London Mental Models Group, with Dr. Joan Bliss, King's College London and Professor Jon Ogborn, Institute of Education, London as Co-directors with Jonathan Briggs, Kingston Polytechnic and Derek Brough, Imperial College.
Initial outline:
The programme will examine the role of tools in exploratory learning through a series of extended-time studies with children between the ages of 10-16. To do this it will modify and/or extend existing software tools and develop new tools where necessary. Analysis of existing tools indicates an important distinction between expressive tools where learners explore their own models of a domain and exploratory tools which allow learners to investigate models of a given domain which are different from theirs. Further distinctions are made between quantitative, qualitative and semi-quantitative tools for both exploratory and expressive tools.
Models are of particular interest in education because it is the role of the teacher or the educator to provide children with appropriate representations or models in a range of domains of knowledge. Clearly these representations should be accurate and consistent but not necessarily complete. Another significant problem for education is how learners can move from their own mental model of a situation to the conceptual model required for a richer understanding of the situation.
The questions to be addressed by the programme are:
- in what ways can interaction with tools containing representations of a domain facilitate learning of that domain?
- are learners helped by representing and exploring the consequences of their own mental models of a domain?
For the domains under study the more quantitative will be selected from technology and the more qualitative from social situations, for example in the humanities. There will be some expert model of the domain, distinct from the learner's. In the first phase of the programme, while working with already existing conceptual models, it will be necessary to formalise the expert's knowledge of the domains since the structure of exploratory tools depends on the nature of the expert's model. It will also be as necessary to elicit the learners' knowledge of the domains and to have some level of formalisation of this, thus providing the primitives needed for expressive tools. Such data will also provide a description of the learner's spontaneous mental models in the domains.
The second phase of the programme, focusing on the extended-time studies, will address, in addition to the two main questions specific to the nature of tools details above, three other questions specific to learners:
- At what point does it become meaningful to talk about children constructing models? In other words, at what point can children understand the notion of a model as standing for something other than it is?
- What do learners need to know and at what age in order to be able to use exploratory and expressive tools?
- How do the exploratory learning experiences of children in the domain of technology and social situations contrast with one another?
The research will focus specifically on individual learning. The diagnosis and description, through the extended-time studies, of how learners' models are modified, changed or extended through interaction with the various kinds of tools will permit a formulation of a clearer description of the function of exploratory and expressive tools.
Contact for further information and outcomes: jogborn@ioe.ac.uk