

What did Mayer’s review (2004) find? (against Bruner)

Answer 6

Strongly argues against pure discovery. Child needs to work out which part to pay attention to and which to not, before attempting to solve the problem. Contrasted pure discovery with guidance. For group work to be successful, the role of the adult in the room is to support and structure the intellectual activity.

Question 7

What is a quote from Mayer (2004)?

Answer 7

“Pure discord - even when it involves lots of hands-on activity and large amounts of group discussion - may fail to promote the first cognitive process, namely, selecting relevant incoming information”.

Question 8

What is Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory?

Answer 8

Focus on the social environment as critical. Internalising what is first observed and experienced on the social plane.

Question 9

What did Vygotsky say about the involvement of a competent social partner?

Answer 9

Cognitive development involves guidance by a more competent social partner - sone of proximal development, implications for instruction (e.g. scaffolding), implications for testing (e.g. dynamic assessment - focus more on assessing where a child could potentially be)

Question 10

What is guided participation?

Answer 10

Adults much more capable of bringing the children on with their learning. Having a trained peer in the group wasn’t enough - Radzizewska and Rogoff 1991 argued they were missing guided participation. There was no scaffolding/attempt to bring the child along.

Question 11

Peer tutoring programmes at school?

Answer 11

Research now focused on identifying specific characteristics of effective peer-tutoring programmes (e.g., King et al., 1998). Had children taking turns as learner and tutor, as it was about both children on an equal level guiding each other’s learning by asking questions about what each other was thinking – success not dependent on ability.
Success not necessarily dependent on greater expertise of tutor.

Question 12

What are information-processing approaches?

Answer 12

Range of processes and strategies involved in children's problem-solving, writing, mathematics, etc. Computer as a metaphor for the mind:
λ	hardware:  capacity, processing speed
λ	software: strategies, knowledge
λ	focus on encoding, storage, 
	and retrieval
λ	sensory memory
λ	working memory
λ	long-term memory

Question 13

What did Craik and Lockhart, 1972 suggest?

Answer 13

Levels of processing. There is a better retrieval following deeper processing.

Question 14

What is the self-reference effect?

Answer 14

Encoding stimuli with reference to the self promotes organisation and elaboration, e.g. Pullyblank et al. (1985) - self-referent encoding leads to better recall than semantic encoding. e.g., Baker-Ward et al. (1990) - recall advantage for self-performed rather than other-performed activities.

Question 15

What did Siegler, 2005 find?

Answer 15

Use of microgenetic approach. Variability of strategies is predictive of learning. Changes of strategies from less to more advanced, but also from more to less advanced. Implications for notion of simple developmental sequences. Changes prompted by self-explanation, as well as feedback
children use a range of strategies to solve one problem.

Question 16

What did Chi, 1978 and Schneider et al., 1993 find about the role of domain-specific knowledge?

Answer 16

Child experts better than adult novices on chess task but poorer on digit span. Where children have specific knowledge, they can outperform adults, even though general knowledge adults do better – this is because children have domain specific expertise. Expertise accounted for 32% of variance in recall of meaningful chess positions (age accounted for just 3%). Expertise accounted for 9% of variance in recall of random chess positions.

Question 17

What is the role of metacognition?

Answer 17

Children’s metacognitive awareness increases with age.
λ improvements in comprehension monitoring (e.g., Markman, 1977)
λ young children overestimate own memory capacity
λ they don’t rehearse and don’t organise as much
λ they don’t allocate study time efficiently (Dufresne & Kobasigawa, 1989)
λ but they are capable of using memory strategies and tend to recall better when they do so (e.g., Lange & Pierce, 1992).