Design Experiments

Design Experiments Ann Brown

My high-level goal is to transform grade-school classrooms from work sites where students perform assigned tasks under the management of teachers into communities of learning (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1989; Brown & Campione, 1990) and interpretation (Fish, 1980), where students are given significant opportunity to take charge of their own learning. 

In the classroom and in the laboratory, I attempt to engineer interventions that not only work by recognizable standards but are also based on theoretical descriptions that delineate why they work, and thus render them reliable and repeatable.      -> Some central scientific criteria are adopted for pragmatic reasons

terested in the problem of learning to learn, a topic with an honorable history in psychology and education. Educationalists have been interested in the problem because of two stumbling blocks to lasting learning: (a) inert knowledge (Whitehead, 1916): students acquire facts that they cannot access and use appropriately; and (b) passive learning: students do not readily engage in intentional, self-directed action. These two problems are commonly regarded as diseases of schooling (Brown, 1977).

Do young children fail to use strategies because they do not think to do so, or do they suffer from a mediational deficiency such that strategic intervention would not help them anyway 

The players had absolutely no educational relevance in mind.

theoretical changes during the last 20 years brought with them increasing demands for more subtle methods to render overt the human thought processes that are usually covert      MMLA

 turns out not to be easy to train a learner to be strategic, to select cognitive activities intelligently, to plan, to monitor, to be cognitively vigilant, economical, and effective! And it is particularly difficult to do so in arbitrary contexts where a learner is attacking meaningless material for no purpose other than to please an experimenter. I believe it is for this reason that the decontextualized approach to metacognitive training was largely unsuccess- ful, and issues of the content and context of learning came to dominate the 1980s.

metacognitiion context

It is essential that we assess the aspects that our learning environment was set up to foster, such as problem solving, critical thinking, and reflective learning.

is sufficient to say that in addition to relatively standard outcome measures involving reading, writing, content knowledge, and computer competence, all of which improve significantly (Brown & Campione, in press), this project generates a vast amount of information that is not readily subjected to standard measurement devices.  

Diaries of children’s development:  The most famous of these studies is Darwin’s (1877) delightful daily record of his eldest son. “So-called” diary studies recording infant development were popular at the turn of the century (Kessen, 1965); primarily conducted by mothers, they generated a great deal of the early language development data. More famous was the work of fathers, with Piaget (1952) studying his three children, Laurent, Lucienne, and Jacqueline, following the lead of Binet’s (Binet, 1903) observations of his daughters, Madeleine and Alice.

Fr archival reasons, though, Schoenfeld is right and we continue to keep all notes, audio and videotapes, and transcripts on file so that our selection bias can be checked by a later indefatigable sleuth, even though we believe that this is unlikely to occur

I have never taken the Hawthorne criticism of my work seriously because of the very specific nature of the improvements obtained. If I were creating a true Hawthorne effect, I would not be able to predict which performance would improve. But in fact we see a close coupling of the cognitive activities practiced and the type of improvements shown.      -> Go a step further, as with Dan’s strategy of showing that non-predicted learning does not occur.

For example, the development of hierarchical structures in the students’ writing exactly paralleled the development of competence in using the file structure on the Macintosh interface.  

Quoting (Roethlisberger & Dickson, 193):  No longer were the investigators interested in testing for the effects of single variables. In the place of a controlled experiment, they substituted the notion of a social situation which needed to be described and understood as a system of interdependent elements. (p. 185)  Components are rarely isolatable, the whole really is more than the sum of its parts. The learning effects are not even simple interactions, but highly interdependent outcomes of a complex social and cognitive intervention. And this presents a methodolog- ical headache for traditional psychology, allergic as it is to multiply confounded experiments.

My own work on readiness has been influenced by the Vygotskian notion of a Zone of Proximal Development (Brown & French, 1979; Brown & Reeve, 1987; Campione, 1989; Campione & Brown, 1990), the distance between current levels of comprehension and levels that can be achieved in collaboration with other people or powerful artifacts.

Because of this skepticism, it is extremely important for the design experimenter to consider dissemi- nation issues. It is not sufficient to argue that a reasonable end point is an existence proof, although this is indeed an important first step.

Most important, the procedure slots neatly into a hallowed classroom niche (Cuban, 1984)

One major question facing contemporary designers is how to avoid repeating the Cuban-Dewey cycle: exhilaration, followed by scientific credibility, followed by disappointment and blame.