Daniel Hickey Research Collection

Permanent link for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/2022/22912

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Productive disciplinary engagement and expansive framing: The situative legacy of Randi Engle
(Routledge, 2022) Hickey, Daniel T.
Productive disciplinary engagement (PDE) and expansive framing are two closely related frameworks for understanding and supporting education. These frameworks emerged from the research of the cognitive scientist Randi Engle (1967-2012) and colleagues. PDE was introduced in 2002 to describe a particularly noteworthy classroom discussion that was recorded in a reform-oriented elementary science classroom. PDE characterizes student engagement in the form of discourse that concerns the academic discipline at hand. Such disciplinary engagement is presumed to be productive when it asks disciplinary questions, clarifies disciplinary misunderstanding, and serves other functions that are known to support disciplinary learning. Engle and her co-author advanced a set of “guiding principles” for supporting PDE. These principles guide educators towards providing instruction and resources that help students (a) “problematize” disciplinary knowledge from their own perspectives, (b) accept a share of authority to resolve the disciplinary problems or questions that result, and (c) hold themselves and each other accountable for appropriately using the language and ideas of the discipline. In 2006, Engle further explored the data from her 2002 study to consider how that learning had been “framed.” She introduced the label “expansive framing” in an experimental study published in 2011 and further elaborated that theory in a paper published in 2012. Expansive framing offers additional educational principles for supporting PDE by helping teachers “position” students as authors (rather than consumers) of disciplinary knowledge. Expansive framing does this by insistently pushing each student to (a) make connections with people, places, topics, and times beyond the boundaries of the assignment and/or course, and (b) see themselves as active participants in a broader intellectual conversation that extends over space and time. Engle’s characterization of engagement as PDE and the design principles for supporting PDE and expansive framing are some of the most useful guidelines for education to emerge from the theory of situated cognition that emerged in the 1980s. Situative theories of knowing and learning are less prescriptive for education than the behaviorist theories that dominated through the 1970s or the information processing and constructivist theories that became influential after the so-called “cognitive revolution” in the 1970s. Situative theories pay particular attention to the social and cultural contexts where learning takes place as well as the social and cultural contexts where that learning might later be used. This is what cognitive scientists call “transfer.” Engle and others argue that PDE and expansive framing can support “generative” learning that transfers readily and widely to new contexts. This article reviews the most influential experimental and theoretical publications by Engle and colleagues regarding PDE and expansive framing and summarizes the research by others who have taken up these frameworks.
Evolving and Emerging Perspectives on the Transfer of Learning
(Oxford University Press, 2023-10-03) Hickey, Daniel; Lam, Diane
This chapter considers the phenomenon of transfer of learning in light of heightened concerns over power, privilege, equity, gender, and race in education. The authors argue that assumptions about transfer have a tremendous impact on education via classroom assessments and achievement tests and that discriminatory and racist practices in education are often produced and reproduced via inappropriate assessment and testing practices. The chapter is organized around four dimensions of assessments as they relate to transfer. These dimensions are format, level, function, and theory. The authors consider each dimension with a particular eye on contemporary “asset-based” responses to historical educational inequities. The authors consider how these dimensions are currently represented in research on culturally responsive educational practices (or not) and speculate about how these dimensions might be used to organize more culturally responsive assessment and testing. The authors specifically explore the synergies between two situative transfer mechanisms and several contemporary asset-based responses to historical inequities. They conclude by arguing that a situative multi-level approach to assessment and new models of research-practice partnership offers a coherent means of applying these synergies to educational practice.
Charles Hohensee and Joanne Lobato (Eds.). Transfer of learning: Progressive perspectives for mathematics education and related fields. [Book Review]
(2023-12-29) Hickey, Daniel; Harris, Tripp; Quick, Joshua
Commentary: Situative Approaches to Online Engagement, Assessment, and Equity
(2022-08) Hickey, Daniel
The articles in this special issue on Improving Online Learning Theory, Research, and Practice characterize online learning using a set of “diverse lenses.” Most of these articles draw primarily from modern socio-constructivist perspectives and applied psychological constructs derived from more basic research. My strong embrace of situated cognition and design-based methods led to questions about how key issues in online learning such as online engagement, summative and formative assessment, and equitable learning were conceptualized. Specifically, I contrast how the socio-constructivist approaches in most of the articles might be re-conceptualized in a situative approach called participatory learning and assessment. I conclude by summarizing the potential value of a deeper embrace of situativity in online learning theory and research.
Advancing sustainable educational ecosystems with open digital credentials and badges
(Routledge, 2021) Hickey, Daniel; Buchem, Ilona
Most existing practices for grading student work, measuring readiness, documenting accomplishment, and accrediting programs and schools are analog and opaque. This makes it difficult for programs, schools, and communities to adopt the innovations described in the other chapters of this volume. Open digital badges can contain specific claims of competency, along with web enable evidence supporting those claims. This information can then circulate in social networks and gain additional meaning. Examples from sustainable, sustainability, and open education are used to illustrate how open badges are being used to help find, acknowledge, recognize, motivate, and endorse learning.
Reimagining online grading, assessment, and testing using situated cognition
(2021-05-01) Hickey, Daniel; Harris, Tripp
Increased online learning is helping many appreciate that online grading, formative assessment, and summative testing can cause instructor burnout and leave little time for more productive instructor interactions. We reimagined grading, assessment, and testing in an extended program of design-based research using situative theory to refine online courses in secondary, undergraduate, graduate, and technical contexts. This research minimized private instructor-student interactions (including grading and private formative feedback) while maximizing public interactions. We present 10 assessment design principles, including a new principle concerning diversity and equity. We assume that these principles will be new to many readers and counter-intuitive to some. These principles focus on assessment functions (rather than ostensible purposes) and align learning across increasingly formal levels. We argue that doing so can maximize formative and transformative assessment functions, position students as authors, rather than consumers, reposition minoritized students to empower them, and increase validity and credibility of evidence.
Recognizing competencies vs. completion vs. participation: Ideal roles for web-enabled digital badges
(2020) Hickey, Daniel; Chartrand, Grant
Open digital badges are new credentials that can contain specific claims and links to web-enabled evidence, and can then circulate in networks. Badges are helping facilitate broader shifts away from measuring, accrediting, and credentialing achievement and towards capturing, validating, and recognizing learning. A study of 30 funded efforts to develop badges found that none of the efforts to develop competency badges (for demonstrating specific competencies) resulted in thriving badge-based ecosystems, while four of the five efforts to develop participation badges (for engaged participation in social learning) resulted in thriving ecosystems. The findings were relatively mixed for the remaining efforts to develop completion badges (for individuals completing projects or investigations) and hybrid badges (for multiple types of learning). These findings suggest that innovators temper their ambition for capturing and recognizing evidence of individual competencies, and consider exploring more social assessments and informal and crowdsourced recognition.
A situative response to the conundrum of formative assessment
(2015) Hickey, Daniel
While formative assessment is popular, it is difficult to evaluate and improve. In some settings it may result in less disciplinary learning by competing with other more productive activities, making those activities less engaging, and narrowing curricular goals. Situative approaches to educational assessment offer a solution by (a) blurring the distinction between instruction and assessment, (b) moving beyond the intended purposes of assessment to focus on actual functions, and (c) using the same assessment to accomplish multiple functions. Framing instruction, assessment, and testing as primarily social practices and placing them on a continuum of assessment formality offers a coherent framework for aligning learning across different assessments and balancing functions within particular assessments. This paper introduces an approach called Participatory Assessment that has been used successfully to enhance (a) communal engagement, (b) individual knowledge, and (c) aggregated achievement of standards, while (d) providing valid evidence of those refinements.
Expansive Framing as Pragmatic Theory for Online and Hybrid Instructional Design
(2020) Hickey, Daniel; Chartrand, Grant; Andrews, Christopher
This article explores the complex question of how instruction should be framed (i.e., contextualized). Reports from the US National Research Council reveal a broad consensus among experts that most instruction should be framed with problems, examples, cases, and illustrations. Such framing is assumed to help learners connect new knowledge to broader “real world” knowledge, motivate continued engagement, and ensure that learners can transfer their new knowledge to subsequent contexts. However, different theories of learning lead to different assumptions about when such frames should be introduced and how such frames should be created. This article shows how contemporary situative theories of learning argue that frames should be (a) introduced before instructional content, (b) generated by learners themselves, (c) used to make connections with people, places, topics, and times beyond the boundaries of the course, and (d) used to position learners as authors who hold themselves and their peers accountable for their participation in disciplinary discourse. This expansive approach to framing promises to support engagement with disciplinary content that is productive (i.e., increasingly sophisticated, raising new questions, recognizing confusion, making new connections, etc.) and generative (i.e., supporting transferable learning that is likely to be useful and used in a wide range of subsequent educational, professional, achievement, and personal contexts). A framework called Participatory Learning and Assessment (PLA) is presented that embeds expansively framed engagement within multiple levels of increasing formal assessments. This paper first summarizes PLA as theory-laden design principles. It then presents PLA as fourteen more prescriptive steps that some may find easier to implement and to learn as they go. Examples are presented from several courses from an extended program of design-based research using this approach in online and hybrid secondary, undergraduate, graduate, and technical courses.
Formative and Summative Analyses of Disciplinary Engagement and Learning in Big Open Online Course
(Association for Computing Machiny, 2015) Hickey, Daniel; Quick, Joshua; Shen, Xinyi
Situative theories of knowing and participatory approaches to learning and assessment were used to design and then analyze learning in a “big open online course” (“BOOC”) on educational assessment. The course was delivered using Google’s Course Builder platform which was customized extensively to support both summative and formative analyses of disciplinary social engagement and individual learning. The course featured personalized “wikifolio” public assignments peer commenting, endorsement, & promotion, formal online examinations, open digital badges, and participatory learning analytics. The course was first completed by 60 students in 2013 and impressive levels of engagement and learning were documented. The course was further refined in 2014 with embedded streaming videos, embedded formative assessments, and streamlined learning analytics. Of the sixty students who registered for the course, 22 completed it. This paper illustrates the more formative learning analytics used to advance the shared discourse in the course as well as the other new features and provides detailed evidence of engagement & learning.
Open Digital Badges and Reward Structures
(Cambridge University Press, 2019-02) Hickey, Daniel T.; Schenke, Katerina
In recent years, web-enabled credentials for learning have emerged, primarily in the form of Open Badges. These new credentials can contain specific claims about competency, evidence supporting those claims, links to student work, and traces of engagement. Moreover, these credentials can be annotated, curated, shared, discussed, and endorsed over digital networks, which can provide additional meaning. However, digital badges have also reignited the simmering debate over rewards for learning. This is because they have been used by some and characterized by many as inherently “extrinsic” motivators. Our chapter considers this debate in light of a study that traced the development and evolution of 30 new Open Badge systems. Seven arguments are articulated: (1) digital badges are inherently more meaningful than grades and other credentials; (2) circulation in digital networks makes Open Badges particularly meaningful; (3) Open Badges are particularly consequential credentials; (4) the negative consequences of extrinsic rewards are overstated; (5) consideration of motivation and badges should focus primarily on social activity and secondarily on individual behavior and cognition; (6) situative models of engagement are ideal for studying digital credentials; and (7) the motivational impact of digital credentials should be studied across increasingly formal “levels.”
Beyond Hype, Hyperbole, Myths, and Paradoxes: Scaling Up Participatory Learning and Assessment in a Big Open Online Course
(University of Chicago Press, 2017) Hickey, Daniel T.; Uttamchandani, Suraj L.
Most readers of this volume are likely familiar with the distinctive history of massive open online courses (MOOCs). Their rapid expansion contrasts with the more steady expansion of higher- education technologies in prior decades, punctuated by small bursts around the advent of computers, personal computers, multimedia computers, and the Internet. The pace of change quickened around the turn of the century with the open education movement that laid some groundwork for the modern MOOC. The acronym itself was coined in 2008 for an open course on “connectivist” learning offered by George Siemens and Stephen Downes. MOOCs exploded in 2011– 12 with Udacity, Coursera, edX, and others, suddenly enrolling tens of thousands of students around the world in free courses designed around the instruction of prominent academics. This outpouring of attention, investment, and learners was unprecedented in higher education.
Wikifolios and Participatory Assessment for Engagement, Understanding, and Achievement in Online Courses
(Journal of Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia, 2013-11) Hickey, Daniel T.; Rehak, Andrea M.
This paper presents new insights from ongoing design-based research of graduate-level online courses in a school of education. This research has been refining the use of widely available wikis and online assessment tools to deliver broad learning outcomes. The research started with a general goal that reflects current situative theories of instruction and assessment, and resulted in five general design principles and course features used to enact those principles. Reflecting the first two principles, each student articulates the relative relevance of chapter concepts for a personally meaningful problem context and then engages threaded discussions within and across networking groups via comments placed directly on wikifolios. Reflecting the third principle, wikifolios and comments are not directly graded; rather, they are evaluated using student reflections placed directly in their wikifolio. Reflecting the fourth and fifth principles, conceptual understanding and aggregated achievement are discreetly assessed with timed exams using conventional items. Examples and learning outcomes from two recent courses are presented.
A Framework for Interactivity in Competency-Based Courses
(EDUCAUSE Review, 2015-08) Hickey, Daniel T.
A proposed course framework, based on five educational design principles, helps instructors organize, motivate, and assess interactive online learning and prepares students to succeed in networked knowledge settings. The principles also offer the flexibility, self-pacing, and accountability associated with competency-based education.
Endorsement 2.0: Taking Open Badges and E-Credentials to the Next Level
(EDUCAUSE Review, 2017-02) Hickey, Daniel T.; Otto, Nate
When Mozilla introduced in 2011 as a way to recognize learning and achievement, it heralded a radical shift in credentialing in higher education and beyond. Unlike conventional credentials, digital badges can contain specific claims and detailed web-enabled evidence supporting those claims, and this information can circulate freely on the Internet. But as with any new technology, it takes time to shake out the problems and standardize solutions. One of the biggest issues — the credibility of these digital credentials — is about to take a big step forward.
Digital Badges and Ethics: The Uses of Individual Learning Data in Social Contexts
(Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Open Badges in Education, 2013-06) Willis, James E.; Quick, Joshua; Hickey, Daniel T.
Empirical evidence contained in open digital badges has the capability to change educational curricula, assessments, and priorities. Because badge data in educational, social media, and workforce contexts is publicly available, questions of privacy and ethics should be scrutinized. Due to change driven by digital transparency, ethical questions at the intersection of learning analytics and the data contained in badges poses three distinct, yet related questions: within learning analytics systems, can the use of educational data in digital badges be used in a predictive manner to create a deterministic future for individual learners? Can badge data that is freely and openly accessible in social media be used against individuals if it exposes intellectual weaknesses? And, can the student data in badges be isolated to exploit particular skills for nefarious reasons, i.e. surveillance or hacking? These questions address ethical principles of human autonomy, freedom, and determinism.
Research Designs for Studying Individual and Collaborative Learning with Digital Badges
(Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Open Badges in Education, 2015-03) Hickey, Daniel T.; Willis, James E.
Web-enabled digital badges are quickly transforming the way that individual and collaborative learning is supported, recognized, and assessed in digital learning contexts. Badges contain specific claims and evidence supporting those claims and they have the potential to also transform the way that researchers study learning. Because digital badges are so new, there are few examples or models for studying them or using them to study learning. This paper introduces six research designs for studying learning with digital badges that emerged in a study of thirty projects funded to develop digital badges in a 2012 competition. These principles distinguish between summative, formative, and “transformative” research, and between using conventional forms of evidence and using the evidence contained in digital badges.
Fostering e-learning discourse among professional networking groups
(Indiana University Press, 2012-02) Bishop, Stephen C.; Hickey, Daniel T.
Many instructors struggle to foster worthwhile discussions in on-line courses. We have refined a strategy that fosters extended discourse around the big ideas of a course while maintaining a reasonable workload for faculty and students. We refined this method in graduate-level courses on Learning Theory and on Educational Assessment with class sizes ranging from 15 to 40 students. The method does not use a discussion forum. Rather, the discussion takes place as comments placed directly on student-generated wikifolios. The method is structured to discourage initial discussion of concepts in the abstract. Instead, students discuss how course concepts take on different meaning in different contexts. This strategy should work in any e-learning setting where students are able to post wikis and make comments directly on those posts. This feature is available in the Sakai open-source course management system and in many commercial e-learning platforms.
“Reading in Context” for networked engagement with course readings
(Indiana University Press, 2012-02) Hickey, Daniel T.
“Reading in Context” is a networked instructional activity. I have been using it to help graduate students efficiently learn to (a) locate, interpret, and critique personally relevant articles, (b) uncover the ultimate meaning of those articles and assigned core articles as they have been taken up in the literature more broadly, and (c) learn the subtle nuances of scholarly referencing. These proficiencies are crucial for graduate students but difficult to foster in classroom contexts. They require extensive individualized guidance from someone with deep knowledge of the relevant literature. Some graduate students never really appreciate how the broadening meaning of a specific article ultimately resides in the way it is taken up and interpreted in the broader literature (Rose, 1996); this challenge is heighted within digitally networked scholarship (Ingraham, 2000). As such, many students don’t appreciate the broader meaning of core readings, or even see how they came to be “core” in the first place (Diezmann, 2005). Many don’t tackle the nuances of referencing (such as the appropriate use of e.g., i.e., and c.f.) in their own writing until they get to their thesis or dissertation (Cafarella & Barnett, 2000). This is laborious for advisors and aggravating for committee members. Worse still, some graduate complete their studies with culminating papers that knowledgeable editors or search committee members dismiss outright because of sloppy referencing.
Anchored Instruction and Situated Cognition Revisited
(Educational Technology, 1993-03) The Cognition and Technology Group
In 1990 an article by our Cognition and Technology Group at Vanderbilt (CTGV) entitled "Anchored Instruction and Its Relationship to Situated Cognition" appeared in the Educational Researcher. In it we discussed two programs that we were developing and testing that involved anchoring or situating instruction in the context of information-rich videodisc environments that encouraged students and teachers to pose and solve complex, realistic problems. One of the programs, The Young Sherlock Program, focused on literacy and social studies, including history. The other program, The Jasper Woodbury Problem Solving Series, focused on mathematical problem solving with links to science, history, social studies, and literature. We noted that both programs were being used and tested in classrooms-generally with students in the fifth and sixth grades.

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