Sense making

These are robust learning processes or outcomes wherein students try to understand the instruction or engage in higher-level thinking to create knowledge independent of instruction. PSLC research focuses on facilitating sense making through two broad categories of instructional methods:

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.

See also The PSLC Theoretical Framework document and slides.