Principal Investigator(1): Sylvia d'Apollonia, Dawson College and Concordia University.
Academic Members: Raymond Bourgeois, Stefan Muszynski
Collaborators: Ovide Bastien, , Susan Caldwell, Michelle Clabrough-Serano, Bruno Geslain, Joe Guerriero, Frederick Jones, Helen Wehden.
Participating Partner Organizations: Concordia University, Dawson College, the Dawson College Teacher's Union, Hartcourt Brace & Company, LDF Publishing Incorporated.
Potential Project Assets: $289,625
We propose to install and maintain a virtual learning environment, Dawson Place, using First Class (Soft Arc, Inc.) in which faculty and students can
We will develop and validate measures of knowledge acquisition, organization, and depth of processing to assess conceptual structures (and therefore conceptual change). Subsequently, we will investigate the influence of design features and student characteristics on the effectiveness of computer-mediated collaborative learning in mediating meaningful learning.
One of the obligations of College Programs is to ensure both the uniformity and diversity of their course offerings. However, circumstances often make meeting these opposite but complementary goals difficult to achieve. For example, there is often a wide diversity in both interests and expertise among faculty teaching a common course. While it is necessary to standardize on core course materials, it is equally necessary to expose students to the rich diversity among faculty. It is also necessary to provide faculty with a work environment that encourages faculty both to collaborate on a common syllabus and to express different approaches to the course content. Similarly, students also vary in their aspirations, prior learning experiences, skills, etc. While some college students are aspiring Rhodes scholars, other students do not have the prerequisite knowledge and skills necessary to succeed in college courses. Thus, post-secondary instructors must simultaneously provide to their students the security of what is known and the challenge of what is yet-to-be learned.
Employers in the future will also require their workers to be members of multinational teams working in virtual offices on collaborative projects. Thus, workers will have to communicate effectively "at a distance" despite cultural differences. Educational institutions are requiring their graduating students to demonstrate a facility with these new computer-mediated collaborative technologies. Some post-secondary institutions are also providing their faculty and students with opportunities to collaborate with faculty and students from other countries. However, such exchanges are often quite costly. Furthermore, students often initially experience difficulties when they travel to the "foreign" host country.
Virtual learning environments such as LearnLink developed at Emory and McMaster Universities offer a means of meeting these challenges. LearnLink is an intranet service designed to provide students and faculty with an ancillary virtual space, in which students obtain information from their course instructor, work on class-assignments, form discussion groups on a variety of topics, and network with students and researchers across the world via the Internet. LearnLink can also be used to collect data on student use, as well as a record of all communications on-line. Therefore, it allows for the unobtrusive collection of data for purposes of evaluating the efficacy of the technology. Instructors and tutors can also log on and provide assistance if work or discussion groups appear to be either not working effectively or need additional assistance. Thus, these new technologies, if used effectively, may help educators meet the needs of diverse student and faculty populations, and build strong communities of learners that interact well both locally and globally.
Many researchers consider that the underlying problem in science education is that many students do not acquire a meaningful understanding of science (Eylon & Linn, 1988; Cavallo, 1991; Alexander & Kulikowich, 1992). Students tend to rely on memorizing isolated facts and procedures rather than on relating ideas and constructing a coherent body of scientific knowledge. They also have extreme difficulty in abstracting key ideas, discerning relationships between ideas, and integrating
these ideas to their prior knowledge to form a coherent framework (Novak & Gowin, 1984; Dansereau, 1990). Concerns about fostering meaningful learning in sciences classes have lead to revisions in science curricula and the development of alternative pedagogies (d'Apollonia & Glashan, 1992; d'Apollonia, De Simone, Dedic, Rosenfield, and Glashan, 1993). Computer-mediated collaborative learning and problem-based learning are two new pedagogies that EvNet researchers are implementing (and evaluating) in an attempt to create a learning environment in which students become meaningfully engaged in classroom tasks.
Many researchers (e.g., Ausubel, 1963; Novak, 1988; Roth, 1990; Pintrich, Marx, & Boyle, 1993) have suggested that at least three conditions are required for meaningful learning to take place . First the classroom instructional context must encourage meaningful learning and conceptual change. Second, the learner must have the appropriate motivational attitudes and behaviours. Third, the learner must have the appropriate prior knowledge and cognitive skills and strategies. When any one of these requirements is lacking, meaningful learning does not take place(2).
Meaningful learning, in contrast to rote learning, is a process whereby learners actively wrestle with new ideas, evaluate their prior knowledge, and reconstruct their conceptual structures to include the new knowledge (Ausubel, 1963; 1968; Novak, 1988; Roth, 1990). Thus, meaningful learning requires that students change their conceptual structures. Conceptual structures are clusters of knowledge in long term memory specifying both a set of concepts and the relationships among them. They often have a hierarchical structure such that these structures describe more complex supraordinate concepts (Klauseimer, 1990).
One of the difficulties in doing research in the area of conceptual change has been the assessment of conceptual structures. Researchers often use performance on paper-pencil tasks as measures of conceptual understanding. However, these measures only assess whether students can accomplish the task, not how they do so. Students can accomplish by rote, complex tasks which many experts consider require understanding. Research in cognitive skill development provides a framework for developing measures which tap the multifaceted nature of conceptual understanding (Royer, Cisero, & Carlo, 1993). According to this framework, cognitive skill development can be characterized along seven dimensions. These seven dimensions are knowledge acquisition, knowledge organization, depth of representation, quality of mental model, metacognitive skills, encapsulation of performance, and efficiency of procedures. Assessment procedures are also suggested for each dimension. Since, we are presently concentrating on the first three dimensions, only these are described below.
In a previous research project, funded by PAREA, d'Apollonia, De Simone, Dedic, Rosenfield, and Glashan (1993) developed a method of analyzing students' verbal protocols which measured the students' knowledge acquisition, knowledge organization, and depth of representation of a given topic. They reported that an instructional strategy (Cooperative Concept Mapping), designed to enhance meaningful learning, significantly increased the biology students' knowledge acquisition and knowledge organization.
McKeachie et al. (1990) reviewed both indirect and direct methods of assessing cognitive structures. Indirect measures involve using key concepts to present a task to students, collecting the students' responses, and transforming the students' responses to proximity measures. These proximity measures are then scaled to yield a representation of the students' cognitive structures. Tasks such as word association, card sorting, and similarity ratings have been used as indirect measures of conceptual structures.
The ordered-tree technique is a promising indirect measure of conceptual structure that can be easily used as a classroom assessment technique. Students are presented with a matrix of key concepts and are asked to place them in an ordered list such that concepts having similar meanings are adjacent to each other. In the original procedure, students perform four cued trials (seven minutes each) with an eight minute interval between each trial. A computer program is used to generate an ordered tree for each subject. This ordered tree is an indirect measure of each student's cognitive structure and furnishes four measures, the degree of organization, the depth of hierarchical organization, the logical sequence, and the similarity to any other ordered tree. This technique has been used to investigate students' cognitive development in college courses (Neveh-Benjamin, McKeachie, Lin, & Tucker, 1986).
Direct measures involve asking students to arrange key concepts or textual material in a spatial diagram which indicates the relationships among the concepts as well as the overall structure of the topic. Students can also be asked to describe orally or in written form their understanding of a topic and this protocol is transformed into a spatial diagram (Novak & Musonada, 1991). These spatial diagrams or concept maps are subsequently coded and analyzed. Wilson (1994) describes a method of using nonmetric multidimensional scaling to code and analyze students' concept maps along three dimensions. One of the dimensions, measures the students' hierarchical organization and is strongly correlated to achievement. Schreiber and Abegg (1991) describe a method of scoring concept maps along two dimensions: propositional validity and hierarchical organization. Propositional validity is significantly correlated to students' formal reasoning; while hierarchical organization is correlated to students' conceptual understanding.
Subjects: The subjects will be college science students registered in the introductory biology course. The students' average age is 18 years and the population includes both males and females, native Canadians and immigrants.
We will subsequently analyze the data using Lisrel to build a model of conceptual understanding. Since we will have multiple measures in three different domains (physics, biology, and chemistry) we will attempt to use multitrait-multimethod techniques to validate the qualitative measures of conceptual structure. We will subsequently describe the instructors' and students' knowledge of the topics in multidimensional terms (e.g., knowledge acquisition, knowledge organization, and depth of processing). We will also describe their conceptual structures in terms of their similarity to the instructors' knowledge structures. Thus, we will develop qualitative measures of understanding that may be of use to other EvNet researchers.
All the Introductory Biology teachers will be using Place Dawson as a virtual learning space. All students (around 240) will be given accounts and be required to log on. The Biology instructors are collaborating in the production of modules for the virtual learning space. However, the instructors differ in the manner in which they design their space: some use hyper-linked web pages, some use extensive text-based materials, some use concept maps as navigational tools, and some use problem based learning.
Thus, we will investigate the influence of different instructional designs (web-, text-, graphic-, and problem-based components) on the ways in which students construct their knowledge of a topic. We will select a topic (e.g., molecular basis of water, cell division, genetics, evolution, ecology) and prepare four modules using each of the above design features. We will subsequently randomly assign students to the modules and assess their understanding of the topic using the multiple measures of conceptual structure described above. We hypothesize that design features of computer-mediated instruction influence the way in which students construct their understanding of the topic. For example, we hypothesize that text-based instruction will promote knowledge acquisition to a greater extent than the other methods; however, problem-based instruction and web-based instruction will promote greater depth of processing.
We would also like to subsequently explore other issues relevant to computer-mediated collaborative learning. For example, we would like to explore how individual students contribute to a "collective" understanding of a topic. We would assess students' individual understanding of a difficult topic (e.g., evolution). We would subsequently randomly assign students to groups and monitor their discourse as they completed the module on the topic. We would subsequently assess their collective understanding of the topic. We could address questions such as: Does the collective understanding of the topic reflect some students' prior understanding (or contribution) more than others? What factors (e.g., ability, language proficiency, motivation, status, gender) affect the influence that a given student has on a group's performance? Thus, we propose to begin a pilot study on the role of computer-mediated collaboration on the social construction of knowledge.
http://www.place.dawsoncollege.qc.ca/~compact
http://www.place.dawsoncollege.qc.ca/~sdapoll
http://www.place.dawsoncollege.qc.ca/~rbourgeois
and invite EvNet researchers to critique their design.
We will continue to publish our research in refereed journals.
Elizabeth Charles, a doctoral graduate student at Concordia University (Gary Boyd is the supervisor) is preparing her thesis proposal. In the winter and fall semesters (1999) she will be evaluating the effectiveness of Jacobson's Knowledge Mediator in effecting conceptual change and the role of spatial reasoning and epistemological beliefs. I will be working closely with her in modifying the instructional medium and developing the measures of conceptual change.
I will also continue to hire undergraduate (Amanda Foster) and graduate students (Mariam Kakkar) to attend research meetings, to prepare research materials (questionnaires), conduct literature searches, collect and analyze data, and help write up the results of the study. The student will be invited to co-author papers based on the project. The students will collaborate both in the design of the learning space and in the evaluation of its effectiveness. Thus we will train students in both in the development of computer based educational materials and in their evaluation.
Work done to Date:
The virtual learning space has been set up. Five biology teachers (four teaching a common course) and one physics teacher are using it with about 350 students. Three versions of the biology course have been set up:
We would like to add a fourth component in which the predominant design feature is problem-based learning. We would like to collaborate with Del Harnish in designing the problem-based component at Dawson College and perhaps in evaluating the effectiveness (and necessary prerequisite skills) of problem-based learning for students at different levels (college vs university, native English speakers vs second-language speakers). However, we have not progressed very far in the suggested collaboration.
We have pilot testing (and are revising) the teaching materials this semester by collecting student and teacher feedback on the course materials.
We are in the process of pilot testing the measures of conceptual structure (and therefore conceptual change). We are using these measures to evaluate the effectiveness of Dawson Place in effecting meaningful learning.
The Science Program at Dawson has made the students' acquisition of computer literacy a major requirement for graduation. Thus, all incoming science students will be required to take a computer placement test. Students who do not perform well will be encouraged to take a computer science course to update their skills. Students will be expected to be fluent in using the web, e-mail, Excell, Windows95 or 98, Word, First Class, Maple, and LoggerPro (for data collection). EvNet has been a major influence in promoting this change in the students' exit profile. The academic members and collaborators of this project have been heavily involved in this process. Now that the changes are in place and faculty have been provided with professional training we are ready to begin to evaluate the effectiveness of computer-mediated instruction. We are interested in collaborating with other EvNet researchers. We have developed a test site at Dawson College that can be used by other EvNet researchers. For example,
The development of validated qualitative measures of conceptual structures may be of use to other EvNet researchers for other projects..
Alexander, P.A. & Kulikowich,J.M. (1992, April). Learning from physics text. Paper presented at the American Educational Research Association, San Francisco, CA.
Ausubel, D.P. (1963).The psychology of meaningful verbal learning.New York: Grune & Stratton, Inc.
Cavallo, A. (1991). The relatonship between students' meaningful learning orientation and their mental models of meiosis and genetics. Unpublished doctiral dissertation. Syracuse University.
Chi,M.T.H., Glaser, R., & Rees, E. (1982). Expertise in problem solving. In R. Sternberg (Ed.). Advances in the psychology of human intelligence. (Vol. 1). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Assoc.
Dansereau, D.F. (1988). Cooperative learning strategies. In C.E. Weinstein, E.T. Goetz, & P.A. Alexander (Eds.).Learning and study strategies: Issues in assessment, instruction, and evaluation. San Diego: Academic Press, Inc.
d'Apollonia, De Simone,C., Dedic, H., Rosenfield, S., & Glashan, A. (1993). Cooperative Networking:A method of promoting understanding in the sciences. Final Report submitted to Programme d'Aide à la rescherche sur l'enseignement et l'apprentissage (PAREA), Gouvernement du Quebec. ISBN 0-9696728-1-0
d'Apollonia,, S., & Glashan, A. (1992).Cooperative learning in a CEGEP science class. Final Report submitted to Programme d'Aide à la rescherche sur l'enseignement et l'apprentissage, Gouvernement du Québec. ISBN 0-9696728-0-2
Eylon, B. S. & Linn, M. C., (1988). Learning and instruction: An examination of four research perspectives in science education. Review of Educational Research, 58, 251-301.
Frederiksen, C.H. (1975). Representing logical and semantic structure of knowledge acquired from discourse. Cognitive Psychology, 7, 371-458,
Frederiksen, C.H. & Breuleux, A. (1990). Monitoring cognitive processing in semantically complex domains. In N.Frederiksen, R. Glaser, A. Lesgold, & M.G. Shafto (Eds.).Diagnostic monitoring of skill and knowledge acquisition. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Assoc.
McKeachie, W.J., Pintrich, P.R., Lin, Y-G., Smith, D.A.F., & Sharma, R. (1990). Teaching and Learning in the college classroom. Technical Report No. 90-B-003.1. The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI.
Mosenthal, P.B. & Kirsch, I.S. (1992). Learning from exposition: Understanding knowledge acquisition from a knowledge model perspective. Journal of Reading, 35, 356:370.
Neveh-Benjamin, M., & Lin, Y-G. (1988, August). The effects of explicitly teaching an instructor's knowledge structure on students' cognitive structures, Paper presented at the American Psychological Association Convention, Atlanta, GA.
Neveh-Benjamin, M., & Lin, Y-G. (1989, August). Assessing the flexibility of cognitive structures created in university courses.Paper presented at the American Psychological Association convention, New Orleans, LA.
Neveh-Benjamin, M., & Lin, Y-G. (1994). Measuring and improving students' disciplinary knowledge-structures. In P.R. Pintrich, D.R., Brown, & C.E. Weinstein, (eds.). Student motivation, cognition, and learning. (pp 51-78). Hilldale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaun, Assoc. Publishers.
Naveh-Benjamin, M., McKeachie, W.J., Lin, Y-G., & Tucker, D.G. (1986). Inferring students' cognitive structures and their development using the "ordered tree technique. Journal of Educational Psychology, 79, 130-140.
Novak, J.D. & Musonada, D., (1991). A twelve-year longitudinal study of science concept learning. American Educational Research Journal, 28, 117-153.
Novak, J.D.(1988). Learning science and the science of learning. Studies in Science Education, 15, 77-101.
Novak, J.D., & Gowin, D.B. (1984). Learning how to learn. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Odom, A.L. & Barrow, L.H. 1995. Development and application of a two-tier diagnostic test measuring college biology students' understanding of diffusion and osmosis after a course of instruction. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 32, 45-61.
Pintrich, P.R.,Marx,R.W.,& Boyle,R.A. (1993). Beyond cold conceptual change: The role of motivational beliefs and classroom conceptual factors in the process of conceptual change. Review of Educational Research, 63, 167-199.
Roth, K.J. (1990). Developing meaningful conceptual understanding in science. In Beau Fly Jones and Lorna Idol (Eds.). Dimensions of thinking and cognitive instruction.Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Assoc.
Royer, J.M., Cisero, C.A., & Carlo, M.S. (1993). Techniques and procedures for assessing cognitive skills. Review of Educational Research, 63, 201- 243.
Schreiber, D.A. & Abegg, G.L. (1991, April). Scoring student-generated concept maps in introductory college chemistry. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the National association of Research in Science Teaching. Lake Geneva, WI.
Wilson, J.M. (1994). Network representations of knowledge about clinical equilibrium: Variations with achievement. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 31, 1133-1142.
Sylvia d'Apollonia (PI), Professor, Biology Dept, Dawson College and Adjunct-Assistant Professor, Centre for the Study of Classroom Processes, Concordia University has extensive expertise in designing collaborative teaching/ learning strategies (cooperative learning (CL), cooperative concept mapping (CCM) for college science students. She has held research grants from 1989, has published several articles in this subject and has given workshops to secondary and post-secondary faculty on CL and CCM. Her role in this research project is to coordinate the the Dawson projects.
Raymond Bourgeois has experience in the introducing information and communication technologies in the classroom. His role will be to coordinate the installation and maintenance of the virtual learning environment at Dawson College.
Stefan Muszynski has been involved in organizing workshops for faculty on the introduction of computer technologies in the classroom. He will participate in the the faculty development component of this project.
Ovide Bastien is a professor of economics and philosophy who has had extensive international experience. He is currently the Coordinator of North-South Studies at Dawson College. His role will be to coordinate the design and implementation of the virtual learning space for North-South studies.
Susan Caldwell has experience in remediation, cognitive psychology, and in web-based instruction for distance learning. She also has an interest in women and third world countries. Thus, she will be involved in the development of materials and courses for North-South Studies and provide advice on other projects.
Michelle Clabrough-Serano is the Director of Student Services at Dawson College and will provide computer facilities to students for connecting to "The Mother House" subject to availability.
Peter Deslauriers is a professor of economics and history who has participated in the exchange program with Denmark. He will coordinate the the design and implementation of the virtual learning spacefor European Studies.
Bruno Geslain is the Coordinator of Research and Development at Dawson College. In 1992, he established a teacher exchange program with Denmark through the Danish Cultural Institute. Several Dawson teachers have taken part in this exchange. Hewill co-ordinate the faculty development activities.
Joe Guerriero is the Dean of Preuniversity Studies and Physical Education at Dawson College. His role will be to present the project to all College bodies, encourage the adoption of this project, and make the necessary resources available to the projects.
Frederick Jones helped found North-South Studies at Dawson College and has promoted the use of electronic links (via internet) to maintain contacts with Latin America. Thus, he will be involved in setting up the virtual learning environment for North-South Studies.
Helen Wehden is a Learning Strategies Specialist at Dawson College. She has been interested in the use of shadow classes to help "at risk" students succeed in their studies. Shadow classes are learning skills classes for at risk students that run parallel to the academic courses. Her role will be to coordinate the addition of learning strategies modules to the virtual learning environment.
Dawson College is Quebec's largest English Cégep with a reputation for providing innovative education to a diverse population of students. Dawson College will provide the project with in-kind computer resources, services, and release time from teaching to a total of $ 251,455. The Dawson teachers' Union is Quebec's largest anglophone Cegep teachers' union. It will have a consultative role in evaluating the impact of technologies on faculty workload, the quality of the workspace, and on issues relating to faculty retraining.
Hartcourt Brace & Company, Canada will provide the researchers at Dawson College with materials from Solomon, E.P., Berg, L.R., Martin, D.W., & Villee, C. (1996). Biology. Saunders College Publishing for inclusion in The Mother House.
LDF Publishing Incorporated will provide the researchers at Dawson a substantial discount, $3.00 each for 600 copies of its software, Making Your Mark, for purposes of evaluation and adaptation in the project (retail value per copy $49.95)
(1) A description of the roles of the academic members and partners is given in Appendix I.
(2) EvNet researchers are already tackling the first two conditions. For example, Del Harnish is evaluating Problem-Based Learning while Philip Abrami and Brian Campbell are examining motivational issues concerning instructor and student use of computer-mediated learning. I therefore propose to concentrate my efforts on the measurement of conceptual change and provide Drs. Abrami and Campbell (if they wish) with a test site at Dawson College..