Commentary on the Special Issue
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Commentary on the Special Issue Gary D. Phye
Published online: 16 August 2012 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2012
At the outset, I must confess to being very enthusiastic about the line of research being presented. On a larger scale, I am very pleased to see experimental psychology as conducted by applied cognitive scientists focusing on principles of learning, memory, and cognition that have implications for classroom practice. At the same time, these principles, generally speaking, have been available to classroom teachers in one form or another for some time. The question that I keep asking myself is “what didn’t work before, what went wrong?” Why has there been no wide spread adoption of these learning principles by educational professionals? Prior to specific comments about individual contributions, I am going to take the liberty of engaging in some philosophical thoughts. First, I will comment on a couple of metaphors frequently employed by educators when making meaning about educational progress and reform. Second, I will recommend the consideration of “the correspondence principle” as described by Gibson (1994) as a means of facilitating communication among researchers and practitioners. Following comments on individual articles, I suggest the development of a model-based reasoning approach (Mislevy 2009), that should not only enhance the construct validity of the arguments presented, but enhance communication between basic researchers and educational professionals. Models, like metaphors, provide a common referent for communication and are a critical component in the conventionalization process.
Metaphors and Models When educational psychologists discuss the history of implementing educational practices (innovations?) in the classroom, reference is frequently made to “pendulum swings”. This metaphor provides discussants with a visual image meant to portray the changes from one theoretical extreme to another that occur in many curriculum content areas. Another way in which educational psychology has characterized change in educational settings is the use of the biological principle of epigenesis. This principle provides the discussants with an image G. D. Phye (*) N162B Lagomarcino, Iowa State University, Ames, IA 50011-3196, USA e-mail: [email protected]
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Educ Psychol Rev (2012) 24:471–477
of recursive growth. This image serves as the basis for the concept of “spiral curriculum” as introduced by Bruner (1960) in his effort to make meaning of how instruction and the curriculum provide guidance in the development of personal academic knowledge of students. In both cases, communication among educational researchers and scholars has been shaped by the use of these metaphors. Examples coming quickly to mind are mathematics and reading. Interestingly, these two content areas are required by the federal government for accountability purposes to which schools in the USA are held. In some respects, it could be argued that the images of pendulum swings and a spiral curriculum characterize many educa
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