Cognitive studies meet education A NEW FIELD OF APPLIED RESEARCH TO EDUCATION AND ITS PERIMETER

Its meaning

Its reasons

A BIT OF HISTORY

What’s new

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Birth of a new field

Policy-making needs science. (Alberts 2010)

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2009- 2010

2002- 2006 2008

2000- 2005 2011

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Birth of a new field

Mind, Brain, Education

2003 Conference at the Accademia Pontificia

2006-2012 Annual Summer School, Biannual Conference

2007 MBE International Society and Journal

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USA:

Harvard Graduate School of Education (Gardner & Fischer)

MBE Teachings in Graduate Schools in the USA,(Texas Austin, …)

McDonnel Foundation (Bruer)

Internationally:

1999-2006 OECD-CERI: Brain and Learning Project (Della Chiesa)

Battro (Argentina), Koizumi (Japan), Goswami (UK), Spitzer (Germany), Léna (France), Dehaene (France), Wolf (USA), Geake (Australia), Strauss (Israel), …

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Birth of a new field

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Educational Neuroscience

Trends in Neuroscience and education Journal (Spitzer)

Educational Neuroscience UK

Cambridge University Graduate School (Goswami)

Center for Educational Neuroscience – Birbeck, IOE, UCL (Bell, Thomas, Butterworth, …)

Neuroscience & Education USA

Vanderbilt University (McCandliss)

Oregon Institute of Neuroscience (Posner)

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Birth of a new field

Neuroeducation UK

2000-2008 Seminar TLRP

2011 Royal Institution

Bristol (Howard-Jones), UCL London (Frith, Blakemore, Butterworth, …), Cambridge (Goswami), …

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Neuroeducation Europe:

EARLI Sig 22 Neuroeducation (Biannual Conferences)

Neuroeducation Quebec:

Neuroeducation Quebec – Conferences, Journal

Neuroeducation USA

Dana Foundation Art & Brain Initiative/Neuroeducation

Johns Hopkins University Graduate School (Hardiman)*

NY University (Brabeck)

SfN – Neuroeducation Summit (Carew)

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Birth of a new field

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Science of Learning Centers Program NSF USA

Life Center (Bransford, Kuhl, …)

…

New Learning Sciences

Istitute for learning and brain sciences, Washington (Kuhl, Meltzoff)

Learning Sciences

ISLI International Society of the learning sciences (Sawyer)

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Perimeter

Biology Cognitive science

Education Technology

Neuroscience Cognitive psychology, evolutionary psychology

Educational psychology

Computer science

Cognitive neuroscience

Information sciences

Social sciences Robotics

Genetics neuroscience

Developmental psychology

Learning and transfer studies

Emerging technologies

Social psychology, anthropology

Instructional design, wisdom of practice

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¤  (Fischer et al. 2007)

¤  Human beings are unique in their ability to learn through

schooling and diverse kinds of cultural instruction.

¤  Education plays a key role in cultural transformations: it allows members of a society, the young in particular, to efficiently acquire an ever-evolving body of knowledge and skills that took thousands of years to invent.

¤  It is time for education, biology, and cognitive science to join together to create a new science and practice of learning and development. The remarkable new tools of biology and cognitive science open vast possibilities for this emerging field.

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¤  (Meltzoff et al. 2009)

¤  Homo sapiens is also the only species that has developed formal ways to enhance learning: teachers, schools, and curricula.

¤  Neuroscientists are beginning to understand the brain mechanisms underlying learning and how shared brain systems for perception and action support social learning. Machine learning algorithms are being developed that allow robots and computers to learn autonomously. New insights from many different fields are converging to create a new science of learning that may transform educational practices.

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¤  Learning sciences is an interdisciplinary field that studies teaching and learning.

¤  Learning scientists study learning in a variety of settings, including not only the more formal learning of school classrooms but also the informal learning that takes place at home, on the job, and among peers. The goal of the learning sciences is to better understand the cognitive and social processes that result in the most effective learning, and to use this knowledge to redesign classrooms and other learning environments so that people learn more deeply and more effectively.

¤  The sciences of learning include cognitive science, educational psychology, computer science, anthropology, sociology, information sciences, neurosciences, education, design studies, instructional design, and other fields.

¤  (Sawyer 2008, p. xi)

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¤  (Bransford et al 2000, p. 4) ¤  Research from cognitive psychology has increased understanding of the

nature of competent performance and the principles of knowledge organization that underlie people's abilities to solve problems in a wide variety of areas

¤  Developmental researchers have shown that young children understand a great deal about basic principles of biology and physical causality, about number, narrative, and personal intent,

¤  Research on learning and transfer has uncovered important principles for structuring learning experiences that enable people to use what they have learned in new settings.

¤  Work in social psychology, cognitive psychology, and anthropology is making clear that all learning takes place in settings that have particular sets of cultural and social norms and expectations and that these settings influence learning and transfer in powerful ways.

¤  Neuroscience is beginning to provide evidence for many principles of learning that have emerged from laboratory research, and it is showing how learning changes the physical structure of the brain and, with it, the functional organization of the brain.

¤  Emerging technologies are leading to the development of many new opportunities to guide and enhance learning that were unimagined even a few years ago.

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Perimeter

Knowledge & Design For better learning

Everywhere

Understanding of cognitive processes

Design better environments for learning

Learn more deeply

Learning that takes place at home

Understanding of social processes

Learn more effectively

At school

Underlying learning

On the job

Among peers

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¤  Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones. The intellectual activity that produces material artifacts is no different fundamentally from the one that prescribes remedies for a sick patient… The natural sciences are concerned with how things are …. Design, on the other hand, is concerned with how things ought to be, with devising artifacts to attain goals.

¤  (Simon 1988, p. 67)

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Reasons

1.  Learning as a natural, pervasive cognitive function.

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¤  (Bransford et al 2000)

¤  Learning is a basic, adaptive function of humans.

¤  More than any other species, people are designed to be flexible learners and active agents in acquiring knowledge and skills.

¤  Much of what people learn occurs without formal instruction, but highly systematic and organized information systems—reading, mathematics, the sciences, literature, and the history of a society—require formal training, usually in schools.

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Reasons

Learning and teaching as both natural and cultural

Humans have created a special technology for promoting learning when learning does not come naturally

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¤  (Pinker 2002, p. 222) ¤  Education is neither writing on a blank slate nor allowing a child's

nobility to flower. 

¤  Rather education is a technology that tries to make up for what the human mind is innately bad at. 

¤  Children don't have to go to school to learn to walk, talk, recognize objects, or remember the personalities of their friends even though these tasks are much harder than reading, adding, or remembering dates in history...

¤  Because much of the content of education is not cognitively natural, the process of mastering it may not always be easy or pleasant, notwithstanding the mantra that learning is fun... they are not necessarily motivated in their cognitive faculties to unnatural tasks like formal mathematics.

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Reasons

2. Societal transformations have occurred that pose new problems to education

e.g. information revolution

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Reasons

•  Preoccupation about international competition to standards

•  Crisis of ideologies

•  From standards to “what works policies”

•  and Evidence-Based Education approaches

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¤  (US Department of Education 1983) ¤  sIf an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on

America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves. We have even squandered the gains in student achievement made in the wake of the Sputnik challenge. Moreover, we have dismantled essential support systems which helped make those gains possible. We have, in effect, been committing an act of unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament.

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¤  (US Department of Education 2008) ¤  If we were “at risk” in 1983, we are at even greater risk now. 

The rising demands of our global economy, together with demographic shifts, require that we educate more students to higher levels than ever before.  Yet, our education system is not keeping pace with these growing demands”… “The pace of change in the global economy poses an already enormous and growing challenge for educators.  As Microsoft founder Bill Gates has said, “You need to understand things in order to invent beyond them.

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¤  (Sawyer 2006, p. 1-2) ¤  In the knowledge economy memorization of facts and

procedures is not enough for success.

¤  Educated graduates need a deep conceptual understanding of complex concepts, and the ability to work with them creatively to generate new ideas, new products, and new knowledge.

¤  They need to be able to critically evaluate what they read, to be capable of express themselves clearly, … to learn integrated and usable knowledge, … to take responsibility for their continuing, lifelong learning.

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Reasons

3. Bounded rationality, cognitive biases and the fallacies of intuition

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Reasons

•  Confirmation bias

•  Probability biases

•  Causal bias

•  Correlation bias

•  Hindsight

•  …

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Reasons

4. Accumulation of knowledge

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¤  (Simon 1988, p. 116) ¤  We have new top-down research techniques that enable us

to observe and model the step-by-step progress of thinking and learning with shorter and shorter steps, even on the scale of seconds and fractions of a second.

¤  We have new bottom-up research techniques, such as magnetic resonance imaging and single-cell recording, that enable us to study the localization of the neural processes that occur during thought and learning and to study the chemistry of neurons.

¤  With the help of these new tools, we are even beginning to forge links between bottom-up and top-down advances, gaining glimpses of the neurologic bases for human symbolic processes.

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¤  Just as the revolution in molecular biology changed the

whole face of medicine by providing both new understanding of physiological processes and new means of intervention when the processes are out of kilter, so the revolution in the study of the mind, usually called the cognitive revolution, is allowing us to enter a new era of human learning and teaching.

¤  This era does not reject the practical knowledge that has built up over millennia but greatly improves and enriches it. Good teachers and good learners may be born, but they cannot reach their potential, or anything close to it, without a deep understanding of the learning processes and how to enhance them. We are becoming more and more able to provide that understanding.

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Larger meaning

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Cognitive studies meet education A NEW FIELD OF APPLIED RESEARCH TO EDUCATION AND ITS PERIMETER

Its meaning

Its reasons

A BIT OF HISTORY

What’s new

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William James’ mild optimism

William James 1899: Talks to teachers on psychology

Philosopher - pragmatism

Psychology – scientific vs introspection

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¤  Psychology ought certainly to give the teacher radical help. And

yet I confess that, acquainted as I am with the height of some of your expectations, I feel a little anxious lest, at the end of these simple talks of mine, not a few of you may experience some disappointment at the net results. In other words, I am not sure that you may not be indulging fancies that are just a shade exaggerated.

¤  That would not be altogether astonishing, for we have been having something like a 'boom' in psychology in this country. Laboratories and professorships have been founded, and reviews established. The air has been full of rumors. The editors of educational journals and the arrangers of conventions have had to show themselves enterprising and on a level with the novelties of the day. Some of the professors have not been unwilling to co-operate, and I am not sure even that the publishers have been entirely inert. 'The new psychology' has thus become a term to conjure up portentous ideas withal; and you teachers, docile and receptive and aspiring as many of you are, have been plunged in an atmosphere of vague talk about our science, which to a great extent has been more mystifying than enlightening.

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¤  There is nothing but the old psychology, which began in Locke’s time, plus a little physiology of the brain and senses and the theory of evolution

¤  I say moreover that you make a great, a very great mistake, if you think that psychology, being the science of the mind's laws, is something from which you can deduce definite programs and schemes and methods of instruction for immediate schoolroom use. Psychology is a science, and teaching is an art; and sciences never generate arts directly out of themselves. An intermediary inventive mind must make the application, by using its originality.

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¤  … the use of psychological principles certainly narrows the path for experiments and trials. We know in advance, if we are psychologists, that certain methods will be wrong, so our psychology saves us from mistakes.

¤  It makes us, moreover, more clear as to what we are about. We gain confidence in respect to any method which we are using as soon as we believe that it has theory as well as practice at its back.

¤  it fructifies our independence, and it reanimates our interest, to see our subject at two different angles,—to get a stereoscopic view, … to be able, at the same time, to represent to ourselves the curious inner elements of his mental machine

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Thorndike’s optimism

Edward Thorndike 1910: The contribution of psychology to education

The first to apply principles of psychology to learning, and to education.

His theories have been very influential in education in the USA

Laws of learning: readiness, exercise, effect (positive)

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¤  Psychology is the science that backs education, like agriculture depends on botany

¤  Just as the science and art of agriculture depend upon chemistry and botany, so the art of education depends upon physiology and psychology.

¤  The foundation upon which education builds is the equipment of instincts and capacity given by nature apart from training.

¤  Just as knowledge of the peculiar inheritance characteristic of any individual is necessary to efficient treatment of him, so knowledge of the unlearned tendencies of man as a species is necessary to efficient planning for education in general.

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¤  Psychology contributes to a better understanding of the aims of education by defining them, making them clearer; by limiting them, showing us what can be done and what can not; and by suggesting new features that should be made parts of them.

¤  …in all cases psychology, by its methods of measuring knowledge and skill, may suggest means to test and verify or refute the claims of any method.

¤  Experts in education studying the responses to school situations for the sake of practical control will advance knowledge not only of the mind as a learner under school conditions but also of the mind for every point of view.

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¤  I hope that it is obvious and needless, and that the relation between psychology and education is not, in the mind of any competent thinker, in any way an exception to the general case that action in the world should be guided by the truth about the world; and that any truth about it will directly or indirectly, soon or late, benefit action.

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Watson’s plan

J.B. Watson 1913: Psychology as the behaviorist views it

Full-fledged behaviorism is a reaction to the use of introspection, to the absence of controlled experiments, and to the focus on consciousness that characterized psychology at the turn of the XX century

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¤  Behaviorism had the aim of making of psychology a science that can be applied

¤  If psychology would follow the plan I suggest, the educator, the physician, the jurist and the business man could utilize our data in a practical way, as soon as we are able, experimentally, to obtain them.

¤  Those who have occasion to apply psychological principles practically would find no need to complain as they do at the present time. Ask any physician or jurist today whether scientific psychology plays a practical part in his daily routine and you will hear him deny that the psychology of the laboratories finds a place in his scheme of work. I think the criticism is extremely just. One of the earliest conditions which made me dissatisfied with psychology was the feeling that there was no realm of application for the principles which were being worked out in content terms.

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¤  The psychology which I should attempt to build up would take as a starting point, first, the observable fact that organisms, man and animal alike, do adjust themselves to their environment by means of hereditary and habit equipments. These adjustments may be very adequate or they may be so inadequate that the organism barely maintains its existence; secondly, that certain stimuli lead the organisms to make the responses. In a system of psychology completely worked out, given the response the stimuli can be predicted; given the stimuli the response can be predicted.

¤  In experimental pedagogy especially one can see the desirability of keeping all of the results on a purely objective plane. If this is done, work there on the human being will be comparable directly with the work upon animals. … We need to have similar experiments made upon man…

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Skinner’s teaching machines

J.B. Watson 1913: Psychology as the behaviorist views it

Centrality of learning in radical behaviorism

Theory of operant conditioning, Reinforcement

Behaviorism allows to control learning, not just describing it

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¤  The learning process is now much better understood.

¤  Much of what we know has come from studying the behavior of lower organisms, but the results hold surprisingly well for human subjects.

¤  The emphasis in this research has not been on proving or disproving theories but on discovering and controlling the variables of which learning is a function. This practical orientation has paid off, for a surprising degree of control has been achieved.

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¤  By arranging appropriate “contingencies of reinforcement,” specific forms of behavior can be set up and brought under the control of specific classes of stimuli.

¤  The resulting behavior can be maintained in strength for long periods of time. A technology based on this work has already been put to use in neurology, pharmacology, nutrition, psychophysics, psychiatry, and elsewhere. The analysis is also relevant to education. A student can be “taught” in the sense that he is induced to engage in new forms of behavior and in specific forms upon specific occasions.

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Behaviorist’s assumptions & limits

¤  implicit assumption: ¤  nothing interesting is going on “inside” (mind is like a blank

slate) ¤  in theory, and as a matter of exaggeration, virtually anything

can be taught

¤  As a matter of fact even radical behaviorism recognizes that the animal is not a blank slate: only behaviors that are possible, that are spontaneously realized by the animal can be reinforced. Skinner considers that anything the child is ready to learn given her development stage can be taught, not anything in general.

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¤  (Bruer 1993 p. 3) ¤  In the mid 1950s, behaviorism was the prevailing orthodoxy in

American psychological science. ¤  In education, behaviorist learning theory emphasized

arranging the student’s environment so that stimuli occurred in a way that would instill the desired stimulus‐response chains. Teachers would present lessons in small, manageable pieces (stimuli), ask students to give answers (responses), and then dispense reinforcement (preferably positive rather than negative) until their students became conditioned to give the right answers.

¤  (Bransford et al. 2000 p. 6‐8) ¤  A limitation of early behaviorism stemmed from its focus on

observable stimulus conditions and the behaviors associated with those conditions. This orientation made it difficult to study such phenomena as understanding, reasoning, and thinking—phenomena that are of paramount importance for education...

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The cognitive revolution

1956 Cambridge MIT

Miller: The magic number 7

Chomsky: A review of B.F. Skinner Verbal Behavior

Bruner: A study of thinking

1958 Herbert, Shaw, Simon: Elements of a theory of human problem solving

1960 Harvard Center for Cognitive Studies (Bruner & Miller)

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¤  Noam Chomsky: A review of BF Skinner Verbal Language

¤  One would naturally expect that prediction of the behavior of a complex organism (or machine) would require, in addition to information about external stimulation, knowledge of the internal structure of the organism, the ways in which it processes input information and organizes its own behavior.

¤  … Every time an adult reads a newspaper, he undoubtedly comes upon countless new sentences which are not at all similar, in a simple, physical sense, to any that he has heard before, and which he will recognize as sentences and understand; he will also be able to detect slight distortions or misprints.

¤  Talk of "stimulus generalization" in such a case simply perpetuates the mystery under a new title.

¤  These abilities indicate that there must be fundamental processes at work quite independently of "feedback" from the environment.

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¤  Insofar as independent neurophysiological evidence is not available, it is obvious that inferences concerning the structure of the organism are based on observation of behavior and outside events.

¤  The differences that arise between those who affirm and those who deny the importance of the specific "contribution of the organism" to learning and performance concern the particular character and complexity of this function, and the kinds of observations and research necessary for arriving at a precise specification of it.

¤  If the contribution of the organism is complex, the only hope of predicting behavior even in a gross way will be through a very indirect program of research that begins by studying the detailed character of the behavior itself and the particular capacities of the organism involved.

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¤  (Simon 2000 p. 115)

¤  Exciting research in cognition today combines computer modeling with neuropsychological studies of the functioning of the brain and with the experimental study of human learning and problem solving.

¤  This research is helping to test and improve detailed theories of the human symbolic processes used in learning and thinking and to build theories of how skills and knowledge can be taught effectively and efficiently.

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Constructivism

The cognitive revolution

•  inherits the interest for learning manifested by behaviorism,

•  broadens the view (innate capacities, a larger number of learning processes)

•  states the necessity of developing new methods for peeping into the black box

•  Looks at constructivism

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Vygotsky

Lev Vygotsky

•  Role of social interaction in cognitive development

•  Zone of proximal development

•  Link between development of language and thinking

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Piaget

Jean Piaget

•  Children are like scientists

•  Children explain the world on the basis of their innate structures

•  Equilibration between cognitive structures and environment: Accomodation and assimilation mechanisms

•  Stages of development: Qualitatively different ways of making sense of the world

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Bruner

Jerome Bruner 1960: The process of education

1959 Woods Hole Conference (NSF) – reform of science and mathematics curriculum

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Situated cognition and the Learning Sciences

Very soon after the cognitive revolution, many cognitivists became dissatisfied with the computational, representational view of cognition put forward by the classical cognitive sciences.

Dissatisfaction concerned the vision of learning, as well

The first conference of the Learning Sciences Institute, 1987 (stems from the Artificial Intelligence and education previous series of conferences)

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Related visions of cognition:

•  Embodied Situated Cognition (Brooks 1991)

•  Distributed cognition (Hutchins 1995)

•  …Criticism towards GOFAI, representationalism, computationalism ….

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¤  (Anderson Reder Simon 1996) ¤  Situated learning … emphasizes the idea that much of what

is learned is specific to the situation in which it is learned. learning takes places in concrete situations and it is there that must be studied

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¤  Artificial intelligence research has foundered on the issue of representation. When intelligence is approached in an incremental manner, with strict reliance on interfacing to the real world through perception and action, reliance on representation disappears. In this paper we outline our approach to incrementally building complete intelligent Creatures. The fundamental decomposition of the intelligent system is not into independent information processing units which must interface with each other via representations. Instead, the intelligent system is decomposed into independent and parallel activity producers which all interface directly to the world through perception and action, rather than interface to each other particularly much. The notions of central and peripheral systems evaporate everything is both central and peripheral. Based on these principles we have built a very successful series of mobile robots which operate without supervision as Creatures in standard office environments. (Brooks 1991)

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¤  (Hutchins 1995)

¤  I will attempt to show that the classical cognitive science approach can be applied with little modification to a unit of analysis that is larger than an individual person.

¤  One can still ask the same questions of a larger socio-technical system that one would ask of the individual. That is, we wish to characterize the behavioral properties of the unit of analysis in terms of the structure and processing of representations that are internal to the system. With the new unit of analysis, many of the representations can be observed directly, so in some respects, this may be a much easier task than trying to determine the processes internal to the individual that account for the individual's behavior.

¤  Posing these questions in this way reveals how systems that are larger than an individual may have cognitive properties in their own right that cannot be reduced to the cognitive properties of individual persons (Hutchins, 1995). Many of the outcomes that concern us on a daily basis are produced by cognitive systems of this sort.

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Learning and the brain

1990 Decade of the brain

1994 Cognitive neuroscience society

1990s Brain-based education

End 1990s Neuroeducation/Mind, Brain and Education

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Pseudo-science and soft science

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