| This doctoral seminar is a survey of contemporary learning theories that are broadly relevant to education.
How do people think? How do people learn? and What are the good ways to facilitate their learning? These are the questions that learning theories grapple with and answers to these questions inform and guide our instruction and research. Learning theories can be difficult, confusing, contradictory, or appear to be far removed from our daily work. But we all subscribe to certain learning theory(ies) explicitly or implicitly. The goals of this course are to help develop or deepen your knowledge of learning theories and research, and construct a personal "creative synthesis" integrating this broad base of knowledge.
To help develop your knowledge in this area, the class will read and discuss seminal works of well-established (e.g., Behaviorism, Constructivism, Sociocultural theories, etc.) as well as emerging learning theories (e.g., Kahneman's Two-System theory, Constructionism, Design-Based Research, Embodied and Multimodal Learning etc.). As a group, we will explore how these perspectives allow us to see and understand specific learning/education phenomena (and obscures others). At the same time, you will have the opportunity to explore theories of personal interest--including the perspectives focused on in the course and perhaps others. The class is intended to support theory-focused dimensions of research activities (during planning, data collection, analysis & reporting)--so you are strongly encouraged to focus the activities of the course on their personal research goals.
In this class, participants will: (a) collectively explore a variety of leading theoretical perspectives used in the learning sciences field, (b) develop expertise in a theoretical perspective (or two) of personal interest, and (c) leverage that expertise to develop a theory-related product (e.g., a conceptual framework for a study, an analytical/coding scheme for an empirical study). |
