An important practical and theoretical question is how to make the ideas we offer in college classrooms truly useful in students’ future professional lives. We need practical, high-impact solutions for large-scale instructional needs such as teacher education. Conceptualizing this focus as part of a continuum of professional development that begins with college, we work within traditional settings constrained by resources and by historical and institutional contexts. Our goal is to overcome these constraints and orient higher education toward desired transitions by proposing and evaluating realistic instructional innovations that are grounded in the science of learning and exploit the power of new media to overcome what is traditionally conceptualized as the cognitive transfer problem. The learning science that must be brought to bear includes: 1. studies of the professional practices we are preparing students to enter; 2. scientific understanding of how people perceptually experience professional environments, and how they learn and interact socially within them; and 3. prototype designs that illustrate how new media can help students construct knowledge representations that will support their future work and learning.
I will highlight my presentation with examples from my work in teacher education.
A few relevant papers:
Derry, S. J. (in press). eSTEP as a case of theory-based web course design. To appear in A. O'Donnell & C. Hmelo-Silver (Eds) Collaboration, Reasoning and Technology. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. *PDF available
Derry, S. J., Seymour, J., Steinkuehler, C., Lee, J., & Siegel, M. (2004). From ambitious vision to partially satisfying reality: An evolving sociotechnical design supporting community and collaborative learning in teacher education. In S. A. Barab, R. Kling & J. Gray (Eds.), Designing for Virtual Communities in the Service of Learning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 256-295. *PDF available
Steinkuehler, C. A., Derry, S. J., Hmelo-Silver, C. E. & DelMarcelle, M. (2002) Cracking the resource nut with distributed problem-based learning in secondary teacher education. Journal of Distance Education, 23(1), 23-29.*PDF available
Derry, S. J., & Potts, M. K. (1998). How tutors model students: A study of personal constructs in adaptive tutoring. American Educational Research Journal, 35, 65-101. *PDF available