What and Why
I am studying knowledge utilization and technology transfer to understand how college students relate, deconstruct, and construct new knowledge among complex ideas. The pedagogical implementation I am designing stems from an experience I had at a leadership institute for the International Writing Center Association in June 2016 where we transferred the learning process of playing a new, complex game to our personal learning, teaching, and directing approaches. From this adult leadership training, I designed this study for college students working in peer learning programs. The study is scalable and has been piloted to various audience sizes ranging from 7 to 200 individuals. Future data collection will be qualitative including data from formative and summative assessments as well as researcher observations. I am hoping to show students the learning process and pathway they create each time they confront a complex problem so they can begin to see transferability among complex problems. The outcomes I aim to measure are 1)recognition of distinct learning phases, 2)time from one learning phase to the next as a measure of cognitive growth, and 3)perception of transferability to a unique complex task. The global goal for this study is to add to the current body of research about best pedagogical practices teaching college students how to relate, deconstruct, and construct the creative solutions needed for future complex problems by transferring knowledge made through complex connections among disciplines, ecologies, and cultures.
Research Design
The grounding theoretical approaches for this study are cognitivism and pedagogy of play. Additional instructional design approaches include: 1)Gagne’s Nine Events of Instruction and 2) Van Merriënboer’s Four Component Instructional Design (4C-ID), both based on guided experiential learning (Clark, 2004) as the pedagogical approach. Complementary pedagogical approaches include Problem based learning (PBL), Complex or “wicked” problem solving (CPS) and Game based learning (GBL). The combination of instructional and pedagogical approaches for this study designed as a training for college students provides a robust framework to measure knowledge utilization and technology transfer across complex ideas.
The Journey
Every year in August I have the opportunity to design activities to train over 100 student learning consultants throughout six peer support programs. This activity is designed for both face-to-face and digital facilitation. It is based on the historically Texas domino game called 42. In academic context, this game aims to introduce learning as an iterative process.
The first time I taught this critical thinking activity in 2018, the feedback I received was that the game was fun but the application of theory to the game was too difficult. The suggestion was that I let the students play and come to understand the application to the learning process (somehow) on their own. So I did. The next time my team taught this in 2019, we didn’t include the pedagogy, theory, or frameworks. As expected, this confused the learners as they had no direction or guidance about what the game was supposed to connect to their learning, work, or community building efforts during training. They begged me to write a lesson plan to include the learning again so we could successfully facilitate in the future. I designed an instructional guide for implementing this pedagogical training to any higher education peer learning training event and presented the design at the National College Learning Center Association in 2021. From this presentation, I was invited to lead a teacher training program at Texas State University in 2022 and began consulting with an undergraduate research scholar at Texas A&M about designing a full research methodology to measure the transferability of metacognitive learning. This research was put on hold due to concurrent other research studies more directly related to my PhD.
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