Kimberly Tanner's 3rd workshop in the
Mind the Gap series considered how we assess students developing level of expertise. This one dealt with similar issues I have read before in Ambrose et al (2010) and what Smith (1998) suggested: novices do not connect their knowledge and focus on superficial features when trying to make sense of new experiences and learning. Kimberly's research shows this using card sorting exercises. Experts in a field will sort/connect features which are not immediately apparent but have deeper meaning/significance to the task or material at hand. In contrast, novices sort/organize according to what they can immediately see/sense/understand. This makes sense of course because novices are still learning the underlying features/connections/significance/meaning of what they are learning - they don't yet know what the connections are. Educators need to lead students to make these connections to produce a robust knowledge structure that is able to be applied to new situations. An interconnected knowledge structure is robust in the sense that it can be applied in new unexpected situations. It enables creativity of problem solving. We need to facilitate students' creation of their own interconnected knowledge structure. This is a constructivist approach to learning. I think this is what students are craving when they feel as if they are set adrift in my active learning classes. They are wishing to have me model how to make the interconnections. The balance in good teaching and learning is to have knowledge construction both modeled and enabled for our students. We have to show them how we organize our interconnected knowledge structure plus support them in students' own attempts/practice at organizing their own knowledge.
Resources
Ambrose, S. A., Bridges, M. W., DiPietro, M., Lovett, M. C., & Norman, M. K. (2010a). How does the way students organize knowledge affect their learning? In How Learning Works: 7 Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching (pp. 40–65). San Francisco, CA: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Smith, B. L. (1998). Curricular structures for cumulative learning. In J. N. Gardner, G. Van der Veer, & Associates (Eds.), The Senior Year Experience: Facilitating Integration, Reflection, Closure, and Transition (pp. 81–94). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass Inc., Publishers.
Smith, J. I. Combs, E. D., Nagami, P. H., Alto, V. M., Goh, H. G., Gourdet, M. A. A., Hough, C.M., Nickell, A. E., Peer, A. G., Coley, J. D., Tanner, K. D. (2013). Development of the biology card sorting task to measure conceptual expertise in biology. CBE-LSE 12(4): 628-644.
