Vol. 2 No. 2

Comments from the Guest Editor

Articles

Ann L. Brown
Design Experiments: Theoretical and Methodological Challenges in Creating Complex Interventions in Classroom Settings
Alan H. Schoenfeld
On Paradigms and Methods: What Do You Do When the Ones You Know Don't Do What You Want Them To? Issues in the analysis of Data in the Form of Videotapes
Geoffrey B. Saxe
Studying Children's Learning in Context: Problems and Prospects

Comments from the Guest Editor

Research Methods in and for the Learning Sciences

Alan H. Schoenfeld

This issue of The Journal of the Learning Sciences inaugurates a series ofarticles concerned with research methods in the learning sciences. We begin with three pieces that address a common issue: What do you do when the perspectives, paradigms, and methods that you know fail to provide adequite explanations of the things you understand?

At the 1991 American Educatonal Research Association annual meeting, Ann Brown, Geoff Saxe, and I shared a podium at which we discussed the issue. To put things succinctly, we were there in large measure because we share the following property: All of us, by virtue of our background and training, were inadequately prepared to do the work we do now do to earn a living........

Read more of the "Comments from the Guest Editor" in JLS Volume 2, Number 2.

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Abstracts

Design Experiments: Theoretical and Methodological Challenges in Creating Complex Interventions in Classroom Settings

Ann L. Brown

The lion's share of my current research program is devoted to the study of learning in the blooming, buzzing confusion of inner-city classrooms. My high-level goal is to transform grade-school classrooms from work sites where students perform assigned tasks under the management of teachers into communities of learning (Beriter& Sccardamalia, 1989; Brown & Campione, 1990) and interpretation (Fish, 1980), where students are given significant opportunity to take charge of their own learning. In my current work, I conduct what Collins (in press) refers to as design experiments, modeled on the procedures of design sciences such as aeronautics and artificial intelligence. As a design scientist in my field, I attempt to engineer innovative educational environments and simultaneously conduct experimental studies of those innovations. This involves orchestrating all aspects of a period of daily life in classrooms, a research activity for which I was not trained. My training was that of a classic learning theorist prepared to work with "subjects" (rats, children, sophomores), in strictly controlled labatory settings. The methods I have employed in my previous life are not readily transported to the research activities I oversee currently. . . (continued in Vol 2 No. 2)

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On Paradigms and Methods: What Do You Do When the Ones You Know Don't Do What You Want Them To? Issues in the analysis of Data in the Form of Videotapes

Alan Schoenfeld

This article examines a range of issues related to the development of nonstandard methods for the analysis of videotapes of problem-solving sessions. It proposes some rather stringent standards for novel methods, standards concerned with issues of validity, reliability, and the communication of methods and data. The discussion is illustrated by the detailed examination of two case studies that employ two different grain sizes of analysis- the first macroscopic, the second microscopic. In the light of those case studies, theoretical issues regarding the relationships among theory-based, method-based, and problem-based approaches to programmatic research in the learning sciences are considered.

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Studying Children's Learning in Context: Problems and Prospects

Geoffrey B. Saxe

In this article, I present a framework for the study of children's learning in cultural practices and educational activities. The framework consists of three analytic components, each of which is grounded in a constructivist treatment of cognitive development: (a) a model for the analysis of emergent cognitive goals in practices, (b) a model for the analysis of emergent cognitive linked to emergent goals, and (c) a model for the analysis of the interplay between cognitive developments linked to one practice or activity to accomplish emergent goals in another. The article describes the early history of the framework and its current application to the design and analysis of a classroom practice in the United States involving arithmetical problem solving in third and fourth grade inner-city classrooms. I close with a discussion of the framework with reference to Schoenfeld's (1992) standards for methodological innovations.

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