Peder Saether Symposium (March 9-10, 2000)

Professor Peter Gärdenfors Presentation

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Professor Peter Gärdenfors, Cognitive Science, Lund University, Sweden

Being the very last speaker of the day, I want to take a huge step backwards and start with an historical perspective. As Dr. Crook says, human beings are the only ones who instruct their young. And for thousands and thousands of years of human existence, education has been based on such a master-apprentice relation. The apprentice learns by doing like the master did. Teaching was done by showing how a practical problem should be solved. Sometimes it was combined with verbal instruction, but no books and no other technology were involved, and very little explicit theory was used.

In medieval times, a new teaching form was developed based on the lecture. And the primary purpose of this educational form was to educate priests. The original meaning of a lecture was that the teacher was reading from one of the holy scripts or from a commentary, while the students were more or less copying what was in the text. Then the Gutenberg revolution took place and books became available, but the lecture form somehow remained. The teacher was very often reading from a text, and there was very little discussion. Education was based on reading and listening. And this form, of course, promotes a particular type of intelligence; it's a form of teaching and learning that's not suitable to everybody. And only in universities was this kind of lecturing combined with critical discussions. The educational form was for large classes without regard to any individual differences.

Basically, we still live with this kind of educational form based on lectures by priests. Some new elements have been added to the classroom in the last century: there is more critical discussion, there are more presentations, and we have pictures available in the books, for instance. Pictures used to be very expensive, but they're much cheaper now. And there are some other practices, like experiments and field studies, which have been added. But still one size of lecturing was supposed to fit all the students. We are still very far from the master-apprentice model. Of course, the kind of problem-based learning that Professor Lundby talked about comes a bit closer to the old-fashioned style of master-apprentice learning.

Now, with the advent of information and communication technology, ICT, we have the possibility to radically reform education, but to some extent we hardly do. Most ICT applications mean taking the traditional lecture-based classroom situation and adding a computer, where the old material is more or less duplicated. Of course, ICT frees the students from the constraints of time and space of the traditional lecture situation. And this is, of course, a radical change in itself. But most of what we see doesn't really change the mode of teaching. So the question is: how should we teach? How should we be using computers in education? Well, I don't know. Nobody seems to know. The fundamental problem is that we know very little about what happens in our heads when we learn. The learning process itself is very badly understood.

The problem is, who can tell us about what happens in our heads when we learn? Neuroscience can help a bit. We know that the hypothalamus is involved in establishing memories and the amygdala evaluates what is learned. But knowing where something is learned does not mean knowing how it is learned. We have very bad models of what learning processes are in the brain, if we look at slightly higher levels than what has been studied by the behaviorists. So the problem is that neuroscience gives us a description of learning that is too low level.

I was very pleased to hear that Professor Staupe mentioned Piaget and Vygotsky. There are some people like them who address the problem of the learning process. And to some extent we can get some inspiration from Piaget and Vygotsky. But one problem with their theories is that they are too high level, they don't give us very much guidance on how to decide on ICT applications to be used in education. So in my opinion, the problem of not understanding the learning process is one of the greatest lacunas in human knowledge. And I'm frankly surprised to see how little is done in educational research to fill this gap, to study how the process of learning really goes on. One consequence of this lacuna, not knowing enough about the learning process, is that we don't really know how to evaluate the different modes of teaching that we have. We don't really have any good measures. We can measure performance in numbers of questions answered correctly and so on, but I don't think this is a good way of evaluating what is really being learned.

For some time, the buzz word in ICT has been 'information'. But information is not knowledge. I would like to quote the Finnish writer Henrik Tikkanen, who says that, 'I have the information, now I want to know what is going on.' We need to interpret the material that is put on computers or in whatever medium. The buzz word nowadays seems to be 'content.' We are talking about putting content on the Web, content on videos, and so on, and students are supposed to learn the content of a lecture, or a book, or a Web course. But I believe that this metaphor of content is rather dangerous when you're talking about education. It somehow implies that students are empty vessels that you can fill. This is a very old-fashioned way of describing education. Instead of talking about learning a particular content, I think that the right value word for assessing education is understanding of insight. We would like to evaluate the amount or the degree of understanding that is added by using ICT instead of using some other form of teaching. We are all familiar with the feeling of pleasure involved in understanding some new theory, or something new, in general. Even a pre-school child knows the joy of understanding. But if the child asks, 'Daddy, what does it mean to understand?,' we are lost, we don't really have a good model of what understanding means. This is another aspect of not understanding the learning process.

Consequently, we have to work with our intuitive understanding of understanding. A simplistic criterion for good education practice is one where the teacher makes the student understand. Then the question becomes: how can ICT improve the understanding brought to the students? It is not obvious that it does. Much of current educational ICT is based on the lecture form, but I want to make some connection back to the old master apprentice form: 'learning by doing' is another buzz word here. My proposal involves a very simplistic analysis of what is involved in understanding: that understanding something within a particular discipline is connecting theoretical knowledge with some kind of practical experience. The best way to reach understanding would be, of course, if the students could really test the theories out in reality. But in most cases they don't have such an opportunity. The teacher is needed to produce the theoretical knowledge and to explain the general background. But on top of the theoretical knowledge, you need something to improve your experience. Several speakers today have been talking about the role of simulation programs. I believe this is one of the major potentials of ICT: to use simulation as a way of connecting theoretical knowledge with practical experience. Neither abstract theory nor the practical work can stand alone. The best way to achieve understanding is by combining theoretical knowledge with simulations.

In summary, if we want to use ICT in education, we need to know more about what happens in our brains when we learn. We need to know more about the learning process. We see a lot of the infrastructure for working with ICT in the classroom and at the universities, but I think that there is much more fundamental research that is necessary before we can really know what we should be doing with this technology.