10LTESK

Ten Important Concepts and Methods You Need to Understand in Order to Understand How People Learn in the Real World

 

Compiled by Jeff Shrager (jshrager@stanford.edu)

 

1. The cultural mediation and internalization theories if LS Vygotsky
2. The power law of practice (aka. the "learning curve"), and where it comes from. (Unfortunately, this is way too complex to go into here; see the entries on Anderson/ACT, and Sielger/Microgenetic Analysis, below.)
3. The "learning by learning to program" theories of Seymour Papert, and why they failed.
4. The extensive work on ICAI (Intelligent Computer-Assisted Instruction) (This is an ugly and boring, but very detailed and complete review for its time!)
5. John Anderson's ACT series of learning theories.
6. The extensive work on informal learning (This is just one of many example projects.)
7. Conceptual Blending, commonsense perception, and view application.
8. Exploratory Learning
9. Computational and cognitive models of scientific discovery and theory formation, and cognitive theories of complex concept representation, esp. qualitative reasoning.
10. The important analytical method called Microgenetic analysis, and other work of Bob Siegler
11. The important concepts of Trading Zones and Interactional Expertise
12. That there are never just ten things to understand in any non-trivial domain.