EDET 709 - Applications of Learning Principles
This paper was written during the Application of Learning Principles course taken in Spring 2022. This artifact required considerable research, as both concepts of reciprocal teaching (Palincsar & Brown, 1984) and situated cognition (Brown, Collins, & Duguid, 1989) were introduced for the first time to me during that course.
This paper was strictly part of an academic context and one of the last artifacts of that course. It was a cumulative research paper on a relevant topic of our choice. I chose to write about the practical relationship between two of the recent subjects in the course.
This was an individual project where I was the researcher and author.
This research could be beneficial to consider during a contextual analysis, which aims to take students’ surroundings, perspectives, environments, prior knowledge, and transfer of knowledge into account (Morrison et al., 2019). Understanding the concepts of situated cognition and reciprocal teaching assists instructors in creating effective learning environments and activities for their class. In addition, these concepts would be effectively used during the Design phase of the ADDIE model, in which the instructional designer plans out the instructional techniques and strategies that will be used in the project (“Addie Model,” 2018).
This paper fulfills the requirements for AECT Standard #5 - Research (AECT, 2012). The Standard 5 indicators that the paper fulfills include theoretical foundations, assessing/evaluating, and methods. This paper compares two instructional theories that can be implemented in coordination with each other. Ethics are not included as a performance indicator because this paper synthesizes theoretical concepts without conducting research on live subjects.
This paper required a lot of research and synthesis on both theories. I was unfamiliar with both of these theoretical concepts before that course, but found them both interesting once they were discussed in class. I believe that when I wrote it I had a good understanding of the two individual concepts, but in looking back on it I believe I needed to develop the connections between them more fully. Simply put, situated cognition is the idea that learning needs to be rooted in "doing," and is most effective in its intended context. Reciprocal teaching is the idea that students retain information when they are able to "teach" each other, and that teaching others creates higher level connections between the students and the material. My argument in this paper was that both of these learning theories could potentially be even more effective when used in conjunction with each other.