{"id":4503,"date":"2011-02-07t07:00:36","date_gmt":"2011-02-07t12:00:36","guid":{"rendered":"\/\/www.imrbdigital.com\/?p=4503"},"modified":"2010-12-29t14:58:00","modified_gmt":"2010-12-29t19:58:00","slug":"fractals-metacognition-and-the-affective-domain-a-conference-report","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"\/\/www.imrbdigital.com\/2011\/02\/fractals-metacognition-and-the-affective-domain-a-conference-report\/","title":{"rendered":"fractals, metacognition, and the affective domain – a conference report"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>by derek bruff, cft assistant director<\/em><\/p>\n

back in november i attended the 30th annual lilly conference on college teaching<\/a> at miami university in ohio. i thought i\u2019d share some session highlights with my vanderbilt colleagues. here\u2019s the fourth in a series of posts about the conference.<\/p>\n

a fractal thinker ponders bringing faculty development to students: what if? \u2013 ed nuhfer, california state university-channel islands<\/strong><\/p>\n

i was really looking forward to this session with ed nuhfer, and i wasn\u2019t disappointed. i know ed, a geoscientist and faculty developer, by reputation and i\u2019ve read some of his work (mostly in the national teaching & learning forum<\/em><\/a>), but i had never attended a conference session of his.<\/p>\n

ed\u2019s known for his use of fractals as a metaphor for learning<\/strong>. it was great to hear about this metaphor first hand. check out his slides<\/a> for a visual description of the metaphor. here\u2019s the basic idea, as i understood it: just as a fractal is a complex shape generated by surprisingly simple rules, learning is a complex endeavor generated by a few simple activities. student affect (their beliefs, ethics, values, feelings, and so on) is the foundation of learning. students who are motivated to learn start to engage with the content to be learned. teachers provide assistance and feedback along the way, and students make sense of that feedback to improve their learning and engage in metacognition<\/a>.<\/p>\n

repetition of these processes leads to learning, which ed described as \u201cgrowing a brain.\u201d i believe he meant that at least somewhat literally, since learning involves physical changes to the neurons in one\u2019s brain. he also noted that doing so takes time and effort, which is one reason the affective component is so important.<\/p>\n

my favorite part of the fractal metaphor was ed\u2019s take on assessment. he said that measuring learning is difficult because it\u2019s like measuring a fractal: different measuring tools produce different measures<\/a>. check out benoit mandelbrot\u2019s classic article, \u201chow long is the coast of britain?<\/a>\u201d for more on this idea. i love it.<\/p>\n

ed\u2019s thesis for this session was a great one: as little training as most faculty receive in how to teach, students receive even less training in how to learn! sure, some students take a study skills course or two, but many of those (i think) focus more on time management than cognitive science. ed argued that students benefit from learning how learning happens<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

one way ed has tried to teach them this is to volunteer to give guest lectures in his colleagues\u2019 classes when they\u2019re out of town. he takes the opportunity to teach his colleagues\u2019 students something about learning during those guest lectures. among other things, he shows students brain scans illustrating the parts of the brain that are active when we engaging in activities such as speaking words, generating words, seeing words, and hearing words. (see his slides<\/a> for examples.) he uses these brain scans to make the case for cooperative learning, since cooperative learning involves multiple tasks and thus activates multiple regions of the brain.<\/p>\n

ed advocated a \u201clearning across the curriculum\u201d movement in which every instructor takes a little time during his or her course to teach students about learning. this would, of course, require instructors to learn a bit about learning themselves, which is not a bad thing.<\/p>\n

ed\u2019s point about teaching students about learning reminded me of conversations i\u2019ve had with faculty members and administrators frustrated by the ways that students view the course evaluation systems used at most colleges and universities. how can students meaningfully assess their learning experience in a course if they don\u2019t have a operational understanding of the learning process? and how can instructors and administrators make sense of student assessments of a course if there\u2019s no shared understanding of learning and the teaching that leads to it? teaching students about learning won\u2019t solve this problem, but it\u2019s certainly a step in the right direction.<\/p>\n

thinking about my own teaching, ed\u2019s comments lead me to wonder why i don\u2019t teach my students about transfer, the process by which we leverage understanding in one context to solve problems in other contexts. i certainly require my students to \u201cdo\u201d transfer in my math courses! why not be more explicit with them about the skills and experiences required to transfer knowledge gained here to solve problems over there? at the very least, doing so might help my students understand why the problems on their exams don\u2019t look exactly like the problems in their homework.<\/p>\n

ed finished by focusing on the roles that the affective domain in general and student motivation in particular play in learning<\/strong>. ed shared a summary of krathwohl\u2019s taxonomy of the affective domain<\/a> that i found easy to understand:<\/p>\n