Slides from the event may be found here.

On January 24, 2017 Division 15 held a special webinar. The event featured Dr. Daniel T. Hickey (Indiana University) and will be moderated by Aman Yadav (Michigan State University).

This webinar summarized the implications of contemporary “situative” theories of cognition for motivating, assessing, and recognizing learning. These theories assume that knowledge is strongly bound (i.e., “situated”) in the social, material, and technological contexts where it is learned and used. The webinar described an extended program of design-based research that builds on the ideas in Brown, Collins, and Duguid’s landmark 1989 article entitled Situated Cognition and the Culture of Learning. This program of research used these and other ideas from situated cognition to address enduring challenges in designing educational multimedia & videogames, online courses, learning networks, and open digital badge systems. These enduring challenges include debates over “extrinsic” incentives and “intrinsic” motivation, the difficulty of evaluating the impact of formative assessment, the validity of learner- generated artifacts as evidence of competence, and the appropriateness of competency-based education systems. This research has resulted in general design principles and specific examples for designing “participatory” learning and assessment systems. These systems support productive forms of disciplinary engagement with peers and resources, while leaving behind impressive levels of disciplinary understanding and achievement, and generating valid evidence of those outcomes.

About the Speaker:

Daniel T. Hickey is a Professor and Program Coordinator with the Learning Sciences Program at Indiana University and a Research Scientist with the IU Center for Research on Learning and Technology. He completed his PhD in Psychology at Vanderbilt University and a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the ETS Center for Performance Assessment. His research has been supported by the MacArthur Foundation, the US National Science Foundation, Google, the US Department of Education, and Indiana University.