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Article Excerpt
ABSTRACT
In recent years, learning has been reconceptualized from an additive process characterized by an individual's acquisition of knowledge to a socially enabled developmental process in which learners continually reorganize knowledge structures and create new representations. In the new view, learning is defined as the development that results from social interaction that affords learners increased access to roles in expert performances. Accepting the dual cognitive-social nature of learning creates a new problem for instructors: designing learning experiences that meld the cognitive and social aspects without subordinating either to the other. This article addresses the problem by presenting, justifying, and exemplifying an approach to designing learning experiences that support learners' development of capabilities so that they learn to do without assistance things that they could initially do only with assistance. The goal of this design approach is for learners to develop capabilities that they firs t experience in assisted or collaborative learning situations. Formally, this approach comprises designing learning experiences within learners' zones of proximal development (ZPDs), "the distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers" (see Vygotsky 1978, 86). The article illustrates the design phases with explanations of learning experiences for a master's course in information systems assurance.
Keywords: collaboration; collaborative learning; information systems assurance; instructional design; online learning; scaffolding; situated learning; zone of proximal development (ZPD).
I. INTRODUCTION
The purpose of this article is to present, justify, and exemplify an approach for designing learning experiences that meld the cognitive and social aspects of learning without subordinating either to the other. The approach operationalizes Vygotsky's (1978, 1986) "zones of proximal development" to design learning experiences that support learners' development of capabilities so that they learn to do without assistance things that they could initially do only with assistance. The goal of this design approach is for learners to develop capabilities that they first experience in assisted or collaborative learning situations. The article provides guidance for designing such learning experiences, specifically for accounting information systems (AIS) and generally for accounting and other business subjects. Our contribution is the juxtaposition of elements into a model that lets the strengths of cognitive and social perspectives emerge, each enriching the other. We begin by placing our work in its historical contex t.
Learning as Behavioral, Cognitive, and Sociocultural Phenomena
Fifty years ago, a premier rationale for learning was behaviorism, which framed education as teachers communicating predetermined, presequenced content knowledge to students, who were assumed to master the whole by accumulating parts, including skills (Bloom 1956, 1976; Gagne 1965). Learners were assumed to be passive, in need of external motivation including reinforcement (Skinner 1953). Although good at explaining behaviors on predetermined tasks, behaviorist theory was silent on explaining conceptual change in learners. A competing rationale was maturationism, which embraced conceptual knowledge as a function of a learner's developmental stage, a result of biological programming (Erikson 1950). In the maturation approach, educators matched cognitive requirements of a curriculum to the learner's presumed age-dependent stage of development. Because developmental stages were deemed a matter of maturation, the learner's role was to work through the developmental crises preceding successive stages.
Later, cognitivists viewed learning as a matter of developing problem-solving skills that transferred to new problems (Anderson 1981). In this computer-inspired information processing approach, the objective was to guide learners to recognize a problem, characterize what a solution would look like, search for relevant information, develop a solution strategy, and execute the chosen strategy (e.g., Anzai and Simon 1979; Gick and Holyoak 1980; Kulkarni and Simon 1988; Dunbar 1993). In this characterization of learning as problem solving, specific facts were irrelevant until they needed to be brought to bear on a particular problem. The focus was on formulating and evaluating problem representations and matching information to aspects of the problem during the development of a solution. Regrettably, from the cognitivists' viewpoint, the extent of transfer was highly variable, from high to low or even negative depending on prior learning and problem contexts (Anderson et al. 1996).
Independent of the behaviorists' and cognitivists' difficulties with their approaches, others were viewing learning not as the individual's acquisition of knowledge or skills, but as learners' construction of their own mental structures through collaboration with others. The lineage started with Dewey's (1916) and Vygotsky's (1978, 1986) (1) focus on the learning activity rather than the individual learner as the unit of analysis. In this approach, learning is "a process of social negotiation or collaborative sense making, mentoring, and joint knowledge construction" (see Zhu 1998, 234). Vygotsky (1978, 1986) and Piaget (1977 [1928]) viewed peer interaction as crucial to learning because it set up circumstances in which learners perceive an internal need to reconcile different perspectives to resolve conflicts of interpretation. The learners' task was to resolve conflicts or contradictions by constructing new mental structures that integrated the different perspectives. This characterization of learning, kno wn as constructivism (Tyler 2001), was consistent with and informed by the growing postmodern realization that a single metanarrative purporting to reveal discovered "truth" was giving way to multiple narratives revealing multiple truths informed by different perspectives (Lyotard 1984).
By the 1990s, two constructivist perspectives emerged: cognitive constructivism (subsuming the earlier cognitivist approach) for those convinced that individual mental processes dominate cognition and social constructivism for those convinced that sociocultural processes dominate cognition (Anderson et al. 1997). A five-year exchange about the relative merits of the two approaches in the pages of Educational Researcher resulted in the cognitive and social constructivists agreeing that both perspectives, individual and social, are important, that the social and cognitive approaches illuminate different aspects of learning, and that both approaches should be pursued (Anderson et al. 2000). This exchange confirmed what other researchers had proposed earlier, i.e., that learning is as much a social as an individual cognitive phenomenon (Vygotsky 1978, 1986; Roschelle 1992; Scardamalia and Bereiter 1994; Harasim et al. 1995; Wenger 1998). Integrating the two into a coherent whole, however, was left to subsequent efforts.
Resolution of the Cognitive-Social Dilemma through Design
The growing realization of the dual cognitive-social nature of learning creates a new problem for instructors: the need to design learning experiences that meld the cognitive and social aspects of learning without subordinating either to the other (Rogoff et al. 1995). In spite of a voluminous and growing literature in instructional design, e.g., Reigeluth (1999a), the needed integration does not seem to have occurred. That is, design prescriptions seem to emphasize one aspect at the expense of the other. This article is a response to that perceived omission in the context of learning for professional practice. It provides guidance for designing learning experiences, specifically for accounting information systems (AIS) and generally for accounting and other business subjects, that integrate cognitive and social aspects. Our approach for designing learning experiences comprises a synthesis of the best theory and practices that were known to us. That is, each individual element of the model originated elsewhe re. Our contribution is the juxtaposition of elements into a model that lets the strengths of cognitive and social perspectives emerge, each enriching the other.
The unifying theme of the design approach we develop is from Vygotsky (1978, 1986), whose solution to the cognitive-social dilemma was to posit learning experiences that support learners' gradual development of capabilities so that they learn to do without assistance things that they could initially do only with assistance. From the viewpoint of the approach developed here, an appealing aspect of Vygotsky's (1978, 1986) resolution is that it permits cognitive and social processes to enable and support each other. Regardless of the source or form of the assistance, the goal is for learners to develop for themselves capabilities that they first experience in assisted or collaborative learning situations (Bereiter and Scardamalia 1985). Learning has occurred "when processes first performed with others on a social plane are successfully executed by a learner in an independent learning activity" (see Bonk and Cunningham 1998, 38).
In practice, members of a group learn from each other by working together as they develop a common sense of purpose, including a common way of thinking about how work gets done and what is necessary to accomplish a task (Wenger 1998; Wenger and Snyder 2000). From this perspective, assuming greater task responsibility is synonymous with engaging in the sociocultural practices of the community of practice (Rogoff 1995), where the development of capabilities constitutes learning. In the sociocultural framework, neophytes perform authentic tasks, beginning with easy ones, until they develop sufficient competence to become bona fide members of the community (Lave and Wenger 1991). This kind of engagement, known as legitimate peripheral participation, guides neophytes' learning until they are able to assume more central roles in the activity.
The next section explains the theoretical basis for and the phases in our approach for designing learning experiences. In the third section, the article illustrates the approach with the design of learning experiences for a master's course in information systems assurance implemented as collaborative learning online. The last section explains implications of applying this design approach.
II. DESIGNING LEARNING EXPERIENCES WITHIN ZPDs
The Meaning of Learning within a ZPD
The underlying premise of the design approach developed below is the concept of a zone within which a learner collaborating with more knowledgeable persons "can participate in performance at a higher level of complexity than that which she/he can manage alone" (see Hansen et al. 1999). As Lewis (1995) depicted it (see Figure 1), the zone can be represented as a band around the core of capabilities that the learner already has. The core represents performance the learner can attain without assistance, and the zone represents what the learner can do with assistance. The zone is Vygotsky's zone of proximal development (ZPD), "the distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers" (see Vygotsky 1978, 86). The activity in the zone is focused not on the transfer of skills to the learner but on collaboration between an expert person and the learner that enables the learner to participate in sociocultural practices (Lave and Wenger 1991). From this perspective, "the development of cognitive structure happens when the individual internalizes a complexity that was formerly distributed over the system that she/he operates within" (see Hansen et al. 1999, 185).
As Figure 1 illustrates, the cores for a group of individuals overlap. However, the more important overlap is that of one individual's core with another individual's ZPD. In the region of overlap, a more expert person can assist a less expert person. Making use of each other's expertise depends, however, on the learners recognizing expertise asymmetries and being willing to collaborate to benefit from the expertise distributed among them. The overlapped cores "constitute a shared reference area or (recursive base) for exchanging information" (Hansen et al. 1999, 186) that permits shared meaning to develop as learners seek to understand each other. In the process of untangling "differences in understanding, participants are forced to make their assumptions explicit, to argue, to reason about and to exemplify them. In order to reach agreement, they need to construct a conception that allows for apparently insightful assumptions from both parties to be integrated, which will often require a conceptualization th at is more complex than the individuals' original ones." (see Baker et al. 1999, 42). In this conception of learning, collaboration drives learners' construction of their mental structures.
Empirical evidence about the effects of collaborative learning is slowly accumulating. For example, Ploetzner et al.'s (1999) survey of empirical studies on learning by explaining revealed that elaborated explanations, but not rephrased explanations, are associated with greater learning. In a single study, Schwartz (1995) found that abstract knowledge acquisition was greater in collaborative problem solving than in individual problem solving. The rationale for this outcome was that collaborative problem solving prompts learners to construct representations that transcend different viewpoints, which are more abstract than a representation needed for one viewpoint alone. Palincsar and Brown (1984) found that, compared with the technique of answer locating, reciprocal teaching was associated with increased performance, a result attributed to the learners in reciprocal teaching being engaged in modeling the activities, identifying comprehension failures, formulating questions, assessing answers to these question s, and constructing explanations. Although they are certainly not definitive, these results are encouraging enough to prompt explicit use and evaluation of collaborative approaches to learning.
The Need for a Design Approach
Although the psychology and education literature contains numerous discussions of(1) cognition as a collaborative process (Rogoff 1998); (2) examples of learning experiences informed by social constructivist perspectives (Fosnot 1996; Palincsar 1998); and (3) analyses of learning gains and differences associated with collaborative learning (Dillenbourg 1999), the guidance to educators about how to design learning experiences based on learners' ZPDs is scant. Regardless of the reasons for this seeming omission, we believe it would be helpful to have some guidance on design choices. We present our contribution to such guidance in the form of an approach to designing learning experiences within learners' zones of proximal development (ZPDs) and situating learners in a community of practice in which learners construct their own competence. Because ZPDs are a function of the interactive context and learners' capabilities, the design approach attends to individual learners' capabilities and to the interaction amon g individual learners, the facilitator, and the tools and other resources that are involved in the common activity (Bonk and Cunningham 1998).
This section develops an approach to designing learning experiences within learners' zones of proximal development (ZPDs), a concept whose underlying premise is that cognitive development in social contexts precedes development of an individual's capabilities (Vygotsky 1978, 1986). The approach emerged over a five-year period in which the authors were redesigning courses for new environments, reflecting on the consequences of their design choices, and attempting to reify the design guidance leading to successful choices.
As shown in Figure 2, the first two phases of the approach, identifying the learning objectives and arranging them in a sequence that facilitates learning, reflect the mission-driven nature of business degree programs in which course learning outcomes enable students to acquire...
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