Instructional designers plan current student experiences that promote future competence. There is a wide agreement that current instruction should allow students to “go beyond the information given” by demonstrating novel understanding. Less clear is what instructional efforts yield what specific emergent knowledge. Under these conditions, emergent learning remains an untestable, and therefore unscientific, concept. We describe a framework that creates emergent learning in both novice and experienced learners, and in many academic subjects, specifying preconditions that will yield specific emergent learning outcomes, and thereby promoting a desirable level of prospective precision in the planning of future student competence.
Many Americans literally fear for their lives on the streets, at home, at work, and at school. This fear is rooted in fact: 24,526 persons were victims of homicide in 1993 (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1995); the National Crime Survey found that an estimated 6.5 million violent crimes occurred in 1992, not including homicide (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1994). The United States experiences more violence than any other industrialized nation; homicide rates are far higher in this country than in any other industrialized nation (8.3 per 100,000 versus rates of about 1 to 2 in most European countries, as surveyed by the World Health Organization in the 1980s). Rates of other violent crimes are also substantially higher (more so the more serious the offense; Reiss & Roth, 1993a). There is a common perception that the rate of violent crime is steadily increasing; however, nationally this is not the case-the incidence of homicidewas actually higher in the 1930s and 1970s. But in the largest U.S. cities, total violent crime has almost doubled since 1973 (Reiss & Roth, 1993a).Violence perpetrated by and against youth is a particularly urgent social concern. The risk of victimization by violent crime peaks for both men and women between the ages 16 and 19 (Reiss & Roth, 1993a).Homicide is the leading cause of death for African American youth both male and female (American Psychological Association [APA], 1993). APA also reported that, in a study of first and second grade students in Wash-75
A learning situation in which the principal content of what is to be learned is not given but is independently discovered by the learner is often considered "discovery learning." Recently, learning scientists have been able to make explicit some of the conditions under which such independent discovery is likely to occur (Andronis, 1983; Epstein, 1996; Johnson & Layng, 1992). One form of "discovery" can often be observed when skills learned under one set of conditions are recruited under new conditions to serve a new or different function-a process of "contingency adduction" (Andronis, Layng, & Goldiamond, 1997). The research reported here investigated the application of contingency adduction in a discovery learning context to establish sound-to-letter correspondence as part of an online reading/decoding program, Headsprout Early Reading. Beginning readers acquired novel letters/sounds correspondence with minimal presentations and few errors-often requiring only one presentation. This research suggests that instructional sequences may be designed to provide effective discovery learning activities to teach some phonics skills.
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