A CRITIQUE OF SITUATED COGNITION
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Anderson, et al, have listed what they see as the four
central claims of a situated learning perspective and have
argued each is flawed:
- Action is grounded in the concrete situation in
which it occurs. Objection: It is true that Brazilian
street sellers, who correctly calculate the cost of items
which they sell in the streets, are unable to answer
similar questions at school. But this is a demonstration
that skills practiced outside of schools do not generalize
to schools, not that arithmetic procedures taught in the
classroom cannot be used by shop keepers. Indeed,
skills like reading clearly transfer from one context to another.
- Knowledge does not transfer between tasks. Objection:
The psychological literature contains both success and
failures to achieve transfer. Transfer between tasks
depends on the amount of practice in the initial domain
and the degree of shared cognitive elements. For
example, subjects who learned one text editor learned
subsequent editors more rapidly, with the number of
procedural elements shared by two text editors
predicting the amount of transfer.
- Training in abstraction is of little use. Objection:
This, Anderson, et al, say has been extended into
an advocacy for apprenticeship training by those
taking a situated perspective. In contrast, Anderson,
et al, advocate a combination of abstract instruction
and concrete examples. When they introduced
real-world-like problems to situate high school
algebra, they felt much class time was wasted on
such clerical tasks as tabling and graphing, while
relatively little time was spent relating algebraic
expressions to the real-world situations. [Koedinger,
et al, "Intelligent tutoring goes to school in the big
city," in Proceedings of the 7th World
Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education,
AACE, 1995, pp. 421-428.] We wonder whether
their observation was due to the kinds of problems
used or the teaching.
- Instruction must be done in complex, social
environments. Objection: Research in psychology
shows training is often more effective when nearly
independent parts are practiced first, before
combining them. In team sports and orchestras,
more time is spent on individual practice than
group practice, although both are necessary.
(Shouldn't the kind of knowledge, whether procedural
or conceptual, matter? Learning how to factor and
understanding the nature and uses of functions
seem quite different.) Anderson, et al, also
question the efficacy of cooperative learning
when applied without requisite structuring or scripting.
[Cf. Anderson, Reder, and Simon, "Situated Learning and
Education,"
Educational Researcher, May 1996, pp. 5-11.]
A RESPONSE FROM THE SITUATED VIEW
The thrust of Greeno's response is, not so much to
take issue with the objections of Anderson, et al, as to
note that the purported claims are
not those of
situated cognition. Their critique seems to have missed the
point about what adherents of situated cognition are
actually studying and claiming -- they present a straw
man, or caricature, which they knock down.
Whereas the cognitive perspective attempts to
explain processes and structures at the level of
individuals, the situated perspective focuses on
interactive systems and the resulting "trajectories"
of individual participation. It borrows research
methods and conceptual frameworks from ethnography,
discourse analysis, symbolic interactionism, and
sociocultural psychology. Greeno sees the significance
of studies like that of the Brazilian street sellers who
can successfully make change, but do not use the
algorithms taught in school, as showing that reasoning
is adaptive in ways that are not well explained by
current cognitive theory.
Knowledge is not just "in the head," if it is to be
found there at all, rather knowledge consists in
the ways a person interacts with other people
and situations. The situated perspective does
not say that group learning will always be
productive, regardless of how it is organized,
or that individual practice cannot contribute to
a person's becoming a more successful participant
in social practices. It does call for more varied
learning situations. For mathematics, this means
more than collective watching and listening, doing
exercises individually, and displaying individual
knowledge on tests. Students need opportunities
to participate actively by formulating and evaluating
problems, questions, conjectures, conclusions,
arguments, and examples.
>From the situative perspective, successful transfer
means improved participation. Whether transfer
occurs depends on how the situation is transformed.
Whether it is difficult or easy for the learner depends
on how the learner was "attuned to the constraints
and affordances" in the initial learning activity. For
example, when students are given instruction about
refraction prior to shooting targets under water, they
are more likely to become attuned to the apparent
angular disparity of a projectile's trajectory before
and after entering the water, and hence, perform
better. Greeno also distinguishes between abstraction
and generality using an example from mathematics.
If students learn correct rules for manipulating symbols
without learning that mathematical expressions
represent concepts and relationships, what they
learn may be abstract, but it is not general (i.e.,
cannot be widely used).
What is needed, according to Greeno, is an
integration of the cognitive and situative research
perspectives that, until recently, have developed
quite separately.
[Cf. Greeno, "On Claims that Answer the Wrong Questions,"
Educational Researcher, January/February 1997,
pp. 5-17. Anderson, et al's response follows on pp. 18-21.]