Question 1: Describe and explain the comprehension and knowledge construction process that Josh and his father are going through, point directly, step-by-step to how comprehension is unfolding during this interaction. In your description, make sure you use the constructs of tacit and explicit knowledge to explain how existing (prior) knowledge is revealed and how knowledge changes as teh interaction proceeds.

Josh is proceeding through Vygotsky's zone of proximal development, which is where a high concentration of tacit knowledge exists. He already knows the shape of the moon (spherical), that the sun is the solar system's light source (and thus the source of the moon's light), that the moon orbits the earth and the earth orbits the sun. What's going on is a guided synthesis of the various pieces of information he has, putting them together to explain the observed phenomena.

Josh is pulling up bits of knowledge that seem relevant to him: meteorological phenomena like clouds are between us and the moon, and may be responsible for hiding the bits of the moon we can't see. His father is instead offering an alternative (correct) explanation, highlighting the correct pieces of tacit background knowledge Josh already has to make them explicit parts of the new model. The goal is for Josh to assemble his background knowledge into a coherent mental model of the situation, so that the new information (about angle of illumination) is anchored by the portions he already knew about to form a coherent schema of lunar phases.

Josh's root question is actually semantic: what does it mean for the moon to be "full". Josh's last question ("it's not cut up") shows that he understands its semantic nature, and by seeking confirmation of his mental model he can answer the semantic one himself.

Question 2: Choose THREE of the following articles and describe for each one, how one might use the findings to explain what is going on with Josh and his father, and then to make recommendations to the dat as to how he should have proceeded int he interaction.

Beck and Mckeown's "Questioning the Author" method "addresses text as the product of a fallable author, as someone's ideas written down". The fundamental idea is to have the student determine for themselves whether or not they believe what they're being told, often by working through an example. Possibly Josh's father could have used examples, asking Josh where the sun is when the moon is full, when it's new, when it's a crescent, etc. Of course this would have taken significantly more time, probably stretched the situation out beyond Josh's interest, and required the father to spend more time away from the ball game. (Given that the entire interaction probably took about fifteen seconds, I think the father handled it fairly well as it is.)

Chan, Burtis and Bereiter were talking about knowledge building. Again, rather than just accepting new information by blind assimilation, knowledge building involves processing the information to resolve conflicts with existing beliefs (what Piaget called accomodation). This is also what the QtA approach of Beck and Mckeown is trying to accomplish: getting students to think through new information and figure out for themselves whether or not it makes sense to them. Knowledge building looks at the process in the context of challenging preconceptions, and the obvious suggestion for Josh's father would be to find and highlight any remaining conflicts with Josh's mental model of how moon phases work. (I still think this is overkill.)

Guthrie and his backup singers talked about Concept-Oriented Reading Instruction (CORI). After hacking through a lot of math, this turns out to be a technique to encourage students to become more strategic learners. This is accomplished by a combination of direct strategy instruction, real world interaction (including minor field trips), and allowing the students to be self-directed (both individually and in groups) as much as possible. Josh's father is already doing pretty well on these counts: his son is the one asking the questions, they're out in the open (presumably looking at the actual moon rather than a picture of it, although the text doesn't specify whether it's visible or not). That just leaves direct strategy instruction, and I really don't see how it could be anything but disruptive in this context. (Josh and his dad did just fine. Leave 'em alone. Learning occurred. Life is good.)

Question 3: Several of our authors this time around either depicted explicitly or strongly implied relationships among several interesting learning constructs such as the following:

Learning (as measured in several ways)
Comprehension (as measured in several ways)
Knowledge (including prior, domain, new conceptual)
Motivation (including interest)
Metacognition (including strategies)

For this question, the task is to come up with a description that summarizes and integrates how you understand these researchers to view the relationships among the constructs. In other words, you get to draw your own path model.

Where you can, cite the research that you find most compelling to support the relationship you are saying exists between constructs.

The cliff's notes version is that learning requires motivation, and connects bits of knowledge to yield comprehension. Metacognition steers.

So linearly arranged, motivation has to come first for anything to happen, it powers the learning process. Knowledge is required for learning to have anything to operate on; most often learning is combining prior knowledge with new knowledge. (The result is new knowledge, which may be an internalization of external knowledge, may be making tacit knowledge expicit, may be a result derived from processing existing knowledge and putting it together in a new way, etc. This new knowledge can then feed back into the learning process, so learning can go on for quite some time without too much external novelty as the student works through the ramifications.) The end result is not just knowledge of facts, but the understanding of the relationships between them and the ability to apply them (comprehension).

Metacognition is hard to fit in linearly, its job is to direct the learning process. What questions should be asked, what bits of knowledge to feed into the learning engine in what way to attempt to get what result. All the talk of strategic learning earlier (Guthrie) was part of metacognition, but really all the papers we've read this time have a metacognitive bent. It's the part of learning that's (mostly) independent of what specific knowledge is being processed, and thus can be abstracted out to talk about learning in general.

(The paper that most closely seems to match this list would be Alexander and Murphy, but I really didn't find their analysis all that helpful.)

Question 4: Find a comment that one of your classmates or I made from the second blackboard discussion. Choose from a group in which you were NOT a member.

Copy the comment. Explain what you think the author of the message meant and then descripbe how the author's and your prior knowledge must have been different and may have contributed to a different understanding of the article.

I chose Debra Kromer's comment from group 2:

Another thing I found interesting about this article were the results from the research done on direct explanation. Both the studies by Duffy, et al. showed increased student metacognition and strategic reading. However, in both studies there were no differences on reading tests between control and treatment groups. So this doesn't make sense. How is that the students had a better understanding of the way they were thinking and they were better strategic readers but yet they showed no difference with the control group? So, in regards to reading, what was the purpose of this type of instruction if it could not be applied to result in improvement? I would have been interested in seeing pre- and post-treatment data.

This is a type of criticism of an article that you probably won't ever see from me. I admire Debra's ability to do this, but it sounds like she's a scientist, and at heart I'm much more of an engineer.

I'm not much of a mathematician, and tend to mentally gloss over statistical explanations of anything. I'm generally much more interested in qualitative rather than quantitative information; my focus on reading these articles was trying to decipher the jargon and figure out what they meant, in a way I could explain to nontechnical people. Since my own comfort level is nontechnical, this process of interpretation helps me learn.

As a result, although I'm technically capable of judging statistical reliability and variations from a control group, it would never occur to me to worry about that part. This goes beyond just prior knowledge to mindset, to my entire metacognitive approach. Either I can empirically test something myself, or it "makes sense". I realise there is an entire domain of scientists with lab coats dealing with statistical methods between those two, and I greatly respect them. But I'm just not one of them, and have no interest in independently verifying their work. (Deep down, statistical methods come up with a percentage chance of being right, allowing a result to be more accurate without necessarily being more truthful.)

In terms of teaching, I'm interested in what helps the kids in front of me, not what helps kids in general. I tend not to trust general prescriptions, since I'm sure there's at least one kid out there that's helped by doing everything wrong. The purpose of statistics and control groups is to factor out that kid. They are valuable tools, but if the results I'm dealing with aren't clear enough to trust without statistical verification, I'm not comfortable with them, and if they are clear enough then the statistical approach with the control group doesn't add anything for me.