Jenny's Play Space

This is where I will be working on the next version of thesis outline. Twiki editor, of course, doesn't have the same mega-capability of MS Word, so things will not be displayed here as they will in the final product. This is simply the play space. Once the thesis outline is ready to submit to committee, it will have to be copied over to MS Word to be prettied up. And the prettied up version will be saved as an attachment in JennysOutlines, of course.

The reason I am developing my thesis outline on this twiki is that it makes it more convenient to work from home or school. No need to copy files to disk or upload files to email.

NOTE 1: This page is in top down order, NOT alpha order; it is organized only by metacognition or informal education. This is done so that if I want to print out my latest work, I can do so by copying just the end of the relevant section and not have to copy many selections from all over the page.

NOTE 2: Some things here are not elsewhere in my twiki pages. For example, reviews of articles from the book "The necessity of informal learning."

Informal Education Musings and Quotes

http://www.infed.org/archives/developing_youth_work/dyw7.htm (informal education archives)

A definition of informal education: ("p. 8") In sum, informal education could be said to have the following characteristics:

1. It can take place in a variety of settings, many of which are used for other, non-educational, purposes.
2. The process is deliberate and purposeful in that the people concerned are seeking to acquire some knowledge, skills and/or attitudes. However, such purpose and intent may not always be marked by closely specified goals.
3. Timescales are likely to be highly variable and often structured by the dynamics of the particular institution(s) in which exchanges are set. Most of those institutions will not primarily be concerned with education.
4. Participation is voluntary and is often self-generated.
5. The process is dialogical and marked by mutual respect.
6. There will be an active appreciation of, and engagement with, the social systems through which participants operate, and the cultural forms they utilize. [page 132]
7. It may use both experiential and assimilated information patterns of learning.

http://www.infed.org/archives/e-texts/hiemstra_self_direction.htm

("p. 1") ...self-direction in learning refers to two distinct but related dimensions: as an instructional process where a learner assumes primary responsibility for the learning process; and as a personality characteristic centering on a learner's desire or preference for assuming responsibility for learning. (see also "p. 7")

("p. 3") (this is a quote inside the source) "It has often been said that the purpose of adult education, or of any kind of education, is to make the subject a continuing, 'inner-directed' self-operating learner." (p. 47)

("p. 11") ...self-direction is learning is a term that we use as an umbrella concept to recognize both external factors that facilitate the learner taking primary responsibility for planning, implementing, and evaluating learning, and internal factors or personality characteristics that predispose one toward accepting responsibility for one's thought and actions as a learner. The PRO model (see "p. 8") illustrates this distinction between external and internal forces. At the same time it recognizes, through the notion of personal responsibility, that there is a strong connection between self-directed learning and learner self-direction. This connection provides a key to understanding the success of self-direction in a given learning context.

("p.11-12") We suggest that optimal conditions for learning result when there is a balance or congruence between the learner's level of self-direction and the extent to which opportunity for self-directed learning is possible in a given situation. If, for example, one is predisposed toward a high level of self-directedness and is engaged in a learning experience where self-direction is actively facilitated, chances for success are high. Similarly, the learner who is not as high in self-directedness is likely to find comfort and, in all likelihood, a greater chance of success in a situation where the instructor assumes a more direct role. In both instances, the chances for success are relatively high, since the learner's expectations are congruent with the conditions of the learning situation.

Where difficulties and frustrations arise in when the balance between internal characteristics of the learner are not in harmony with external characteristics of the teaching-learning transaction. Individuals who enter a learning situation with a clear idea of how and what they wish to learn are likely to become frustrated and disenchanted if not given the freedom to pursue these directions. In the same vein, the learner who seeks a high level of guidance and direction will probably have similar feelings in a situation where the facilitator emphasizes an active leadership role by the learners. For individuals in either situation, the problem is that the teaching-learning situation is not in harmony with the needs and desires the learner brought to the situation. This does not mean that the learner was "unsuccessful," nor that the facilitator was "ineffective." Rather, it suggests that success and effectiveness are relative terms that depend on clear communication of needs and expectations among all parties engaged in the teaching-learning transaction.

ME: What this means is that when we have learners who are not experienced at the task of informal education, they need further assistance in order to succeed. Otherwise, they will be frustrated and will tend to give up. [see more of this source...I didn't want to copy entire pages over to twiki] You need to meet your learners where they're at for a given situation, otherwise you'll lose them.

Also, if what is currently being done isn't working (i.e. people are not using the tutorial), then clearly we are not meeting the learners half-way. They are still lacking what they need, and based on classroom experience in Prof. Holz' classes, it seems that metacognitive training is one way to meet learners half-way and to draw them into the informal education process, or transaction.

http://www.infed.org/i-intro.htm

What is informal education?

("p. 1") Informal education...is a process - a way of helping people to learn.

("p.2") Informal education:

• works through, and is driven by, conversation.
• involves exploring and enlarging experience.
• can take place in any setting. ("p.3") ...the purpose of informal education...is a concern to build the sorts of communities and relationships in which people can be happy and fulfilled. John Dewey once described this as educating so that people may share in a common life.

It comes as no surprise then, that those working as informal educators tend to emphasize certain values. These include commitments to:

• work for the well-being of all.
• respect the unique value and dignity of each human being.
• dialogue.
• equality and justice.
• democracy and the active involvement of people in the issues that affect their lives. As informal educators we have to spend a lot of time thinking about the values that run through our work. We do not have a curriculum or guiding plan for a lot of the work, so we have to consider how we should respond to situations. This involves going back to core values. Reflecting on these allows us to make judgments about what might best help people to share in a common life.

ME: The point of informal education is to work with others...("p.8") in everyday situations so that life can be more fulfilling and all can share in its fruits.

http://www.infed.org/archives/usinginformaleducation/burley.htm

The attractions and distractions of informal education.

("p. 4") ...Students' responses to informal education bear no consistent relationship to their academic ability. The key distinguishing factor, however, is the degree and nature of choice which students have over participation, and the quality of relationships developed with staff. If informal education within the curriculum is given a low status by some students then there is no doubt a connection between this and the priorities and resources given to it by staff. As with formal learning, it will tend to have meaning within an institution such as a school only when it has a perceived and explicit relevance.

("p. 4") The relationship of informal education to the overall aims, practices and curriculum of the school must be defined. Clear policy statements must promote a positive understanding of the contribution it can offer to the life of the school... The contribution of informal method to the formal curriculum should also be considered.

ME: There are claims in here that it will be difficult to enlist the support of formal educators... However, with the approach we are taking (i.e. using metacognition), we no longer need to sell our product through faculty. If our tutorial has a truly useful and powerful effect, then the tutorial will sell itself through word of mouth among the user population, and we can promote the system through fliers. With Hilary's reputation with her metacognition classes, we already have strong word of mouth going for us.

Informal education through community education

("p. 11") ...there is only a limited value in expecting teaching staff to dip into work that remains outside their predominant training and orientation. It is far better to assist them to do the job they are already engaged upon and help them to extend it, or look at it in a different way, rather than adding on alternative activities. It is prudent for those wishing to develop informal education to find ways of making it more central to the curriculum and culture of the schools. It is inappropriate to rely on goodwill alone. This would marginalize the work at a time when it requires a higher profile.

ME: This is what we're doing!

Conclusion

("p. 11") Informal education exists in schools whether or not it is openly recognized by the staff, students and parents who use them. At present it is a diverse process with varying aims and objectives and a variety of intentions and contexts, but arguably offering a common purpose: that of self-development. The benefits of informal education are felt to be more participation, choice, independence and a sense of fulfillments for students and staff alike: a recognition of ownership of their learning and work.

ME: Exactly!!!

Practicing informal education

("p.1") Within formal education are various spaces for other ways of working. It is too easy to dismiss schools and colleges as not offering much to informal educators--but for youth workers, for example, they are full of possibility. If we follow the old youth work maxim that you need to start where young people are at--where they are at, for the most part, is school and college. One significant tradition of work has been the school-based youth club--but in recent years there has been developments in other approaches. For example:

1. working with students to set up study circles and 'homework clubs'.
2. encouraging and supporting the development of groups around 'enthusiasms and interests such as music and sound systems, environmental issues, and cross-community reconciliation.
3. developing alternative educational provision for young people experiencing difficulties in mainline classrooms.
4. working with individuals around the personal difficulties they are experiencing in their lives. This could be to do with family relationships and friendships, schooling, health or around thinking about their future.
5. opening up avenues for young people to engage with different political systems via things like school councils and youth forums.
6. assisting with the development of inclusive education. This may be through working with young people to accept others, and to make sense of the school environment.

("p. 6") Some themes

These examples just scrape the surface. The thing that joins them together is the way in which the workers approach their task.

First, and foremost, they see themselves as educators. Their job is to work with people so that they may explore their experiences and learn.

Second, they seek to work with people, rather than to organize or provide for them.

Third, while they may be involved in very different activities these educators look to conversation as a central means by which people can reflect and learn.

Fourth, they are concerned with the whole person. The task is not to develop a narrow area of knowledge or skill but to encourage people to value and engage with themselves and the world. This means attending to the body, mind and spirit (to use an old YMCA phrase).

Fifth, there is a central interest in working so that all may share in a common life. There is a stress on fostering democratic ways of working, equal opportunity and justice for all.

Sixth, a lot of the work is undertaken in and with groups. For quite a lot of the time informal educators are involved in forming and developing groups. Sometimes the group is just for a single event such as a trip, sometimes for something more permanent such as a tenants' association.

http://www.infed.org/biblio/inf-lrn.htm

("p. 1") Informal learning should no longer be regarded as an inferior form of learning whose main purpose is to act as the precursor of formal learning; it needs to be seen as fundamental, necessary and valuable in its own right, at times directly relevant to employment and at other times not relevant at all. (Coffield 2000: 8).

ME: Yes!!!

("p. 1") We must move away from a view of education as a rite of passage involving the acquisition of enough knowledge and qualifications to acquire an adult station in life. The point of education should not be to inculcate a body of knowledge, but to develop capabilities: the basic ones of literacy and numeracy as well as teh capability to act responsibly towards others, to take initiataive and to work creatively and collaboratively. The most important capability, and the one which traditional education is worst at creating is the ability and yearning to carry on learning. Too much schooling kills off a desire to learn.... Schools and universities should become more like hubs of learning, within the community, capable of extending into the community... More learning needs to be done at home, in offices and kitchens, in the contexts where knowledge is deployed to solve problems and add value to people's lives (Leadbeater 2000:111-112)

Informal learning - an administrative concept

("p. 2-3") We can begin to see some of the problems associated with the term 'informal learning' as soon as we glance at the definitions offered. For example, Veronica Mc Givney used the following in her study. Informal learning is:

• Learning that takes place outside a dedicated learning environment and which arises from the activities and interests of individuals and groups, but which may not be recognised as learning.
• Non course-based learning activities (which might include discussion, talks or presentations, information, advice and guidance) provided or facilitated in response to expressed interests and needs by people from a range of sectors and organizations (health, housing, social services, employment services, education and training services, guidance services).
• Planned and structured learning such as short courses organized in response to identified interests and needs but delivered in flexible and informal ways and in informal community settings.

Margaret Dale and John Bell (1999) define informal learning somewhat more narrowly for their purposes as:

Learning which takes place in the work context, relates to an individual's performance of their job and/or their employability, and which is not formally organized into a programme or curriculum by the employer. It may be recognized by the different parties involved, and may or may not be specifically encouraged.

Dale, M. and Bell, J. (1999) Informal Learning in the Workplace, Department for Education and Employment, RB134, retrieved from http://www.dcsf.gov.uk/rsgateway/DB/RPP/u012809/index.shtml

("p. 1") This study explored informal learning in the workplace and investigated how it can contribute to the success of companies (especially small and medium sized enterprises) and enhance the employability of employees. Companies regarded as being leading edge in the training and development of their employees took part in interviews and case studies and employees drawn from different types and size of company participated in group discussions.

("p. 1") Informal Learning: Learning which takes place in the work context, relates to an individual's performance of their job and/or their employability, and which is not formally organized into a programme or curriculum by the employer. If may be recognized by the different parties involved, and may or may not be specifically encouraged.

Employability: The skills, knowledge and abilities of individuals that give them the potential to obtain paid employment in their target labour market.

Key Findings

• Informal learning results in the development of skills and knowledge, enhances employability and produces positive benefits for managers and companies;
• Informal learning needs to be led; managers' active involvement is critically important, but they need the skills to support learning;
• Informal learning forms part of everyday activities, and everyday activities support learning;
• Many different activities can aid Informal Learning. These include instruction and demonstration, shadowing and role modelling, practice and constructive feedback;

(" p. 3-4") Benefits: For employees and companies:

• Employees are more flexible and become more employable;
• Employees have greater self-confidence and better awareness of their abilities;
• Learning can be adapted to company and individuals' needs and situations;
• Learning sinks deeply into the subconscious and becomes a part of the normal way of behaving as it occurs over time and is reinforced on-the-job by colleagues and managers;
• Learning is rapidly put into practice;
• Employees understand the company better as they are more aware of its context, performance and priorities. They know how their jobs fit with others and the importance of other processes. They are more involved in the company and share its overall goals;
• Better relationships exist between colleagues and with managers;
• Working practices and performance are reviewed and new ideas encouraged; these help to resolve work related problems, early.

("p. 4") Conclusions: Informal learning has a vital impact on employability and makes a valid contribution to companies' long-term success. It does not need sophisticated schemes or large budgets; simple, sensible actions which link to other processes and types of learning are highly effective.

Learning, in all its various forms, should be an integrated and integral activity. Its contribution to both the employability of employees and the long-term success of the companies involved in the study cannot be denied. The fact that the latter are successful in business terms as well as being publicly recognized for their commitment to learning is testimony to its overall value.

ME: Thank goodness I found this article!

http://www.infed.org/biblio/b-selfdr.htm

("p. 2") [Charles Hayes] "'When we fail to take control of our education, we fail to take control of our lives. Self-directed inquiry, the process of taking control of your own education...is the lifeblood of democracy' (1998:xiv)."

("p. 2") Self-direction as:

• a personal attribute (personal autonomy)
• the willingness and capacity to conduct one's own education (self management)
• a mode of organizing instruction in formal settings (learner control)
• the individual, non-institutional pursuit of learning opportunities in the 'natural social setting' (autodidaxy).

("p. 3") In its broadest meaning, 'self-directed learning' describes, according to Malcolm Knowles (1975: 18) a process:

...in which individuals take the initiative, with or without the help of others, in diagnosing their learning needs, formulating learning goals, identifying human and material resources for learning, choosing and implementing appropriate learning strategies, and evaluating learning outcomes.

("p. 3") Knowles puts forward three immediate reasons for self-directed learning. First he argues that there is convincing evidence that people who take the initiative in learning (proactive learners) learn more things, and learn better, than do people who sit at the feet of teachers passively waiting to be taught (reactive learners). 'They enter into learning more purposefully and with greater motivation. They also tend to retain and make use of what they learn better and longer than do the reactive learners.' (Knowles 1975: 14)

("p. 3") A third immediate reason is that many of the new developments in education put a heavy responsibility on the learners to take a good deal of initiative in their own learning. 'Students entering into these programs without having learned the skills of self-directed inquiry will experience anxiety, frustration, and often failure, and so will their teachers (Knowles 1975: 15).

("p. 3") To this may be added a long-term reason--because of rapid changes in our understanding it is no longer realistic to define the purpose of education as transmitting what is known. The main purpose of education must now be to develop the skills of inquiry (op cit).

("p. 3") Knowles' skill was then to put the idea of self-direction into packaged forms of activity that could be taken by educators and learners. He popularized these through various books and courses. His five step model involved:

1. diagnosing learning needs.
2. formulating learning needs.
3. identifying human material resources for learning.
4. choosing and implementing appropriate learning strategies.
5. evaluating learning outcomes.

Pintrich, P.R. and Garcia, T. Self-regulated Learning in College Students: Knowledge, Strategies, and Motivation. Student Motivation, Cognition, and Learning: Essays in Honor or Wilbert J. Mc Keachie. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, New Jersey, 1994. pp. 113-133.

p. 113 The authors have conducted research over the past 5-8 years that has focused on self-regulated learning in college students. They have worked on how to teach college students learning strategies and how to improve their motivation. They developed a general model of college student motivation and self-regulated learning.

p. 114 The purpose of this chapter is to review several general themes that have characterized Bill Mc Keachie's research as well as our own research in the College Student Research Group, as to propose future directions for research on self-regulated learning in college students.

p. 114 ...Bill has always taken a more cognitive view of learning, and as he observed in Teaching Tips, (Mc Keachie, 1994) "human beings are learning organisms--seeking, organizing, coding, storing, and retrieving information all their lives; building on cognitive structures to continue learning throughout life, (certainly not losing the capacity to learn); continually seeking meaning" (p. 289).

p. 115 ...we have been convinced that just as there are cognitive structures that represent content knowledge, there are cognitive structures that represent self-knowledge and that these structures--self-schemas--can influence learning.

p. 117 We are just beginning our research on self-schemas and self-regulated learning with college students, but the results are promising. For example, Garcia (1993) found that students' self-schemas were related to their motivational beliefs and strategies for learning. The various self-schemas generated by the students (e.g., "intelligent," "keeps up with course work," "procrastinates," "unhappy with major") were differentially related to motivational beliefs and learning strategies.

p. 117 These distinct patterns of correlations suggest that different levels of self-regulated learning may be partially accounted for by students' self-beliefs. That is, what we believe we are like and what we believe we may become help provide the impetus for regulating behavior;...

p. 117 First, a problem we have struggles with is the assessment of self-schemas, not unlike our colleagues Naveh-Benjamin and Lin (this volume) with the assessment of knowledge structures.

p. 118 ...the self-schema literature has not really examined how individuals come to acquire and form their self-schemas, instead focusing on the influence self-schemas have on self-perception, motivation, and affect (e.g., Fong & Markus, 1982; Markus, 1977; Markus, Hamill & Sentis, 1987; Ruvulo & Markus, 1992).

p. 119 A second general issue concerns research on the transfer of these knowledge structures across tasks and situations. In the cognitive domain, this involves examining how knowledge structures are used across different tasks.

p. 119 In addition, the development of this taxonomy will help us become more aware of how to specifically teach for transfer across tasks and domains and encourage the use of tasks and specific instructional strategies that help us accomplish the goal of transfer of learning.

p. 120 ...we are interested in the self-schemas students have for different academic domains and how these course- or discipline-related self-schemas are organized and their functions in self-regulated learning.

p. 121-122 Our model assumes that these cognitive and metacognitive strategies are not "traits" of the learner, but rather that these strategies can be learned and can be brought under the control of the student. By focusing on strategies that can be controlled and learned by students, our model presents a more optimistic view of learning to both faculty and students. Students can be taught these strategies directly and faculty can help students learn how to use them. In contrast, models of personality styles assume that these traits of students are stable and domain-general and that students do not have much control over them. Accordingly, models that focus on cognitive styles suggest that faculty adapt their class and teaching style to the diversity of student learning styles--a rather difficult and impractical suggestion.

p. 122 Besides these general substantive findings, a second more practical contribution of this research has been the development of a self-report instrument for assessing learning strategies and motivation, the Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire or MSLQ (Pintrich, Smith, Garcia & Mc Keachie, 1993). The MSLQ can be used for both research and classroom purposes, thereby serving both substantive and practical concerns...Students can use it for self-diagnosis of their strengths and weaknesses in any course or in specific learning to learn or study skills courses. It seems to be a reliable and useful tool that can be adapted for a number of different purposes for researchers, instructors, and students.

p. 122 In terms of future directions for research in this area, there are a number of directions; the one that seems most important concerns the contextualization of general learning strategies. For example, we have found that for certain courses and certain types of exams, rehearsal strategies actually work quite effectively, or at least are correlated highly with students' grades on the exam. These courses and exams stress the simple recall of facts, names, and labels as in many biology courses that focus on memorizing terms. These results have made us realize that good strategy use in the classroom may be more conditional and contextual than is suggested by experimental research. That is, students need to understand the conditions under which certain learning strategies might be more or less effective, rather than just assuming that all deeper processing strategies like elaboration are better. We need more on the conditional knowledge of strategy use, not unlike the research discussed earlier on the range of applicability of knowledge structures. This would include studies of the range of applicability of learning strategies for different tasks and different domains. In addition, as part of understanding conditional knowledge we need research on students' understanding of the goals of the task (e.g. memorization vs. understanding), their own personal goals and criteria used to judge success (performance vs. mastery), and how these goals are coordinated with actual strategy use.

p. 126 Constructs such as self-schemas and motivational strategies highlight the integration of motivation and cognition in academic settings such as the college classroom. However, we still need more research on how these constructs interact with other motivational and cognitive components and hwo an individual student regulates his or her knowledge, strategy use, motivation, and volition. As Zimmerman (1989, this volume) and others like Como (1993) pointed out, students' ability to control their cognition, motivation, and volition can have a dramatic influence on learning. This is especially true for college students who, when you talk to them, are very motivated and concerned about doing well, but often have a very difficult time enacting their intentions, given all the internal and external distractions they confront in college life. So, although the ability to regulate cognition and volition may be important for K-12 education, we think it is even more important for college students. Not only are they developmentally more likely to have the capability to be metacognitive and self-regulating, the classroom and general college environments they confront offer them more choices and control and demand more self-regulation and motivational and volitional control.

ME: This article seems to be concerned with the validity of results (their own and others') rather than presenting results that I can use. It gets interesting by p. 121-122. Also, this material may also belong under metacognition, but I think it belongs here as well, so here it sits.

Coffield, Frank. (2000). The structure below the surface: reassessing the significance of informal learning. The necessity of informal learning. The Policy Press, Great Britain, 2000. pp. 1-11.

7/25/08: This article is the intro to the booklet, but an article in itself. Coffield is the editor. This booklet discusses informal learning as a policy issue in Great Britain.

(p. 1) If all learning were to be represented by an iceberg, then the section above the surface of the water would be sufficient to cover formal learning, but the submerged two thirds of the structure would be needed to convey the much greater importance of informal learning.

(p. 1) This report, in contrast, breaks away from the standard, mainstream approach to learning and argues instead that formal education and training represent only a small part of all the learning that goes on in schools, colleges, at work, at home and in the community. It goes further by claiming that, although informal learning is routinely ignored by government, employers and most researchers, it is often necessary, whereas formal training is often dispensable. The five chapters in this report explore different aspects of the submerged and neglected world of informal learning. Taken together, they amount to a plea for a fundamental reassessment of its significance.

(p. 2) Informal learning, then, may plan the psychological role of engaging students of all ages in learning and helping some of them to survive formal education. For me it acted as an indispensable complement to, rather than an easy replacement of, formal knowledge.

(p. 2) Kumar argues that informal learning should no longer be dismissed as extra-curricular, but:

must come to be seen and attended to as the real heart of university life and the main justification of the university's existence...universities were--and are--unique concentrations of a diversity of talents formed by family, school and class cultures. They provide the milieu in which these talents find the space and opportunity to flourish, often in areas remote from the formal academic curriculum. It is in this, rather than in the provision of formal learning, that the universities are distinctive. It has often struck many of us who work in universities that the students learn more from each other, in a variety of ways, than they do from us: purveyors indeed of increasingly questioned and questionable stocks of knowledge. (Kumar, 1997, pp. 28-9)

(p. 2-3) ...John Field and Lynda Spence claim in Chapter 2 that relatively low levels of participation in formal education and training for adults can "simply mean that people have found that informal learning is a better way of achieving the goals they set themselves."

...Stephen Baron, Alastair Wilson and Sheila Riddell in Chapter 3 studied the provision of supported employment for adults with learning difficulties and argue that "becoming a competent member of the workplace depends less on formally defined skills and their acquisition through training than on scarcely noticed processes of acculturation into social networks and their whole ways of life."

For Pat Davies, ..., the concern is that certification may destroy the highly motivating informality between tutor and student and may even alienate the latter. Thankfully, the empirical data that she explores in Chapter 4 showed that such fears were largely unfounded.

Finally, in a long Chapter 5, Ralph Fevre, Stephen Gorard and Gareth Rees draw on an historical archive to suggest that in South Wales, prior to mechanisation in the first half of the 20th century, there was an informal system of training in coal-mining in the region which formed knowledge and skills more effectively than a more formal system might have. In the second half of their paper, they use they survey of more than one thousand residents and in-depth interviews with 10% of them to make the provocative suggestion that "formal training my lead to unnecessary learning whereas informal learning is concerned with the acquisition of necessary knowledge and skills."

(p. 3) ...it is appropriate to introduce briefly The Learning Society Programme. The full title of the programme is The Learning Society: Knowledge and skills for employment and the original specification described it as follows:

The programme is a response to the growing national consensus that the UK needs to transform radically its thinking and practice in relation to education and training if it is to survive as a major economic power with a high quality of life, political freedom and social justice for all its citizens.

The aim of the programme is to examine the nature of what has been called a learning society and to explore the ways in which it can contribute to the development of knowledge and skills for employment and other areas of adult life. The programme focuses on post-compulsory education, training and continuing education in a wide variety of contexts, both formal and informal. (ESRC, Research Specification, 1994)

(p. 4) The vision, as detailed in David Blunkett's memorable Foreword to The Learning Age, celebrates the wider contribution that learning has to make in creating a civilised society, developing the spiritual side of our lives and promoting active citizenship (DfEE? , 1997, p. 7)

(p. 4) ...does the pursuit and possession of qualifications instil a love of learning?

(p. 4) The research of Stephen Ball and his colleagues in one post-16 education and training market in London pointed to those young people who identities had been so damaged by 11 years of formal schooling that more education and training is viewed as an "impossible or unpalatable" option (Ball et al, 1999).

(p. 5) Do those who become the successes of the formal system of initial education become lifelong learners? ...there is no simple causal link...

(p. 5) Do adult workers who obtain vocational qualifications in a specific area subsequently improve their work performance in that area? The study by Jenny Hewison and her colleagues of training among National Health Service staff demonstrated that the qualifications required by managers for a particular job were not thought necessary by nurses to do that job (Dowswell et al, 1999).

(p. 5) Three out of 10 graduates in 1997 were in jobs for which a degree was not an entry requirement--a level similar to that recorded in 1986. This suggests a deficiency in employer demand and a cost to society in terms of underused (but paid for) human capital resources. The mismatch between the demand and the supply of all qualifications is also alarmingly high--in 1997 around one in five of those holding any qualification reported that no qualification at all was required for the job they currently had. (Felstead et al, 1999, p. 69).

(p. 5) _Higher levels of education and training may be a necessary precondition for greater economic success, but on their own they are not sufficient to ensure that it occurs. They are better seen as simply one part of a much wider matrix of factors that lead to what the OECD has dubbed the "high performance workplace"... These finding beg important questions about the efficacy of the UK's current emphasis upon boosting the supply of skills, and assuming that the demand for and effective utilisation of increased skills and knowledge can be left to take care of itself. (Brown and Keep, forthcoming, p.22)

(p. 5) Qualifications will continue to perform the important functions of selecting (and rejecting) people for further education or for jobs, of guaranteeing standards to employers and the community, and of opening up opportunities for all those who obtain them...However, our qualification-driven system runs the risk of high participation rates resulting in much education and training being of dubious value because students are intent on increasing their credentials rather than their understanding.

(p. 6) Ralph Fevre et al comment, "It is almost as if the best sort of learning--and not simply that very basic learning without which the organisation could not function--is the informal type".

(p. 6) In addition to the so-called transferable skills of literacy, numeracy and information technology (IT), what employers need are employees who have learned how to learn and who wish to go on learning. The significance of these research findings is that a capacity and enthusiasm for learning appears to be transferable between 'useless' and 'useful' knowledge.

These findings show that this type of learning is not trivial and amounts to far more than the acquisition of additional information; it means the definition proposed by Michael Eraut that "the use of the word 'learning' in the phrase The Learning Society should refer only to significant changes in capability of understanding" (1997, p. 556)

(p. 6) However, the surprising finding from their survey of more than 1,000 residents is that "most new jobs involved no training of any type, not even a half-day of Health and Safety training...new tasks were picked up through 'common sense' and "the conclusions that most of these respondents drew from their experiences was that, in their view, formal training was unnecessary and that experience was everything". Again, informants spoke eloquently of the greater importance in their lives of the informal learning which took place in transient social interactions inside and outside employment. It is via informal learning that most of us pick up "the deeply implicit rules of the workplace", which prove such a barrier to adults with learning difficulties, as Stephen Barron et al explain in Chapter 3.

(p. 7) A genuine culture of lifelong learning needs to adopt a very broad definition of learning which includes general education, education for living and for active citizenship; improving the skills of the workforce must not become the only or the overriding goal of policy. Many adults, and especially those who have retired, wish to take a broad range of courses and they neither need nor want a qualification. Insisting that such courses become accredited may alienate these learners.

(p. 7) The key issues can be summarised as follows:

The existence, significance and necessity of informal learning needs to be more widely acknowledged by policy makers, practitioners, employers and researchers. Informal learning should no longer be regarded as an inferior from of learning whose main purpose is to act as the precursor of formal learning; it needs to be seen as fundamental, necessary and valuable in its own right, at times directly relevant to employment and at other times not relevant at all.

We need a greater understanding of informal learning as a means of sparking off curiosity in all types of apparently useless knowledge (at least from an economic perspective) and in all types of formal and informal settings. Such curiosity, when aroused, spills out into all areas of life.

...

There is more to creating a learning society than continually beating the drum of human capital. The more subtle claims of social capital need to be explored, and robust indicators of informal learning should be developed, including criteria for funding.

Metacognition Musings and Quotes

Hartman, Hope. (2001). "Developing Students' Metacognitive Knowledge and Skills," Metacognition in Learning and Instruction: Theory, Research and Practice, Hope J. Hartman ed., Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001, pp. 33-68.

First of all, the ABSTRACT: Recent research highlights the importance of both metacognitive knowledge and metacognitive skills in learning. This chapter reviews some of the recent literature on metacognition in learning and describes some methods of helping students acquire strategic metacognitive knowledge and executive management metacognitive skills to improve their learning. Topics focused on include reading metacognition, graphic organizers, self-assessment, self-questioning, and thinking aloud, all of which can be used across content domains.

Second of all, I realize I will be quoting a lot from this article, but this is one of my richest resources. I put quotes here that I think will help me organize my thinking when it comes time to write.

(p. 33) In this chapter, a strategy is defined as a conscious, deliberate use of a specific method, whereas a skill is defined as a refined strategy which is used selectively, automatically and unconsciously as needed.

(p. 33) From an information processing perspective, metacognitive, executive control processes, which guide the flow of information through the mind and regulate cognition, explain why some students learn and remember more than others (Woolfolk, 1998). High achieving students have been found to possess more metacognitive awareness and engage in more self-regulatory behavior than low achieving students. Indeed, metacognition in general has been found to be an important characteristic of expertise (Meichenbaum & Biemiller, 1998; see Sternberg, Chapter 12). The kinds of metacognition discussed in this chapter can "make or break" academic success; they are the kinds of knowledge and strategies that successful people tend to figure out for themselves and that some people must be taught. When used extensively and in varied contexts, metacognitive knowledge and strategies can be used automatically in skilled performance.

(p. 33-34) Use of metacognition has been demonstrated to be essential to learning. General strategic, metacognitive knowledge and strategies, and domain-specific knowledge have been shown to have important roles in thinking and problem solving (Bransford, Sherwood, Vye and Rieser, 1986).

(p. 34) Zimmerman (1990) characterizes the metacognitive processes of self-regulated learners in terms of planning, setting goals, organizing, self-monitoring and self-evaluating at various times during the learning process. Zimmerman (1995) points out that it is not enough for students to have metacognitive knowledge (or skills); they also must self-regulate its use when confronted with stress, competing attractions and fatigue. Context-dependent motivational issues, such as effort, self-efficacy, persistence and task choice are also important determinants of self-regulation. Metacognition is necessary, but not sufficient, for academic success.

(p. 34) Research on learning emphasizes the importance of attention to higher level thinking (including problem solving, metacognition, and critical thinking) and affect (including motivation, self-concept, affective self-regulation and attributions) in addition to the traditional focus on content and basic skills. Learning is best when it is active, meaningful, retained over time, and transfers to a variety of contexts. A vitally important but often neglected aspect of learning is that often students have the requisite knowledge and skills for performing complex tasks but do not use them; i.e. the skills remain inert. Sometimes this is because students are not motivated or confident to apply them, and sometimes students simply do not recognize that the situation calls for use of particular knowledge and skills. That is, students may have declarative and procedural knowledge, but not the contextual or conditional knowledge needed for application and transfer (Hartman & Sternberg, 1993).

(p. 34) Garner's (1990) theory of settings suggests that the nature of strategic activity often varies with the context. She notes that children and adults often fail to use the strategies at their disposal because minimal transfer, attributions and classroom goals do not support strategy use, the knowledge base is not adequately developed, and learners tend to use primitive routines and show poor cognitive monitoring. According to Garner's theory of settings there are at least six contextual factors that affect strategy use. These factors include strategies being too tightly linked to particular situations, lack of knowledge about the relationship between strategy use and task demands, and classroom settings that do not value the effortful application of strategies.

(p. 34-35) Although over the past two decades research has documented the important role of metacognition in learning, many students are unaware of the concept of metacognition and do not reflect on their thinking and learning strategies and attitudes and how they might be improved. Knowing about your own knowing or thinking about your own thinking--metacognition--includes thinking about your own thinking processes and the products of your thinking. Two fundamental aspects of metacognition are awareness of and control over one's thinking. Two basic types of metacognition are executive management strategies for planning, monitoring, evaluating and revising one's thinking processes and products, and strategic knowledge about what information and strategies/skills one has (declarative), when and why to use them (contextual/conditional), and how to use them (procedural). Some metacognition is domain-general, applying across subjects and situations; and some is domain-specific, applying selectively to particular subjects and situations (see Schraw, Chapter 1 and Wolters & Pintrich, Chapter 6). Research suggests that the development of metacognition begins by five to seven years of age and is enhanced during and through schooling (Flavell, 1985; Flavell, Green & Flavell, 1995; Garner, 1990).

(p. 35) Cognitive (worker) skills perform the intellectual work decided on by the metacognitive bosses. Examples of cognitive skills include encoding (registering information), inferring, comparing, and analyzing. Metacognition refers to "thinking about thinking," such as deciding how to approach a task. Metacognitive (boss) skills involve executive management processes such as planning, monitoring and evaluating. Although cognitive skills are important, Wagner and Sternberg (1984) argue that teaching needs to emphasize metacognitive skills because:

1. Teaching specific strategies, such as the order in which to perform a particular task, will not give students the skills they need in the long run. Students must learn general principles such as planning, and how to apply them over a wide variety of tasks and domains.
2. Both the long-term benefits of training in cognitive skills and the ability to apply cognitive skills to new tasks appear to depend, at least in part, on training at the metacognitive level as well as at the cognitive level. Metacognitive knowledge and skills are needed for effective cognitive performance.
3. Generally students have a history of blindly following instructions. They have not acquired the habit of questioning themselves to lead to effective performance on intellectual tasks.
4. Students with the greatest metacognitive skill deficiencies seem to have no idea what they are doing when performing a task.
5. Students have metacognitive performance problems of: a) determining the difficulty of a task; b) monitoring their comprehension effectively, i.e. they don't recognize when they don't fully understand something (e.g. task directions, information in textbooks); c) planning ahead (e.g. what they need to do and how long each part should take); d) monitoring the success of their performance or determining when they have studied enough to master the material to be learned; e) using all relevant information; f) using a systematic step-by-step approach; g) jumping to conclusions; and h) using inadequate or incorrect representations.
6. Metacognitive skills and knowledge, as important as they are, are not often taught in most areas of the curriculum.

Self-Assessment

(p. 36) Self-regulating students engage in learning activities with specific goals in mind, observe their performance as they work, evaluate progress in attaining their goals and react by continuing or changing their approach as needed, depending upon the value of the task and upon perceived self-efficacy (Schunk, 1991). Students who observe and evaluate their performance accurately may react appropriately by keeping and/or changing their study strategies to achieve the goal of maximizing their grade in a course or on a test.

(p. 36) ...many students could benefit from improved awareness of factors affecting their grades and strategies they can use to get better grades, so that as self-directed learners they can make appropriate efforts to attain the grade goals they have set for themselves.

Cultural Influences

(p. 36-37) Research demonstrates cultural and social influences on students' self-perception. For example, self-concept is affected by factors including social influences, such as peers and significant others; physical considerations, such as physical appearance and ability; and gender (Shavelson & Bolus, 1982; Skaalvik & Rankin, 1990). In a study of predictors of college graduation, Tracey & Sedlacek (1987) found a differential impact of academic self-concept as a function of ethnicity. Although it was a useful predictor of success for white students, it was not useful for black students. Research suggests that there are ethnic differences in locus of control (Kumea-Shorter, 1976; Lao, Chuang & Yang, 1977; Cole, Rodriguez and Cole, 1978). Mestre (1989) cites research identifying cultural factors that affect mathematics learning. He believes comprehensive attempts to improve math education for minorities must take into account cultural, linguistic, socioeconomic, and attitudinal factors. Cognitive style research has demonstrated that variations within ethnic groups are general greater than variations among them. Various cultures tend to show considerable similarities in their cognitive styles (Shipman & Shipman, 1985).

(p. 37) According to Anderson (1988), most minority college students are inadequately prepared to compete with better educated, more affluent students. Unfortunately, most colleges respond by retention programs that emphasize only remediation and counseling. These programs have not been very successful with ethnic minorities in part because of the ethnocentric assumption that minorities have the same cognitive framework as whites... These programs rarely attempt to identify the learning preferences and cognitive assets of non-white students. Minority students are expected to adapt to the instructional program rather than the instructional program adapt to meet students' needs. The culture of the classroom may conflict with students' cultural styles. For example, while college classrooms often emphasize competition and individual achievement, students from non-western cultures may be more accustomed to group cooperation and value group achievement. Often minority differences are equated with deficiencies.

(p. 37-38) ...there may be cultural differences in metacognition and the relationship between metacognition and other variables that affect academic performance. Supporting these predictions is research suggesting that problem-solving metacognition is related to students' academic self-concepts, and that culturally distinct ethnic groups very on these measures and their interactions (Hartman, Everson, Tobias & Gourgey, 1996). Analysis of variance showed there were significant main effects due to ethnicity in self-reports of metacognition; black students reported the most use, Asian students reported the least use, and Hispanic students were in the middle. There was also a significant interaction between gender and ethnicity in metacognition. Black females reported more use of metacognition than black men, while Asian and Hispanic men reported more use of metacognition than women in their respective groups. The finding regarding Asian students' reports of relatively little use of metacognition may be a reflection of the Asian practice of self-criticism.

(p. 38) For non-native speakers of English, linguistic diversity may affect students' academic performance as well as teachers' attitudes and expectations. Cultural factors, such as ethnic or gender stereotypes, may also trigger certain teaching behaviors, such as lowering standards or expectations, thereby affecting the quality of instruction, and in turn academic achievement.

(p. 38) ...Treisman (1985) examined the academic behavior of black and Chinese students and found that black students, unlike Chinese, rarely studied with classmates. Chinese students often worked in informal study groups. Cooperative work with a shared purpose, which research suggests creates an environment rich in metacognitive processing, enables Asians to share their mathematical knowledge, check out their understanding and approaches, and critique each other. Consequently, cooperative learning facilitates both content acquisition and metacognition.

(p. 38) Cultural variables, such as those observed by Treisman, can affect thinking and learning. Another major cultural factor that impacts education is when the students' native language is different from the language of instruction, which can affect students' ability to acquire knowledge through reading, as well as their ability to communicate what they have learned through writing.

ME: This is why Hilary deemphasizes perfect English in her assignments, but encourages writing.

Metacognitive Reading Strategies

(p. 39) Alexander's (1995) Domain Model of Learning suggests self-regulation, such as metacognition, is affected by the level of one's knowledge in a particular domain. Novice learners are likely to engage in metacognitive activities less often and less successfully than learners with more subject area knowledge, who are at the competence stage of learning in a domain. What are the implications for students who must learn the subject area by reading about it in a language different from their native tongue? Some students will compound lack of prior knowledge in a subject with minimal knowledge of the language in which it is written. To what extent does the use of successful metacognitive reading strategies transfer across languages?

This is an important issue for ACUT. Our target audience is international as well as female students.

(p. 39) ...experts and novices in specific domains differ in how they budget and regulate their reading time. Domain-knowledge sometimes includes metacognitive knowledge of the relative effectiveness of various strategies. Studies comparing good and poor readers identify a variety of metacognitive skills that enhance reading comprehension. According to Brown (1980) and others, good readers regularly plan, attend to task demands, predict, use strategies to increase their comprehension and meet task requirements, check, monitor, reality test, control and coordinate their learning. Four effective reading comprehension strategies found by Jones, Amiran and Katims (1985) were: organizational, contextual and reflective thinking, and imagery strategies. Long and Long (1987) reported that good comprehenders in college are more mentally active while reading than are poor comprehenders. Good comprehenders engage in mental interactions with the text through visualizing, self-questioning, and inferring. Although poor comprehenders engage in some metacognitive activities, such as skimming, rereading and pointing to key works, they perform behaviors similar to those of good comprehenders, but without mentally activating operations needed for understanding.

(p. 39-40) Metacognitive reading skills include: skimming, activating relevant prior knowledge, constructing mental images, predicting, self-questioning, comprehension monitoring, summarizing and connecting new material with prior knowledge. Students cannot be expected to be competent with these skills because they are rarely taught and not everyone develops them independently. They need to be explicitly and continually addressed, practiced, polished and internalized. Improvements in these skills can lead to dramatic improvements in academic achievement. Students who are aware and in control of their metacognitive reading behaviors are at a distinct advantage because many of them involve monitoring one's comprehension, taking steps to clarify difficulties and restoring the comprehension process when it has broken down. Effective instruction in metacognitive reading skills requires that teachers explain the skills or strategies, model them for students, give examples, explain when, why and how to use them, emphasize the value of flexibility in selecting specific skills to fit the particular context, provide guided practice on a range of texts, and give corrective feedback. Palincsar and Brown's (1984) reciprocal teaching procedure is specifically designed to develop four metacognitive reading skills: questioning, clarifying, summarizing and predicting. Through reciprocal teaching, eventually students are able to apply these metacognitive reading strategies on their own as self-regulating readers.

(p. 40) Research on college reading and study skills notes that there is a trend across studies showing that students' perception of their own control over learning has important implications for student performance in a wide range of areas (Maxwell, 1993). Students' perceptions of control tend to affect their time management, use of reading strategies, and test taking: "...previous research on control theory suggests that unless students perceive that they have some control over and can influence their environment, their capacity to learn from instruction is limited." (110, p. 9)

(p. 40-41) A classic study ... (Brown, Campione and Day, 1983) compares three instructional conditions: 1. blind training, in which subjects are not told about why the activities they have been asked to perform are useful, 2. informed training, in which learners are induced to use a strategy and told why it is useful, and 3. self-control training, in which they are explicitly taught how to monitor and self-regulate their use of a reading strategy. Such research suggests that understanding the value of a strategy can give students personal rationale for using it, which facilitates the continued use the strategy (Paris, Wixson and Palincsar, 1986). This genre of research has demonstrated that reading is enhanced and reading strategies tend to transfer when strategy training is accompanied by self-control training (Garner, 1987).

(p. 41) Garner's (1987) review of research on metacognitive strategy training in reading discussed efforts to improve comprehension through text reinspection. Garner identifies two main components of text reinspection: noting that one does not remember what one has read, and deliberately reprocessing segments of the text to provide the information. Garner and her associates found that to use this strategy successfully, readers need conditional metacognitive knowledge, i.e., knowing when and where to use text reinspection. Duffy, Book and Roehler (1983) found that explicit explanations created student awareness, which in turn, stimulated student achievement. Garner argues that explanations about reading comprehension strategies should include: why the strategy should be learned, what the strategy is, how to use it, when and where to use the strategy and how to evaluate strategy use. Elementary school teachers do little direct instruction in how to comprehend text (Durkin, 1981). The tendency is for teachers to give students unguided practice. Finally, Garner reviewed the literature on text summarization, including the work of Brown and her associates on what students at different ages do and don't do: e.g. use of deletion rules, topic sentence invention rule, condensing, and revising. Garner (1987) found both high school and college students rarely integrate units of textual information, which would help produce succinct summaries.

(p. 41) Training studies have demonstrated that students can learn to use metacognitive strategies which can lead to better performance. Tobias (1987), using an aptitude-treatment-interaction (ATI) research paradigm focusing on mandatory text review, showed that unstrategic readers with low prior domain knowledge can be made to successfully review and refine their comprehension upon giving the wrong answers to adjunct questions. The results suggest that low-achieving students can be taught to use metacognitive strategies, such as text reprocessing, that my ultimately improve their reading comprehension. Knowledge about when to use strategies is an especially important form of metacognition (Pressley, 1984).

(p. 41-42) Research indicates that metacognitive knowledge about imagery is an important factor affecting its use. Images provide meaningful representations of material to be learned (Kulhavy & Swenson, 1975; Paivio, 1971). Such meaningfulness may facilitate both learning and retention. Kulhavy and Swenson (1975) investigated whether giving students instructions about images increased semantic recall of what they learned. The instructions they used told their subjects to form mental pictures of the events and activities in each paragraph before answering the question. Subjects in the image-instructed condition were told to use a specific strategy--mental pictures--and they were shown when to use the strategy. Embedded within the experimental booklets for these subjects, typed at the bottom of each page was, "Form a mental picture of these events before turning the page" (p. 49). Control subjects were just told to read the material and answer each question correctly. The material was carefully constructed for this study. It consisted of 20 prose paragraphs on "The Island of Ako and Its People," and two questions on each paragraph. Essentially all of the nouns in the paragraphs and questions had concrete environmental referents. Image-instructed subjects performed better than controls on the first test, but the difference was not statistically significant. However, image-instructed participants performed significantly better than controls on the delayed test. The image instructions with strategic metacognitive knowledge about imagery increased the amount of text-content available over time.

(p. 42) In addition to this specific, conditional or contextual information about strategy use, individuals may need to know other information about using the strategies. What good is it to tell a subject when to form a mental image if the subject doesn't know exact what is meant by a mental image? The strategic knowledge base must include extensive declarative information, facts about the world in general and the particular domain, like the imagery strategy and its application to reading. For example, many students equate imagery with mental pictures and do not realize that mental images can be auditory, olfactory or from any of the sense--not just vision. Declarative knowledge interacts with strategy execution; it is often needed to implement the appropriate identified strategy. Knowing that images may be auditory can stimulate students to construct auditory images while reading. Finally, it may be important for a person being instructed to know step-by-step procedures for how to create one and regulate its use. Students can benefit from hearing an expert reader think aloud while constructing and using mental imagery in reading. Self-regulation includes the ability to monitor and evaluate strategy use. Readers may decide to supplement an auditory image with an olfactory image.

Metacognition in Tutoring (NOTE: This relates to students as tutees as well as training we need to give to content developers in their role as tutors.)

(p. 42) Tutoring has a long history as an instructional method for developing students' knowledge and skills. Theoretical models of tutoring that include metacognitive factors affecting the tutoring process have been used to design tutoring programs and to plan tutor training that is designed to help students become self-directed learners (Hartman, 1990, 1993; Rings & Sheets, 1991; Condravy, 1995). In one tutoring model that emphasizes student development and metacognition, the student development component suggests that tutors should learn how to help students monitor their progress. It also suggests that tutors should confront students who fail to take responsibility for their own learning, and should help students develop effective communication skills and learn about instructional support and other campus resources. The metacognitive component suggests that tutors should teach students a problem solving model with four components: individual learner characteristics of motivation, learning styles and culture; task, or specific learning goals; strategies, including predicting test questions, categorizing information, and managing time, and materials, including use of print and media. Tutors

Informal Education and Metacognition Writing Section

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Thesis Outline, Version 3.1 (Am I still going to work on ACUT, or am I working on Twiki??? 7/25/08)

PROBLEM STATEMENT: What is the problem you want to address?

In the computing world, informal education skills are essential to academic and career success (Tully, 1996; Dale and Bell, 1999; Hartman, 2001). The field of computer science is constantly changing, with new--or new versions of--languages, operating systems, software and hardware appearing all the time. In order to keep up in the field, students and professionals simply must have the skills to learn how to learn outside the classroom.

One such example of the need for informal education skills for computer science students is the UNIX operating system. UNIX is rarely taught formally in universities. Students are left to their own devices to learn what they need to know to write programs and pass their exams. This sink-or-swim approach to learning UNIX has its consequences. In the male-dominated field of computer science, where the incoming male student population has more early experience with computers and more peers in the computer science program than women, lack of formal UNIX training creates an additional hurdle for college women trying to break into the field. Difficulties like the UNIX problem lead to frustration, poor performance in classes, and ultimately giving up on the field as a career option (Blum, 2001).

ACUT (Adaptive Collaborative UNIX Tutorial) was created to address this problem. It is a software tool that helps people learn UNIX on their own. It was specifically designed to assist female and international students, who lack easy social connections in the field and/or pre-existing knowledge of UNIX. ACUT adapts the material it presents to the user based on the experience cluster the user belongs to. The experience cluster is determined by the user's answers to an online survey and also the user's recorded experience with the tutorial. For example, good performance on quizzes will raise a user's experience cluster to a higher level. ACUT is also a collaborative system, wherein users are able to record their comments on the web page, and other users are able to read those comments and benefit from other users' understandings. In this way, nontraditional and disenfranchised students are able to join together in ACUT and help one another learn UNIX.

Though it has been operational for several years, ACUT has not had significant usage by the student population. I would like to study whether implementing metacognition in ACUT will increase the usage of ACUT by nontraditional students.

7/25/08: Previously, I felt informal education was an essential factor for career success. After reading The necessity of informal learning, though, I feel that informal learning is the substance of life. It is the basis of success in the work place, but also the foundation of life. I may want to rewrite this problem statement.

This isn't about learning how to learn on one's own in isolation. It is learning how to learn in an informal environment. Informal learning isn't just a person with a book in a room. Informal learning is people learning from each other as well as from books, outside the formal classroom environment.

ASSUMPTIONS: How are you going to bound your problem so that it is manageable? What decisions did you have to make for which you couldn't cite someone else's results or do your own research?)

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GOALS: The specific goals you intend to achieve in this project

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THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK/GROUNDED THEORY: How will you go about achieving those goals? Is there a particular theory you are following? Base your approach in what others have done or tried to do.

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SIGNIFICANCE: Why do we care if you achieve your goals? What impact will your research have?

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OBJECTIVES: These are measurable objectives for each goal. They follow from the discussion of approach and significance.

measure increase in motivation

I contend that by teaching metacognitive principles to nontraditional students, they will gain back some of the disadvantage they have versus their traditional male colleagues, and that their performance in their UNIX classes will improve.

I also contend that they will be able to translate their metacognitive knowledge towards success in their other classes and their future careers.

METHOD: What specific methods will you follow to meet your objectives? Are you using experimentation? If so, what type? What data will you use or collect?

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HYPOTHESES: What specific testable hypotheses are you going to validate in your research? The hypotheses should match up with the objectives and goals.

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DATA/RESULTS: What happened? What statistical model are you using to analyze your results? What was the outcome? Did you validate your hypotheses?

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CONCLUSIONS: Did you meet your objectives? Achieve your goals? Why or why not? What new knowledge arose from your work?

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FUTURE WORK: What will you do next? What do you think are promising avenues to pursue, given your results?

(I think this is more so "What is the next step after this research?" Not so much "What am I personally going to do next?"

REFERENCES: (This is quick 'n dirty. See JennysResearchJournal for fuller reference detail.)

Blum, 2001. "Women in Computer Science: The Carnegie Mellon Experience."

Dale and Bell, 1999. "Informal Learning in the Workplace." Department for Education and Employment, Research Brief No. 134.

Hartman, 2001. "Developing Students' Metacognitive Knowledge and Skills." Metacognition in Learning and Instruction: Theory, Research and Practice. Hartman, editor.

Tully, 1996. "Informal Education by Computer--Ways to Computer Knowledge."