Classroom Learning Implications of Situated Cognition and Cognitive Apprenticeship

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Situated Cognition and

Cognitive Apprenticeship:
Implications for Classroom
Learning
a
Sara Hennessy
a
School of Education , Open University , U.K.
Published online: 26 Mar 2008.
To cite this article: Sara Hennessy (1993) Situated Cognition and Cognitive
Apprenticeship: Implications for Classroom Learning, Studies in Science Education,
22:1, 1-41, DOI: 10.1080/03057269308560019
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Studies in Science Education, 22 (1993) 1-41 1
Situated Cognition and Cognitive

Apprenticeship: Implications for
Classroom Learning
SARA HENNESSY
School of Education, Open University, U.K.
INTRODUCTION
This paper reviews recent research in the area of situated cognition, focusing on
the domains of mathematics, science and technology. The key issue addressed
here is the disjunction between classroom learning and cognition in practice. The
notion of apprenticeship inside and outside the classroom, the potential
scaffolding function of computer-based learning environments, the role of prior
knowledge in learning, and the notion of a general thinking and problem-solving
capability are also explored, and implications for pedagogy are considered.
The first important implication for our understanding of knowledge
construction and problem-solving processes comes from the previously
established literature which characterises cognitive differences between novices
and experts. This work indicates that predominantly through an interactive
process of cognitive apprenticeship, experts spend years acquiring intuitive
specialist knowledge and sophisticated mental models of their domain (e.g.
Collins and Gentner, 1987). These models are influenced by the social and
cultural context in which solving a problem takes place, including the physical
structure, the purpose of the activity, the existence of collaborating partners and
the social mileu in which the problem is embedded (Furnham, 1992). Rather than
being an individual, purely experiential process, then, cultural transmission plays
a major role in the construction of domain expertise. However, practical
applications of expert/novice comparisons are somewhat limited. Since experts
and novices do not normally share similar goals or constraints nor wish to carry
out similar tasks, teaching novices what experts are assumed to know is not
2 Sara Hennessy
necessarily an optimal strategy. Direct comparison between expert problem

solving and that of young novices in the form of schoolchildren is therefore
unlikely to be illuminating. The previous tendencies of cognitive psychologists to
characterise various forms of everyday knowledge as deficient by comparison
with expert knowledge lack credibility in the light of recent research concerning the
construction of informal knowledge. The latter is successfully used in a range of
domains — by children and adults — to meet the demands of everyday problem-
solving situations, without recourse to school-taught strategies. Expert problem
solving is similar to this 'knowledge in action' in that practitioners rarely find it
useful to draw upon knowledge or skills attained during schooling. This is

because schooling does not really prepare pupils for later life or for problem
solving in the workplace; it can be viewed as a unique culture, a specialised
practice with its own conventions, organisations and concerns, which are in fact
of little value to society outside. The consequent gap between schooling, and
everyday practice by children, adult expert practitioners and 'just plain folks'
(Lave, 1988), is now well-documented and is explored below.
SITUATED COGNITION
Learning and problem solving in and out of school
The relatively new theoretical framework which characterises 'everyday' or
'situated' cognition considerably widens our view of cognitive models of problem
solving (a) to recognise the critical role of the social and physical circumstances in
which actions are situated, when interpreting those actions (Suchman, 1987), and
(b) to encompass thinking as a part of culturally organised activity which is carried
out within a community of practitioners. In this view, learning is a process of
enculturation or individual participation in socially organised practices, through
which specialised local knowledge, rituals, practices, and vocabulary are
developed. The foundation of actions in local interactions with the environment
is no longer an extraneous problem but the essential resource that makes
knowledge possible and actions meaningful (Suchman, 1987). The context and
content of thought are thus inseparable from the reasoning process. The
implication that problem solving is not a process internal to an individual mind,
but one grounded in social practice (e.g. Crook, 1991) has, in fact, increasingly
been recognised in a wide range of domains, for example, by researchers working
on gender issues in science and technology (Harding and Grant, 1984; Murphy,
1991).
The situated cognition framework has important implications for our
understanding of classroom learning. For example, the Piagetian view that
children develop an ability to handle abstraction is now being revised in terms of
their developing awareness of a set of cultural conventions for interpreting a task
and communicating the answer (Mercer, 1992). The child's task has become one
Situated Cognition and Cognitive Apprenticeship: Implications for Classroom Learning 3
of learning an implicit set of educational ground-rules — representing social

conventions for presenting knowledge in school, and cognitive problem-solving
procedures (Edwards and Mercer, 1987). These rules operate only in the
traditional classroom environment, which is considered an alien culture to the
practices and thinking which take place outside it. The main reasons for this
disjunction are as follows:
(i) According to the situated perspective on learning, knowledge moves from
being private to being shared through engagement in socially shared activity
and discourse. Wenger's (1991) study of insurance claim processing
demonstrated that even the most routine jobs generate very complex social
communities where learning is characterised by the sharing of informal
knowledge and the construction and negotiation of meaning. One of the
main purposes of formal schooling is likewise to develop a 'common
knowledge' (Edwards and Mercer, 1987). Yet an individualist perspective
is dominant in our educational system, where a premium is placed upon
what individuals can achieve by themselves and without external support
(Resnick, 1987a), and where even when groupwork is apparently being
encouraged, pupils work as individuals (Galton, Simon and Croll, 1980).
(ii) The incentives outside school lead to learning that is self-motivated or
commercially driven and the problems encountered are hence authentic and
relevant to the learner rather than artificially constructed, as, for instance,
computation exercises are. Hence, everyday learning is goal-directed and
often incidental or effortless, whereas much academic learning is deliberate,
effortful and decontextualised, being carried out for its own sake (Reeve,
Palincsar and Brown, 1987). An apparent lack of purpose and of explicit
criteria for success divorces classroom learning from readily understandable
goals such as the play goals of childhood or the work activities of adulthood
(Bruner, 1972).
(iii) Informal learning fuses intellectual and emotional factors, which are
separated in formal learning (Harris and Evans, 1991), where, for instance,
a concern with technical solutions to technical problems can overshadow the
values component of technology and its relevance to people and social
issues. As in science, this alienates girls in particular (Harding and Grant,
1984).
(iv) In school, almost all problems are pre-formulated and accompanied by the
requisite data, whereas, outside school, problems are seldom clearly defined
initially and the information necessary for solving them must be actively
sought from a variety of sources (Maier, 1980). Moreover, accuracy is
defined by the situation and correctness is negotiable outside school
(Hoyles, 1991).
(v) Although the same subject topics arise in both contexts, the methods used
4 Sara Hennessy
are quite different; school mathematics relies heavily on paper and pencil,
for instance, and the greatest premium is placed on pure thought activities
— what individuals can do without the external support of books, notes,
calculators or other complex instruments. In contrast, most mental
activities and actions in everyday life are intimately engaged with the
physical world — with objects, events and with some form of tools. The
resultant cognitive activity is shaped by and dependent upon the kinds of
tools available (Resnick, 1987a). The mechanisms of informal learning
include observation, imitation, identification and cooperation, whereas
formal knowledge is transmitted primarily through teacher talk (Scribner

and Cole, 1973).
Everyday mathematics
The major pioneering work in the area of situated cognition has focused on the
relationship between mathematics learning in school and mathematics 'in
context', namely in the workplace and in domestic life. (A global and up-to-date
overview of this work is collectively provided by a collection of papers edited by
Harris, 1991; Lave's book, Cognition in Practice, 1988; Nunes' analysis of
mathematical development, 1992; and by the May 1988 special issue of
Educational Studies in Mathematics.) A series of key research studies
characterising problem-solving strategies in everyday situations provides further
elaboration. This work spans several cultures: it documents the craft
apprenticeship of tailors in Liberia (Lave, 1977; Reed and Lave, 1981), the
everyday practice of arithmetic and manipulation of quantity relationships in
grocery shopping, cooking, dieting and money management, (Lave, 1988; Lave,
Murtaugh and de la Rocha, 1984), street vending in Brazil (Carraher, Carraher
and Schliemann, 1985; 1987; Saxe, 1988), dairy workers' calculation strategies
(Scribner, 1984), construction work (Carraher, 1986), and pottery making (Price-
Williams, Gordon and Ramirez, 1969). This research describes forms of
mathematics — sometimes known as 'ethnomathematics' (d'Ambrosio, 1985) —
that vary as a consequence of being embedded in cultural activities whose purpose
is not 'doing mathematics', and that differ radically from those used in school.
Researchers in this tradition have consistently found that quantitative relations
are dealt with inventively and effectively in everyday situations, and that
arithmetical activity is structured into, and by, ongoing activity (Lave, Smith and
Butler, 1988).
Lave (1988) showed that personal methods are commonly invented and used
successfully by adults in a practical situation — calculating the 'best buy' in a
supermarket — with a very high degree of accuracy (98%), whereas the same
people solved only 59% of similar calculations correctly in a written test. This
finding and those of Reed and Lave (1981) and Saxe (1988) indicated that two
distinct systems of arithmetic procedures and practices (symbol- or rule-based

versus meaning-based) function independently within the same culture with
different procedures and rates of success. This conclusion is corroborated by
studies contrasting the calculation strategies employed by the same children in (a)
selling produce in Brazilian street markets, (b) solving word problems and (c)
computation exercises (Carraher et al., 1985; 1987). Similarly, construction
workers have been found to demonstrate greater skill in applying proportional
reasoning when interpreting blueprints than students who learned the principles
in formal mathematics; the presence of physical objects in the builders'
environment rendered the task more meaningful to them (Carraher, 1986).

Carraher's work has also demonstrated the sophisticated understanding of
proportional relations developed by fishermen in their everyday practice; they
were able to invert their computational strategies and transfer them to new
domains (Carraher et al., 1988). A further example is Scribner's (1984)
observation that dairy employees used a wide range of strategies in processing
their milk orders, including the invention of units of calculation based on the
structuring resources available in the materials of the situation. The apparent
inconsistency in their strategies reflected rapid adaptation derived from the high
priority assigned to economy of effort. By way of contrast, students asked to solve
similar problems used a single, much less efficient algorithm. Scribner concluded
that 'Skilled practical thinking is goal-directed and varies adaptively with
changing properties of problems and the changing conditions in the task
environment' (1984, p.39). Saxe's (1982) work with the Oksapmin of Papua New
Guinea provides a classic example of such flexible adaptation; the introduction of
a money economy influenced the indigenous numeration system which is based
on body part counting. Conversely, the manipulation of abstract symbols (rather
than concrete quantities) carries the burden of computation in a classroom
situation and divorces mathematical operations from reality (Carraher et al.,
1985; Reed and Lave, 1981).
To conclude, it is now widely recognised that most adults and children
spontaneously invent their own, reliable mathematical procedures, and they
rarely use the standard written methods outside school (Fitzgerald, 1985; Shuard,
1986b). These findings are not altogether surprising. Two large-scale survey
reports on adult numeracy have concluded that formal teaching lacks relevance to
mathematics as commonly practiced in daily life; many adults have forgotten
those methods or they lack the confidence to use them (ALBSU, 1983; Sewell,
1982). Knowledge formed in practice, on the other hand, is often used to address
problems in different contexts, and it can be adapted for school-based problem
solving. Saxe (1988) has investigated the mathematical understandings of
schooled and unschooled child candy sellers and non-sellers in Brazil. The sellers
were observed to construct and operate on problems that were influenced by
6 Sara Hennessy
cultural artifacts, social conventions and interactions. They developed

increasingly complex problem-solving strategies that drew on the structure of
their currency system and conventional pricing ratios. Some sellers who attended
school worked towards adjusting their invented regrouping strategies to solve
mathematics problems in school, although the opposite influence of schooling on
out-of-school mathematics was minor. Saxe's studies highlighted the inter-
relationship between social and developmental processes in mathematical
learning and corroborated other findings from work on counting and measuring
such as those of Carraher et al. (1985) and Saxe and Moylan (1982). Collectively,
this work provides clear evidence for out-of-school development of abilities like
transitive inference-making about units, and decomposition or grouping of
numbers in ways appropriate to the activity, independently of a base structure in
the particular numeration system. Note that not all out-of-school mathematical
abilities are as sophisticated as those reported above, as Hatano's (1988)
comparison between Brazilian street mathematics and the routine expertise of
Japanese abacus operation shows. Both kinds of competence are acquired without
formal teaching in school and are used for commercial transactions, but the
process of accelerating speed in abacus manipulation has the same consequence as
the demand for high precision in executing mathematical procedures taught in
school: the flexibility, comprehension and the clarity of meaning underlying each
calculation step which characterise sellers' strategies, are sacrificed.
Everyday science
The 'everyday' and 'street' mathematics literature is supported by
characterisations of situated reasoning in other domains, including intuitive
psychology, biology and physics (Hatano, 1990; Inagaki, 1990). Most
prominently, there is a growing interest in 'street science' (George and Glasgow,
1988) and a wealth of research over the last two decades has focused on 'alternative
frameworks' in children's understanding of science (e.g. Driver, 1989; McDermott,
1984) and on everyday scientific thinking in general (Kohn, 1989; see also Furnham,
1992). Briefly, there is conclusive evidence that children construct intuitive
beliefs about natural phenomena (such as heat or forces) which conflict with the
scientific viewpoint and that these beliefs are highly resistant to counter-evidence
and instruction. These frameworks, and similarly lay adults' mental models of
science and technology (Wynne, Payne and Wakeford, 1990), often appear to be
partial, incoherent or internally inconsistent (Champagne, Gunstone and
Klopfer, 1985); typically there is no co-ordination of theory with evidence (Kuhn,
1989). This is because, as with everyday mathematics, pieces of knowledge or
models are being drawn upon flexibly and according to their appropriateness and
usefulness in a specific practical context. They provide a sensible framework for
understanding and describing phenomena which fit with the learner's experience;
new information is integrated with existing beliefs and ideas about how the world
works. Likewise, external scientific knowledge is defined by lay adults against
familiar knowledge (Wynne et al., 1990). Alternative conceptions are continually
reinforced through the mass media and daily conversation; the persistence of such
socialised knowledge is unsurprising.
Collectively, researchers engaged in studying situated cognition have built
upon recent developments in the areas of mathematics and science education in
challenging the previous assumptions of some educators that school is the central
source of everyday practice in these domains and that schooling needs to replace
the inferior, intuitive knowledge acquired in the outside world (Lave et al., 1988).
In fact, the following discussion implies that the reverse is more accurate!
The role of prior knowledge

A key factor in problem-solving ability according to Schoenfeld (1985) is the
learner's resources — the informal or intuitive knowledge an individual is capable
of bringing to bear and his or her relevant competencies. Schema theory and
related research indicate that as in the case of expert practitioners, children's
previous knowledge and experience are a major determining factor in how new
tasks are interpreted, what is understood and what they can go on to learn. The
organised, abstract bodies of information which learners bring to learning
determine whether new materials will make sense (Schuell, 1986). The situated
perspective elaborates upon this essential assumption of constructivism,
portraying learning as a process of guided participation in sociocultural activity,
which involves building bridges between what children know and new
information to be learned, and supporting children's cognitive development
(Rogoff, 1990). A large body of research now shows that children — including
preschoolers — are capable of participating productively in activities involving
mathematical and scientific thinking; they have significant implicit
understanding of many concepts and principles before encountering instruction
that enables these to be made explicit (e.g. Gelman and Gallistel, 1978; Greeno,
1992; Hughes, 1986). However, while quite a lot of encouraging progress is being
made as curriculum developers revise their views of learning and re-evaluate their
aims, conventional teaching in complex domains such as mathematics and science
nevertheless continues to impede the development of understanding through (a)
over-emphasising formal problem-solving procedures whilst neglecting the
appropriate conditions for applying them (NSF, 1983) and (b) ignoring children's
existing knowledge and experience. Many children are consequently unable to
cope with novel problem-solving situations and to bring their own resources to
bear. Ultimately they cannot bridge the gap between school-taught procedures
and everyday practice and thinking.
An unfortunate disjunction clearly persists between theory and current
8 Sara Hennessy
practice. Constructivist theories of learning, which hold that the forms and
content of knowledge are constructed through active interaction with the
environment, have long been established in the research literature and are now
part of conventional educational wisdom, yet few of today's classroom situations
encourage pupils to perceive what they are doing as the construction of
knowledge. For example, the views of many science teachers conflict with the
constructivist stance taken in the non-statutory guidelines for National
Curriculum Science in England and Wales (NCC, 1989c) and in teaching schemes
based on investigation (such as CLIS, 1987). A study by Aguirre et al. (1990)
investigating student teachers' conceptions concerning the nature of science,

teaching and learning produced depressing results; almost half of those
questioned believed in a transmission model, namely the passive accumulation of
a body of knowledge which has independent reality.
Evidence for the mismatch between theory and practice is widespread across
domains. For instance, many educators now believe that a combination of
calculator work and a varied repertoire of reliable mental methods of computation
is sufficient for most practical purposes and that there is little future for the
traditional written methods (e.g. Shuard, 1986b). The use of out-of-school
mathematics in school is generally no longer viewed as the intrusion of
inappropriate and primitive strategies that need to be replaced by formal
mathematics. Significant progress has accordingly been made in developing
mathematical curricula which build on children's existing knowledge and foster
a flexible problem-solving approach (e.g. Hobbs, 1989; PrIME, 1990; Resnick
et al., 1987; Shuard, 1986a; Stacey, 1991), and the National Curriculum
recognises the limitations of the highly complex conventional written algorithms
(NCC, 1989b). Nevertheless, the learning and practice of those algorithms
remains a dominant activity in primary classsrooms (in 1986 it took up 80% of the
total time spent on number: Shuard, 1986a). The reports by Sewell (1982) and
ALBSU (1983) indicated that one consequence of this outdated approach is an
exorbitant rate of adult innumeracy in the U.K., leading to unexpected
difficulties affecting home life and employment prospects. The surveys both
concluded that one in four British adults could not successfully solve problems
such as calculating the change from £5 for one item. One reason why some
children and adults cannot perform even the most straightforward calculations
mentally (Cockcroft, 1982; Sewell, 1982) may be because they are using mental
versions of formal column arithmetic procedures (Hope and Sherrill, 1987).
Those procedures often appear 'magical' and meaningless to pupils (Hart, 1981),
and according to Lampert (1986, p.340), many school leavers believe that
'mathematics is an esoteric body of memorized knowledge enjoyed by a small and
strange minority'! It should be stressed that pupils' apparent difficulties in
understanding mathematics and operating with numbers are probably not
conceptual in origin; some may derive from confusions concerning notational

conventions, as indicated by Nunes' work on the development of understanding
of signed numbers in everyday life (Nunes, in press).
Similarly, formal teaching of science neither builds upon nor dispels children's
robust, informal beliefs and gives little opportunity for the development of
necessary qualitative reasoning. Its predominantly quantitative approach in the
physics domain can instead hinder children in acquiring an understanding of
underlying scientific principles (cf. White and Horwitz, 1987). Indeed, the same
informal theories are found in undergraduate physicists (Viennot, 1979). The
dominant conceptual change approach to science learning involves facilitating the

restructuring of children's conceptions through deliberate instruction. (While
some of the most primitive ideas may need to be replaced, others can probably be
fruitfully built upon.) However, the 'situated cognition' view suggests that co-
existing alternative models may be appropriate in different contexts. Learning
then becomes a process of distinguishing when particular conceptions are
appropriate rather than one of exchanging faulty prior conceptions for scientific
ones (Solomon, 1983). Since everyday notions of science are necessary for
communication, the demand is for pupils to think and operate in two different
domains of knowledge and to be capable of distinguishing between them, yet
crossing over from one domain of meaning to another is exceedingly hard.
Solomon's work shows that solving physics problems deliberately set in familiar
contexts can cause pupils to relinquish their grasp on learnt symbolic knowledge,
reverting to familiar everyday systems of explanation. This phenomenon was
researched by Murphy (1989) who found a significant performance difference
when pupils were set the same problem in a familiar context and in an overtly
scientific one. Her finding has been replicated by recent research concerning
investigative work in science (Foulds, Gott and Feasey, 1992). (Note that the
biological domain is less problematic, since rather than hinder the development
of school-based scientific expertise, everyday biological knowledge appears to
provide a positive foundation for it: Inagaki, 1990.)
A further consequence of ignoring children's prior knowledge is that there are
frequent mismatches between actual learning experiences and outcomes, and
teacher-intended ones (Simpson, 1988). An extensive investigation of language
and mathematical learning at primary school level by Bennett et al. (1984) found
that an astonishingly high proportion — over half — of the tasks presented by
teachers were mismatched to children's level of attainment, and teachers
remained unaware of the cases where they had underestimated. In a similar vein,
the mathematics education literature is replete with examples of the ways in which
children ignore newly taught formal procedures, secretly adhering to their own
intuitive methods whilst presenting a 'veneer of accomplishment' (Lave, Smith
and Butler, 1988). Their behaviour is understandable and sensible; informal
10 Sara Hennessy
arithmetic methods — typically based on mental regrouping of terms — are

usually more accurate and easier to execute than traditional written ones
(Hennessy el al., 1992). Another tremendous advantage is their great flexibility;
invented techniques can be adapted according to the numbers involved, and to the
minds and purposes of individuals. Although an enormous variety of reliable
methods is in general use and they share the same underlying logical principles as
those taught in school (Carraher et al., 1988), these informal methods are in fact
often devalued in the classroom context (Hart, 1981), and outside by both
children and adults (Lave, 1988). My previous research indicates that the failure
to build upon children's informal knowledge impedes acquisition of the formal

calculation methods and precludes children from bringing their implicit
conceptual understanding to bear: for example, children's invented versions of
written procedures frequently violate their knowledge of basic arithmetic
principles (Hennessy, 1986). The teacher's job accordingly becomes one of trying
to reconnect principled conceptual knowledge with procedural knowledge, i.e.
connecting procedures which have become mindless to contexts that give them
mathematical reasonability (Lampert, 1986).
Children are also known to construct their own intentions and conclusions
regarding school science activities (Wittrock, 1977). These often differ from the
teacher's agenda and may influence what is learned from an activity in unintended
ways. Children's prior conceptual knowledge significantly affects their
predictions, explanations and perceptions of novel phenomena and problem
situations. Its interference with development of their understanding of some
unfamiliar scientific concepts may give rise to conceptual confusion.
'Confirmatory bias' (seeing what one expects to see) is very common and prior
beliefs are thus often reinforced through teaching which merely tries to overlay
new ideas. Another consequence of this teaching method is that much of the
knowledge acquired in many domains is inert. Remedial teaching is generally no
more effective than initial teaching since it usually repeats earlier instruction
whilst ignoring pupils' well-formed procedures and models, which may be
incorrect or inappropriate in certain contexts.
The critical importance of considering pupils' different experiences outside
school and how these affect their perceptions of tasks and learning situations in
school emerges from Murphy's (1990) discussion of the lessons learned from the
Assessment of Performance Unit science project. Numerous examples (spanning
the full range of tests and age groups) are offered which show that like other
activities, assessment activities are situated: their content and context are highly
significant variables affecting outcome. Indeed, the ways in which pupils access
their knowledge depend on many things, including the perceived purpose of a
task. Confusingly for them, pupils are often expected to apply their knowledge
selectively in different circumstances. Murphy concludes that to construct
meaning in pupils' responses, assessors must understand that children's models

of the world depend on whether and how they have linked the different
experiences gained in and out of school. Unfortunately, such understanding is
often lacking and formal assessment in the classroom is rarely diagnostically
revealing; it ignores everyday knowledge and tends merely to confirm what
teachers already know (Simpson, 1988). Many teachers are consequently under
the illusion that children know what they have previously been taught, but this is
often not measured effectively. For example, Brown (1981) has observed that
secondary school children have a much more limited mathematical knowledge
base than teachers believe, and building upon it in fact necessitates re-teaching
much of primary mathematics.
It is obvious that merely presenting children with new information and
experiences in the classroom is insufficient to promote learning. To avoid
confirmatory bias and move pupils' primitive thinking forward, new experiences
need to be articulated and reasoned about, related to their informal conceptions,
and generalised to other similar situations. An increasingly large body of research
shows that social interaction contributes to children's cognitive development, and
that collaborative problem solving is a key means of significantly increasing the
chances of these outcomes. Current work on computer-supported learning shows
that tasks which encourage joint decisions not only can promote conceptual
change (Howe et al., 1991), but they can even improve learning outcome on
subsequent individual tasks (e.g. Blaye et al., 1990). There are many advantages
of working in collaboration. For instance, it highlights the significance of
individual elements in the learning process within the context of a meaningful
whole, rather than promoting the practise of small pieces of skill in isolation. It
also motivates learners, providing: encouragement to try new approaches,
support for their partially successful efforts, and opportunities for appropriating
shared thinking for their own uses. The notion of learning through participation
in collaborative thinking processes is at the root of apprenticeship, as discussed
below.
Apprenticeship
Cognitive psychology research into the processes involved in situated cognition
and learning through collaboration with others is heavily influenced by the work
of Vygotsky (1962; 1978) and other activity theorists in his tradition. Cognitive
development is portrayed as the internalisation of cognitive activity originally
experienced in social contexts, whereby the learner's existing knowledge and
skills are extended through appropriation of shared cognitive processes. This
work shows that learning can be facilitated through a series of processes such as
modelling, coaching, scaffolding, fading, articulation and encouraging learners to
reflect on their own problem-solving strategies (Collins, Brown and Newman,
12 Sara Hennessy
1989). These processes are the components of apprenticeship, which essentially

involves providing help in developing an appropriate notation and conceptual
framework for a new or complex domain and allowing the learner to explore that
domain extensively, then gradually withdrawing support. This process makes
normally hidden mental processes overt. Exposing learners to alternative
viewpoints and providing counter-examples encourages articulation — and
argumentation concerning the utility — of particular solutions or models
(Vygotsky, 1978). The ultimate aim is to give learners control over their own
learning processes and the confidence to engage in critical analysis. The
apprenticeship process usually begins with a competent other person — the tutor
— making explicit their tacit knowledge or modelling effective strategies through
demonstrating desirable ways of problem solving in authentic activity. It then
continues through the social sharing of tasks, supporting the learner's attempts to
execute the task, and allowing knowledge to build up bit by bit. Fading then
involves a gradual withdrawal of help and learner participation increases —
according to the needs and learning pace of the individual — as independent
thinking and practical skills are developed. Scaffolding refers to the help which
thereby enables learners to engage more successfully in activity at the expanding
limits of their competence, and which they would not have been quite able to
manage alone, i.e. within the 'zone of proximal development'. The latter extends
to 'the level of potential development as determined through problem solving
under adult guidance or in collaboration with more competent peers' (Vygotsky,
1978, p.88).
Subsequent interpretations and applications of the notion of apprenticeship
have without exception focused on the tutor's implicit theory of the learner as
being a crucial element of the scaffolding process. It is now considered critical that
the tutor possesses some understanding of — and displays sensitivity to — the
learner's current needs, knowledge structure and performance characteristics.
This understanding interacts with the tutor's theory of the task or problem, which
should incorporate an understanding of the skills and knowledge needed to
handle the situation independently. It is necessary for generating feedback and
devising situations appropriately tailored to the learner at any given point in task
mastery. Developing the fundamental ability to generate hypotheses about a
learner's hypotheses and interpretation is difficult because problem-solving
activity often has a deep structure that may not be apparent until a long sequence
in process is near completion (Wood, Bruner and Ross, 1976). (For instance, the
tutor cannot always be sure whether a child is ignoring a suggestion or
systematically misunderstanding it.) Modification of the tutoring approach
according to the learner's responses entails a subtle evaluation and re-evaluation
of the learner's readiness and the level of participation of which s/he is capable; the
learner always handles the problem before the tutor intervenes. Classroom
teachers may carry out this kind of on-line diagnosis using information about the
timing and length of a student's responses or nonverbal cues, as in the case of
undergraduate tutorial interactions as analysed by Fox (1988a; 1988b). The
essential features of scaffolding in a classroom setting have not yet been
conclusively identified, although very recent work is making strides in this
direction. Teacher's scaffolding strategies in mathematics, science and
technology instruction are currently under investigation by Bliss and Askew
(1992), and analytical frameworks for examining classroom interaction and the
practical implications of the scaffolding concept have been put forward by
Maybin, Mercer and Stierer (1992) and by Fleer (1992).

Another important addendum to Vygotsky's theory is provided by Bruner's
(1985) interpretation of the proposed development of consciousness and control.
According to his analysis, the tutor serves the learner as a vicarious form of
consciousness until the learner can master an action through achieving conscious
control over a new function or conceptual system; it can then be used as a tool.
Before that point, the tutor effectively performs the critical function of
scaffolding the learning task to make it possible for the learner to internalise
external knowledge and convert it into a tool for conscious control. Wood, Bruner
and Ross (1976) have provided a useful elaboration of the scaffolding functions of
a tutor during joint problem solving. These include first recruiting the learner as
a tutoring partner, then controlling those elements of the task that are initially
beyond the learner's capability, thus allowing her to concentrate on only those
elements within her range of competence. The tutor continues to direct the
problem solving, marks critical features of the task, and controls the learner's
frustration. (Fewer interventions per action are needed with older and more
experienced learners.) The tutor also demonstrates solutions once the learner can
recognise them, interpreting any discrepancies. Finally, the tutor stands in a
confirmatory role until the learner is ready to act independently. A prerequisite
in this analysis is that the learner must recognise the properties of a solution to a
particular class of problems before moving towards producing it unaided
(linguistically, comprehension must precede production).
Tutorial interactions are a fundamental feature of learning in infancy and
childhood. While Vygotsky's work focused on the acquisition of language,
children's efforts in developing socially, physically and intellectually are in fact
also assisted by more skilful others. Rogoff's (1990) exhaustive treatise of work in
this area discusses the processes of guided participation in which caregivers and
children collaborate in arrangements and interactions that both tacitly and
explicitly support children in learning the social and cognitive skills and values
important in their culture. Socialisation through guided participation in relevant
problem-solving activities is a universally observed process (although there are
cultural variations in arrangements for and communication with children). The
14 Sara Hennessy
caregiver subdivides tasks into manageable goals and gradually increases the
child's participation and responsibility for activities, thereby providing a natural
bridging which extends the child's familiar knowledge and skills to a higher level
of competence. Rogoff's thesis is that interactional cues are central to the
achievement of a challenging and supportive structure for learning that adjusts to
the learner's changes in understanding. Children themselves are normally eager
to seek and share meaning; they take a significant, creative role in structuring
instruction (except in explicit teaching situations) and in influencing the nature
and direction of scaffolding. This role increases with age. Rogoff stresses the
importance of achieving a shared focus of attention, with children's participation

and social guidance building on the child's perspective. She offers examples of
mothers intentionally teaching their children and consciously adjusting their
input and demands (according to the degree of skill or hesitation exhibited), as the
children simultaneously adjust their level of participation and request assistance,
greater responsibility and greater involvement. Support in such situations
provides both challenge and sensitive assistance to the child, whereas insufficient
familiarity with the child's background precludes sensitive support and leads to
difficulties for the child.
In sum, interactions are finely tuned, and both adults and children actively
manage their contributions to guided participation through collaboratively
ensuring that the child works at a safe but challenging level, namely within his or
her zone of proximal development. Note that children's learning may also be
supported without deliberate attempts at doing so; guided participation includes
tacit structuring of communication. Simply observing expert partners plays an
important role too and has been shown to promote learning (Azmitia, 1988).
Thus, learning is mediated by a learner's own initiative in imitating and making
suggestions as well as by expert guidance. In the case of craft apprenticeship,
learners usually establish — through observation — criteria by which they can
judge their own progress and they often correct their own errors (Lave, 1977).
Rogoff's analysis covers collaboration involving both symmetry and
asymmetry of status, levels of skill and understanding of partners and their
responsibility for adjustment to each other. Asymmetrical situations have the
advantage that skilled partners can use their clearer ideas of the eventual goal and
sophisticated means of reaching it to provide direction in problem solving and
may assist the novice in appropriating relevant new information. The key
prerequisites of communication between any partners include both common
ground and differences in perspectives and ideas; for example, the interaction of
a young child with a peer — particularly an older sibling — may challenge both
partners to stretch their understanding and take account of each other's
perspectives since they are relatively unskilled in supporting others'
communication. Another advantage of asymmetry, then, is that skilled partners
themselves often gain understanding of the process they attempt to facilitate, and
of the needs and skills of the children with whom they interact (for example,
experience and troubleshooting strategies acquired by new parents in testing
hypotheses regarding how to handle their first child are useful in handling their
second child). Both partners individually appropriate the jointly produced
products, so that information and skills are not transmitted but transferred in the
creative process of appropriation. Rogoff (1990) has clarified this notion of the
appropriation of shared activity as reflecting an individual's understanding of and
involvement in the activity rather than the taking of something directly from an
external model. She adopts Leont'ev's (1981) view that 'internalisation is not the
transferal of an external activity to a pre-existing, internal plane of consciousness:
it is the process in which this internal plane is formed' (p.57). In these accounts,
interpersonal aspects of an individual's functioning are internalised integrally
with the individual apsects.
In conclusion, development is not spontaneous but is chanelled through
sociocultural activity, in which children and their partners are interdependent.
Social exchanges are continuous and essential bases for advances in individuals'
ways of thinking and acting. Communication and shared problem solving
inherently bridge the gaps between old and new knowledge, and between
partners' differing understanding of the values and tools of the culture, which
itself is revised and recreated as they seek a common ground of shared
understanding.
CLASSROOM APPLICATIONS: COGNITIVE APPRENTICESHIP
Introduction
Our increasing understanding of everyday cognition has significant practical
implications for improving learning in the classroom situation. To summarise,
work in this field shows that learning is most successful when embedded in
authentic and meaningful activity, making deliberate use of the physical and
social context. Expertise is acquired through both the spontaneous invention of
personal, highly efficient procedures in response to the needs of a situation, and
through apprenticeship. The latter is acutally the normal means of informally
indoctrinating novices in the workplace in our and many other societies.
Previously, this mode of teaching was formalised in the form of the guild system
for vocational training. The master taught the novice in a realistic environment,
so that professional skills were acquired through interaction with the same tools
used by experts; the master's control was faded as the learner developed expertise
(Pieters and deBruijn, 1992). Unfortunately, formal technical skill training and
professional education have moved towards a largely unproductive blend of
16 Sara Hennessy
school-type instruction (theoretical explanation), unstructured observation and

practice, with inadequate engagement with the tools and materials of work
(Resnick, 1987a). Apprenticeship has almost disappeared in the Western
educational system, although it is still current practice, for example, within
science research groups where young scientists successfully learn informally from
more experienced ones. However, our relatively recent system of formal
schooling is incompatible with this model and has led to an unfortunate
decontextualisation and abstraction of many kinds of skills and knowledge from
their uses in the world. Insofar as they address processes, conventional pedagogic
practices still tend to emphasise routines for solving 'textbook' problems, and
domain (conceptual and factual) knowledge and procedures. Heuristic, control
and learning strategies — the crucial elements of problem solving (Schoenfeld,
1985) — are usually ignored. Consequently, the metacognitive awareness that is
critical for mathematical and scientific thinking (Kuhn, 1989) does not develop.
At present, problem-solving activity by experts — mathematicians and
scientists engaged in everyday practice — much more closely resembles that of
ordinary people in everyday situations than what takes place in school. Cultural
transmission through schooling is ineffective and distorted, and success within
this culture often has little bearing elsewhere. The problems which engage and
motivate learners in school classrooms are dilemmas about their performance
rather than problem-solving dilemmas. For example, the rhetoric of the relatively
new curriculum area of design and technology education assumes that pupil
motivation is provided by the posing of 'real' problems (e.g. designing a new cycle
lock), whereas previous experience indicates that such aspects of the everyday
culture cannot be so readily transposed to the artificial environment of the
classroom. Attempts to make classroom activity more meaningful and contextual,
for example by introducing mathematics word problems, have tended to fail
dismally. Such 'problems' have little in common with life outside school; they are
merely 'coated with a thin veneer of 'real-world' associations' (Maier, 1980, p.21).
Faced with such problems, learners continue to rely heavily on their knowledge
of standard textbook patterns of problem presentation rather than their
knowledge of problem-solving strategies (Schoenfeld, 1985). The former
knowledge provides cues for students in many domains where narrowly-focused
problems require correct solutions, including study at undergraduate level
(Miller and Parlett, 1974). A more promising current development is the
'Enterprising Mathematics Project' which aims to develop concepts and
techniques from investigations and problem solving in real contexts, and to relate
mathematics to other school subjects (Hobbs, 1989). It remains to be seen
whether such approaches can succeed in overcoming students' cue-
consciousness. The critical factor is the provision of authentic dilemmas and these
may be imaginary or real (Lave, 1992).
Because totally different ways of learning are usually imposed in the classroom
(Brown, Collins and Duguid, 1989), misconceptions of what practitioners do are
common. Rennie's (1987) survey showed that children hold misconceptions of
what technology is and of its pervasiveness in everyday life. A pilot study carried
out as part of the ongoing PSTE (Problem Solving in Technology Education)
project at the Open University investigated perceptions of problem-solving
activities undertaken by children outside school and by expert practitioners, and
their relationship with school-based activity. The preliminary results signify that
the link is in fact minimal in both teachers' and pupils' views; our subjects saw a
link only where there was a one-to-one correspondence between activities (e.g.
kite-making) or use of skills. Of course, pupils' experiences are almost inevitably
remote from those of practitioners. Nevertheless, teaching which does not even
reflect the real world of technological activity is unlikely to be successful in
developing children's awareness and appropriate use of technological thinking,
action and vocabulary. In order to realise the pedagogic intention that learning
design and technology prepares children for living and working in a changing
technological society, then, teaching needs to be informed by knowledge of the
nature of technology as it is actually practised (Medway, 1989). For example,
Petroski (1985) portrays the process of developing a successful idea as a steady
improvement upon unsuccessful ideas and learning from past failures — one's
own and others' — by avoiding weaknesses observed in existing artefacts/
systems. Yet, children often start from scratch without evaluating the latter.
Prototype modification and refinement is indeed a more realistic and less
frustrating mode of working than the present demand for the artificial generation
of several design ideas. Research shows that existing assessment procedures can
lead pupils to omit unsuccessful designs from their final project folders (Anning,
1992) and to describe a logical, systematic procedure rather than the actual
development of design ideas (Jeffery, 1990). The Hayes report (1993) indicates
that professional designers too have been criticised by their employers for not
offering alternative solutions to a design problem, and for starting from scratch or
persisting with an unsuccessful idea. These imposed constraints have the same
consequences outside and inside school: professional designers can be observed to
doctor their portolios in the same way that children do.
Cognitive apprenticeship programmes

There have, however, been a few significant exceptions, whereby craft
apprenticeship methods have been adapted for the guided learning of thinking
and problem-solving skills in a classroom context: this is the notion of cognitive
apprenticeship, which has been successfully applied to a variety of school subjects,
notably mathematics. Lave, Smith and Butler (1988) suggest that it is crucial to
engage with children in argumentation about real dilemmas in the area of focus.
18 Sara Hennessy
These should provide opportunities for discovery and invention of problems as

well as solutions, and understanding in patterns of ongoing activity, rather than
specific problem procedures and a compendium of experts' truths (cf. Papert,
1980). This approach is encapsulated in the mathematics curriculum offered to
primary school children at the University of Irvine's 'Farm School'. Similar
examples include teachers and pupils negotiating and making sense of
mathematical notations and procedures such as long division (as described by
Newman, Griffin and Cole, 1989), and the collaborative thinking about
mathematical concepts and principles arising during Lampert's (1986) classroom
instruction in multidigit multiplication. The latter entails whole-class discussion

in which children invent and justify solutions. The teacher models interpretive
problem solving, making an explicit connection between the concrete/intuitive and
the computational, and requiring children to use their own ways of deciding
whether procedures are mathematically reasonable. Resnick and her colleagues
have developed an initial mathematics programme built entirely on children's
invented procedures and informal knowledge about quantities and their
relationships (Resnick, Lesgold and Bill, 1990). This makes a link with the formal
language of mathematics by using standard notation to record public discussions
and conclusions, and draws upon everyday problem finding; children generate
and bring in problems from home, and their homework concerns events and
objects in their home lives. It has successfully been shown to foster both number
sense and computational competence, and can therefore replace rather than
merely supplement the standard curriculum.
The basic notions of cognitive apprenticeship have been successfully embodied
in two further instructional programmes which mimic the conditions of natural
learning and engage students in constructing and interpreting meaning (a concise
overview and critique of these programmes is provided by Collins, Brown and
Newman, 1989). In Palincsar and Brown's (1984) 'reciprocal teaching' of reading
comprehension, a progressive transfer of responsibility takes place as the
teacher's demands for student involvement increase and students begin to
perform parts of the task until they finally produce strategic behaviour which
resembles that initially modelled by the teacher. The students and teacher take
turns playing the role of teacher and the students gradually serve as experts to
each other; they pose questions about texts, summarise them, offer clarification
and make predictions. The programme has been found to promote significant and
lasting improvement in reading performance after 8 weeks. (Resnick and Nelson-
LeGall, 1990 are currently attempting to adapt the method of reciprocal teaching
for mathematics learning.) In Schoenfeld's mathematics courses, problem-
solving heuristics are deliberately taught, in a contextualised way that makes
contact with the students' knowledge base. These heuristics themselves are
critically assessed as the students use self-regulatory strategies to assess their own
solution paths; they ask themselves questions such as 'What am I doing now?',
'Why?' or 'Am I making progress?' (Schoenfeld, 1985). Schoenfeld (1991)
outlines three further programmes of mathematical instruction which share an
underlying goal with his own programme and with Lampert's: that students
develop a deep, rather than a superficial understanding of mathematical
processes.
These programmes have specifically overcome the problems inherent in
importing the concept of scaffolding from its context of investigation — the
linguistic and cognitive development of very young children — to a practical
classroom context (cf. Maybin et al., 1992). Indeed, they have successfully
tailored the characteristics of everyday practice and of craft apprenticeship to the
needs of pupils in school (including socially disadvantaged children and slow
learners). For example, by beginning with a task embedded in a familiar activity,
Schoenfeld's approach shows his students the legitimacy of their implicit
knowledge and its availability as scaffolding in apparently unfamiliar tasks. All of
the programmes outlined strive to promote reflective thinking about the meaning
of what children are doing and its relation to solving real problems, and they are
based on the notion that development of meaningfulness comes from a social
process of interaction and negotiation. Brown and Campione (1984) have
analysed the mechanisms of transfer which underlie such successful instructional
programmes. They stress the importance of appropriate transfer across domains,
of adaptability and flexibility (rather than routine expertise), and of deliberately
preparing for transfer by seeking analogies, performing thought experiments and
self-questioning. Good learners are aware of what they know and do not know.
They facilitate and reflect upon their own learning using other metacognitive
strategies such as planning, predicting outcomes, and managing time and
cognitive resources efficiently (Brown, 1978).
Another important feature of successful programmes is that they build a sense
of 'empowerment' and confidence in the learner's own knowledge and mastery of
the domain. Children need to realise that there are inevitably multiple ways to
solve any problem, and to think of themselves as reasoners who are able — indeed
expected — to discover some of those ways (Resnick, Lesgold and Bill, 1990).
The frequent tendency to present a preconceived view of a 'correct' way of
mastering a mathematical procedure, for example, may be singularly
unsuccessful with some children; mathematics must be matched to each
individual and built upon his or her existing knowledge base (Hart, 1981). A
fundamental difference which is evident between conventional teaching
programmes and those based on apprenticeship is the degree of control taken by
teacher and pupils; in one case, they together engage in deciphering the demands
of a textbook, and in the other, they collaborate in building a culture of sense-
making in the classroom. This means assessing the adequacy of their shared
20 Sara Hennessy
understanding of the purpose of their mutual pursuit — which must obviously be

clear to pupils — and sharing responsibility for ascertaining the legitimacy of
procedures, actions or solutions (e.g. by reference to known mathematical
principles).There may be a lesson to be learned here from Japanese methods of
evaluating the products and processes of students' problem-solving efforts, which
commonly involve children in presenting inadequate solutions to the class for
discussion of ways of correcting them; this is a far cry from the predominant
Western obsession with praising students who perform well (Stigler and Perry,
1988). This highlights again the crucial importance of providing a target for
reflective comparison through the discussion about problem-solving processes

and solutions which underlies many effective apprenticeship programmes.
Comparison between one's own and one's peers' ideas helps develop awareness
and means of modification, and the teacher's guidance is also critical. In sum,
learning experiences and activities can be rendered useful and meaningful by the
sense made of them by classroom talk (which is generally under-valued as a
learning tool: Edwards and Mercer, 1987).
The apprenticeship model involves successive approximation of mature or
expert practice. However, its success depends upon its emphasis on teaching not
only the skills and domain knowledge which experts possess but more
importantly, the actual processes they use to handle complex tasks. In the case of
cognitive apprenticeship, this tacit, strategic knowledge includes both cognitive
and metacognitive processes — ideally incorporating (a) problem-solving
heuristics, (b) control strategies with monitoring, diagnostic and remedial
components for managing problem solving, and (c) knowledge about how to
learn, including general strategies for exploring a new domain and local ones for
reconfiguring knowledge (Collins, Brown and Newman, 1989). (These are rarely
observed in the average classroom). Cognitive apprenticeship programmes
promote situated learning by giving students the critical opportunity to observe,
engage in and invent or discover expert strategies in context. As with other forms
of apprenticeship, the emphasis is on developing the learner's own resources
rather than teaching recipes or algorithms. Ultimately, support is withdrawn and
students are gently eased into a mode of independent problem solving; teaching
exploration strategies is critical if they are to explore a domain productively and
pose problems that are interesting and that they can solve. It is also important that
teachers relinquish control and refrain from dominating the agenda and
discussion so that pupils can function independently of the precise context of the
classroom activity (Edwards and Mercer, 1987).
In contrast with traditional apprenticeship, cognitive apprenticeship
programmes aim to extend situated learning to different settings, generalising
acquired knowledge across a range of applicable contexts. This serves to help
learners to cope with novel problems and to progress from embedded activity to
general principles of the culture. Mathematics, science and other areas of problem
solving are considered to be practices or forms of authentic activity, rather than
bodies of content which must be assimilated. Students are thus exposed to a
culture's way of thinking and solving problems, and to its conceptual viewpoint.
According to Brown, Collins and Duguid (1989), this is essential if the knowledge
and conceptual tools they acquire are to be robust and useable rather than inert,
like most knowledge acquired through conventional schooling. The outcomes of
learning are said to be recognising opportunities or problem finding, knowing
when and how to apply skills that have been learned in other contexts, and
exploiting properties of the presenting situation (Collins, Brown and Newman,

1989). Note that an interaction between domain-specific and strategic knowledge
is critical, and that there is no disjunction between conceptual knowledge and
problem-solving activity, i.e. between knowing and doing, in this analysis. The
assumption that they can be separated ignores the ways in which situations
structure cognition. Activities are not carried out with the explicit purpose of
determining principles separate from acting in the world.
Computer-supported learning environments

In classrooms where cognitive apprenticeship programmes operate, pupils
usually derive help from an adult (teacher) or more skilled peers. Other children
may fill different, important roles to those taken by adults and they are more
available. They offer unique possibilities for discussion, exploration and
collaboration when they carefully consider and challenge each other's
perspectives (Rogoff, 1990). However, the advent of sophisticated computer
technology in today's classrooms now offers an additional resource of a related
kind (Hoyles and Noss, 1987) and this enables us to realise 'intelligent'
apprenticeship learning environments that were previously impossible or
impractical (Collins, 1991). The recent trend towards development of computer-
based learning environments based on 'guided discovery' and experimentation
(Elsom-Cook, 1990; Hennessy et al., in press [a]) illustrates how we have begun
to exploit this resource, further extending the notion of scaffolding through
guided participation in social activity. Some of the tools now available have been
designed to provide procedural facilitation; i.e. they enable learners to carry out
more complex and sophisticated operations than they could otherwise carry out
(without providing the substantive knowledge required); research involving
children using a LOGO environment exemplifies this (Hoyles and Noss, 1987;
Noss, 1991). One line of research is exploring the potential of hyper- and multi-
media for helping learners master thinking skills which allow them to access and
use information effectively (Dede, 1992). A key example is a hypermedia tool
called HyperAuthor developed by Carver, Lehrer and their colleagues for
scaffolding students' acquisition of an extensive set of design skills (Carver et al.,
22 Sara Hennessy
1992). HyperAuthor contains both hypermedia construction tools and reflection

tools that help students focus on the organisation and structure of their ideas. Its
underlying model of design skills is used as a basis for a wide range of assessments
of students' understanding and use of their skills.
Other ongoing developments include computer-simulated environments for
technical/professional education (e.g. Johnson, 1990; Lesgold el al., 1986) and
Pieters and deBruijn's (1992) exploration of heuristic coaching (offering the
learner global advice rather than a solution). The aim here is for students to
schematise their strategies and use them in another appropriate learning phase or
in a similar context. One of the most promising and ambitious developments in

this area is the Sherlock system which combines instruction and dynamic,
diagnostic assessment in the context of troubleshooting. Lajoie and Lesgold
(1992) assert that the system provides a platform for assessing: structural changes
in learners' knowledge organisation, transitions in their mental models, the
efficiency of troubleshooting procedures, whether learners know the information
required and whether they interpret given information correctly. Finally,
Sherlock is said to be able to foster metacognitive skills (by explicitly modelling
which plans a learner has entered up to the point of an impasse) and to assess the
use of those skills.
Design principles for effective computer-supported learning environments
have been derived from the key conditions of apprenticeship by Scardamalia el al.
(1989). They include: making knowledge construction activities overt through
objectifying knowledge and encouraging comparison, criticism and cross-
fertilisation of new ideas and information; maintaining attention to cognitive
goals; examining and maximising existing knowledge; sustaining perceptible
progress through knowledge operations which have relevant consequences;
supporting individual learning styles; giving pupils responsibility for
contributing to each other's learning. These principles have been implemented in
Scardamalia and Bereiter's cross-curricular CSILE system, which is an
impressively flexible, networked hypermedia system with a student-created
database.
The latest version of CSILE is based on the idea of a knowledge-building
community and is aimed at restructuring classrooms as places for collaborative
inquiry (Scardamalia and Bereiter, in press). It constitutes a prototype-general-
purpose environment which enhances the value of public and private knowledge.
Activities in this environment engage children in the conscious, co-operative
development of shared knowledge, in the same way that research communities
work. Students contribute to the advancement of the group's knowledge (in
contrast with the usual judgment of schoolwork using internal criteria) and their
activities are not separated from either the curriculum or the social life of the
classroom. Discrete environments have now been created for different kinds of
operations such as hypothesis-testing, exploring analogies, identifying causal

relationships and underlying mechanisms, and research using on- and off-line
reference material. Scardamalia and Bereiter acknowledge the dangers of
computer intervention in complex and delicate cognitive processes and they have
consequently moved toward designing whole environments to be supportive of
certain kinds of mental activity, rather than depending on specific procedural
facilitations (hints or structural devices triggered by user actions).
While many computer-based tools incorporate a model of a learner, they
actually encounter similar difficulties to those of human tutors in recognising
hypotheses underlying long sequences, particularly at the most critical point —

the 'disordered' mid-phase of learning. There are indeed too many complexities
for either human or computer programs to take into account at this point, where
formal programmes of individualised teaching are consequently most difficult to
realise. Fox (1988b) argues that the sophisticated, tacit processes of diagnosis and
repair used by human tutors in sensitively adjusting their support are altogether
beyond the capability of a computer program, which lacks the necessary cognitive
flexibility and multiple interpretations of ongoing interaction in context.
Suchman (1987) similarly highlights the disparity of the richness of the resources
available in situated interaction, maintaining that machines lack access to most of
their users' actions and circumstances. Merrill et al. (in press) are more optimistic
in their comparision of the guidance and support offered by human tutors and
intelligent tutoring systems. They conclude that human tutors offer more flexible
and more subtle support, but that the differences in terms of monitoring problem
solving and guiding students in error recovery are smaller than previously argued.
Future development work will probably lead to more interactive and effective
computer tutors, but it must be recognised that the scope of interaction between
machines and their users presently remains substantially limited in some ways.
SITUATED VERSUS DECONTEXTUALISED KNOWLEDGE AND THE NOTION OF

GENERAL PROBLEM-SOLVING CAPABILITY
Expectations and evidence of transfer

A fundamental implication of the research on learning through apprenticeship in
everyday situations is that learning of knowledge or skills takes place in the
context of their intended use. Nevertheless, many teachers and educators work on
the unvalidated assumption that universal cognitive skills of thinking and
problem solving can be taught (often independently of the acquisition of prior
subject matter) and immediately and flexibly applied to a variety of contexts (e.g.
Argles, 1988; Bonington, 1988; Wharry, 1988). Such skills have the appealing
potential to transfer across subject boundaries as well as to activity outside school
24 Sara Hennessy
and in adult life, whereas pure content-focused study is for the most part accepted
as having extremely limited application in everyday life. Domain knowledge
tends to remain inert when it is acquired in isolation from realistic problem
contexts (Collins, Brown and Newman, 1989). The assumption of domain-
independent cognitive skills underlies the development of programmes of
instruction in higher order skills, such as de Bono's CoRT (Cognitive Research
Trust) Thinking Program (this and other such programmes are outlined and
reviewed in Segal et al., 1985, where the effectiveness of directly teaching
thinking skills is also questioned). The CoRT programme uses generally
familiar knowledge and is intended to foster problem-solving, interpersonal and

lateral thinking skills, including megacognitive skills (such as planning) and a
wide variety of evaluation techniques and idea- and solution-generation
techniques. Although the programme has been widely used in the USA and
elsewhere for over 15 years, very little systematic evaluation of it has taken place
and there is minimal support for its lofty claims (although anecdotal evidence is
often positive and short-term gains have been reported by Edwards, 1991). There
is some other evidence to support the notion of general cognitive skill
development (Adey and Shayer, in press); however, the limitations of transfer
theory and the context-dependence of the application of knowledge and skills
have increasingly been recognised and demonstrated empirically (Glaser, 1984).
This evidence derives from several sources. To begin with, the first substantial
evaluation of de Bono's classroom materials by the Schools Council (Hunter-
Grundin, 1985) found little evidence for transfer of learning, despite the
programme's ambition for students to extend their new thinking skills to 'a
variety of real-life situations' (de Bono, 1985). Secondly, a considerable body of
work, beginning with Gay and Cole's (1967) cross-cultural study of estimation
tasks, and including that of Donaldson(1978;McGarrigle and Donaldson, 1974),
has shown that cognitive performance is affected by task familiarity and implicit
contextual cues. It can be improved through making more explicit the nature of
a task — changing its focus or symbolic features. (For example, Roazzi and
Bryant, 1992, have shown that children's approach to, and their performance on,
a quantitative task is determined by the extent to which they realise it is a
quantitative task.) This work presents a substantial challenge to Piagetian theory.
In the same vein, the situated cognition literature discussed above clearly
provides some further evidence against the notion of a general problem-solving
capability. Specifically, for instance, the study of young street vendors in Brazil
by Carraher et al. (1985) found that problems embedded in a familiar context were
solved more easily. However, careful manipulation of task conditions has
indicated that transfer and generalisation from an initially limited range of
contexts and contents may be mediated by tasks set in familiar contexts
(Schliemann and Magalhaes, 1990).
Lave (1988) has additionally reviewed research in cognitive psychology that,

despite manipulation of experimental conditions and problems, cannot
demonstrate a strong transfer. The problems posed have typically required
correct, experimenter-determined answers, whereas authentic and everyday
problem solving is characterised by the resolution of dilemmas. In fact, the
situated cognition framework diminishes the importance of the notion from more
conventional learning theory that knowledge exists independently of individuals
and is to be transferred to novel situations and activities. The latter are
exceptionally rare in everyday life and when they do occur, individuals are
unlikely to encounter them alone. According to Lave (1988), attempts to

represent everyday cognitive activity as a sequence of 'recognising a problem,
representing it, implementing a resolution and evaluating the results' ignore the
multitude of ways of tackling a problem and the fact that some activities take place
simultaneously or structure each other differently on different occasions.
We can conclude that a simplistic, linear all-purpose problem-solving process
is inherently unproductive and most unlikely to be successfully appropriated and
generalised. Yet, such a process forms the backbone of the design and technology
component of the present National Curriculum for Technology (in England and
Wales), which explicitly goes beyond the specific qualities which technology
education in particular might be expected to foster. It intends to develop general
practical capability and to prepare students to handle complex problems in their
future personal and working lives (NCC, 1989a, 1.47). Technological capability
is defined in terms of the ability to employ the processes of: identifying and
clarifying tasks or problems; investigating; generating and developing solutions;
evaluating (NCC, 1989a). Design educators maintain that these broad processes
are universal, and proponents of this approach make ambitious claims about the
variety of potential outcomes; these comprise personal, social, cognitive,
metacognitive, creative and practical skills. Examples include discovery, critical
assessment, decision making, problem solving, planning, evaluating, reflecting,
and collaboration (deLuca, 1992). Eggleston (1992, p.24) predicts that such skills
will have a 'wide general applicability in the adult life likely to be experienced by
the students', and deLuca argues that technological problem-solving activities
simultaneously teach students how to apply knowledge learned from experiences
in and out of school. Sellwood (1990) asserts further that the value of the process
approach lies in its structuring and organising of thinking skills, and that it will
ideally become second nature to pupils (and teachers) to organise a means of
successfully achieving objectives which can then operate at all levels and in all
situations. As yet, there is no evidence to support these claims (see Hennessy,
McCormick and Murphy, 1993, for a fuller discussion of the 'general problem-
solving capability' notion in technological education). As in other domains, it
seems likely that direct teaching for transfer will be necessary to realise the desired
26 Sara Hennessy
aims. This could incorporate some of the features of the successful cognitive
training programmes described earlier, as identified by Brown and Campione
(1984): namely, task-specific skills training, self-regulation training, and
awareness training. Instructional programmes which instead leave the problem of
transfer up to the learner are inevitably less effective.
Direct teaching for transfer can also be successful in facilitating children's
conceptual development. This is exemplified by my own recent work addressing
children's alternative conceptions of science using interactive computer
simulations (Hennessy el al., in press [b]). The body of research in this field
indicates that, like the prominence of adults' scientific and technological

knowledge in practical contexts (Wynne, Payne and Wakeford, 1990), children's
conceptions are perpetually context-bound (Driver et al., 1985; Solomon, 1983).
Our intervention showed that an approach which both explicitly addresses
specific difficulties and highlights qualitative relationships between variables,
can, however, help children to develop a coherent set of rules which transfer
across physical contexts, including both real ones and those not directly
experienced (such as space). Nevertheless, transfer of newly acquired concepts
and procedures across the cultural barrier between the classroom and everyday
problem solving can be problematic. One obstacle is that formal knowledge, such
as that taught in science and mathematics, is not in a form that can simply be
'applied'. Layton (1991b) reminds us that formal scientific knowledge needs to
be reconstructed, integrated and contextualised for practical action in everyday
life. (This means re-introducing real-life complications, emphasising lost
relationships between components of scientific knowledge, and reducing the level
of abstraction.) Resnick makes a similar case for mathematics: 'the packages of
knowledge and skill that schools provide seem unlikely to map directly onto the
clusters of knowledge people will use in their work or personal lives' (Resnick,
1987a, p.15). This is undoubtedly true in both directions. Carraher (1989)
proposes that representations of certain aspects of mathematics enountered in
everyday life have become incorporated in natural language and differ from those
used in school for the same concepts; arithmetic problem-solving behaviour and
understanding is re-organised under the influence of schooling and the learning
of formal representations.
Our demands on pupils to transfer knowledge and skills across domains may
also be unreasonable within the context of school. An example is the belief that
pupils will bring knowledge from other subject areas to bear in technological
problem solving. The design process embodied in the National Curriculum
presumes that pupils will apply conceptual knowledge from across the curriculum
— especially from science and mathematics — in conjunction with procedural
knowledge specifically from technology in tackling realistic problems, designing
and making artefacts and systems (Layton, 1991a). However, the use of scientific
knowledge in technological activities is not at all straightforward, as McCormick

(1992b) has outlined; at the very least, some degree of restructuring or translation
is required (Layton, 1991b). Informal observation accordingly indicates that
children have difficulty in bringing in knowledge and skills from other domains,
even when they have recently been demonstrated. Conversely, Layton (1991b)
implies that design parameters are often specific to particular situations and have
little validity outside these fields.
Narrowing the focus further to the domain of design and technology itself, we
find a clear expectation placed upon pupils to appropriate an all-purpose design
process and apply it across five very diverse subject areas which previously had
little connection in the curriculum. The notion of transferable general problem-
solving skill appears unrealistic once again in this context. Research has shown
that failure to transfer often derives from a lack of the conditions needed for
transfer rather than from domain-specificity (Perkins and Saloman, 1989).
However, there is actually no evidence that technology teachers are effectively or
even explicitly assisting pupils in acquiring general skills and in making a
convincing link between the five subject contexts. Teachers are not usually
trained to teach across contexts and we know that their previous subject traditions
strongly influence the new ways of working required by design and technology
(McCormick, 1991). The specific activities within different subjects may actually
be projecting different views of the 'design process'. This is exacerbated by the
use of loose overarching themes within which the subject areas work, and may
preclude pupils from developing a coherent view of the process. Experience
indicates that children engaged in 'food technology' activities, for instance,
perceive that they are 'doing cooking' rather than 'investigating' or 'evaluating';
this is hardly surprising. Links across contexts are probably tenuous and pupils
are consequently unlikely to be able to recognise, reflect on and use the prescribed
subprocesses.
Subject matter knowledge and problem-solving skills: a balance

While most forms of everyday problem solving require context-specific forms of
competence, and the traditional, strong generalist position now lacks credibility,
intuition nevertheless leads us to believe that there are some commonalities in
children's thinking. Global problem-solving strategies which may have a role to
play in knowledge acquisition include general heuristic, control and learning
strategies (Collins, Brown and Newman, 1989). These are especially helpful when
experts face novel problems in a domain (Perkins and Saloman, 1989). Situation-
specific learning by itself can be very limiting, precluding transfer when familiar
aspects of a task are changed (as shown by Schliemann and Acioly, 1988, in their
comparison of schooled and unschooled individuals' ability to invent new
procedures for calculating bets). The power inherent in decontextualised
28 Sara Hennessy
knowledge was recognised early on by Bruner (1972) who argued that the process
of reorganising knowledge into formal notational systems results in far greater
flexibility. When the solving of particular problems becomes a mere instance of
much simpler general problems, the range of applicability of knowledge is
increased. In mathematics, furthermore, the power of expressions derives from
their divorce from the situations to which they refer. In this sense, the meaning
of algebra is encountered within the formal system, although algebraic
expressions and transformations can always be interpreted in terms of the
quantities and relationships to which they refer (Resnick, 1986). Much work has
focused on schooling's counterproductive requirement that students use

symbolic representations and procedures before they fully understand them. By
studying how people come to make sense of mathematical ideas outside school, we
can now perhaps learn how to promote that understanding, hence increasing the
utility and power of mathematical knowledge.
Although general performance components in complex tasks are difficult to
specify (Gardner, 1985), the situated perspective on knowledge construction in
everyday contexts is sometimes unconcerned with these. Its focus on embedded
learning thus puts it in conflict not only with prevalent adaptations of cognitive
science views of problem solving to educational research, but also with Piagetian
stage theory. The latter emphasises the role of cognitive invariants in the
structuring of local contexts; the situated approach conversely stresses the
importance of context in the construction of cognitive invariants and questions
the power of formal thinking. Ackermann (1990) helpfully smooths over the
differences by offering an integrated perspective which maintains that distancing
oneself from and then re-engaging with a situation is sometimes necessary for
gaining deeper understanding. Like Bruner, she asserts that decontextualised
knowledge helps us master complex situations, giving them form. Replication of
the Piagetian water-level experiment led her to the compelling conclusion that
cognitive development depends on both co-ordination of local knowledge and
differentiation from general rules.
Perkins and Saloman (1989) have also attempted to reconcile the differences
between the conflicting context-free and context-bound positions, by focusing on
general heuristic strategies which function in contextualised ways to access and
deploy domain-specific knowledge. A major conclusion of an extensive literature
review by Alexander and Judy (1988) was similarly that problem-solving
strategies cannot be utilised efficiently in the absence of a foundation of domain-
specific knowledge. Collectively, the above findings concerning lack of transfer
are in keeping with this conclusion, and a recent collection of papers on enhancing
thinking and learning skills in science and mathematics (Halpern, 1992) indicates
that the present trend is indeed towards embedding instruction within specific
academic disciplines of the curriculum, rather than isolating thinking skills as
separate topics. (Isolated decontextualised skills are problematic in many ways,

not the least being that they do not usually engage pupils' interest.)
Unfortunately, cognitive skills tend to be driven out altogether by a demand for
teaching ever larger bodies of knowledge, with the idea that their application to
reasoning and problem solving can be delayed (Resnick, 1987b). Educational
practice swings periodically between knowledge-oriented and general process- or
skill-oriented teaching, with an accompanying de-emphasis on subject matter
knowledge. This is precisely the situation in which technology education finds
itself at present.
The value of an all-pervasive design process and the accompanying diminished

role of craftwork skills in the present technology curriculum is highly
controversial. For example, the recent report on technology education sponsored
by the Engineering Council deplores the fact that practical skills have become a
secondary concern in design and technology, which now constitutes 'generalised
problem solving without a specialised knowledge base' (Smithers and Robinson,
1992, p.6). This controversy has already led to an increase in weighting of the
'planning and making' component, and revision of the Statutory Order for
Technology is underway. The new formulation will probably raise the
prominence of specific skills, knowledge and understanding (NCC, 1992). This
oscillation is likely to prove unproductive since research on problem solving in
knowledge-rich domains shows that subject matter knowledge and reasoning
processes are intimately connected. Instruction needs to accommodate this
connection so that thinking and problem solving arise in the context of acquiring
structures of knowledge and skill that comprise the subject matter of schooling
(Glaser, 1984). Encouraging steps have indeed been taken in this direction in the
form of the recently publicised work on 'cognitive acceleration' through science
learning (Adey and Shayer, in press). Focusing on cognitive conflict,
metacognition and bridging, this intervention has led to increased achievement in
mathematics and English language as well as science. In sum, an important
implication of the research literature is that instruction needs to achieve a balance
between subject matter knowledge, problem-solving strategies and strategies for
effective learning.
CONCLUSION
The work reviewed here indicates that cognitive activity is socially defined,
interpreted and supported, and that prior knowledge and experience are crucial
factors in the learning process. The situated cognition literature shows that the
thinking of 'experts' and lay people alike is intricately interwoven with the
specific problem-solving context and sensibly adjusted to meet the situation's
demands. Problem-solving strategies are shaped by the structuring resources
available in the situation (Lave, 1988), and all acquired knowledge and
30 Sara Hennessy
understanding is 'situated' in the sense that it is partly a product of the activity,

context and culture in which it is developed and used (Brown, Collins and
Duguid, 1989). A major conclusion from this literature and related work
concerning scientific 'knowledge in action' is that there is a fundamental
distinction between problem-solving processes in everyday and classroom
situations. Specifically, in real life problem solving, a situation becomes a
problem in the course of activity in a particular setting (Lave et al., 1984).
Uncertainty, flexibility, improvisation, contingency and adaptation to
uncontrolled factors are normal, and values, goals and beliefs are taken into
account (Wynne, 1991). This provides a contrast with (a) the culture of school
mathematics, whose emphasis on formal procedures precludes application of
sophisticated informal knowledge, and similarly, (b) the culture of science with
its assumptions of coherence and manipulability, as perceived — and often
rejected — by both schoolchildren and lay adults (Wynne, Payne and Wakeford,
1990). The curriculum emphasis on acquiring algorithms, formulae and other
quantitative techniques seems to override 'doing science' (Jenkins, 1992), 'doing
maths' or indeed, 'doing technology'; we can now add (c) the culture of school
technology, where an over-emphasised and narrowly perceived problem-solving
process may again result in a mechanical approach to solving artificial 'problems'.
The research discussed demonstrates the effectiveness of situated learning in
supporting the emergence of productive thinking. It has moved us radically
forward from the wisdom of 20 years ago when school-based knowledge was
perceived as being powerfully abstract and context-free rather than
'encapsulated' as it is presently characterised (Inagaki, 1990). It is now recognised
that knowledge acquired outside school may attain a far more sophisticated level
and display a generativity that was previously unknown (Cole, 1990).
Although school is an artificial setting in many ways, it is nevertheless the way
in which our society chooses to organise its education of young people. It is a 'real
world' of its own for children (and teachers), absorbing most of their waking
hours for many years; school activity is situated practice. Within this framework
there are in fact opportunities for training pupils to develop practical expertise
and for preparing them for the world of work and everyday problem solving.
While it is impossible (as well as probably undesirable and impractical) to provide
direct job training for school students since job requirements now change so
quickly, the potential is there instead for work which steps back to consider and
evaluate the everyday world through intellectual processes of reasoning and
reflection (Resnick, 1987a). Resnick chides us to take up these opportunities and
to aim to prepare people to be good adaptive learners, able to perform effectively
in unpredictable and changing situations.
'One important function of schooling is to develop the knowledge and
mental skills students will need to construct appropriate mental models of
systems with which they will eventually work... (These mental models)
permit flexibility in responding to unexpected situations' (p.18).
Adaptability is crucial in science and technology education since society is
continually developing with respect both to science and technology itself and to
our understanding of them.
In sum, the focus of schooling needs to be redirected to encompass more of the
features of successful everyday functioning and apprenticeship programmes, as
outlined above, in order to help children become strong out-of-school learners,
able to participate and function effectively in social, personal and political life.
Schooling must therefore move away from individualised forms of competence,

tool-free performance, decontextualised skills, encouraging efficiency in solving
routine problems, and the urgent need for external reinforcement. Specific
suggestions for how teachers can overcome some of these crippling features of
conventional educational practice are outlined in the following section, with an
emphasis on extending the pioneering work in mathematics education to science
and technology.
IMPLICATIONS FOR TEACHING
Cognitive apprenticeship
Implementing an apprenticeship programme in the classroom involves pupils in
working with and observing an 'expert' solving problems. This represents a
departure from the norm whereby teachers demonstrate particular skills rather
than participating in activity and modelling problem-solving strategies. Teaching
through cognitive apprenticeship can help make explicit the largely tacit
knowledge most expert practitioners possess about their own problem-solving
processes. Pilot attempts to adapt it to a classroom context show that it can help
children acquire a culture's tools and vocabulary, and the means to discuss and
evaluate conventional procedures, collaboratively. The work in this tradition
(reviewed above) focuses predominantly upon the curriculum area of
mathematics and to some extent, reading and writing. These domains are thought
to be particularly well-suited to cognitive apprenticeship methods because they
involve cognitive and metacognitive processes that are basic to learning and
thinking more generally (Collins, Brown and Newman, 1989). Recent changes in
our vision of science and — especially — technology education mean that
potentially its central notions are especially applicable to these domains. Johnson
and Thomas (1992, p.10) have pointed out that instructional approaches like
Schoenfeld's could feasibly be adapted to the technology classroom as follows:
Teachers need to act like technologists. They need to solve unfamiliar
problems for students and not be afraid to make errors or have difficulties
finding solutions. By serving as a role model, technology teachers can show
32 Sara Hennessy
students how to collect and use information to solve technological problems

and help them realise that not all problems have straightforward solutions.'
A potential problem here is that teachers are not, on the whole, actually
technologists; this is partly because unlike mathematics, technology is not an
identifiable domain outside school, but a conglomeration of numerous
technological practices. (A similar situation holds for the practice of science.) Yet
this may not be an impassable obstacle: Ursula Franklin (1991) urges teachers
simply to 'become learners along with their students and be willing to share their
own personal expertise and life experiences'. Another potential problem is that
the economic bias of the workplace means that useful and meaningful skills will
be acquired rapidly in traditional apprenticeship settings, whereas the scope of
problems which can be transposed to a classroom context, and the range of
solutions which can be formulated, are necesarily limited (in this case by practical
constraints rather than an economic bias). However, a tentative step towards
overcoming these problems has been taken in the form of the Neighbourhood
Engineers scheme, whose most productive aspect for pupils turned out to be the
opportunity to work alongside professional engineers who played an advisory role
(Bridges et al., 1991). The purpose of activity of this nature is to teach directly
cognitive skills such as problem solving, decision making, planning, evaluating
and reflecting. Johnson and Thomas (1992) remind us that instructional goals
which highlight conceptual learning and thinking processes are esssential in
technology education, and these are the kinds of goals which are best reached
through cognitive-oriented techniques.
Apprenticeship can also take place in the context of peer interaction and
collaboration. A situation where pupils are working together is both beneficial to
learning and reflects most activity outside of school. Discussions and negotiations
in groupwork situations will provoke a more meaningful engagement with the
problem-solving processes that teachers want to encourage. For example, if
technology teachers believe that a general design and problem-solving process is
useful and can be transferred across many different contexts, then they must
endeavour to make it explicit as pupils will not otherwise appropriate it;
collaborative problem solving can play a crucial role here in getting children to
reflect upon the process they have used. (To overcome the problems of individual
assessment as part of a group, specific roles and division of labour may be
necessary.)
Bridging from prior knowledge

It is clear from the discussion above that teaching must build on children's
existing knowledge and experience so that these are no longer downgraded in the
classroom while expertise is glorified. A successful teacher therefore requires a
model of the learner's knowledge structure. S/he must be aware of the kinds of
other subject matter knowledge the pupils have encountered and developed, and
of the knowledge requirements of tasks being presented. Rather than 'providing'
knowledge, the teacher must make a deliberate effort to help children access and
use their prior knowledge appropriately in solving problems in the new domain
under mastery. It is also critical that deliberate attempts are made to bridge from
intuitive to formal knowledge. This is illustrated successfully by the mathematics
programme developed by Resnick et al. (1987), which draws upon everyday
problem finding; this approach has great potential for science and technology too.
Apprenticeship programmes like Resnick's radically challenge our view of

schooling to become one of providing a context for knowing, acting and sense-
making, in which children participate daily and actively in a socially valued
process. This means devising problem situations which are 'authentic'.
Authenticity
A critical insight derived from the situated cognition research is that problems
emerge out of dilemmas and learning arises when means are sought to resolve
those dilemmas. The implications are that formal educational settings need to
encourage active intellectual engagement in mathematical, scientific and
technological thinking, and that tasks should relate to those encountered in daily
life. We should encourage schoolchildren to formulate, attempt to solve and
communicate their discoveries about questions arising in their classrooms,
playgrounds and homes, i.e. in their own environments, in the same way that
proficient lay people do. Lave (1992) points out that 'mathematizing' everyday
experience is more productive than attempting to couch classroom problems in
everyday terms. We must recognise that 'emergent problems' will arise while
students are carrying out complex tasks in a rich problem-solving context. In
technological problem solving, for example, the process of solving a problem can
often be observed to change its nature quickly. According to Collins, Brown and
Newman (1989), knowledge about the instructional designer's goals and simple
debugging techniques are insufficient when solving emergent problems; students
must learn to refine these problems interactively, using the constraints of the
embedding context to help solve them. In sum, invention, discovery and
refinement of problems are the hallmarks of the most successful instructional
programmes, which thereby strive to promote pupils' 'ownership' of problems.
Problems should be ones pupils want to solve, which are real and relevant to
them, which engage their interest, and for which they can take responsibility.
'Problem solving' now comes to denote the resolution of meaningful problems
and dilemmas in the context of guided social interaction and negotiation with
teachers and peers.
34 Sara Hennessy
Metacognition
Finally, the ability to reflect on one's own knowledge is a critical factor in learning
and there is thus a need to develop learners' metacognitive strategies. One
effective technique is that adopted by Schoenfeld (1985) in teaching mathematical
problem solving: he encouraged students to ask themselves questions continually
about what they were doing, what they were trying to achieve and what they
would do next. The questions were eventually internalised and the students'
problem-solving performance improved. Requiring children to assess and
monitor their own progress and performance in this way can help make pupils
aware of what they are doing and why.
ISSUES FOR RESEARCH

The main implication of the situated cognition perspective for research is that we
should seek to ground theories of action in empirical evidence, generalising from
records of particular, naturally occurring activities. This will entail explication of
the relationship between structures of action and the resources and constraints
afforded by the physical and social context (Suchman, 1987). When this context
is a conventional classroom, education may fruitfully be construed as a form of
situated activity and discourse (Edwards and Mercer, 1987). Close examination of
this process whereby teachers and children interact to some supposed common
purpose permits identification of the ways in which that purpose is achieved or
lost. The research reviewed here provides a clear framework within which to
examine the structuring of activity in the classroom and to assess whether
teaching is in fact achieving a productive level of specification — in terms of
projects and dilemmas rather than mechanical procedures — with clear aims. The
PSTE project is currently pursuing this research goal; our focus is on
characterising the degree of mismatch between teachers' and children's
perceptions, agendas and intentions concerning a holistic design and problem-
solving process, and investigating the possibility of a 'veneer of accomplishment'
in technology learning. This type of research allows us to observe how much and
what kinds of help children need to complete a task successfully. It will hopefully
yield a constructive outcome in terms of information about what kinds of
problems are motivating and what kinds of task structure and presentation are
most productive. New styles of problems are emerging in mathematics as
researchers pursue ways in which teachers may more easily employ co-operative
learning strategies so that strong goals for learners are linked with an
improvisational approach for reaching them (Lave, 1992). Research must not
ignore the real dilemmas of teachers who are attempting, within the system of
schooling, to sustain such an approach to the learning of mathematics, science and
technology as practices.
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Classroom Learning Implications of Situated Cognition and Cognitive Apprenticeship

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Studies in Science Education

Situated Cognition and

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Situated Cognition and Cognitive

necessarily an optimal strategy. Direct comparison between expert problem

useful to draw upon knowledge or skills attained during schooling. This is

of learning an implicit set of educational ground-rules — representing social

formal knowledge is transmitted primarily through teacher talk (Scribner

distinct systems of arithmetic procedures and practices (symbol- or rule-based

environment rendered the task more meaningful to them (Carraher, 1986).

cultural artifacts, social conventions and interactions. They developed

The role of prior knowledge

investigating student teachers' conceptions concerning the nature of science,

conceptual in origin; some may derive from confusions concerning notational

dominant conceptual change approach to science learning involves facilitating the

arithmetic methods — typically based on mental regrouping of terms — are

to build upon children's informal knowledge impedes acquisition of the formal

meaning in pupils' responses, assessors must understand that children's models

1989). These processes are the components of apprenticeship, which essentially

Maybin, Mercer and Stierer (1992) and by Fleer (1992).

importance of achieving a shared focus of attention, with children's participation

CLASSROOM APPLICATIONS: COGNITIVE APPRENTICESHIP

school-type instruction (theoretical explanation), unstructured observation and

Cognitive apprenticeship programmes

These should provide opportunities for discovery and invention of problems as

instruction in multidigit multiplication. The latter entails whole-class discussion

understanding of the purpose of their mutual pursuit — which must obviously be

reflective comparison through the discussion about problem-solving processes

exploiting properties of the presenting situation (Collins, Brown and Newman,

Computer-supported learning environments

1992). HyperAuthor contains both hypermedia construction tools and reflection

in a similar context. One of the most promising and ambitious developments in

operations such as hypothesis-testing, exploring analogies, identifying causal

hypotheses underlying long sequences, particularly at the most critical point —

SITUATED VERSUS DECONTEXTUALISED KNOWLEDGE AND THE NOTION OF

Expectations and evidence of transfer

familiar knowledge and is intended to foster problem-solving, interpersonal and

Lave (1988) has additionally reviewed research in cognitive psychology that,

unlikely to encounter them alone. According to Lave (1988), attempts to

indicates that, like the prominence of adults' scientific and technological

knowledge in technological activities is not at all straightforward, as McCormick

Subject matter knowledge and problem-solving skills: a balance

focused on schooling's counterproductive requirement that students use

separate topics. (Isolated decontextualised skills are problematic in many ways,

The value of an all-pervasive design process and the accompanying diminished

understanding is 'situated' in the sense that it is partly a product of the activity,

Schooling must therefore move away from individualised forms of competence,

IMPLICATIONS FOR TEACHING

students how to collect and use information to solve technological problems

Bridging from prior knowledge

Apprenticeship programmes like Resnick's radically challenge our view of

aware of what they are doing and why.

ISSUES FOR RESEARCH

ACKERMANN, E. (1990) 'From decontextualized to situated knowledge: Revisiting Piaget's water-level

National Child Development Study, London, ALBSU.

Technology Teacher, 51 (4), 7-12.

SIMPSON, M. (1988) Improving learning in schools — what do we know? A cognitive science

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