Andrea diSessa

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Andrea diSessa
Born (1947-06-03) June 3, 1947 (age 76)
Alma mater Princeton University (A.B.)
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Ph.D.)
Scientific career
Institutions Massachusetts Institute of Technology
University of California, Berkeley
Thesis Symmetry Groups, Representation Theory and Perturbations of Relativistic Universes  (1969)
Doctoral advisor Roman Jackiw

Andrea A. diSessa (born June 3, 1947) is an education researcher and author of the book Turtle Geometry about Logo. He has also written highly cited research papers on the epistemology of physics, [1] educational experimentation, [2] and constructivist analysis of knowledge. [3] He also created, with Hal Abelson, the Boxer Programming Environment at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. [4]

Contents

Personal history

DiSessa received an A.B. in physics from Princeton University in 1969 and a Ph.D. in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1975. [5] He was an invited fellow in residence at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences twice, once from 1997-1998 and again from 2007-2008. He is currently Evelyn Lois Corey Professor of Education at the University of California, Berkeley and has been a member of the National Academy for Education since 1995. [5] [6] [7]

Some of his notable work in Education research focuses on the concept of material intelligence and computational literacy, and ontological innovations and the role of theory in design based research.

Material intelligence

Material Intelligence can be thought of as a subset of distributed cognition, where it refers to the new knowledge that furthers human intelligence and skills by interaction with the computer, and existing computer literacy, in a social environment. It can also be the ability of tools in general, and computers in specific, to increase the intelligence and skills of human mind. It was coined by Andrea DiSessa in his book Changing Minds: Computers,Learning and Literacy. [8] He uses the terms computational literacy, material literacy, and material intelligence interchangeably. Conceptually, material intelligence is influenced by constructionism and distributed cognition theory. This concept is similar to constructionism because user makes sense of the world around them using a tool, and the interaction with this tool is helpful in shaping the understanding of the world. [9] It is similar to distributed cognition because it focuses on "social and material setting of cognitive activity, so that culture, context and history can be linked with the core concepts of cognition." [10]

Material intelligence has to be dependent on the material (the tool, or the computer), but it also has to be social. He says that "Material intelligence does not reside in either the mind or the materials alone. Indeed, the coupling of external and internal activity is intricate and critical". [8] Hatch & Gardner elaborated on the social aspect of human intelligence in their chapter on Distributed Cognitions. [11] They stated that learning is social and happens whenever humans interact with one another, even though the manner in which learning happens may differ based on 1) cultural forces, 2) local forces, and 3) personal forces, with cultural forces being the least motivating force, and personal forces being the most motivating force. [11] This is relevant because instances of material intelligence happen at an individual level, which are shaped by personal experiences, and then they spread outwards to influence the culture.

Examples of material intelligence

A typical example of material intelligence is calculus. When Newton discovered Calculus, it was a form of material intelligence because he used the tool (literacy and scientific abilities) to further his knowledge. However, this did not create any significant effects on general human intelligence at that time, because it was a hard notion to understand. Leibniz introduced the simpler notations of Calculus, thereby making it accessible to general people, and hence, making it a permanent member of Math curricula around the world. Material intelligence can become as pervasive as traditional literacy only when all the complex social forces of innovation, adoption and interdependence support it, even if it originated with an individual or a small group of people.[ citation needed ]

In today's world, the Google search engine can be thought of as an example of material intelligence. When it was invented in 1998, it was knowledge accessible only to the "technological elite", but it is now a common tool that ordinary people use to build on their intelligence or knowledge at the most basic level. This is to emphasize the point that Google had the advantages that other search engines didn't and the complex social forces of innovation, adoption and interdependence supported it. This computer based technology is a tool that is enhancing the intelligence of general people enabling them to do more interesting things with their new knowledge.[ citation needed ]

Although tempting to think that artificial and material intelligence are similar because of their relation to computers and computational thinking, they are two very different concepts. It is distinct from Artificial Intelligence (AI) as AI places either existing human knowledge, or some enhanced version of it, into a machine; [12] whereas material intelligence is new knowledge that furthers human intelligence and skills by interaction with the computer, and existing computer literacies, in a social environment.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cognitive science</span> Interdisciplinary scientific study of cognitive processes

Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary, scientific study of the mind and its processes with input from linguistics, psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, computer science/artificial intelligence, and anthropology. It examines the nature, the tasks, and the functions of cognition. Cognitive scientists study intelligence and behavior, with a focus on how nervous systems represent, process, and transform information. Mental faculties of concern to cognitive scientists include language, perception, memory, attention, reasoning, and emotion; to understand these faculties, cognitive scientists borrow from fields such as linguistics, psychology, artificial intelligence, philosophy, neuroscience, and anthropology. The typical analysis of cognitive science spans many levels of organization, from learning and decision to logic and planning; from neural circuitry to modular brain organization. One of the fundamental concepts of cognitive science is that "thinking can best be understood in terms of representational structures in the mind and computational procedures that operate on those structures."

Educational psychology is the branch of psychology concerned with the scientific study of human learning. The study of learning processes, from both cognitive and behavioral perspectives, allows researchers to understand individual differences in intelligence, cognitive development, affect, motivation, self-regulation, and self-concept, as well as their role in learning. The field of educational psychology relies heavily on quantitative methods, including testing and measurement, to enhance educational activities related to instructional design, classroom management, and assessment, which serve to facilitate learning processes in various educational settings across the lifespan.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Learning theory (education)</span> Theory that describes how students receive, process, and retain knowledge during learning

Learning theory describes how students receive, process, and retain knowledge during learning. Cognitive, emotional, and environmental influences, as well as prior experience, all play a part in how understanding, or a worldview, is acquired or changed and knowledge and skills retained.

Science education is the teaching and learning of science to school children, college students, or adults within the general public. The field of science education includes work in science content, science process, some social science, and some teaching pedagogy. The standards for science education provide expectations for the development of understanding for students through the entire course of their K-12 education and beyond. The traditional subjects included in the standards are physical, life, earth, space, and human sciences.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Outline of academic disciplines</span> Overviews of and topical guides to academic disciplines

The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to academic disciplines:

Instructional scaffolding is the support given to a student by an instructor throughout the learning process. This support is specifically tailored to each student; this instructional approach allows students to experience student-centered learning, which tends to facilitate more efficient learning than teacher-centered learning. This learning process promotes a deeper level of learning than many other common teaching strategies.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Constructivism (philosophy of science)</span> Branch in philosophy of science

Constructivism is a view in the philosophy of science that maintains that scientific knowledge is constructed by the scientific community, which seeks to measure and construct models of the natural world. According to constructivists, natural science consists of mental constructs that aim to explain sensory experiences and measurements, and that there is no single valid methodology in science but rather a diversity of useful methods. They also hold that the world is independent of human minds, but knowledge of the world is always a human and social construction. Constructivism opposes the philosophy of objectivism, embracing the belief that human beings can come to know the truth about the natural world not mediated by scientific approximations with different degrees of validity and accuracy.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Concept map</span> Diagram showing relationships among concepts

A concept map or conceptual diagram is a diagram that depicts suggested relationships between concepts. Concept maps may be used by instructional designers, engineers, technical writers, and others to organize and structure knowledge.

Situated cognition is a theory that posits that knowing is inseparable from doing by arguing that all knowledge is situated in activity bound to social, cultural and physical contexts.

Distributed cognition is an approach to cognitive science research that was developed by cognitive anthropologist Edwin Hutchins during the 1990s.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Constructivism (philosophy of education)</span> Philosophical viewpoint about the nature of knowledge; theory of knowledge

Constructivism is a theory in education which posits that individuals or learners do not acquire knowledge and understanding by passively perceiving it within a direct process of knowledge transmission, rather they construct new understandings and knowledge through experience and social discourse, integrating new information with what they already know. For children, this includes knowledge gained prior to entering school. It is associated with various philosophical positions, particularly in epistemology as well as ontology, politics, and ethics. The origin of the theory is also linked to Swiss developmental psychologist Jean Piaget's theory of cognitive development.

This glossary of education-related terms is based on how they commonly are used in Wikipedia articles. This article contains terms starting with A – C. Select a letter from the table of contents to find terms on other articles.

Computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) is a pedagogical approach wherein learning takes place via social interaction using a computer or through the Internet. This kind of learning is characterized by the sharing and construction of knowledge among participants using technology as their primary means of communication or as a common resource. CSCL can be implemented in online and classroom learning environments and can take place synchronously or asynchronously.

Evolutionary educational psychology is the study of the relation between inherent folk knowledge and abilities and accompanying inferential and attributional biases as these influence academic learning in evolutionarily novel cultural contexts, such as schools and the industrial workplace. The fundamental premises and principles of this discipline are presented below.

Enactivism is a position in cognitive science that argues that cognition arises through a dynamic interaction between an acting organism and its environment. It claims that the environment of an organism is brought about, or enacted, by the active exercise of that organism's sensorimotor processes. "The key point, then, is that the species brings forth and specifies its own domain of problems ...this domain does not exist "out there" in an environment that acts as a landing pad for organisms that somehow drop or parachute into the world. Instead, living beings and their environments stand in relation to each other through mutual specification or codetermination" (p. 198). "Organisms do not passively receive information from their environments, which they then translate into internal representations. Natural cognitive systems...participate in the generation of meaning ...engaging in transformational and not merely informational interactions: they enact a world." These authors suggest that the increasing emphasis upon enactive terminology presages a new era in thinking about cognitive science. How the actions involved in enactivism relate to age-old questions about free will remains a topic of active debate.

In psychology, constructivism refers to many schools of thought that, though extraordinarily different in their techniques, are all connected by a common critique of previous standard approaches, and by shared assumptions about the active constructive nature of human knowledge. In particular, the critique is aimed at the "associationist" postulate of empiricism, "by which the mind is conceived as a passive system that gathers its contents from its environment and, through the act of knowing, produces a copy of the order of reality".

The Institute for Research on Learning (IRL) in Palo Alto, California was co-founded by John Seely Brown, then chief research scientist at the Palo Alto Research Center, and James Greeno, Professor of Education at Stanford University, with the support of David Kearns, CEO of Xerox Corporation in 1986 through a grant from the Xerox Foundation. It operated from 1986 to 2000 as an independent cross-disciplinary think tank with a mission to study learning in all its forms and sites.

Conceptual change is the process whereby concepts and relationships between them change over the course of an individual person's lifetime or over the course of history. Research in four different fields – cognitive psychology, cognitive developmental psychology, science education, and history and philosophy of science - has sought to understand this process. Indeed, the convergence of these four fields, in their effort to understand how concepts change in content and organization, has led to the emergence of an interdisciplinary sub-field in its own right. This sub-field is referred to as "conceptual change" research.

Constructivism has been considered as a dominant paradigm, or research programme, in the field of science education since the 1980s. The term constructivism is widely used in many fields, and not always with quite the same intention. This entry offers an account of how constructivism is most commonly understood in science education.

Thomas L. Griffiths is an Australian academic who is the Henry R. Luce Professor of Information Technology, Consciousness, and Culture at Princeton University. He studies human decision-making and its connection to problem-solving methods in computation. His book with Brian Christian, Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions, was named one of the "Best Books of 2016" by MIT Technology Review.

References

  1. DiSessa, A. (1993), "Towards an epistemology of physics", Cognition and Instruction, 10 (2–3): 105–225, doi:10.1207/s1532690xci1002&3_2 .
  2. Cobb, P.; Confrey, J.; DiSessa, A.; Lehrer, R.; Schauble, L. (2003), "Design experiments in educational research", Educational Researcher, 32 (1): 9–13, doi:10.3102/0013189X032001009, S2CID   145255473 .
  3. DiSessa, A. (1988), "Knowledge in pieces", in Forman, G.; Pufall, P. (eds.), Constructivism in the Computer Age, Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, pp. 49–70; Smith, John P. III; DiSessa, A.; Roschelle, J. (1994), "Misconceptions reconceived: a constructivist analysis of knowledge in transition", Journal of the Learning Sciences, 3 (2): 115–163, doi:10.1207/s15327809jls0302_1 .
  4. "A flat index to the Boxer literature" . Retrieved 6 July 2022.
  5. 1 2 DiSessa's c.v. Archived August 20, 2008, at the Wayback Machine at UC Berkeley.
  6. Gazette, UC Berkeley, December 6, 1995.
  7. National Academy of Education members Archived June 3, 2008, at the Wayback Machine , retrieved May 28, 2008.
  8. 1 2 DiSessa, A. A. (2001). Changing minds: Computers, learning, and literacy. MIT Press.
  9. Swan, K. (2005). A constructivist model for thinking about learning online. Elements of quality online education: Engaging communities, 6, 13-31.
  10. Hutchins, E. (2000). Distributed cognition. International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Elsevier Science.
  11. 1 2 Salomon, G. (1997). Distributed cognitions: Psychological and educational considerations. Cambridge University Press.
  12. DiSessa, A. A. (1987). The third revolution in computers and education. Journal of Research in Science Teaching