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AN INCOMPLETE DRAFT PREVIOUSLY FOUND IN PARTS ON TABLET PC EDUCATION BLOG
Introduction
Classic education offers the quickest way for learners to adopt specific content that the most informed people know. Such classic learning has evolved over eons in order to reduce the number of trials-and-errors people make when learning such content.
A Learning Efficiency Analysis Paradigm (aLEAP) maps optional generic behavior patterns learners use during those trials-and-errors. The map permits learners as well as observers to track the way people learn as does a GPS show a vehicle’s progress toward a predetermined destination and as do musicians follow a score of 12 tones on the chromatic scale to perform a composition. Each provides current location, options available, and changes in routes, including for learners to meet a learning criterion for a lesson.
For over a century, learners have shown empirical, experimental, behavioral researchers pieces of this map. the map represents logical empirical relationships among these pieces. The map illustrates an infrastructure of learning the way a road map shows routes to and proximities of cities.
The capacity to increase learning depends on two things: understanding how people learn and translating this information into instruction and other learning venues. We know more about learning than we have in the past. This gives us an unparalleled opening to increase learning in schools. Yet, the rate of increased opportunities to learn appears to exceed the rate of increased learning through U.S. public schools.
aLEAP maps samples of what we know about learning in order to reduce that gap. It gives educators, parents, and software develolpers an outline of how to matches the process of learning with the content of instruction.
Statement of the Problem
aLEAP addresses two problems: (1) demands to increase learning rates in schools, and (2) the option to increase the amount of learning without also increasing costs of education.
Demands to Increase Learning Rates in Schools
Goldin and Katz (2008) argued that the quality of learning in U.S. public schools has declined since the 1970s as the quantity of technology has increased resulting in an increasing inequalities among U.S. citizens. They conclude that public schools must increase students’ learning in order to decrease inequity, because technology will likely continue to increase around the world, and other countries are increasing students’ learning in ways that take advantage of technology.
In spite of many critiques with similar conclusions and hundreds of billions of dollars of Federal funding, U.S. public school reform programs claimed to increase learning over the past four decades have failed to do so in ways that decrease inequalities. The U.S. continues to drop lower than other countries on key indices of academic accomplishment such as high school and higher education graduation rates.
During these past decades, public school educators have adopted pedagogy that moves away from students learning facts to other less tangible outcomes.
The Option to Increase the Amount of Learning
A Case for Classic Education
In general, school reform programs have glided away from classic education that links teaching programs with scientific descriptions of how people learn. This glide path has occurred for many reasons.
1. Most teacher educators do not know or require preservice teachers to use scientific descriptions of how people learn. They both know that such literature exists, and may have been introduced to it, but they have not used it routinely to formulate lessons or curricula.
2. School reform efforts exist as programs without direct reference to scientific descriptions of how people learn.
3. The relatively few educators who do know scientific principles for how people learn are not required, and are sometimes chastized for using them in spite of administrative directives to follow other programs.
Rationale for Remedy (Case Statement)
Three reasons have lead to proposing the automation of a Learning Efficiency Analysis Paradigm (aLEAP), starting with a working prototype.
1. Behavioral scientists have for more than a century a huge library of empirical experimental data that describes how people learn and how instructors and trainers have used it to increase learning promptly and directly. They provide protocols for analyzing learning in most settings whether in or out of schools. aLEAP resulted from assembling and arranging samples of these protocols and data resulting from their use.
2. Technology exists to transfer portions of this library to software that analyzes the efficiency of learning with Tablet and other mobile PCs. Computer technology relies on replicating and using patterns. Developers prepare software that provides faster, more efficient, and more reliable outcomes than humans alone can provide. Learning as changes in behavior patterns meets criteria required to develop software that analyzes learning with Tablet and other mobile PCs.
3. Educators …
Technology Transfer with aLEAP
aLEAP provides a framework to translate research descriptions of how people learn into advances in human learning.
References
Goldin, C. & Katz, L. (2008). The Race between Education and Technology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.