Contact:cdent@burningchrome.com
Roschelle, J. (1995). Learning in Interactive Environments: Prior Knowledge and New Experience. _Public Institutions for Personal Learning: Establishing a Research Agenda_. John Falk and Lynn Dierking, Editors. Washington: American Association of Museums. Retrieved November 26, 2001 from http://www.astc.org/resource/educator/priorknw.htm An extensive review of the impact of prior learning on new learning experiences from the perspective of Piaget, Dewey and Vygotsky. In this review prior learning, often viewed as a challenge to be overcome, is seen as a crucial part of the process forcing a shift away from viewing learning as the accumulation of information to a process of conceptual change. For the author this implies change for designers: First, designers should seek to refine prior knowledge, and not attempt to replace learners' understanding with their own. Second, designers must anticipate a long-term learning process, of which the short-term experience will form an incremental part. Third, designers must remember that learning depends on social interaction; conversations shape the form and content of the concepts that learners construct. Only part of specialized knowledge can exist explicitly as information; the rest must come from engagement in the practice of discourse of the community. These changes are supported by Piaget, Dewey and Vygotsky: Piaget emphasizes psychological changes to schemata, Dewey emphasizes the transformative possibilities in experience, and Vygotsky emphasizes the role of social interaction in reconstructing the relationship of structures to experience. Piaget's thoughts are reminescent of Zerubavel's fine lines: encountering conceptual boundaries leads to learning. Back to the Index