Lifelong learning and second-order learning objects

Current cultural, social, and economic trends challenge traditional concepts of learning and lifelong learning. This paper draws on the twofold nature of learning in a knowledge society and explores options for technological support. The concept of Second‐Order Learning Objects is introduced as a potential means to foster generative learning. Generative learning goes beyond that what is already known and extends or transforms the socially shared knowledge including its artefacts and practices. According to the notion of individual and social learning as a process of reflective action, the role of strategies and media for reflection and inquiry is stressed. This paper outlines the use of schematically represented strategies for learning and reflection and sketches important features of a pursuant modelling approach.     

Rise and decline of education systems: a contribution to the history of the modern state

If by ‘education systems’ we understand institutional units, constituted by common legal provisions, organizational structures, curricular goals and value foundations, the current period signals their decline. This indicates the decline of the modern nation state, which has characterized the political map of Europe for 300 years and gradually expanded to the other continents. Therefore education systems in their ‘state‐bound’ constitution must be identified as a category of ‘organized space’ within a given historical period—and not as a perpetual phenomenon. This understanding of the current ‘education system’ points the way to the concept of ‘educational spaces’ in periods preceding the modern nation state. It helps to identify the current stages of transition, indicated by the emergence of regional ‘educational spaces’, the expansion of private sectors, and the invasion of the globalizing markets into the ‘knowledge society’.     

Challenges to Comparative Education: Between Retrospect and Expectation

This article takes an autobiographical approach, which is applied in order to devise a panorama of Comparative Education, as it has developed during the past four decades. It identifies five "paradigms" which have been dominant in debates, inquiries and projects carried out by comparative educationists in various regions: East-West conflict (fifties and sixties); large-scale educational reforms (seventies); intercultural education in multicultural societies and gender issues (late seventies and eighties); transformation processes and post-modern "revolt" against the predominant theories of modernity (late eighties and nineties); and universalism versus cultural pluralism (nineties). The "changes' of these paradigms have been stimulated by developments and trends in the socioeconomic, political and cultural framework as well as by the continuous debates within the science. The current period seems to be primarily determined by the challenges to Comparative Education to define its response to the antagonism between universalism and cultural pluralism. Comparative studies may provide evidence for "reconciliatory" endeavour. They can, on the one hand, warn universalists of hasty "harmonisations", while, on the other hand, they can tell radical advocates of cultural pluralism that the commitment to one's ethnic, religious or national identity need and should not close the doors to the search for universal trends and generally acceptable values.     

The Impact of Expertise on Performance: illustrations from developmental research on memory and sports 1

Research on the impact of expertise on cognitive performance mostly conducted with adult samples has yielded impressive results, documenting the outstanding role of domain knowledge for memory and problem — solving skills. In this paper, the available research on the development of expertise in children and adolescents is reviewed in order to explore the respective roles of domain knowledge and basic intellectual abilities in determining exceptional performance. Most developmental studies conducted in different fields such as memory or sport seem to validate findings obtained from adult samples in that individual differences in domain knowledge account for the lion's share of variance explained in the performance variables. However, a closer analysis of effects reveals that individual differences in aptitude cannot be ignored and seem reliable even in homogeneous (expert) samples. Thus the developmental findings do not completely support the view proposed by Ericsson and colleagues that “deliberate practice” is the only predictor of exceptional performance. Instead, “threshold” or “partial compensation” models seem more appropriate to describe the interplay between aptitude and domain knowledge in predicting peak performance

     

A Reconsideration of Cognitive Load Theory

Cognitive load theory has been very influential in educational psychology during the last decade in providing guidelines for instructional design. Whereas numerous empirical studies have used it as a theoretical framework, a closer analysis reveals some fundamental conceptual problems within the theory. Various generalizations of empirical findings become questionable because the theory allows different and contradicting possibilities to explain some empirical results. The article investigates these theoretical problems by analyzing the conceptual distinctions between different kinds of cognitive load. It emphasizes that reduction of cognitive load can sometimes impair learning rather than enhancing it. Cognitive load theory is reconsidered both from the perspective of Vygotski’s concept of the zone of proximal development and from the perspective of research on implicit learning. Task performance and learning are considered as related, but nevertheless fundamentally different processes. Conclusions are drawn for the further development of the theory as well as for empirical research and instructional practice.

Fifth graders metacognitive knowledge: general or domain-specific?

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the structure of metacognitive knowledge in fifth grade pupils and its relation to school achievement. Since the structure of metacognitive knowledge is controversially discussed with little empirical evidence for either its domain specificity or its domain transferability, the debate remains somewhat hypothetical up to date. In theory it is assumed that the development of metacognitive knowledge begins highly domain and situation-specific and becomes more flexible and domain-transcending with practice and experience (Borkowski et al. 2000). As standardized measures to assess metacognitive knowledge of students in the age group under investigation were missing, newly developed instruments were applied to assess the domain-specific metacognitive knowledge in reading and mathematics as well as domain-transcending metacognitive knowledge. The influences of domain-specific and general metacognitive knowledge on school achievement in the two domains were analyzed. While findings on the structure of metacognitive knowledge indicate some degree of domain specificity, they also point out a strong relation between general metacognitive knowledge and domain-specific metacognitive knowledge. The cross-sectional relation between metacognitive knowledge and academic achievement were relatively low. Implications for future research will be discussed.     

Education for Democracy: reasons and strategies

According to social scientists Herfried Münkler in Germany and Colin Crouch in England, major developments in Western industrial societies — individualism, increasing social complexity, globalisation — present serious threats to basic requirements of stable societies and expose democracy to the corrosion of its socio-moral resources such as social trust and civic commitment to the public good. In order to grow and to flourish, the competences and capabilities that constitute these resources require systematic cultivation through educational processes.The school is the only institution that can provide the appropriate experience of a democratic life to all members of society. At present, however, schools are generally far from this goal. This article describes strategies for providing the experience of schools as democratic lifeworlds from an early age: classroom councils as tools for democratic self government and sites for sociomoral learning; projects of service learning in the community which can be successfully organized by these councils; and early experiences of civic engagement in community contexts as part of democratic classroom practice.     

Teachers’ beliefs, instructional behaviors, and students’ engagement in learning from texts with instructional pictures

This study investigated the relations between teachers’ pedagogical beliefs and students’ self-reported engagement in learning from texts with instructional pictures. Participants were the biology, geography, and German teachers of 46 classes (Grades 5-8) and their students. Teachers’ instructional behaviors and students’ engagement in learning from texts with instructional pictures were assessed by means of student ratings. Teachers’ beliefs about using texts with instructional pictures in their teaching were assessed by a self-report questionnaire. Results showed that the more teachers believed that students should be taught clear strategies on how to learn from texts with instructional pictures the more engagement was reported by their students. A multilevel mediation model showed that the association between teachers’ beliefs and students’ self-reported engagement was mediated by teachers’ perceived instructional behavior.     

La Mesure des Effets Pédagogiques des TIC : Pièges et Illusions du Découpage du Réel et de L'administration de la Preuve

La forte incitation actuelle de la part des autorités scolaires À recourir aux médias numériques en classe pose une nouvelle fois la question des arguments mis en avant. Et comme À l'occasion d'incitations antérieures (télévision scolaire, audiovisuel, informatique éducative), partisans et détracteurs s'appuient sur différents travaux qui attestent ou non de telle ou telle amélioration ou dégradation. Cette contribution se propose de montrer que les concepts et les modèles convoqués dans certains travaux, y compris les nÔtres et notamment le programme IN-TELE (Internet-Based Teaching and Learning), établissent entre les situations d'enseignement-apprentissage considérés comme classiques et celles qui sont supposées innovantes des distinctions parfois non pertinentes, qui se traduisent par des résultats outrageusement significatifs ou non significatifs. C'est donc le schéma modèle-observation-interprétation que nous interrogeons en suggérant que les outils de pensée disponibles et les procédés d'observation mis en m uvre aujourd'hui dans les différentes disciplines académiques qui s'intéressent aux usages pédagogiques des TIC contraignent, voire altèrent, notre compréhension des phénomènes éducatifs induits par les 'nouveaux' médias. Measuring the pedagogic effects of CIT: traps and illusions of cutting out actuality, and the

administration of proof. The strong current encouragement of school authorities to have recourse to digital media in the classroom poses once again the question of the arguments that have been advanced. And, as at the tine of earlier encouragement, (for school television, audiovisual, educational informatics), partisans and detractors rely on different works which support, or not, such-and-such a praise or detraction. This contribution attempts to show that the concepts and the models brought together in certain works, including our own and notably the IN-TEL (Internet-Based Teaching and Learning) programme, which establish between the teaching-training situations considered as classic and those which are supposed to be innovative, distinctions which sometimes are not pertinent, which are translated into results which are outrageously significant – or non-significant. It is, then, the schema of model-observation-interpretation that we question in suggesting that the mental tools available and the observational procedures used today in the different academic disciplines which are interested in the pedagogic use of CIT constrain us to see, may even, alter our understanding of the educational phenomenon introduced by the 'new' media. Analyse der pädagogischen Auswirkungen von ICT (Information and Communcation Technologies) : Fallen und Illusionen aus der Wirklichkeit, sowie die Beweisführung. Die gegenwärtig stark geförderte Umstellung des Unterrichtsmaterials auf digitale Medien durch die Schulbehörden, stellt erneut die bereits vorgebrachten Argumente in Frage. Und wie schon bei vorangegangenen Einführungen (von Schulfernsehen, Audiovision, pädagogische Informatik) beziehen sich Befürworter und Gegner auf verschiedene Studien, die den Nutzen oder Unnutzen attestieren. Dieser Beitrag versucht aufzuzeigen, dass herangezogene Konzepte und Modelle in verschiedenen Arbeiten - einschliesslich der unseren und insbesondere des Programms IN-TELE (Internet-Based Teaching and Learning) - sich zwischen klassischen Bildungssituationen und denen als innovativ angenommenen wiederfinden - auch wenn diese Unterscheidung nicht immer treffend ist. Wir stellen also das Schema Modell-Observation-Interpretation in Frage, indem wir suggerieren, dass die heute applizierten Denkmodelle und Observationsverfahren - der verschiedenen akademischen Disziplinen, die sich für den pädagogischen Gebrauch von ICT interessieren - für unser Verständnis des pädagogischen Einflusses durch Multimedia hinderlich sind, ja wenn nicht sogar deren Gebrauch nachteilig beeinflussen.