Learning by simulation – or simulated learning?
A classroom study of four students’ strategies when learning control systems by computer-based simulation
Paper presented at the ECER conference (EERA –network 2: VETNET)
University of Crete 22-25 September 2004
Ingrid Berglund
Department of Social and Cultural Studies in Education. Stockholm Institute of Education
Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to describe, illuminate and analyze individual learning strategies when computer-based learning software is employed in education. The descriptions made are mainly based on interviews and video recordings of four students’ interaction with the learning software in the subject of control technique. The results show that only the single most competent of the students’ masters the simulations in practice; all the other students perceive it as remarkably difficult. One of the decisive factors is whether or not the student perceives the virtual simulations as real. The study also emphasises the importance of adequate instructional support built into the software; otherwise it must be supplemented by printed matter and teacher support.
The study has been performed and monitored from a combination of a socio-cultural perspective (Vygotsky 1934/1986; Wertsch 1998), and Activity Theory (Leontiev 1978; Engeström 1987). The study was carried out during 2002-2004 within the context of the automation/electrical programme in vocational education in Swedish upper-secondary school system.
Introduction
Swedish secondary vocational education in transformation
Sweden implemented in 1991 a reform of its system of secondary education. This reform implied large changes, particularly in vocational education. Vocational programmes were extended from two to three years, and were also made qualifying for tertiary education as well as for working life, as more theoretical subjects became obligatory in all high-school programmes. The high-school reform also implied that vocational subjects, which were previously consolidated into one subject, were divided into different subjects and courses. These changes can be seen as an ‘academification’ and ‘theoretisation’ of vocational education. Another important modification was the on-the-job training, which implies that about twenty percent of the courses should be moved to companies.
Technological developments in professional life have also affected the changes in the content of vocational training. Above all, the constantly increasing use of information technology in working life has implied that professional practice has changed. When the tools become more sophisticated, professional practice can also be considered as more abstract, because the new tools often replace manual tasks. Computer graphics become representations of processes, which are not visible to the eye, but which must be comprehended. As a consequence of this, vocational education must also change, with less exercising of manual tasks and more training in the use of computers and technical equipment.
Computer-based teaching materials are increasingly being used in vocational education in Sweden, both in basic education and in further education. As computer technology develops and becomes more advanced, and as computer-based learning software becomes cheaper and more realistic, increased use of these virtual practices can be foretold. In computer-based simulation, students can practice without risking to damage people or equipment. But the question is what learning in virtual practice involves? The new tools involve other ways to design the learning environment of schools, and it raises new demands on competence amongst students and teachers. What do the new learning environments, where computer-based learning tools are used, look like? How important is experience from working life in order for students to be able to fit the practice at school into a professional context?
This paper describes a classroom study in basic vocational training, where the teaching is carried out by means of computer-based learning software.[1] The study is focusing on four students’ learning in the subject of control techniques in the Electrical Programme. Students’ activities in class were videotaped and these tapes became the point of departure for interviews. Students’ learning strategies are described by studying how students act when they solve their tasks, and how they reason about what they do. We also analyse the learning software. What kind of pedagogical support is offered in the software and which resources do the students use in their learning?
The study employs a socio-cultural perspective on learning in describing the students’ interaction with the computer-based learning software. In the analysis, we use Activity Theory to analyse the classroom interaction and to illuminate the motives behind students’ behaviour in the classroom. The analysis is done in three steps, where focus is gradually widened from students’ interactions with the software, via their classroom interaction, to an overview of students’ views on the relationship between working life and the tasks in school.
Theoretical framework
Learning in a socio-cultural perspective
In a socio-cultural perspective, we are constantly learning things, but what we are learning depends on the context. Learning is taking place in a mutual interaction between the individual and the environment, through our ability to communicate through tools. Our tools mediate (convey) human knowledge and culture. Human learning is therefore about the ability to use and develop tools.
Mediating tools can, according to Vygotsky (1934/1986), be psychological and internally oriented as well as physical and externally oriented. Examples of psychological tools are: gestures, language, memory support, signs and symbols, and decision-making systems. Externally tools are used synonymous with artefacts. Vygotsky argued that there occurs, through man’s tools, a mutual interaction between man and tool, called ‘reverse action’. As we humans keep constantly developing our tools, not least through technical progress, our own abilities are also being developed. Learning is therefore; in a socio-cultural perspective, about mastering and acquiring mediating tools, and that process changes our relationship with the environment. (Säljö, 2000, 2002; Vygotsky 1978). This acquisition is also known as appropriation[2]. Säljö (2002) argues that the process of appropriation is a matter of how people “acquaint themselves with, penetrate, and master various intellectual (concepts, systems of concepts, algorithms) and physical abilities.” (Säljö, 2000, p. 16). Wertsch (1998) distinguishes between mastering and appropriation. The difference may consist in that the individual can master a cultural tool without appropriating it, by feeling reluctance to using it and even, perhaps, refusing to use it.
Wertsch (1998) also argues that it is important to focus on the material side to things, on the use of tools and how their use develops skills, rather than on mental processes. It is important to avoid sorting individuals according to developmental path, where their skilfulness is being graded, without contextualizing it. This does not mean that there are no differences in aptitude between individuals and groups, but that these differences must be analysed in a context. By studying mediating behaviour, one avoids looking upon the individual as somebody who has an abstract attribute such as intelligence; instead, the focus is set on the context of the behaviour and on the ability to manage the tools.
Apprenticeship and learning practices
Vocational training has its tradition in apprenticeship learning and originates from the tradition to do apprenticeships with a Master, in order to acquire the skills, knowledge and the values that are part and parcel with the profession or craft. Through studies of apprenticeship learning in various contexts, Lave and Wenger (1991) have advanced a theory about ‘situated learning’, which can help illuminating learning processes in general. By stressing the meaning of participating in a ‘community of practice’, they emphasise also the significance of the collective, which involves – beyond acquiring professional dexterity – the socialisation into a professional culture. They argue that the apprentice goes from a peripheral, legitimate participation to an increasingly comprehensive participation in the craft practice in which the apprentice participates. By starting out with peripheral chores, which are nonetheless essential to the trade, the apprentice gradually gets to carry out increasingly complex tasks, thus fostering increasing competence, as well as having an incrementally complete participation in the community of practice.
A person’s intentions to learn are engaged and the meaning of learning is configured through the process of becoming a full participant in a socio-cultural practice. (Lave & Wenger 1991, p. 29)
Against this theory there have been arguments (Nielsen and Kvale, 2000) to the effect that learning rarely takes place only in one community of practice, but rather in many different contexts and learning environments. Moreover, the communities of practice form part of larger communities. Lave (2000) argues that learning takes place both within and between communities of practice.
Learning can be viewed as a step in the subject’s shifting participation in motion through many different kinds of contexts in their daily life. (Lave, 2000, p. 52; italics in orig.)
Lave also turns against the notion that learning, as far as institutionalised learning in schools is concerned, should be seen as ‘a certain kind of individual short-run mental exercise’. (Lave, 2000, p. 53) Her studies of different forms of apprenticeship learning have given her the insight that all activity and learning is contextually dependent or ‘situated’. What is generally viewed, in the context of schools, as decontextualised learning, is also situated. If learning, in a socio-cultural perspective, always is situated in some form of practice, then that implies that there are no practice-neutral concepts and no practice-neutral knowledge. What does this imply for the learning environment of schools, where learning is traditionally perceived as decontextualised and general: one learns in school, to use the knowledge in other contexts?
Carlgren (1999, p. 19) argues that it becomes important ‘to shape environments that provide the kind of experiences and give rise to the questions to which the more traditional forms of school knowledge has got the answers’. How these school environments should be shaped is not an unproblematic matter, and to take various practices outside school as models for the learning environments of school could have the consequence of school dissolving into ‘authentic practices’, and that would effectively take us back to the forms of learning in pre-modern societies. Therefore one might view school as a kind of practice similar to other kinds of practices outside school – a ‘learning practice’.
An alternative is to think of school practice as analogous to practices outside. School practice would then not have to be an imitation of others but something of its own – what one might call a ‘community of learners’. (Carlgren, 1999, p. 22)
This line of argument involves moving one’s focus from the individuals that are there to learn to describing and analysing the environment of learning. The activities that are carried out give this practice its structure, and become, in their turn, part of the learning.
Activity Theory
Activity Theory has its roots in Vygotsky. Leontiev and Luria[3] elaborated Vygotsky’s theory of mediation between the individual and the object to encompass also collective mediation; moreover they launched the concept of ‘activity’. Engeström (1987, 1999) has since conceptualised Activity Theory in a model that builds on Vygotsky’s schematic for mediation and Leontiev’s Activity Theory.
Figure 1. Mediating relationships in Activity Theory. Drawn freely after Engeström’s model of Activity Theory.
The model illustrates the complex relations between the various elements in an activity. The upper part of the triangle is Vygotsky’s original figure for mediated action through the use of tools. Mediation between the subject and the object also involves a mediation of the historical development through the tool.[4] The tool enables the process of transformation, which involves reshaping the object of the activity to a result, for the subject. At the same time the interaction is limited to the perspective offered by the specific tool.
The lower part of the triangle describes the collective mediation of the activity. To study only the mediation between individual and object is not sufficient in order to analyse the activity. An individual is not isolated but part of a community, which affects the individual’s actions defined by the sharing of the same object in the activity. Two new relationships are thereby formed: subject – community, and community – object. In these relationships there is a continuous dynamic and mutual interaction between the agents and through mediation.
In order to understand an activity, one must understand how tools mediate the activity within the cultural context in which the activity takes place. It is important that the mediation takes place in a mutual way, which is to say that the agent is affected through the mediating artefacts at the same time as the agent affects these artefacts, in a constantly dynamic and mutual process.
The object of an activity delimits it
An activity is a form of collective action directed towards a common object. Hence it is the object of the activity that delimits it. An object can be tangible, but it can also be less real, e.g., a plan, or entirely abstract, e.g., a common idea. Behind every activity there is a motive and behind every action there is an objective. The motive for the activity is to transform the object to a result. Engeström (1987, 1999)
An ‘action’ is a process subject to the notion about the result that must be accomplished, i.e., a process that is subject to a conscious goal. In the same fashion that the concept of ‘motive’ is related to the concept of activity, the concept of ‘objective’ is related to the concept of action. (Leontiev, 1978, pp. 158–9)
It is possible that the object and the motive changes in the course of the activity process, but it is only through actions that the object, and the motive, becomes clear and can be studied. Actions can be individual or common. Activities can also include chains and networks of actions, which can be related to one another by sharing the same object and motive, i.e., they can be related to the same activity system. To participate in an activity involves carrying out conscious actions, which have an immediately defined objective. What appears to be the same kind of action can belong to different activity systems, if the actions have multiple simultaneous objectives. Seemingly different actions may also form part of the same activity, if there is a common motive behind them.
Comparison of socio-cultural perspectives and Activity Theory
It is difficult to draw sharp borders between socio-cultural perspectives and Activity Theory. Nardi (1996) describes the difference between Activity Theory and ‘situated action’ as a difference in unit of analysis. The unit of analysis in Activity Theory is the activity, and the collective mediation is placed in focus. Studies of individual mediation are therefore insufficient to understand the rationale behind the activity. The object of analysis in ‘situated action’ is ‘the activity of persons – acting in a setting’ (Nardi, 1996 p. 71), which can be linked to Vygotsky’s original model, in which focus is set on individual mediation. In the present study the term ‘socio-cultural perspective’ is used for the corresponding relationship. In ‘situated action’ it is, according to Nardi, the actual situations that are the object of analysis, often of a problem-solving character, but the historical perspective is lacking. To study only the actual situations means that it may be difficult to make statements about the activity in which the actions take place, since the motive can be difficult to ascertain. Ostensibly similar actions may have different motives, and thereby belong to different activities.