How Knowledge Is Made Relevant
Oslo (NO), November 2013 - Associate Professor Ingeborg Krange has been working on the design of digital learning environments for more than a decade and has specifically analyzed their use in educational settings. The title of her talk at OEB is -œA Learning Miracle: Improving Conceptual Learning by Designing and Using Digital and Analogue Devices-œ. What special learning approaches are used in Norway?
Ingeborg Krange: I wouldn’t say that there are any particular learning approaches in Norway, but I would argue that the international research community has theories that dominate the research discussions.
Conceptual learning is one, and it constitutes the very essence of how learners make sense of subject-specific issues.
Representation is another idea that receives a huge amount of attention. This notion points to all sorts of presentations of subject-specific issues. Representations can be analog tools like the abacus or digital like a 3D model of a beating heart.
A third theory I’d like to highlight here is the idea of transfer. This refers to how knowledge is made relevant across activities and settings.
All these concepts are, of course, related, and they could engender various types of research. For example, we could investigate what characterizes students’ conceptual learning while interacting with a 3D model of a human heart and in what ways do students make these interactions relevant during later diagnostic work.
Can these concepts be applied to all forms of instruction and content, or do they have to be developed specifically for each?
Ingeborg Krange: These concepts can be applied to all sorts of instructions and all types of content. However, it is important to emphasize three points: conceptual learning in various domains might look different, diverse types of representations have their particular characteristics, and the role of transfer changes depending on the activities and settings.
How long and with which age groups have you done investigations?
Ingeborg Krange: I have mainly studied secondary and upper secondary students, but I have also looked into professional training in trauma team. The learning concepts mentioned above have always played a crucial role in my studies.
Is there exchange among Norwegian educators about their experience with these learning concepts?
Ingeborg Krange: As a research community we share our experiences with these concepts, and this is reflected in our university courses and in teacher-training programs. I would argue that we also share this knowledge with Norwegian educators more generally: for example at conferences like ONLINE EDUCA BERLIN and more national-policy-oriented conferences. However, research communication is not trivial, and there is still a long way to go before our knowledge pervades the everyday practice in classrooms across all educational levels.
