It seems timely to share an idea from my notes of December, 2007, about using Tablet and other mobile PCs to manage learning life cycles. Use of mobiles as well as their in-laws handhelds and smart cellphones continues to increase as learning tools. These increases appear to offer a viable market for an on-board learning life cycle management software program.
Tablet based life cycle management could likely expand teacher influence on learning rates in and out of schools. It could free up teacher classroom time from some repetitious instruction.
It also seems reasonable to expect school funding agencies to demand more student learning for each dollar spent in schools. The political atmosphere seems receptive for more automation of instruction to fulfill this expectation.
At the present, school based educators use only a few direct ways to affect promptly student learning rates in or out of schools. Tablets and their cousins as well as technology on the horizon will likely make their use with instruction and analyses more practical than with current manual methods.
A learning life cycle model offers a step toward increasing learning-to-cost ratios as well as to increase learning rates.
Research Based Learning Life Cycle Model
The learning life cycle model (LLCM) has existed in behavioral science research literature for decades. Most people know about the cycle, but without the LLCM label.
Experimental and applied empirical research reports show high levels of confidence in relationships among the beginning, middle, and ending parts of each individual’s learning events. These stages account for the fit or misfit of instruction with a learning event. Learning efficiency indicies represent instruction-learning fits.
In the Learning Life Cycle Model, learning occurs in an observable sequence of Ante-Behavior, Behavior, and Consequence of Behavior. Tom Caldwell calls this the ABCs of learning. Others refer to it as the stimulus-response (S-R) paradigm.
According to David Zeaman and Betty House’s visual discrimination research, activity before learning exists as trials-and-errors as each learner tries to figure out to what to attend.
Then, a color, shape, position, size, or some collection of them (such as a ring; Zeaman and House called this class of visual objects “junk”) of an object catches the learner’s attention (Caldwell Stage A).
Next, learner chooses that stimulus (Stage B). In studies, learners touch one of two cards, blocks, etc. to indicate choice.
A consequence occurs for that behavior (Stage C). The learner receives a candy or praise for a correct response in some studies.
Marc Gold showed that successful completion of each step of a complex task held sufficient consequence for learners to continue their assignment without additional external positive or negative feedback. I found the same lack of need for positive or negative consequences in data collected from use with hundreds of different tasks in 42 venues across Massachussets with hundreds of learners.
Implications of the Learning Life Cycle Model
The learning life cycle model provides a structure for measuring crucial instruction-learning sequences. Arguably, learning does not occur without the ABC sequence. Instruction could occur with or without teacher moderation or control.
Tablet PC and other Ink software designers and developers can use the learning life cycle model to develop more sophisticated learning programs.
In turn, learning analysts, teachers and learners can use the model to identify the most lasting interactions with Tablets, which parts of the learning process with Tablets are open to modification, and which can be dropped with minimum risk of learning losses.
Cautions
The complex task of valuing parts of the instruction-learning process has stumped learners, learning analysts, educators, and software designers as they have tried to automate an implicit learning life cycle. As a result, educators and designers have approximated learning cycles with a variety of fault-tolerant instruction instead of no-fault learning programs.
Thus, boards of education approve budget lines for increased student testing, for specialized instruction programs, for professional development programs intended to increase student test scores, and for supervision of instruction in order to insure that teachers increase student learning. Procedures paid by these four budget lines are also fault-tolerant and imply that higher value exists than to assure that all students learn increasingly more and promptly.
Software learning programs based on the learning life cycle model seem a reasonable way to make learning at least less-fault tolerant.
Related Reading
Glossary about Tablet PC Learning
Learning with Tablet PCs Research Agenda: From Facts to Pragmatics