Generative Learning Theory,Paradigm Shifts,and Constructivism in Educational Psychology: A Tribute to Merl Wittrock

This appreciation of Wittrock's contributions to educational psychology suggests that his 1974 article describing generative learning theory was remarkably prescient. In that article Wittrock set the stage for the subsequent paradigm shift from cognitive to constructivist approaches to instruction. Furthermore, his suggestion that schools were the most appropriate contexts for testing learning principles is widely shared among contemporary educational psychologists; it is noteworthy that Wittrock also urged testing these principles in training sites. Finally, Wittrock also emphasized the importance of transfer, prior learning, and the interaction of student characteristics and instructional methods in his generative learning approach, themes that are as important 35 years later as they were when the article was first published. These considerations and Wittrock's dedication to the profession confirm that he was the complete educational psychologist.     

Generative Learning Processes of the Brain

This article presents a functional model of learning from teaching that, in contrast to structural models of schemata and knowledge representation, focuses on the neural and cognitive processes that learners use to generate meaning and understanding from instruction. Wittrock's model of generative learning (Wittrock, 1974a, 1990) consists of four major processes: (a) attention, (b) motivation, (c) knowledge and preconceptions, and (d) generation. Each of these processes involves generative brain functions studied in neural research and generative cognitive functions studied in knowledge-acquisition research. In this model of generative learning, the brain is a model builder. It does not transform input into output. Instead, it actively controls the processes of generating meaning and plans of action that make sense of experience and that respond to perceived realities. Within this framework, teaching becomes the process of leading learners to use their generative processes to construct meanings and plans of action.     

Hope for Children Trapped in Failing Schools: The Promise of Crawford v. Davy

On October 4, 2007, a trial level court in New Jersey dismissed Crawford v. Davy, a class action lawsuit filed on behalf of 60,000 schoolchildren throughout the state seeking the court's authority to leave schools that fail to educate their students. By filing suit, plaintiff schoolchildren had hoped to be transferred to an alternative successful public or private school utilizing their pro rata share of state and local school funds to subsidize the transfer. Now, the dismissal of Crawford consigns these children to poor inadequate neighborhood schools indefinitely. If the dismissal of Crawford v. Davy is not reversed on appeal, it will not only extinguish the hope of plaintiff schoolchildren to receive an equal and adequate educational opportunity, but could threaten the right of a thorough and efficient education guaranteed by the State Constitution and reverse gains achieved over the past 40 years in New Jersey's education jurisprudence. This article places Crawford in the context of the state's enduring legal struggle to equalize educational opportunities and discusses its claims and purposes in relation to that history. The article then addresses the significance of the Crawford dismissal on the state's legal precedents, especially rulings in the on-going Abbott v. Burke equity funding litigation. Finally, the article concludes with a prediction of the impact that Crawford's dismissal may pose for the larger equity/adequacy litigation movement playing out across the country. For the moment, the hope of 60,000 plaintiff schoolchildren is diminished. Only time and New Jersey's appellate courts will dictate whether their hope for an equal and adequate education shall survive.     

Our Teen Age Boys and Girls by Lester and Alice Crow. McGraw-Hill Book Company. 353 pp. $3.00

This article critique reflects on “Standards for a New Century: Educating U.S. Students to Compete in the Global Economy,” which was published in 2009 in the Carnegie Reporter, a publication of The Carnegie Corporation of New York. The article, written by Carnegie staff writer Karen Theroux, explained the need for Common Core State Standards, one of the Obama administration's educational reforms. This critique analyzes Theroux's article from the perspective of an educational researcher and evaluates Theroux's responsible use of research while informing readers about the Common Core State Standards reform. By analyzing four major concerns, this critique illustrates the author's misuse of research, therefore, informing readers about the reform in a biased manner.     

Donald J. Trump and the rhetoric of ressentiment

ABSTRACT

This essay contributes to and reframes the preliminary scholarly assessments of President Donald J. Trump's appeals to rage, malice, and revenge by sketching the rhetorical dimensions of an underlying emotional-moral framework in which victimization, resentment, and revenge are inverted civic virtues. I elaborate on the concept of ressentiment (re-sentiment), a condition in which a subject is addled by rage and envy yet remains impotent, subjugated and unable to act on or adequately express frustration. Though anger and resentment capture part of Trump's affective register, I suggest that ressentiment accounts for the unique intersection where powerful sentiments and self-serving morality are coupled with feelings of powerlessness and ruminations on past injuries. Thus, shifting focus from the rhetoric of resentment to that of ressentiment explains how Trump is able to sustain the affective charge of animus without forfeiting the moral high ground of victimhood to his audience's “oppressors”—Democrats, the press, criminals, immigrants, foreign adversaries, welfare recipients, the Me Too movement, “globalists,” and racial Others.     

Alternative Frameworks and the Concept of Task. Cognitive Constraints in Pupils' Interpretations of Teachers' Assignments

Halldén, O. 1988. Alternative Frameworks and the Concept of Task. Cognitive Constraints in Pupils' Interpretations of Teachers' Assignments. Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research 32, 123‐140. If we are to understand a learning outcome, we have to take into consideration the learner's conception of the learning task. Task is here defined as the means a teacher utilizes when trying to communicate an assignment to a pupil. The pupil's interpretation of such a task is called a problem or a project. It is the pupil's attempts to solve such problems or to complete such projects that account for the learning that takes place. Two qualitatively different types of problem are identified: procedural and content‐related. Factors influencing pupils' task interpretation are discussed and implications for research on pupils' alternative frameworks are considered. One such implication is the identification of two different levels of alternative frameworks.     

Advice on a rough draft: The Pickwick papers' ‘Mr. Weller the Elder delivers some critical sentiments respecting literary composition’1

The author discusses a scene from Dickens's The Pickwick papers wherein the novelist describes and dramatises an inexperienced but earnest and determined young man writing a Valentine's letter under the tutelage of a confident yet incompetent tutor, his father. The author, presenting Dickens's marvellous comic scene, compares Sam Weller's difficulties and satisfactions, as well as his weary trailing off, to those of the author's students at a community college in Brooklyn, New York.     

“Poetry? Of course we do it. It's in the National Curriculum.” Primary children's perceptions of poetry

What can listening to children's ideas about poetry teach us? This article considers ways in which exploring primary‐aged students' perceptions of poetry can inform teachers' work with children. Using strategies from earlier studies in secondary schools, a small‐scale project with Year 6 students revealed their complex and sometimes contradictory ideas. These ideas reflect some of the current debates around the nature of poetry and ways of teaching it. The children's ideas are analysed with critical attention paid to the impact of the view of literacy in England's National Literacy Strategy on the teaching and learning of poetry.     

Wentzel,Kathryn R & Brophy,Jere E (2014) Motivating students to learn Routledge (New York & London) isbn 978‐0‐415‐89352‐7 301 pp £39.99 http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415893527/

The authors of Motivating students to learn offer teachers evidence‐based classroom strategies to motivate their students. This fourth edition draws comprehensively on current psychological and educational research on student motivation and extrapolates this to implications for teaching practice in the classroom. This book's aim is primarily school teachers but it may also be of interest to people in further and higher education. If you think this book's content could be relevant, I suggest you borrow a copy to decide whether it's worth buying. Sara Hammer     

Mrs. Klein and Paulo Freire: Coda for the Pain of Symbolization in the Lifeworld of the Mind

The preceding symposium articles speculate on the psychosocial dynamics of discrimination as reverberating with grief, mourning, melancholia, and denial. They invite a psychoanalytic paradox on the fate of inchoate loss and its complex relation to oppression and depression: constellations of attachment to loss met with its social and psychical disavowal render inexpressible to the other the work of mourning and drive its myriad expressions. A different way of putting the dilemma is that grief calls upon symbolic equation (collapse of subject with object) and the pain of symbolization (contingency without certainty). Deborah Britzman's coda reads the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein's consideration of depression as the origin of the human condition with Paulo Freire's call to educators for a radical humanization to release oppression. Between Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Klein's Love, Guilt, and Reparation, the coda traces a signifying loss that attests to the entwined roots of the self/other matrix with attention to the needed fluctuations within interiority and exteriority, loss and the depressive position, illness and health, and psychoanalysis with pedagogy.     

Anatomical Sciences Education Vol. 7, Issue 2, 2014 Cover Image

ON THE COVER: An interesting method to emphasize student collaborative learning in the anatomy course has been developed by Dr. Emeka Anyanwu from the University of Nigeria. A board game entitled Anatomy Adventure encourages and motivates students to participate in the learning process, enhances learning outcomes and knowledge retention. In this picture students in Dr. Anyanwu's anatomy class enjoy playing Anatomy Adventure. Details of the game's design, results of students' perceptions of the game, and a summary of the learning outcomes are reported in this issue of ASE.     

Of dogs and martyrs. Sherrington,Richards, Pavlov and Vygotsky

I. A. Richards' psychological account of the poet's experience was central to his The principles of literary criticism. He aimed to ‘rehabilitate’ English criticism through perspectives gained from scientific discoveries in psychology after the Great War. A chief source for this was the work of the neurophysiologist, C. S. Sherrington. The title of this piece refers to a remark made by Sherrington to the Russian physiologist, Ivan Pavlov: ‘the animal [a dog] seemed to me in a state of persecution best comparable with that of a Christian martyr’. Paradoxically, Vygotsky retold the story within a critique of Pavlov's limiting accounts of human behaviour. Richards' picture of the complexity of the poet's experience—the balancing of conflicting impulses—also relied on an essentially reductive account of behaviour, in which the ‘extraordinary’ quality of the poet's experience is traceable to the workings of the brain and the nervous system. In contrast, Vygotsky offered a powerful picture of semiotically mediated consciousness, dependent on human agency and purpose. The story restores neglected European historical perspectives to a key development in English studies.     

CRITICAL LISTENING AND THE DIALOGIC ASPECT OF MORAL EDUCATION: J.F. HERBART'S CONCEPT OF THE TEACHER AS MORAL GUIDE

In his central educational work, The Science of Education (1806), J.F. Herbart did not explicitly develop a theory of listening, yet his concept of the teacher as a guide in the moral development of the learner gives valuable insight into the moral dimension of listening within teacher‐student interaction. Herbart's theory radically calls into question the assumed linearity between listening and obedience to external authority, not only illuminating important distinctions between socialization and education, but also underscoring consequences for our understanding of the role of listening in educational relations. In this inquiry, Andrea English argues that critical listening in teaching contributes to the moral education and development of the learner. To do this, she examines Herbart's view of the teacher's task as a moral guide in the realm of moral education. English contends that reexamining Herbart's theory of education (a theory that is, for the most part, no longer discussed in Anglo‐American educational philosophy) can productively inform our understanding of moral education in democratic and pluralist societies.     

Language,thought and reality: a comparison of Ferdinand de Saussure's Course in General Linguistics with C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards' The Meaning of Meaning

This paper returns to two key texts in the history of linguistic theory: Saussure's Course in General Linguistics (1916) and Ogden and Richards' The Meaning of Meaning (1923). While Saussure's linguistic model is dialectical and synthetic, with the two elements of the linguistic sign (signal and signification) being compared to the two sides of a sheet of paper, Ogden and Richards' is tripartite and analytic, with the three elements involved in the language situation (word, thought and thing) being represented as the three points of a triangle. Moreover, while Saussure sees language as turning in upon itself, with the sign referring not to things in an extra‐linguistic reality but to other signs within the same linguistic structure, Ogden and Richards see language as referring beyond itself, to a reality outside language. These differences are related to differences in how the human mind is conceived: while Saussure sees thought as embedded in language, and while he invests the mind with the power to order and regulate the chaos inherent in language, Ogden and Richards, writing very much in the wake of the new psychology of stimulus–response behaviourism, separate thought from language, and divest the mind of any power to resist ‘the power of words’. Interestingly, though, Ogden and Richards show signs of an early cognitivism, which raises the question of whether contemporary cognitive science is perhaps more indebted to the stimulus–response paradigm than it would care to admit.     

R.S. PETERS AND THE CONCEPT OF EDUCATION

In this essay Kelvin Beckett argues that Richard Peters's major work on education, Ethics and Education, belongs on a short list of important texts we can all share. He argues this not because of the place it has in the history of philosophy of education, as important as that is, but because of the contribution it can still make to the future of the discipline. The limitations of Peters's analysis of the concept of education in his chapter on “Criteria of Education” are well known. In the chapter on “Education as Initiation,” however, Peters offered a synthetic sketch of education that, Beckett argues, points us toward a more comprehensive definition of education, one which, he maintains, can be accepted by all philosophers, regardless of the tradition they work in.     

Measuring Beliefs in Centimeters: Private Knowledge Biases Preschoolers' and Adults' Representation of Others' Beliefs

A novel task, using a continuous spatial layout, was created to investigate the degree to which (in centimeters) 3‐year‐old children's (N = 63), 5‐year‐old children's (N = 60), and adults' (N = 60) own privileged knowledge of the location of an object biased their representation of a protagonist's false belief about the object's location. At all ages, participants' knowledge of the object's actual location biased their search estimates, independent of the attentional or memory demands of the task. Children's degree of bias correlated with their performance on a classic change‐of‐location false belief task, controlling for age. This task is a novel tool for providing a quantitative measurement of the degree to which self‐knowledge can bias estimates of others' beliefs.     

Schooling in Capitalism: Navigating the Bleak Pathways of Structural Fate

In this review essay Kevin Murray and Dan Liston examine three texts in what this symposium has deemed the recent resurgence in neo‐Marxist accounts of schooling: David Blacker's The Falling Rate of Learning and the Neoliberal Endgame, Mike Cole's Marxism and Educational Theory, and John Marsh's Class Dismissed. Murray and Liston argue that Blacker, Cole, and Marsh provide a much‐needed structural delineation of schooling in capitalist society. All three works have substantial merit and are in need of minor adjustments. Blacker's vision is telling and chilling but may need some fine‐tuning; Cole's defense of Marxism is commendable but tends toward the disembodied abstract; and Marsh's text capably highlights educationists' blinders but seems to miss elements of a critical structural account. While recognizing real limitations on transformative education under capitalism, Murray and Liston nevertheless elaborate a variation of the radical humanist project. It is their skeletal attempt at an educationally and morally defensible reparative theory.     

Kohlberg and Piaget: Aspects of their Relationship in the Field of Moral Development

Abstract:

Kohlberg's system of moral judgment development has some important links with Piaget's work on moral judgment, though Piaget's work is not the only influence on Kohlberg's ideas. Piaget's system of moral growth is briefly examined, and the extent to which subsequent research has validated it, is noted, thus placing Kohlberg in a historical context. The ways in which Kohlberg extends or departs from Piaget's system of moral growth are examined. The concept of stages and the nature and processes of stage development are discussed, and in this context the relationship between Kohlberg's moral development and Piaget's cognitive development is examined. It is concluded on the basis both of logic and evidence that the relationship, although complex rather than isomorphic, is likely to hold considerable potential for future research.