I had an original impulse to respond to Don and Jimis (Hi Jim!) article on Learner-Centered instruction, but I hesitated until I saw my name taken in vain in one of the messages, so now I want to chime in. What I have to say is a bit long, but I would like the responses of others, so I am sending it in full.
I have seen the Communications of the ACM (CACM) issue, and it is of greatest interest to someone who has not read extensively in this area. The examples are well chosen, the articles are short, and they mix the concrete nicely with the theoretical. I look forward to the second half of the articles next month.
I agree fully with the assessment Norman and Spohrer make of the trend toward problem-centered forms of instructional experience. There is a sea change afoot in our area of instructional technology. New, more precise, and more controlled instructional techniques will become the standard. Surprisingly, they will be embedded within environments that look less structured and less deliberately contrived than the ones we are used to today, but a reading of the articles in this first installment of the CACM series reveals that those are false impressions: the seemingly unstructured environments conceal carefully designed problem structures which the student eventually finds and uses to learn the intended knowledge.
I found it ironic that Kent Thomas found any conflict with Don and Jimis' writing, because I know him and have seen his products. They are of very high quality, and in many respects are examples of the type of instructional environments that Don and Jim describe in the abstract. I believe it is a case of mutual misunderstanding due to terminology.
I personally believe that the type of instruction Don and Jim describe is the direction the future will witness. I constructed computerized, problem-based instructional tools with my colleagues for several years in industry and continue to do so in the academic world. Currently Joel Duffin and I are working on systems capable of providing intelligent feedback, and Joel has built one in which the content and extent of the feedback message can be controlled parametrically, by the throw of a software switch.
I take only one exception to what Don and Jim wrote in their preface. I would like to suggest a term other than "learner-centered." I believe that appellation is not fully descriptive of the fundamental change which is taking place--not only in how we instruct but in how we build instructional products. I suggest that we use the term "model-centered education" or "model-centered instruction," and I will try to explain my reasons.
"Learner-centered" education or instruction is positioned in the Norman-Spohrer preface in opposition to "content-centered" educational or instructional practices. From the preface: "In the past, the focus has been on the content: the curriculum is structured around the basic topics of literacy, history, social studies, science, and mathematics." The phrase content-centered, then refers to the topical discipline structures which have come to provide the central organizing framework within which are defined the more subordinate curriculum structures--units, lessons, etc.
The shift we are witnessing today is away from these static, non-process-related structures, toward environments and models--which are more aligned with mental processes--as the basis for defining instructional events. More particularly, the shift is toward problems and activities which take place within these modeled environments (which may also contain models of systems).
The best description of the shift, then, is to say that it is away from "content-centered" instructional structures and toward "model-centered" ones. By structures I do not mean the containers we place the instruction in, I mean the structures we expect the student to learn. We are shifting away from learning static discipline-related structures and toward learning dynamic performance-related structures.
This distinction is more than window dressing, for the shift is not just in the type of performance we want the learner to learn. It is a shift in the way we design and construct new instructional forms. More significantly, all of this betrays as well a shift in the underlying model we use to characterize the instruction-learning process.
I would like to express this instructional view, because it is the real reason for my preference of the term "model-centered." It also lies close to the heart of the constructivist interpretation of learning which the Norman-Spohrer preface invokes.
Consider the learning process, which normally (and for the majority of our personal learning) takes place as a learner (L) acts upon some real-world system (S)--a natural or manufactured system--and receives a response in return. The learner pokes the world and the world pokes back.
The learner's interpretation of the response-poke leads to conclusions which are somehow added to a body of personal knowledge. (I like the Norman-Rumelhart terminology more for their intuitive feel than anything.)
This learning-by-poking or learning-by-experiment is the natural pattern of learning. It is the method by which the overwhelming majority of our personal knowledge originates, even taking into account the mass of knowledge we acquire through formal studies. This pattern of learning is how we learn to shave, ask for a date, hammer a nail, or debug a computer program.
Without some form of assistance, this experience-based pattern of learning (the self-guided form of problem-based learning) is prone to erroneous conclusions, gappy knowledge, and superstition. It has therefore become common practice for a learner to seek the aid of a companion (C) in learning (I avoid the term "teacher" intentionally, why you will see later). This companion--perhaps a peer, perhaps an expert--can communicate with both the learner and the natural system, supplying a variety of services in support of the learner's intentions to learn--which learning comes mainly in response to the learner's decision to learn and from the learner's own interactions with the system.
The companion's services may be no more accurate or complete than the learner would supply himself or herself, but the companion does have an influence on whatever learning takes place to the extent permitted by the negotiation of the learner and companion wills. The companion may take the initiative, but the learner will learn only what he or she decides or accedes to.
As sensory communications to the learner become more complex and harder for the learner to sense (atomic forces, galactic motions), it becomes difficult to provide the learner direct experience with the system as a basis for learning. In western education, the response to this has been to take the economical route of substituting verbalized experience or just plain verbalizations for first-hand experience. This involves reducing the experience of the companion (or an expert) to verbalisms and having the student learn from them. This and the perceived need to supply a "complete" set of knowledge are the origins of the content-centered or discipline-centered curriculum.
As the shift toward content-centering took place, the role of the companion also changed: from companioning to dominating. The companion became the directing force in instruction. I believe this shift was due largely to economic reasons. To increase the efficiency of instruction, just formalize the knowledge, catalog it, and verbalize it to the student through the companion, expect a verbalized response as a measure of effectiveness, and call it quits.
The teacher was invented, and the triangular relationship which existed before between the learner, the system, and the companion evolved into a two-way relationship between the learner and the teacher--dominated by the teacher. The premise of teacher certifications is that a teacher has first-hand experience with natural systems and is therefore prepared to verbalize on personal experience. Unfortunately, most certifications are poorly defined, and many teachers today teach verbalisms which they themselves have accepted from others because they have had no personal experience with the (natural or manufactured) systems they teach. Several colleagues and I (Vic Bunderson, Jim Olsen, and Greg Kearsley) wrote a paper in 1981 in which we referred to this phenomenon of a verbalized instructional catechism the "lexical loop." Our educational system today is caught in this loop. Our students are good at writing about but not at learning from experience as a result.
The shift we observe today consists of the substitution of computer models for real-world systems--computer models of environments or of systems themselves--as the basis for learning experiences. This makes possible the restoration of the triangular relationship between the learner, the system, and the companion which provides an experiential basis for learning. This is not a restoration of former educational practice from a previous period of history but a restoration of the practices we each had in our youths but which have been lost to us through formalized educational practice--a practice in which we are told that verbalization, not experience, is the root of learning.
As this change takes place, we are having to learn again the appropriate role(s) and function(s) of the now-restored companion and the learner and negotiation of initiatives between them. To the extent that we can automate these roles and functions, we are able to create intelligent tutors and intelligent instructional features to support a companioned learning experience rather than relying solely on live companions. It has also become important again for us to know how to use designed sequences of problems to support learning long a desired path.
I see the shift toward new forms of instruction as a migration back to a system-centered and experience-centered mode of learning, except that now it is not real systems from which we will learn, it is models of them. These models may be models of environments or of systems, and every problem-based learning experience has as its backdrop either an environment, a model, or a combination of models situated within environments. I have tried to describe this in a recent book chapter (Dills and Romiszowski, Eds., 1997, Educational Technology Publications).
This model of learning and instruction has enormous implications for the way we design and build instruction. Just as instruction will become model-centered, our instructional design activities will now center first on the creation of environmental and system models and secondly on the creation of intelligent companions (instructional functions) to accompany the student in the use of those models as learning tools. This impacts not only the selection of development tools but the internal structural designs of the products themselves at many levels.
I hope that I have made a reasonable case for describing the transition we are experiencing as one from content-centered instruction (and designs and development tools) toward model-centered instruction (and designs and development tools). The term "learner-centered," though it signals our reformed intentions toward the learner, does not tell the whole story.