| Australian Journal of Educational Technology 1994, 10(2), 81-95. |
AJET 10 |
The paper describes the theoretical basis and methodology for research seeking to identify higher order cognitive activity occurring in students' information seeking and learning tasks with hypermedia. It reviews difficulties arising from the inconsistency among schemes of cognitive analysis, and of articulating such schemes closely with accounts of the desirable attributes of graduates in employment, where the display of higher order skills is expected. It concludes that such analyses of learning with hypermedia must, despite these problems, be guided by more holistic theoretical accounts of thinking, and constantly adapt methodologies to avoid reliance on over-simplified models.
This entailed due consideration of higher education's current concern with the generic, transferable cognitive capacities ideally desired of graduates, and with the means of aligning the development of these capacities in the course of undergraduate studies with lifelong learning approaches and professional attributes and attitudes valued in employment.
It is instructive to compare features of schemes for the description of thinking and for prescriptive use in teaching it, such as those presented by Bloom (1956),Sternberg (1986), Presseisen (1985) and Beyer (1988). Depending upon how one wishes to use these schemes, one may see them either as having substantial areas of overlap or as having disturbingly discrepant features. For example, Ross (1994) makes use of the Bloom taxonomy without modification for an experimental correlation with hypertext design. However, comparisons among the four illustrative classification schemes show that analysis and synthesis, which are ranked at the higher end of Bloom's scale, are nevertheless among Beyer's (1988) 'micro-thinking' skills which serve, but are not themselves examples of, the highest orders of thinking. Again, analysis and synthesis are among the lower order of 'basic processes' proposed by Presseisen (1985). Sternberg (1986), would not rank these skills directly among the higher-order 'metacomponents' of his own conceptual scheme.
The notion of critical thinking gives rise to similar problems. Beyer acknowledges the current relativist position that it means 'whatever its users stipulate it to mean' (1988:61). Critical thinking is generally regarded as a higher order skill more characteristic of experts than of novices. However, Pogrow (1985) states that he has found no evidence that mastery of basic thinking skills is a prerequisite for engaging in higher order thinking skills. On the contrary, he observes, evidence from animal research suggests that in fact higher order thinking proceeds independently of basic thinking tasks (1985:239). Glaser (1984) notes similarly that, although it is believed that higher thinking skills are complex and basic skills more rudimentary, just the reverse may in fact be the case.
These statements or reports of investigations have generally emphasised the need to cultivate deep as opposed to surface learning during undergraduate studies, in the sense in which these concepts have been developed and theorised over the past twenty years (Marton and Saljo, 1976; Entwhistle in Richardson et al, 1987; Entwhistle and Ramsden, 1982; Trigwell and Prosser, 1991). The concepts are illustrated by Entwhistle's 'defining features of approaches to learning', cited by Warren Piper (1993:133) as'work provid[ing] direct, clear and specific pointers for the creation of high quality educational regimes at university level':
Deep Approach. Intention to understand, vigorous interaction with content, relate new ideas to previous knowledge, relate concepts to everyday experience, relate evidence to conclusions, examine the logic of the argumentThe outcome hoped for from these processes is typically expressed in a university mission. The following desired attributes of graduates are cited as an example by Warren Piper (1993).Surface Approach. Intention to complete task requirements, memorise information needed for assessments, failure to distinguish principles from examples, treat task as an external imposition, focus on discrete elements without integration, unreflectiveness about purpose or strategies.
Strategic Approaches. Intention to obtain highest possible grades, organise time and distribute effort to greatest effect, ensure conditions and materials for studying appropriate, use previous exam papers to predict questions, be alert to cues about marking schemes.
Coherent and extensive knowledge in a discipline area
Ability to reason logically and distinguish fact from opinion
Appreciation of other cultures and customs
Clear and fluent communication in writing
Oral articulateness and confidence
Computer literacy
Statistical literacy
Valuing truthfulness, accuracy, honesty and ethical standards in personal and professional life
Capacity to accept responsibilities and obligations as well as assert rights
A desire and the skills for continued intellectual development and creativity
The ambiguities which abound in these divergent discourses on cognition have been strongly influenced by concepts of situated and distributed cognition (Lave, 1988; Brown, Collins and Duguid, 1989; Salomon, 1993; Pea, 1992; Schank and Birnbaum, 1992). Such ambiguities can be found within the same document. Penington asserts, for example, in a discussion paper on undergraduate education (Higher Education Council/Australian Vice-Chancellors' Committee, 1994) that the notion of transferable generic skills is not proven and does not withstand rigorous intellectual testing, while the document notes that this assertion seems to run counter to the observation, experience and expectations of employers of graduates.
It is not unfair to assume that the object of discourse (generic, higher order, transferable cognitive abilities) has different meanings to the different stakeholders who have a concern for the cognitive performance of graduates in work and social roles, and for the means of helping them to achieve it. There would appear to be a fairly fundamental contradiction between, on the one hand, the project of shifting the preoccupations of higher education from a fixation with content coverage to enabling students to become lifelong learners, and, on the other, evidence that the highest cognitive performances emerge from the most intensively contextualised and knowledge dependent activities (Royer, Cisero and Caro, 1993; Glaser, 1984;Greeno, 1989; Schank and Birnbaum, 1992; Pea, 1987b). Seemingly, you cannot have it both ways.
Perkins, Jay and Tishman,(1993), addressing this dilemma, argue for a much more complex and holistic conception of 'mindware' (they use this neologism to avoid the conceptual frameworks referred to above) capable of accommodating this diversity. Research has produced, in their view, 'an enriched entology of mind, a more panoramic picture of the kinds of mindware that figure importantly in thinking'. They seek a compact between the contending positions of context-free and context-bound cognition, but emphasise all the same that any acceptable account of good thinking must take due account of research in cognition and recognise 'the power of the particular'. As Kay (1993/4) notes, coming round to this position means overcoming the traditional scientific view that universality is inherently more meaningful than diversity.
This direction is supported in an overview by McGuiness (1993) of research and practice associated with teaching thinking. She argues for a 'cognitive apprenticeship' model, and cites Greeno's (1989) case for adopting new perspectives which question a number of framing assumptions, namely: 'that thinking is about individual mental representations; that cognitive processes are uniform across people and situations; and that knowledge and skills are built up from simple component processes'.
Paul and Nesich's (1992) proposed model for the national assessment of higher order thinking in the United States postulates 'universal intellectual standards' as one of the four domains essential to critical thinking. This 'universalism' exhibits a contemporary flavour in the requirement that the process of assessment should 'respect cultural diversity by focusing on the common core skills, abilities and traits useful in all cultures', but at the same time, of course, both assumes the existence of a common core and appeals to an undefined criterion of 'usefulness'. Lave (1988) sees Western rationality more radically as the universalising formula allowing this system of thought to be both closed and tautologised endlessly (83), while Paul and Nesich's program can be viewed as perhaps going some way towards recognising the context-specific and culture-specific aspects of cognition.
In order to explain the substantial shift of perspective needed to view cognition and intelligence from the viewpoint of contemporary research, Schank and Birnbaum (1992) point to the traditional psychological preconception that the knowledge base of intelligence is 'too contingent, too atomised, too undifferentiated' to be other than 'grist for the mill' as far as theories of cognition and intelligence are concerned. Hence, they argue, psychological theory has given serious attention only to the mill and largely ignored the grist. As Perkins and Salomon (1989) put the matter in relation to the neglected role of specific, culturally determined knowledge: 'There didn't seem to be enough to know about such databases to make them central to thinking ability'.
One of the important implications of these parallel theoretical frameworks is that intelligence and cognition have to be seen as emergent processes rather than as fixed or variable quanta, and it is from this viewpoint that the role of technologies in learning can most productively be examined. As Pea (1985) observes: '... the specific restructurings of cognitive technologies are rarely predictable; they have emergent properties that come to be discovered only through their use'.
In a later article (1992) he asks: 'What opportunities are lost for learner participation in higher level activities, and meaningful contributions rather than basic skills practice, if one does not allow for distributed intelligence support for those activities involving artefacts and other persons?' The 'artefacts and other persons' are the social or learning ecology (Frampton and Wharton, 1992, 1993) designated as 'person-plus-surround' by Perkins (1993). Allowing for 'emergence' in the intelligent behaviour exhibited in technology supported environments is clearly at odds with the view of information and communications technologies as neutral carriers of 'content' (Clark, 1983), which is consistent with a logical positivist rather than a constructivist concept of enculturated knowledge.
Details of our preliminary analytical approaches have been reported elsewhere (Alexander and Frampton, 1992,1993). To recapitulate these briefly, having transcribed the 'events' both directly observed and recorded on videotape for the duration of a task undertaken separately by 15 pairs of subjects, the researchers applied the terms of classification schemes, either singly or using more than one at a time, to the transcribed verbal protocols of the learners' commentaries and the accompanying video recorded actions.
The terms were applied both to a 'content' column and to an 'interface' column of specially prepared logsheets while the researcher viewed the recorded events. The latter took the form of a view of the pairs of subjects (less than 25% of the screen area) inserted into a full screen view of the application in use.
The task set for the subjects in these preliminary observations was to search for and identify information related to a specific set of historical circumstances. The purpose was not to attempt to measure learning gains, which would have required different methods, but to categorise the cognitive performance evident within the boundaries of segments, and particularly to identify the incidence of higher order thinking.
Certain measures which we applied were relatively task specific (eg. time taken from start to first content related search activity, whether 'closure' was achieved). Quite wide variations were observed in some cases (eg. from 5 minutes to 32 minutes from start to 'first item of relevant information').
Rowland's principal terms are the following:
| READ REPHRASE DESCRIBE RECORD RETRIEVE QUESTION IDENTIFY INFER [GOAL] |
PREDICT GENERATE EVALUATE CITE REASON CONCLUDE REVIEW STATE DOING PLAN |
Each one is accompanied by a fuller description which has been omitted for simplicity. The description for 'IDENTIFY', for example, reads: 'label something as a (problem, constraint, resource, etc.) without certainty; can be a hypothesis; arrived at primarily through analysis of given and inferred in formation'.
The attractiveness of Rowland's largely non-hierarchical scheme lay not so much in its apparent simplicity compared with some of those we examined as in its specificity for the task and subtlety in the detail: with its main cognitive terms as operators, its application is never 'disembedded' from the task under study.
Our observation was that the subjects generally had an insufficient familiarity with the conceptual relationships proper to the domain (wars in which Australia had been involved in the twentieth century) for incidence of a deep or relational approach (Trigwell and Prosser, 1991) to be apparent. That view would of course tend to lend weight negatively to the robustness of situated cognition theory as it has been discussed above.
A second conclusion in which the researchers concurred was that the cognitive classification schemes examined did not appear to cater well for subjects' response to non-textual items in a multimedia environment. Presseisen (1985:44) noted that spatial or visual processing had been taking on increased significance in instruction, and touched on the question of its effect on cognitive development. However, she concluded that the testing of cognitive abilities already catered adequately for multiple modes of thinking.
We tend to disagree ;with that view. In the comments column of our log sheets we noted some clear affective reactions to non-textual items, but in cases where, using Presseisen's classification of basic and complex skills, it was difficult to find the appropriate coding for these events. It is not clear, in our view, that current means of identifying cognitive events can adequately cater for responses to the organisation of media in a multimedia program, or for the emergent characteristics of distributed cognition in that environment. Evidence provided by Schwarz and Clore (1988) about the information function of affective states, for example, should warn us against assuming too readily that the types of classification discussed earlier in this paper are fully suitable for dealing with emergent technology supported cognitions.
Another problem we recognised was that of carrying out the observations separately from the students' overall learning environment and course context. Since we were not focusing on specific learning acquisitions but on the incidence of cognitive events, particularly of a higher order, in a multimedia computing environment, this aspect may arguably have been less important than specific task motivation and the lack of appropriate conceptual knowledge.
Even so, where practical organisation makes it difficult to study cognitive events in situ in closer accordance with ethnomethodological procedures, it seems to us useful to allow for some compensating features encouraging conation. Examples might be the close relevance of the content area of a multimedia product to the subjects' immediate academic concerns, or means of increasing extrinsic motivation towards the task or environment involved in the trial (unless, of course, motivation is one of the variables being gauged).
To compensate for the conduct of a fresh set of observations in an environment somewhat detached from the normal learning context, we have consequently spent considerable preparatory time with a third year PhD student in the subject area concerned in order to shape the most motivating problem complex. This student has been observed and video recorded addressing problems himself using the hypermedia product in question. He is evidently well beyond undergraduates in his developing expertise in the content domain, yet still close enough to the undergraduate course context to provide valuable input to the tasking process. However, we believe that this aspect of the research methodology merits further attention.
In other words, we are resisting generalising from observed events that a particular subject can 'analyse', for example, observing only that she applies analysis to such-and-such a conceptual object or objects. We do not intend to assume transferability.
It is also coherent with theories of situated and distributed cognition discussed earlier, and emphasises the socially constructed interdependence of the endogenous and exogenous elements of technology mediated learning environments and communication: 'the resources that shape and enable activity are distributed in configuration across people, environment and situation. In other words, intelligence is accomplished rather than possessed' (Pea, 1992:3).
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| Author: David Frampton is Director of Educational Technology Services in the Information Services Division of Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia. His current research is concerned with the relationships between users' cognitions, particularly those of a higher order, and advanced technologies such as hypermedia used in information-seeking and learning tasks.
Please cite as: Frampton, D. (1994). Analysing cognitions in a hypermedia learning environment. Australian Journal of Educational Technology, 10(2), 81-95. http://www.ascilite.org.au/ajet/ajet10/frampton.html |