NORA DUFFY

SUSANNAH GOLDSTEIN

DANICA TAYLOR

Human Information Behavior in Educational

Institutions

Background

In Brown, Collins, and Duguid’s study (1989), the gap between classroom instruction and real, acquired knowledge is addressed.

Many methods of didactic education separate learning and use as separate entities, resulting in students who memorize formulae, historical timelines, or vocabulary – but who have no real sense of what they mean in a greater context.

In language acquisition, new words are learned most effectively in their natural contexts – by reading, or talking, or listening – not by rote memorization.

“ Words and sentences are not islands, entire unto themselves.”

Situated Cognition

Learning and Context

• The authors contend that all learning is much like language acquisition – it must happen in context.

Much like Dervin’s assessment that one swims in context “like a fish,” the authors believe that when a student is separated from the real-life applications of the desired concepts, the student is, in essence, flopping around on dry land.

Additionally, like Dervin’s theory of time/space bound knowledge, the authors contend that “a new concept, for example, will continually evolve with each new occasion of use, because new situations, negotiations, and activities inevitably recast it in a new, more densely textured form.”

Situated Cognition

So how, then, to view knowledge? As “Conceptual Tools”

Just as it might be possible to own a screwdriver and have no idea how to properly use it, so too are mathematical formulae or vocabulary.

Here the authors invoke Whitehead and his position on the difference between “mere acquisition of inert concepts and the development of useful, robust knowledge.”

It is useless to acquire a tool without learning how exactly to use it – gathers dust inside a toolbox.

Finally, just as two craftspeople might own the same exact tool and never use it the same way as each other, a physicist and an engineer might use the same formula to very different ends.

Situated Cognition

Enculturation as the key to learning

The way to properly acquire conceptual tools is to see them in their authentic activity.

School culture is a culture unto itself, with its own rules and knowledge-based goals, which in no way relates to the real world – the authors use the example of math word problems, whose language is only applicable to… math word problems. Thus, math students don’t really understand what math is *actually* used for.

In the real world, former students try to find the classroom cues, which are obviously, now absent.

The way to accomplish this daunting task of ensuring that students are embedded in the culture of the conceptual tools? Cognitive Apprenticeship.

Situated Cognition

Cognitive Apprenticeship

A concept attributed to Collins, Brown & Newman

Attempts to emulate in classroom learning what is so successful about the thousands-year-old practice of craft apprenticeships

Some might argue that students aren’t *ready* for this, but just as a tailor’s apprentice learns about fabric through ironing, there are always ways “at the ground floor” to see a cognitive tool in action

Schoenfeld: teaches strategy rather than subject matter

Process of cognitive apprenticeship Begins by teachers “providing

modeling in situ” and providing the structure of the authentic activity

When students gain more confidence, they start to become more autonomous, and dip a toe into the culture of the knowledge themselves

The students become more autonomous as the process continues

Situated Cognition

Characteristics of Cognitive Apprenticeship

Begin with a task embedded in a familiar activity Shows students that what they are studying is, in fact, useful Shows students that they can apply this knowledge to unfamiliar

situationsShow many applications and uses outside of the current one

Shows students that there isn’t one path or one application for anything – no learning is absolute

Give students the autonomy to “generate their own solution paths”

Allows students to develop the shared vocabulary of the culture, and to learn to work collaboratively

Allows students to become active participants in their intellectual growth

Situated Cognition

Benefits to Cognitive Apprenticeship in a Group Setting

Collective Problem Solving

aggregate knowledge group think allows for

new insights/solutionsDisplaying Multiple

Roles allows students to see

each other in the various roles, allowing for more reflection than one person playing every role

Confronting Ineffective Strategies and Misconceptions

groups can be more effective at drawing out misconceptions and ineffective strategies, and correcting them

Providing Collaborative Work Skills

vital to the workplace and individual growth

Situated Cognition

Background

Shirley Brice Heath is a MacArthur genius and a renowned scholar on linguistics, education, and many other cross-disciplinary topics

Heath was doing field work in “Trackton,” a predominantly poor African American community in the Southeast, and some of the community members asked her to study why their children weren’t performing in school (1970-1975)

Heath set out to discover why the black children and the white children responded so differently to the same classroom methods, where some of the classrooms were newly integrated, and the majority of teachers were white

Questioning at Home and at School

The Role of Questions in Development

Questions are often used in different societies to train children from a young age to interact verbally, and to direct their attention

Studies have found that when middle-class mothers speak to their preschool children, much of the utterances are questions

What Heath found is that much of the difference in performance between the black students and the white students was linked to questioning, and the types of questioning each student was used to at home, and in the student’s community

For Heath’s study, she looked at the Trackton children, and then how the classroom teachers were raising their own children for comparison

Questioning at Home and at School

Questioning in the Homes of Classroom Teachers

Many children were alone with caregivers/parents all day, so the questioning was also for the parent to make conversation with another person

When speaking to preverbal children, adults not only asked questions, but also answered them, to teach the children

“Do you want your diaper changed? Yes, you want your diaper changed.” “Did you lose your toy? Yes, you did- let’s find it.”

To teach a politeness formula, parents used interrogatives “Can you say thank you?” “What’s the magic word?”

Adults used questions as a means of teaching their children about the world, and to instruct them on formulaic responses

“What does a duck say?” Who is this in the picture?” “This is a dog. You’ve never seen a dog before, have you?”

Questioning at Home and at School

Effects of the Questioning in the Homes of Teachers

The questions posed by the parents trained the children to act as question-answerers, and to be “experts” about their own environments

Sometimes the children would feel like they simply needed to give an answer, and would invent one.

Adults used corrective questions more in public “Johnny! Do we act like that in a museum?”

Trained children to ask the “right” kinds of questions

Children were trained not to ask about sickness, not to ask too many questions, etc.

Questioning at Home and at School

Types and Frequency of Questions at the Homes of Teachers

Q1: When the questioner knows the information, and is asking it of the answerer (“How many bananas are on the table?” What color is grass?”)

A1: When the answerer has the information that is being requested (“What would you like for lunch?”)

U1: When no one has the information (“Look at the sky. I wonder what’s up there?”)

Types of Questions and Their Fre-

quency

Q1A1U1

Questioning at Home and at School

Questioning in the Homes of “Trackton” children

In many Trackton families, other adults were always present, so the adults made conversation with other adults

Most utterances were imperatives, and most questions were rhetorical

Children were taught not to answer questions from outsiders

Children were not seen as either reliable sources of information or conversational partners

Questioning at Home and at School

Common Training Techniques in Trackton

Analogies were the most commonly used training technique, in distinction to questioning.

“Your shirt looks like my cousin’s shirt” “Your eyes are the color of honey.” Trackton children were trained to see the likenesses and differences

between objects, people, and the world around them.Story Starters were used as a conversational technique,

both to elicit a story from the adult, and to train story telling techniques in the child.

Virtually no Q1 questions were used, which led to the classroom disconnect- the children were unfamiliar with the techniques, and the desired responses.

Questioning at Home and at School

Using Different Classroom Instruction Techniques

When classrooms simply relied on Q1 questions to teach, the Trackton children were unresponsive.

When opening up the pedagogy and using more open-format discussion, the Trackton children were very responsive, because they could use their skills of analogy and story-telling, and were less fearful of the line of questioning.

“What’s happening in this picture?” “Tell me what that was like.”

Moved from who, what, when questions to how and why questions

Questioning at Home and at School

Background of Study

ELIS: Everyday Life Information-Seeking Type of info-seeking that “people employ to orient themselves in

daily life or to solve problems not directly connected with the performance of occupational tasks.” (Savolainen, 1995)

Inner-city teens face so many issues (poverty, prejudice, etc.), and information can help make the process easier

Dr. Agosto (a Rutgers alumna!) and Dr. Hughes-Hassell wanted to find out where urban teens are getting their info from, and develop an empirical and a theoretical model

Everyday Life Information Needs of Urban Teens

Why aren’t they using information in libraries?

Urban youth view the library as “uncool and uninviting” (Yohalem & Pittman, 2003)

Teen girls turned to libraries last (after family/friends/teachers) – didn’t believe that libraries could help. (Poston-Anderson & Edwards, 1993)

When teens were offered assistance, they often didn’t know what to ask, and encountered problems using information systems (Julien, 1999)

Everyday Life Information Needs of Urban Teens

About the Study

27 high school students in inner-city Philadelphia Students were either in the Boys and Girls Club or were Free Library

Teen Leaders, so it was a bit of a skewed sample, which the authors acknowledged

Phase 1 of data collection involved written surveys, audio journals, written activity logs, and digital camera tours

Phase 2 of data collection involved group interviewsData conclusions: teens always consulted humans first,

and the ELIS needs of the urban teens surveyed matched up with identified ELIS needs of non-urban teens – need to study further to confirm

Everyday Life Information Needs of Urban Teens

Theoretical Foundations

Among the many authors whose work Agosto & Hughes-Hassell drew upon, one of the most important was Robert Havighurst, and his 1972 model of tasks of development in adolescence.

The tasks of development in adolescence are: adjusting to a new physical sense of self, adjusting to new intellectual abilities, adjusting to increased cognitive demands at school, expanding verbal skills, developing a personal sense of identity, establishing adult vocational skills, establishing emotional/psychological independence from parents, developing stable and productive peer relationships, learning to manage sexuality, adopting personal value systems, developing increased impulse control and behavioral maturity.

Everyday Life Information Needs of Urban Teens

Everyday Life Information Needs of Urban Teens

Urban Teen ELIS

Supports

The Emotional Self

The Reflective Self

The Physical

Self

The Creative

Self

The Cognitiv

e Self

The Social Self

The Sexual Self

Everyday Life Information Needs of Urban Teens

Empirical Model of Urban Teens’ Everyday Life Info Needs (correlated with Havighurst’s Developmental

Tasks)

Est. emotional and psychological independence

from parents

Dev. increased impulse control & behavioral maturity

Dev. stable & productive peer relationships

Dev. personal sense of identity

Establishing adult vocational goals

Adopting a personal value system

Everyday Life Information Needs of Urban Teens

Empirical Model of Urban Teens’ Everyday Life Info Needs (correlated with Havighurst’s Developmental

Tasks)

Adjusting to a new physical sense of self

Adjusting to new intellectual abilities

Adjusting to increased cognitive demands at school

Expanding verbal skills

Learning to manage sexuality

Information Needs for “Selves”

Social Self Friend/peer/romantic

relationships, pop culture, social activities, fashion, social/legal norms

Emotional Self Familial relationships, emotional

health, religious practiceReflective Self

Self image, philosophical concerns, heritage/cultural identity, civic duty, college, career

Physical Self Daily life routine, physical

safety, goods and services, personal finances, health, job responsibilities

Creative Self Creative performance, creative

consumptionCognitive Self

Academics, school culture, current events

Sexual Self Sexual safety, sexual identity

Everyday Life Information Needs