RT data was interpreted as showing only shifts to new problems, whereas there could be qualitative changes in how the student is thinking about the problem, which would have a cognitive cost probably captured in longer RTs. Developmental psych certainly has findings showing deterioration in performance before it gets better as children reconstruct their conceptual representations. Couldn't those bumps be reinterpreted that way? The same ought to apply across all forms of learning. And I absolutely agree that "Student learning is driven by small set of mechanisms" and that these are common to all ages, stages, and content of learning. It's an idea often disputed "it's different for schools", "it's different in my subject" etc. There are enough similarities at the level of the nature of the formal learning process to be of great value. Could this be something we attempt to agree on??
pm437Mar 10, 2008 2:43 PM
I agree that I felt the reaction time graph could be explained in several ways - it could point to places where learners reconceptualise, it could mean some questions are just more difficult, it could be that the data is always going to be very noisy even over large samples. The explanation in the talk was that we were looking at overlapping patterns and it probably works but I wasn't sure if it generalised.
dl291
Mar 10, 2008 10:53 AM
RT data was interpreted as showing only shifts to new problems, whereas there could be qualitative changes in how the student is thinking about the problem, which would have a cognitive cost probably captured in longer RTs. Developmental psych certainly has findings showing deterioration in performance before it gets better as children reconstruct their conceptual representations. Couldn't those bumps be reinterpreted that way? The same ought to apply across all forms of learning.
And I absolutely agree that "Student learning is driven by small set of mechanisms" and that these are common to all ages, stages, and content of learning. It's an idea often disputed "it's different for schools", "it's different in my subject" etc. There are enough similarities at the level of the nature of the formal learning process to be of great value. Could this be something we attempt to agree on??
pm437
Mar 10, 2008 2:43 PM
I agree that I felt the reaction time graph could be explained in several ways - it could point to places where learners reconceptualise, it could mean some questions are just more difficult, it could be that the data is always going to be very noisy even over large samples. The explanation in the talk was that we were looking at overlapping patterns and it probably works but I wasn't sure if it generalised.