Classroom Lessons. Kate McGilly (Ed). MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1996 (Cloth 1994). No. of pages 317. ISBN 0-262-63168-7. Price US $17.50 (Paperback).
✍ Scribed by Susan L. Golbeck
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1997
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 68 KB
- Volume
- 11
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0888-4080
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
This edited volume provides an excellent overview of some particularly innovative attempts to apply theory and research in cognitive science to problems of elementary and secondary education. The contributing authors in this volume all received funding from the James S. McDonnell Foundation's Program in Cognitive Studies for Educational Practice targeted toward the improvement of current educational practice. The eight substantive chapters describe diverse projects, all of which offer something of interest to cognitive and developmental psychologists interested in schooling.
The ten chapters, including an introduction by McGilly and a concluding chapter by Bruer, are organized into three sections: Domain-Specific Applications, Across the Curriculum Applications, and Classrooms as Learning Communities. The eight content chapters are well written, informative and provide an excellent orientation to the use of cognitive (and, I would add, developmental) psychology to transform educational practice. Each chapter provides a description of a project, including the conceptual foundations, actual implementation, some form of evaluation, and speculation on implications of the work for theory development and subsequent program innovations. The projects themselves vary considerably in their duration and level of development. Those with longer histories (e.g., Griffin et al.; the Vanderbilt group) seem to have more to say about the complexities of the research practice relationship. The book is aimed at a wide audience including researchers and educational policy makers. Often, attempts to reach such diverse groups are superficial or trivial. It is to the credit of the individual contributors and especially the editor that this volume escapes this trap.
Several themes are evident across the chapters. First, there is an explicit recognition that knowledge is actively constructed by each learner and educators should make use of this principle through a guided discovery approach to instruction. Second, traditional curriculum objectives are re-evaluated to focus on meaningful real-world knowledge and problem solving. Third, the social environment of the classroom must be organized to promote knowledge construction in the context of meaningful social activity.
Chapter 1, by Kate McGilly, is an introduction. It provides an overview of key terms in cognitive psychology and a brief description of the social context for the work described in the major substantive chapters. This chapter should be particularly useful to practitioners lacking an extensive background in cognitive psychology or psychologists unfamiliar with contemporary problems in elementary and secondary education.
Chapters 2, 3 and 4 address domain-specific applications of cognitive psychology to the classroom. In Chapter 2, by Sharon A. Griffin, Robbie Case and Robert Siegler, an instructional program for kindergartners in mathematics is described. This instructional program appears to be successful in fostering young children's understanding of a central cognitive structure underlying numerical understanding and the authors make a compelling case for why this learning occurred. This is not simply a patchwork of successful teaching techniques. Rather, these instructional strategies are well grounded in research on instruction and cognitive change.
A different domain of knowledge, physics, is the focus of Chapter 3. Hunt and Minstrell describe an innovative approach to teaching high school physics. The goal of this instructional program is to expose students to situations and questions that will help them develop