Brazilian Education – Week 5 – Class Notes

On Tuesday’s class we had the honor of listening to Professor Henry Levin, from Columbia University, will give a talk on his “Benefit Cost Analysis of the Accelerated Study in Associate Programs (ASAP)”

What I got out of the talk was that measures can be taken to improve education – and they are not highly complex or impossible to implement – students need a little bit of support – scaffolding. Tax payers, policy makers and budget administrators have to come to realize that the more you invest in education, the better off the country will be in the future not only as a society but also financially. Hard to believe but it makes complete sense – the better education one has, the higher salary the have, the more taxes they pay.

Notes from the reading are here…

Intro Teaching – Week 5 – Reading Notes

Some 4 am reading.

Learning Environments – Week 5 – Reading Notes

Reading:

LEARNING BY SELF-REGULATION AND SOCIALLY SCAFFOLDED ACTIVITY

Jean Piaget (1926/1951). The Language and Thought of the Child. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul(Ch. 1: The functions of language in two children of six. pp. 1-49.

Lev Vygotsky (1934/1986). Thought and Language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (Ch. 2: Piaget’s theory of child language and thought, 12-57.)

Notes:

Response:

“It was Piaget himself who clearly demonstrated that the logic of action precedes the logic of thought, and yet he insists that thinking is separate from reality.” Vygotsky pg. 53

It was very interesting to read Piaget’s own research followed by a critical analysis of it. From Piaget’s work, I was intrigued by how his methodical counting and categorization of behavior lead to such profound observations on the thought process of children. The separation between egocentric and socialized speech makes a lot of sense and resounds deeply since we seem to maintain these traces in our own thoughts as we grow. I wondered though how much the environment would affect the development of thought – would children from other cultures have a different pattern or speed in evolving logical thought?

I also found intriguing that the children knew not to ask each other ‘why’ or ‘how’ questions – these were directed to adults exclusively. So it struck me as odd when he generalized that children were apparently unaware of each other, or did not care if another child was not paying attention. It seems strange that he was able to reach this conclusion observing only the children at play, when a more casual and less logical behavior is expected. Also, the notion that if left alone a child would never develop logic also seems strange to me. I this is that case, who started teaching logical thought?

These impressions were confirmed to have foundation on the second reading where the author points to some contradictions in Piaget’s work. Although extremely valuable, sound and indoubtedly influential, it felt like fine adjustments or fewer generalizations could be made in his work. The main points were questioning this harsh separation between the mind and reality – which comes first or which dominates the other – or not. The point being that inner thought and the environment are intertwined, interdependent and cannot be evaluated if taken as separate and parallel phenomena.

BRAZILIAN EDUCATION – Reading Notes

Reading:

“ASAP Benefit Cost Report”, Levin 2013 (he’s going to talk in class next week 🙂

Notes:

Followup:

Investing in education pays back in future taxes.

Tech 4 Learners – Week 5 – Reading & Assignment

Reading:

“Four-Phase Model of Interest Development” Hidi & Menninger, 2006

Notes:

Assignment:

Submit 3 paragraphs synthesizing the article. Describe the big idea, articulate any questions or concerns it brings up for you, and reflect on how it might inform the design of a learning tool.

Bonus: can you think of a time when you yourself developed an interest in this way? After submitting, take five minutes to read the responses of other students (if you’re first, you might have to come back later”. “Like” anyone whose story is similar to your own experience.

Response:

The big idea I got out of this article is that levels of interest can be more easily categorized, described, measured and improved if the described Four-Phase Model of Interest Development is utilized.

The model’s main hypothesis is that the interaction of affect and knowledge along with positive feelings and opportunities are key factors in developing “well-developed individual interest”.

The model makes a distinction between “situational” and “individual” where the first involves interaction with the environment and the latter involves an internal initiation.

Each phase is further broken down into “triggered and maintained” and “emerging and well-developed”.

Situational Interest	Triggered	Short-term – affective & cognitive processing – aroused by external environment
Situational Interest	Maintained	Focused attention and persistence – project based learning, group work…
Individual Interest	Emerging	Predisposition to seek repeated reengagement – starts asking questions
Individual Interest	Well-developed	Enduring predisposition – develop own theories, seeks further sources of information – research

The model seemed to have quite a practical approach in offering a framework to measure levels of interest in learners. The way that affect and knowledge were intertwined, dependent and mutually feeding made tremendous sense to me.

A personal example: paragliding.

Triggered Situational Interest: a friend told me about paragliding and showed me some pictures. I felt like it was something cool to experience but knew nothing about it.
Maintained Situational Interest: we went to the launch site and I watched him fly and played around with the equipment on the ground
Emerging Individual Interest: I finally did a flight on my own and started asking more questions about flying, techniques to stay up in the air, risks and emergency procedures.
Well-developed Individual Interest: 30 years later, I am planning on taking lessons and buying my own equipment to start flying as a real hobby.

Note that in the past 30 years I did not seek to fly on my own.The interest level regressed to the situational interest since, when provided with the opportunity (trip to Cape Town for example), I engaged in a tandem flight.

While reading the article I also loosely correlated the 4 phases into:

Kindergarten- expose to information and hopefully we arouse interest
Middle and High School – engage in activities and explore interests
College/University – choose a field of study and engage repeatedly with subject matter
Graduate School / Doctoral Programs – enduring predisposition to reengage

This model could be used to assess interest generation potential of features within the design process of learning tools. You could design the tool to offer specific content/activities directed to each phase of interest the learner is at. You could classify learners into each phase and attempt to ‘promote’ them to the next level with the appropriate actions.