Knowledge and Interaction

A Synthetic Agenda for the Learning Sciences

Andrea A. diSessa, Mariana Levin, Nathaniel J.S. Brown, Andrea A. diSessa, Mariana Levin, Nathaniel J.S. Brown

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317632948
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Pedagogía
• Thema: Educación general

Decades of research in the cognitive and learning sciences have led to a growing recognition of the incredibly multi-faceted nature of human knowing and learning. Up to now, this multifaceted nature has been visible mostly in distinct and often competing communities of researchers. From a purely scientific perspective, "siloed" science—where different traditions refuse to speak with one another, or merely ignore one another—is unacceptable. This ambitious volume attempts to kick-start a serious, new line of work that merges, or properly articulates, different traditions with their divergent historical, theoretical, and methodological commitments that, nonetheless, both focus on the highly detailed analysis of processes of knowing and learning as they unfold in interactional contexts in real time.

Knowledge and Interaction puts two traditions in dialogue with one another: Knowledge Analysis (KA), which draws on intellectual roots in developmental psychology and cognitive modeling and focuses on the nature and form of individual knowledge systems, and Interaction Analysis (IA), which has been prominent in approaches that seek to understand and explain learning as a sequence of real-time moves by individuals as they interact with interlocutors, learning environments, and the world around them. The volume's four-part organization opens up space for both substantive contributions on areas of conceptual and empirical work as well as opportunities for reflection, integration, and coordination.

Part I

Foundations

1

Competence Reconceived

The Shared Enterprise of Knowledge Analysis and Interaction Analysis

Nathaniel J. S. Brown, Joshua A. Danish, Mariana Levin and Andrea A. diSessa

Knowledge Analysis (KA) and Interaction Analysis (IA)¹ are two approaches within the learning sciences that trace their primary lineage to opposite sides of the cognitive–situative divide. On the one hand, KA is deeply committed to the study of intra-mental phenomena, focused on understanding systems of knowledge. On the other hand, IA is deeply committed to the study of situated practice involving individuals, artifacts, and culture, focused on understanding systems of interaction. However, despite the apparent incompatibility implied by this history, there is much in common in their theoretical perspectives on knowing and learning and their suite of methodological and analytical tools. Over the last decade, a growing number of researchers have come to believe that these approaches are in fact deeply compatible and that a joint effort between KA and IA would represent a powerful synergy, a possible way to bridge the cognitive–situative divide and leverage the strengths of both approaches to improve education.

This volume is the result of a concerted attempt at capitalizing on synergy, bringing together researchers from both traditions to analyze data on knowing and learning while drawing on both approaches. This chapter lays out the case for the similarities between KA and IA with respect to goals, methodology, and theoretical orientation. Despite similarities, we also describe differences and points of contention between the approaches. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of why we believe a joint effort would be particularly productive for the design of learning environments.

Competence Reconceived: Knowing and Learning as Performance in Context

Although they emerged as independent research traditions within different paradigms, Knowledge Analysis and Interaction Analysis can both be viewed as efforts to rethink how we analyze an individual’s observable performances. We use the word performance to capture the broad range of activities in which people engage; in the learning sciences, these performances are the observable cognitive and physical actions of learners or experts in a variety of settings, including schools, workplaces, research sites, and everyday life. Both KA and IA treat such actions as performances in the sense that they recognize their nature as dynamic and responsive to activity as it unfolds. That is, both approaches recognize that a performance is never a simple public display of a static mental state, but rather a highly contingent and continually adaptive response that is shaped by many aspects of the individual’s history and by the context of action.

For the learning sciences, one crucial result of focusing on dynamic and contingent performances as a means of understanding knowing and learning is that researchers in these traditions have fundamentally transformed our conceptions of competence. Competence and its opposite – incompetence, deficiency, or naiveté – are treated not as static traits but as interpretations of performances that are situated in the immediate context, allowing the possibility for each action to be viewed (by both participants and researchers) as more or less competent based on both the physical and social context. The most poignant and likely most important cases of this reframing concern KA and IA researchers’ challenging conventional characterizations of learners as systematically deficient. For example, KA researchers have challenged descriptions of students as holding fundamental and entrenched misconceptions of scientific phenomena, discovering that such students demonstrate a highly contextualized understanding, giving both normative and non-normative explanations for the same phenomenon in response to shifts in attention. As another example, IA researchers have challenged descriptions of students as being academically or behaviorally deficient, discovering that such students demonstrate a highly contextualized ability, giving both competent and deficient performances of the same academic skill in response to shifts in the interactional environment.

The root of revised conceptions of competence and incompetence lies in equally dramatic shifts away from orthodox conceptions of knowing and learning. Instead of assuming that knowledge and ability to learn are stable, KA and IA researchers began to focus on when and where (in which contexts and interactions) students are either viewed or treated as competent, and how novice competency evolves very gradually into expert competency. For both perspectives, contextuality became a central concern, and the term acquired a very different and deeper meaning than the ways in which it had been previously construed. Rather than expecting differences in competence depending only on broad strokes of context – such as in school vs. out of school, or English Language Arts vs. Mathematics – these perspectives came to understand contextuality as operating on a moment-by-moment basis, highly sensitive to the changing details of the situation as participants interact with the environment and people around them. Striking differences in competence can manifest within the same setting or domain as a result of subtle differences in participants’ focus of attention, the social arrangement, or the materials at hand.

Reconceiving competence and accounting for the contextuality of knowing and learning was not the only impetus behind the development of KA and IA, nor even necessarily the most important. However, it represents a fundamental commitment of both approaches, deeply connecting with their theoretical perspectives, preferred methodologies, and recommendations for educational reform. Relevant to the purpose of this volume, this joint commitment is a wellspring of the convergent evolution that makes it seem possible and desirable to search for common ground between KA and IA, and to look for ways to work together.

Parallel Examples from Knowledge Analysis and Interaction Analysis

To highlight the KA and IA convergence concerning contextuality, we review two chapters from edited volumes that were published in the mid-1990s, each describing the important role of this deeper sense of contextuality in understanding and explaining the competence of a student. We associate the first chapter with the cognitive tradition and argue that it is, despite appearing many years before the term Knowledge Analysis came into use, an example of the KA approach. We associate the second chapter with the situative tradition and argue that it is, despite appearing several years before the term Interaction Analysis came into common use, an example of the IA approach. The first, “What do ‘just plain folk’ know about physics?” was written by Andrea diSessa in 1996 and published in The Handbook of Education and Human Development: New Models of Learning, Teaching and Schooling, edited by Olson and Torrance. It describes apparent changes in the conceptual understanding of an undergraduate student, J, in subtly different contexts. The second, “The acquisition of a child by a learning disability,” was written by Ray McDermott in 1993 and published in Understanding Practice: Perspectives on Activity and Context, edited by Chaiklin and Lave. It describes apparent changes in the reading ability of an elementary school student, Adam, in subtly different contexts.

Although both were and remain influential, neither of these chapters represents the first application of their respective approaches. The data underlying the argument in each chapter were collected many years prior (in the late 1970s and early 1980s), and had been previously analyzed in other published reports. Moreover, as described in the chapters in this volume on Knowledge Analysis (diSessa, Sherin, & Levin, this volume) and Interaction Analysis (Hall & Stevens, this volume), both of these traditions trace their roots even further back. Nor are these two chapters the most famous or highly cited examples of their respective approaches. Arguably, these might be the theoretical and methodological overviews provided by diSessa (1993) and Jordan and Henderson (1995). However, this pair of case studies provides a striking parallel, illustrating a common awareness of the importance of moment-by-moment contextuality, and arguing forcefully for a reimagining of the notion of competence.

J and “What do ‘just plain folk’ know about physics?”

J was a female university freshman enrolled in introductory physics, participating in a series of seven one-hour clinical interviews intended to probe her understanding of physics. She enjoyed and had obtained good grades in physics classes. In the excerpts below, J exhibits an apparent inconsistency in her understanding of what happens when a ball is tossed into the air. First, she provides a normative physics account of the toss, emphasizing by asserting twice that the only force acting on the ball during the toss is gravity:

J:Not including your hand, like if you just let it go up and come down, the only force on that is gravity. And so it starts off with the most speed when it leaves your hand, and the higher it goes, it slows down to the point where it stops. And then comes back down. And so, but the whole time, the only force on that is the force of gravity, except the force of your hand when you catch it. And, um, it … when it starts off it has its highest speed, which is all kinetic energy, and when it stops, it has all potential energy – no kinetic energy. And then it comes back down, and it speeds up again.

(diSessa, 1996, p. 720; emphasis added)

Then, after being asked what happens at the peak of the toss, J gives an incorrect but common account (after waffling about the role of air resistance) in which a second force acting on the ball is in competition with gravity, initially stronger, then fading away:

J: Um, well air resistance, when you throw the ball up, the air … It’s not against air because air is going every way, but the air force gets stronger and stronger to the point where when it stops. The gravity pulling down and the force pulling up are equal, so it’s like in equilibrium for a second, so it’s not going anywhere. And then gravity pulls it back down. But when you throw it, you’re giving it a force upward, but the force can only last so long against air and against gravity – actually probably more against gravity than against air. But so you give this initial force, and it’s going up just fine, slower and slower because gravity is pulling on it and pulling on it. And it gets to the point to the top, and then it’s not getting any more energy to go up. You’re not giving any more forces, so the only force it has on it is gravity and it comes right back down.

(p. 720; emphasis added)

Before the follow-up question about the peak of the toss, J appeared to be a competent physics student, giving a normative account of this phenomenon. Her subsequent account, however, appears to be deficient, invoking a common misconception, which was, in fact, previously documented and described as a (stable and pervasive) naive theory of mechanics (McCloskey, 1983). diSessa’s (1996) analysis of J illustrates one of the central phenomena uncovered by conceptual change researchers working in the KA tradition: students can produce both normative and non-normative explanations in response to what is ostensibly the same line of questioning, in response to subtle shifts in attention to different aspects of the phenomenon. The interviewer’s intervention, merely asking J to consider the top of the toss, was, in fact, designed to probe for the stability of her apparently normative model of a toss by subtly highlighting different aspects of the situation, leading to a reconfiguration of her model.

Adam and “Acquisition of a Child by a Learning Disability”

Adam was a male nine-year-old elementary school student, participating in a multi-year study in which he was videotaped in various settings, including classroom lessons and testing sessions, an after-school cooking club, and everyday life, to record naturally occurring examples of mental activities like attending, remembering, and problem solving. He was an officially designated Learning Disabled (LD) child. In the excerpts below, Adam exhibits what appears to be an inconsistency in his level of reading competence as he prepares bread in Cooking Club. First, Adam brushes off a mistake in which he and a friend, working together, add some ingredients in the wrong order and produce green cranberry bread, a behavior that is ultimately treated as a normal level of competence for these students:

When the others gathered around to laugh, he simply said, “So I made a goddamn mistake, so what.” The issue passed.

(McDermott, 1993, p. 287)

On a different day, when working alone, Adam once again adds some ingredients in the wrong order, giving the impression to a fellow student that he is farther along than she in preparing banana bread, a context in which she participates actively in positioning Adam as needing more than a normal level of assistance, perhaps deliberate...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I Foundations
• Part II Synthetic Analyses
• Part III Theoretical, Methodological, and Meta-scientific Issues
• Part IV Reflections and Prospects
• Index