Sense making

These are robust learning processes wherein students try to understand the instruction or engage in higher-level thinking to create knowledge independent of instruction. PSLC research focuses on two types of sense-making processing.

o Coordinative learning: When students go beyond direct instructional feedback to learn on their own by integrating results from multiple input sources, representations, or reasoning strategies, we say they are engaged in coordinative learning. Coordinative learning includes co-training (Blum & Mitchell, 1998), a theoretically sound technique in machine learning for using multiple input sources to perform unsupervised learning from data that does not include correct responses or feedback. Coordinative learning also includes other ways of learning from “multiples” including multimedia, multiple representations and multiple strategies.

o Interactive communication: When two agents takes turns with each other, share initiative during the instruction, and may explore an idea at arbitrary depth, then we say they are engaged in interactive communication. We mean to include natural language dialogues between a student and a peer or a tutor as well as other non-verbal (e.g., computer interface mediated) forms of dialogue (from The PSLC Theoretical Framework).

Sense making refers to the phenomena of making and unmaking of sense.

The way that people choose between multiple possible explanations of sensory and other input as they seek to conform the phenomenological with the real in order to act in such a way as to determine or respond to the world around them.