![Believing is Seeing: Exploring the Role of Student Beliefs in ‘Real’ Learning Washington Assessment, Teaching & Learning Conference May 2006 William S. Moore, Ph.D. State Board for Community & Technical Colleges [email_address]](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/believingisseeing-120103163102-phpapp02/85/believing-is-seeing-1-320.jpg)
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Exploring How Student Beliefs Impact Real Learning
- 1. Believing is Seeing: Exploring the Role of Student Beliefs in ‘Real’ Learning Washington Assessment, Teaching & Learning Conference May 2006 William S. Moore, Ph.D. State Board for Community & Technical Colleges [email_address]
- 2. “ Do you mean ‘really learning’ or ‘just learning’?” Student quoted in Bill Perry’s “ Sharing in the cost of growth,” from C.A. Parker, 1978
- 4. Whose Meaning Matters? Look! Do I sound crazy in saying that the students are the source of the meanings they will make of you? All right, so you feel you are making meaning for them; you know your subject matter, they do not. But it is the meaning they make of your meaning that matters! Obviously. Why am I shouting? After all, it is the meanings you make of my meanings that matter, and shouting will not help… William Perry, from The Modern American College , A. Chickering & Associates, 1981
- 5. Why Does it Matter? Diversity, social problems, environmental issues, and the changing geopolitical situation all require minds that can grapple successfully with uncertainty, complexity and conflicting perspectives and still take stands that are both based on evidence, analysis and compassion and deeply centered in values. Craig Nelson, 1994
- 6. “ Perry-ism” #1 When bright people persist in doing stupid things, we know that powerful forces are at work.
- 11. Learning as Transforming Understanding … Being able to repeat facts and plug numbers into formulae to get the right answers is handy, even essential. But it is not what education is fundamentally about… Learning should be about changing the ways in which learners understand, or experience, or conceptualize the world around them … Paul Ramsden
- 13. “ Perry-ism” #2 If the power [of the scheme] is to label students the better to develop them, we shall dehumanize them and ourselves. What’s more, as we do not possess such powers, we shall be defeated…
- 15. “ In Over Our Heads”
- 19. Assessing Real Learning Understandings of core concepts/themes Ways of reasoning within disciplinary contexts Self-assessment of learning
- 21. When All is Said and Done, It’s Easier Said than Done
- 22. Hope & Loss: Real Learning Takes Courage … It may be a great joy to discover a new and more complex way of thinking and seeing, but what do we do about the old simple world? What do we do about the hopes that we had invested and experienced in those simpler terms? When we leave those terms behind, are we to leave hope, too? Bill Perry, 1978 “ Sharing in the cost of growth”
- 23. “ Perry-ism” #3 This is our creative obligation as educators: to find ways to encourage.
Notes de l'éditeur
- “ seeing”=deep understanding=“real learning”
- What do you think she meant by this distinction? [Compare to goals/outcomes listed earlier] As the result of their encounter with us, we want our students to think differently—about key concepts, the discipline in general, themselves… Paul Ramsden, Australia: learning should be about changing the ways in which learners conceptualize the world around them, [not just] being able to repeat facts.
- We’re living in an uncertain and rapidly-changing world
- This morning is about exploring one perspective on what these powerful forces might be. The other part of the context is the notion of “real learning” I alluded to in my title—it comes from a student responding to an interview question about what she thought about her learning in the past year in college:
- Differences in performance undoubtedly exist—question is why? Socialization: (outsider insider) DEVELOPMENT: specifically epistemological development
- Way of understanding learning as transformation--reconstruction of one's ideas about knowledge, about learning, about self background for study--Harvard, 50’s & 60’s, published 1970 not a straight, smooth linear process perspectives don’t reside in students, but in the “in-between”--the relationship between learner and learning context
- Knowledge increasingly conjectural, certainty limited by contexts Learner increasingly active, responsible for learning Teacher shifts from source of learning to a resource for learning
- Perry referred to the transition from late multiplicity to contextual relativism as “the space of meaninglessness between received belief and creative faith” (faith as the “activity of seeking and composing meaning”—Sharon Parks)
- Belief systems matter; believing IS seeing, and the transformation Ramsden describes involves transforming these underlying worldviews Perry scheme particularly helpful in understanding these processes (see next slide)
- Steven Pinker: naïve epistemologies & un-learning Knowing and the knower are inseparable Not just an accumulation of stuff, but a transformation in the way learners think about key topics (and learning itself) Building blocks that provide better capacity for grappling with the complexity of the world; empathy for “the other” is central to process
- What we’re talking about is using these perspectives to help us create conditions for learning that would engage students and promote more effectively, and for a broader range of learners, the kind of real learning we seek Talk a little bit about implications for teaching and for assessment
- NOT about dragging students kicking & screaming up some developmental hierarchy " The future is an idea that guides us in the present, but it's only an idea. While we are helping people to develop, let us not forget to celebrate them as they are in this moment." (Perry) 2) Meet students where they are and build a bridge to where you want them to go (Vygotsky notion of scaffolding) 3) R. Kegan: people grow best where they continuously experience an ingenious blend of support and challenge; the rest is commentary
- transformation of understandings is harder work for students than receiving transmitted knowledge (and often resisted– A lot of us feel overwhelmed at times—though perhaps we’re not as blithely comfortable with the simple solution as Calvin is!
- This wouldn’t be so painfully funny if it weren’t grounded in at least some reality—and whether we like it or not the perception is a common one. There’s a little pain of self-recognition in this admittedly exaggerated (and funny) perspective—but real learning is more than just what you need to know later (and hopefully more than just 2 hours worth!)
- Use the 3 major strands that shape (and are shaped by) students’ meaning-making as a framework for re-thinking classroom practice in ways that influence student meaning-making about the subject matter and learning itself
- 1) Defines what’s important Conveys epistemology 2) Content, context, perceptions Understandings in social context 3) Feedback essential to process Done with, not to, students
- The understandings students have of the core concepts (or “big ideas”) of the disciplinary context in question, and the ways they use those big ideas to think about and solve real problems within that context, but also the often-neglected realm of self-assessment: explicit reflections students have about their own learning within the discipline (pushing them to be more aware of their own thinking and learning in the process)
- Formal measures: Interviews Perry RJI (Reflective Judgment) Production measures MID (Measure of Intellectual Development) MER (Measure of Epistemological Reflection) Forced-choice/recognition measures LEP (Learning Environment Preferences) RCI (Reasoning about Current Issues)
- We’ve just scratched the surface today—Bill Perry was always clear that individual learners are more complex than any theory Not only that, classrooms are made up of a wide variety of learners, and exist in complex educational contexts that don’t always support, let alone reward, the kind of challenging work we’re talking about here. It’s important to acknowledge that, and further, to recognize that the kind of real learning we’re describing takes courage on the part of learners.
- It also, of course, takes courage, dedication and persistence on the part of teachers, especially in these days of increasing public scrutiny and calls for accountability. But I’ll close with one last Perry-ism that helps remind me, anyway, of what our focus should be:
- Not just our students, but ourselves and our colleagues as well…
- 1) Range of personal epistemologies in any given classroom: qualitatively different conceptions of the nature of knowledge and what learning involves; these conceptions are often different from faculty's expectations, and are difficult to change, particularly if ignored 2) transformation of students' understandings about the subject matter and the nature of knowledge than about the transmission of information 3) both a loss of world views and a threat to one's sense of self 4) For better or for worse, whether you’re explicit about it or not