The 73rd Installment
The Slow Learning Curve
by Tsuyoshi Aziro,
Assistant Professor, Master Program of Innovation for Design and Engineering
The Slow Learning Curve
The PBL (Project Based Learning) presentation session ended in success. Up until now, time has gone by like a storm in the cold and snow with the hustle and bustle of December, Christmas, New Year, coming of age ceremonies, and entrance exams. But now it has passed, and there is a dramatic change of season for AIIT. Preparations for the coming spring are quietly beginning, and are part of my favorite season.
Then, there is this column series. This time, I think that I would like to try writing a little about my dreams for the future of learning after explaining that they are strictly at the research stage. Every day, I discuss with students, colleagues, and research partners about what and how they can learn to utilize in each of their own different fields, but also how to do it in the shortest time possible and as certainly as possible. Speaking for myself, I have repeatedly run workshops on disaster prevention, image software, programming, statistics, game design, idea conception, product photography, 3D CAD and so forth with an initial goal of “supporting an upgrade in basic academic ability.”
Each and every workshop was creative, and I exercised my own ingenuity in a variety of ways. Above all, everyone who took part was highly motivated, so the workshops were extremely fulfilling. But something was wrong. In the course of searching for things that contribute to education at a higher education institution, I lost sight of my own goal. In the process of this, I think that I made everyone around me feel quite uncomfortable.
Therefore, in 2014, I decided to temporarily suspend all the workshops and carry out a review. I would like to say that in the midst of my gloom, there are finally “a mass of clouds above the hill I am climbing,” but I found things that are more like thin, thin threads. One is perhaps to explicitly incorporate the application (transfer) of knowledge to different fields rather than to have it culminate in individual areas. The other is about the design of learning and games. In the past (for me), utilizing game design in education was to project knowledge (concepts and worldviews) onto phenomena (metaphors) to design teaching materials and curricula. However, it occurs to me that the ingenuity to utilize learned content in one’s own field was “self-service” by learners. Regrettably, I started to wonder whether something like “making knowledge correspond to reality” or so-called “reverse game design” can be done.
An outline of the concept at the present stage is as follows (see Figures 1 and 2).
Background: Higher order cognition is required to achieve the educational goals in higher education institutions of recent years (OECD, Japan’s Ministry of Education Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, etc.) (cannot be achieved with simple memorization).
Problems: The extraction of knowledge from phenomena in the practical learning used in professional schools is not easy (the learning content problem). In addition, because efficient education cannot be expected if higher order cognition is entrusted to learners, a systematic process for supporting cognition is required (the pedagogical problem).
Challenge: To develop a pedagogy that assumes higher order cognition and cognition can be changed consciously (control in the active aspect of metacognition) and make this a learning goal.
Hypothesis: By using knowledge transfer (high order transfer) between multiple phenomena that appear to be very different at a glance, it can be expected that learning content will be clarified as the contrast is clear and knowledge is limited (learning content). In addition, dialogue (three-way communication) through individual support for learners is used to support cognition (pedagogy).
＜Enter Figure 1＞
Figure 1 shows the learning problem. The practical education commonly utilized at professional schools requires the extraction of knowledge from phenomena. However, a phenomenon contains diverse knowledge to form a complete whole (A). Therefore, in the process of “reflection” often carried out aimlessly in the past, it is necessary to set an explicit goal (“metacognitive control” here) and ensure sufficient time (B). In addition, in the extraction of knowledge, it can be expected that defining the knowledge to be extracted will be easy through comparison with different phenomena rather than defining knowledge within a single phenomenon (C). Meanwhile, learners at professional schools already have adequate knowledge and experience. For example, if they can consciously distinguish “the correct solution to a phenomenon (for example, disaster prevention)” from “cross-disciplinary problem-solving methods in different phenomena (for example, disaster prevention and photography)” according to the phenomenon (metacognitive control), it can be expected that there will be that many more opportunities to be able to utilize existing knowledge (D).
＜Enter Figure 2＞
Figure 2 shows the pedagogical model. Until now, the process of extracting knowledge from phenomena in learning has been left to learners (E). Therefore, high order transfer (learning content) and three-way communication (pedagogy) will be used to support metacognitive control. The learning goal is metacognitive control (conscious distinction), not to acquire specific knowledge and metacognition (F).
I hope to resume the workshops this spring using these threads. Finally, I will write about a challenge that I want to solve in the future. According to Bloom’s Taxonomy, cognition is classified into the Cognitive domain (comprehension and analysis, etc.), the Affective domain (likes, dislikes, strengths, and weaknesses, etc.), and the Psychomotor domain, and it is said that certain views such as values which are fostered through many years of experience are influenced by both the cognitive domain and the affective domain. I also often fail and have hurt the feelings of others with negative statements without sharing context sufficiently. Naturally, these are things I think to be “Correct” from an educational point of view. And I can also make the critique that it is because the other party is undifferentiated in the “cognitive domain” and the “affective domain” in terms of Bloom, but it may be that I myself have been caught up in the affective domain of “Correct.” Although it is a bit of a leap, I would like to try delving into the cognitive and affective, the rational and the emotional in the future.
Finally, I feel the breath of spring.
While the cold still comes like a bite on my cheek,
Thinking of the steam of the earth and the shoots of the trees,
The mountains hazy in the pale crimson far away,
Stepping on the soft, gently sinking footpath
I go into the fields of spring.
