QUERY Cognition, and Instructor to Student dialogue

This forum contains all archives from the SD Mailing list (go to http://www.systemdynamics.org/forum/ for more information). This is here as a read-only resource, please post any SD related questions to the SD Discussion forum.
Locked
Markus Eklund
Junior Member
Posts: 3
Joined: Fri Mar 29, 2002 3:39 am

QUERY Cognition, and Instructor to Student dialogue

Post by Markus Eklund »

Hi,

Thanks to all those who initially helped me in my in my query
regarding 'System Dyanmics Modeling: Memory and Learning"". Especially
to Steve Kipp, and John Gunkler who pointed me in the right direction
of literature to review and how to think about my problem. Based on
their (and other's) feedback, I decided to spend a couple months
studying results from cognitive psychology concerning how to measure
learning and forgetting rates, and how these are affected by problem
spacing, testing intervals and some individual differences. Along the
way I was able to get quite a bit of help understanding this by some
researchers around the globe (mostly at Carnegie Mellon) that are
associated with ACT-R.

Currently, I have a validated Systems model (thanks to Farhad Saba and
Rick Shearer) that describes the inverse relationship between the
structure (a measure of an educational programme's responsiveness to
learners' individual needs) and dialogue (the extent to which learner
and instructor are able to respond to each other). Thus, in education
the 'distance' between instructor and learner is determined by the
level and rate of dialogue and structure, not physical distance. This
model has several assumptions, one of which that learner experience
(e.g. knowledge represented internally by memory) is a constant. To
use this model for instructional prescriptions, this constant needs to
be the variable that it is.

My goal is extend this model to include the fact that experience is
dynamic (see my proposal abstract for more complete details). Based
on my extended review of the literature I believe I've found the
equations needed (already backed-up by plenty of data) to meet this
goal but I need some help in figuring out how to translate these into
flow diagrams and a systems model.

Is there anyone out there who could help me, or provide me with a
method for how to reverse engineer these equations into flow diagrams
and a system model? I already have a start, but don't think my method
is good. Also it's been 15 years since Calculus so my math is a bit
rusty! [ Email the poster for the equations in word document.]

thanks in advance for you help,

Markus Eklund
From: Markus Eklund <
markus.eklund@gmail.com>
Masters' Student
San Diego State University


ABSTRACT
This proposal will investigate the affect of the learners' declarative
prior knowledge on the structure and dialog between instructor and
learner. Drawing on four different fields – Cognitive Science,
Distance Education, Discourse Analysis, and System Dynamics – the
project will measure ten key variables in education. The data
collected will be input in a systems dynamics model of transactional
distance and learner prior knowledge (learner experience).

It is anticipated that learners with more prior knowledge of the
content will be more active in asking questions and providing
information, which will cause the rate and amount of communication to
increase. This will provide more evidence that the communication
needs of learners vary as they move from the cognitive stage to the
autonomous stage of learning. These communication amounts and rates
will affect problem spacing and according to the Power-Law of
learning, the learning rates. Thus, to make learning rates optimal,
the instructor must know how to control amounts and rates of
communication patterns during different stages of learning.
Locked