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Prototyping a Real-World Problem

Luis Perez-Breva and Nick Fuhrer

in Innovating: A Doer's Manifesto for Starting from a Hunch, Prototyping Problems, Scaling Up, and Learning to Be Productively Wrong

You can give any hunch the structure of a problem and make that problem tangible. Innovations are not prescribed, but rather emerge from what you do in the process of trying to understand and tame a ... More

You can give any hunch the structure of a problem and make that problem tangible. Innovations are not prescribed, but rather emerge from what you do in the process of trying to understand and tame a real-world problem—that is, prototyping a problem. Get ready to be wrong, because a good solution can emerge from being wrong a lot and you need only be approximately right once. This process of prototyping a problem as an approach to innovation has several advantages: progress is about how much you learn about the problem; there are multiple strategies for making your problem tangible and getting to specific questions; and there is a demonstration possible of any problem at a scale that matches your current resources.Less

Think-Aloud Interview Procedures: Measuring Problem-Solving Response Processes

Jacqueline P. Leighton

in Using Think-Aloud Interviews and Cognitive Labs in Educational Research

The objective of the second chapter is to delve deeply into the theoretical and empirical distinction for think-aloud interviews. This chapter includes defining what think-aloud interviews are ... More

The objective of the second chapter is to delve deeply into the theoretical and empirical distinction for think-aloud interviews. This chapter includes defining what think-aloud interviews are designed to measure—problem-solving processes and how these processes differ from other cognitive functions. The reader is introduced to distinctions between controlled versus automated processing in relation to problem solving, and identifying the specialized interview instructions and probing procedures required for think-aloud interviews; for example, concurrent interview probes. The chapter also presents the role of cognitive models for codifying verbal reports, ways to reduce bias or negative influences on the contents of verbal reports, task materials for eliciting reports, and human sample size considerations. Examples are used to illustrate concepts and ideas.Less

Educational Trends

Alex Russ and Marianne E. Krasny

Alex Russ and Marianne E. Krasny (eds)

in Urban Environmental Education Review

This chapter discusses five trends related to urban environmental education: City as Classroom, Problem Solving, Environmental Stewardship, Individual and Community Development, and City as ... More

This chapter discusses five trends related to urban environmental education: City as Classroom, Problem Solving, Environmental Stewardship, Individual and Community Development, and City as Social-Ecological System. City as Classroom aims to facilitate learning about urban and other environments, ecology, science, geography, history, and other subjects using urban outdoor and indoor settings. Problem Solving aims to solve or mitigate environmental problems and related social problems. The goal of Environmental Stewardship is to foster community-based management of urban ecosystems, involve community members in decision making and action to improve urban natural resources. Individual and Community Development seeks to promote positive youth development and social capital. City as Social-Ecological System aims to develop an understanding of cities as social-ecological systems, and reimagine how to manage cities to achieve desired environmental and social outcomes. The chapter shows that urban environmental education contributes to urban sustainability by addressing social and environmental issues.Less

Sustainable Campuses

Scott Ashmann, Felix Pohl, and Dave Barbier

Alex Russ and Marianne E. Krasny (eds)

in Urban Environmental Education Review

This chapter examines sustainable urban campuses and their impact on their students and local communities. It also considers elements of green infrastructure, learning, and community through the lens ... More

This chapter examines sustainable urban campuses and their impact on their students and local communities. It also considers elements of green infrastructure, learning, and community through the lens of urban environmental education trends, namely: City as Classroom, Problem Solving, and Environmental Stewardship. After providing an overview of aspects of sustainable university campuses, the chapter discusses the ways that such campuses address urban sustainability related to infrastructure, teaching and learning, as well as connections to the community. It shows that the built environment and lifestyles are important for urban campuses, given their location in areas of highly concentrated buildings and dense human population. It argues that environmental education in cities can benefit from harnessing the power that lies within a university campus's academic, infrastructural, and community-related resources.Less

Musical Theater Meets Reality TV: An Investigation into the Canadian Context1

Christine Quail

in Music and the Broadcast Experience: Performance, Production, and Audiences

Combining elements of artistic performance with contest-based tasks and documentary-style narratives about the contestants, musical theater reality TV (MTRTV) features musical theater–based ... More

Combining elements of artistic performance with contest-based tasks and documentary-style narratives about the contestants, musical theater reality TV (MTRTV) features musical theater–based television programs dedicated to casting musical theater shows. This chapter uses a cultural approach to genre to interrogate how MTRTV works through and against systems of cultural power and politics, as well as how the genre functions at discursive and political-economic levels, including labor. The analysis focuses on two MTRTV programs that aired in Canada on the CBC: How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria and Over the Rainbow, both of which involved casting the leads for Toronto productions of live musicals—The Sound of Music and The Wizard of Oz, respectively. This chapter analyzes the adapted television formats, linking local and global television systems, and considers how this production technique impacts the theater.Less

Footholds and Handholds: Scaffolding Cognition and Career

Barbara Horberg Wimsatt

in Developing Scaffolds in Evolution, Culture, and Cognition

Cognition is both developmentally and socially scaffolded. I focus on the social aspects of cognition, whose development occurs through a dynamic coordination and integration by individuals of social ... More

Cognition is both developmentally and socially scaffolded. I focus on the social aspects of cognition, whose development occurs through a dynamic coordination and integration by individuals of social resources afforded or sought by them over time. In the often open-ended development of expertise, we see vital handholds, or encouragement by mentors and significant others, and footholds or foundational steps such as crucial decisions, commitment to a training program, access to salient information or other key resources. I consider the early scientific careers of Craig Venter and Charles Darwin, and the many ways in which they were scaffolded both emotively and cognitively. For Darwin, I focus mostly on the development of his theory through multifarious social interactions. This also shows the intertwining of career and intellectual development. Other cases I discuss of medical trainees suggest that that factors such as gender may affect availability of career resources.Less

Intelligence, Executive Function, and Violence

Kevin H. Wozniak

in Thugs and Thieves: The Differential Etiology of Violence

In our first substantive chapter, we provide a comprehensive review of studies that have tested associations between indicators of intelligence (broadly construed to include executive functions and ... More

In our first substantive chapter, we provide a comprehensive review of studies that have tested associations between indicators of intelligence (broadly construed to include executive functions and other cognitive measures) and physical aggression or violence. This includes studies of verbal ability, performance intelligence, and the PIQ > VIQ discrepancy. We found that there is much evidence indicating that violent offenders have greater intelligence and executive functioning deficits than nonviolent offenders do, and we were surprised to find that it is unclear whether intellectual deficits are associated with nonviolent-only offending at all. We conclude that measures of intelligence and executive functioning are differentially associated with violent behavior.Less

Serving Time by Coming Home: Communicating Hope through a Reentry Court

Jeralyn Faris

in Working for Justice: A Handbook of Prison Education and Activism

This chapter demonstrates how a reentry court in West Lafayette enables former prisoners to build new lives and stay out of trouble by supporting them with a team of legal specialists, social ... More

This chapter demonstrates how a reentry court in West Lafayette enables former prisoners to build new lives and stay out of trouble by supporting them with a team of legal specialists, social workers, health and job counselors, and other staff. While reentry is a part of the criminal-justice system and “doing time,” a reentry Problem Solving Court (PSC) is also an effort to reform the prison-industrial society. The chapter studies the deep power structures whereby the reentry court shapes ex-prisoners' experiences and navigation of court boundaries and surveillance as they become both disciplined and agentic in their path to becoming contributing citizens. It argues that the PSC demonstrates Michel Foucault's art of governing by creating a “subtle integration” of coercion and agency via its communicative organization.Less

The nature of intelligent behaviour: cognition or adaptation?

Anthony Trewavas

in Plant Behaviour and Intelligence

There is a common public perception that regards intelligence as limited to human beings, to do with language and success in mental tests of various kinds. This subjective view unfortunately clouds ... More

There is a common public perception that regards intelligence as limited to human beings, to do with language and success in mental tests of various kinds. This subjective view unfortunately clouds the ability to see its biological base and enable a better understanding of what intelligent behaviour involves. Whereas today IQ tests are used with trivial problems to be solved, 50,000 years ago these problems involved survival and thus fitness. That is the real context of intelligent behaviour and concerns all organisms other than humans who live in wild circumstances. Intelligent human behaviour has been broadened into multiple intelligences ranging from physical to logico-mathematical intelligence. This radical view has implications for human evolution particularly notions of group evolution. A suggestion of physical intelligence removes the common view of intelligence as supposedly always intellectual in character. The capacity for problem solving, as a descriptor of intelligence, is suggested by several authors as the most common descriptor of intelligence given by numerous qualified psychologists and is considered to be present throughout the living world. Other definitions of intelligence can be summarised as the ability to succeed in achieving biological goals in variable environments; that is, adaptation. Further psychological discussion makes clear the relation between adaptation and intelligence. It has been argued cogently that species be regarded as intelligent. Intelligence in this case, is then a holistic, emergent quality of populations and species as it is for individuals.Less

Learning Public Reason

Olivia Newman

in Liberalism in Practice: The Psychology and Pedagogy of Public Reason

This chapter suggests that students are most likely to acquire a dispositional commitment to public reason when they have opportunities to think about, talk about, and collectively tackle ... More

This chapter suggests that students are most likely to acquire a dispositional commitment to public reason when they have opportunities to think about, talk about, and collectively tackle controversial collective problems, in the context of at least some ideological diversity. This chapter considers a number of educational practices that might offer such opportunities, ranging from open classroom discussion of current affairs to efforts to involve students in municipal governance. The pedagogy of public reason is flexible and open to innovation in the field; there are many ways to satisfy its imperatives, which suggests that the pedagogy of public reason is scalable. These claims are substantiated through a survey of literature on civic education and its efficacy, paying special attention to how a dispositional commitment to public reason might carry from school to polity without steamrolling other and possibly contending commitments in other domains.Less

Talent as Musical Intelligence

Joanne Haroutounian

in Kindling the Spark: Recognizing and Developing Musical Talent

Jake was enjoying his first few months of piano lessons and eager to make musical connections with all he was learning. At his last lesson, he learned the ... More

Jake was enjoying his first few months of piano lessons and eager to make musical connections with all he was learning. At his last lesson, he learned the pattern of whole steps and half steps of a major scale, discovering the joy of playing his first black key in the G major scale. The teacher was hesitant to venture farther than C major and G major during that first introduction to scale structure. Jake couldn’t wait to share the discovery he had made “all by himself” during his week of piano exploration. He began his journey from the bottom C of the keyboard. He played the scale he had learned last week, jumping up five keys to G and playing that scale. Then with a wry smile, he ventured five more keys up to D, A, E, B, and so on, playing each discovered scale with imaginative fingering but accurate notes! Jake had discovered the basic scale relationship of the “circle of fifths” on his own. Jake’s curiosity and ability to find and solve a musical problem exemplifies a student who demonstrates musical intelligence. This term describes the process of developmental learning through music, which distinguishes it from music aptitude, which is based primarily on natural musical capacities. The concept of musical intelligence most likely dates back to the early Chinese and Greek theories of music and most decidedly is included in the texts of Carl Seashore. The renaissance of the term can be credited to Howard Gardner, a leading cognitive psychologist at the Graduate School of Education of Harvard University, who included musical intelligence as one of seven multiple intelligences in Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences (1983). The publication of Gardner’s theory broadened the concept of intelligence from a single factor of general intelligence, or “g,” to seven separate intelligences, each unique to a specific domain. Actually, the idea of multiple intelligences is not new or novel. J. P. Guilford’s Structure of Intellect (1959,1967) includes over 120 different ways of knowing. Tests and curricular models based on this theory are prevalent in the field of gifted education. Less

Talent as Creativity

Joanne Haroutounian

in Kindling the Spark: Recognizing and Developing Musical Talent

It was a few minutes past four on a Thursday, and I knew Andrew had arrived for a piano lesson. He bounded down the stairs, arrived at the piano bench with ... More

It was a few minutes past four on a Thursday, and I knew Andrew had arrived for a piano lesson. He bounded down the stairs, arrived at the piano bench with a thud, propped his dog-eared manuscript book on the piano, and looked at me with his determined “let’s get started” smile—a delightfully talented young man of 15 about to share his latest composition with a welcome audience of one. He asked, “Do you know the speech from Julius Caesar, ‘It must be by his death?’” I was unfamiliar with this bit of Shakespeare. He then dramatically went through the well-memorized speech, turning a bit red in the face as he shared this unfamiliar type of performance with his piano teacher. He motioned to his scribbled score, hands on the keyboard. “And this is also the speech.” He then began his composition, peppering the performance with “this is fate” or “B-flat is death” to explain his motivic creative connections. The piece ended with a low B-flat repeatedly resonating as it died away (smorzando). The musical creative process involves realizing sounds internally and communicating them to others in a unique way. Andrew discovered a personal way to interpret and communicate Shakespeare through the language of music. When we think of creative music-makers, we immediately envision the inspired composer, scrawling creative ideas on paper. We also recognize the jazz musician who jams through the night, improvising at will. On a simpler plane, the young child in musical play is spontaneously creating through sound. These are the generative music-makers, creating music from scratch. In the preceding chapter, we examined the creative-interpretive process of a musician who performs music from a written score. This deliberate decision-making process requires constant internal perceptive/cognitive manipulations (metaperception) to discover how to express a personal emotion through sound. The resulting creative interpretation communicates sounds that describe the expressive intent of the musician. The performer is the creative interpreter of music. If we expand our perspective further, the person who listens perceptively and can communicate the idea of these sounds through words also shows musically creative talent. Less

The Quest

Joanne Haroutounian

in Kindling the Spark: Recognizing and Developing Musical Talent

A point has been reached in this discussion of musical talent and its identification where some concrete questions must be answered. We have examined ... More

A point has been reached in this discussion of musical talent and its identification where some concrete questions must be answered. We have examined perspectives of talent across fields and synthesized a simple set of musical talent criteria. Will teachers and musicians agree that these criteria are valid indicators of talent in students they teach on a daily basis? What must be added to define this criteria further? We recognize the need to identify talented students in music; however, we have yet to find an effective procedure to carry out this identification. What is the best way to unveil potential as well as demonstrated talent in a variety of school settings? The research discussed in this chapter sought to answer these pressing questions. This personal quest began with an analysis of data from the National Research Center on the Gifted and Talented (NRC G/T) at the University of Virginia, augmented by data from different specialized schools. This analysis provided a look at the status quo of what criteria and procedures were currently being used in schools across the country. A survey containing criteria and procedures drawn from this analysis was sent to musicians, teachers, researchers, and specialists across the music and gifted fields in over 15 states. My goal was to see which criteria were deemed “absolutely essential” by people who work with talented music students. In addition, what procedures are currently being used and what types of activities will effectively reveal musical talent? The survey also sought opinions about what performance criteria were important to consider on assessment forms. Quantitative results created a list of criteria and procedures that showed their degree of importance according to the mean of the survey rating scales. Numbers on paper provide quantitative results. However, discussions with experts across the music and gifted fields could allow clarification of ideas, substantive qualitative input, and brainstorming of possible procedures for identification that all seem invaluable for answering questions concerning musical talent. Therefore, this research concluded with a set of interviews of experts across the music and gifted fields of education, research, performance, and psychology to gather this vital information. Less

Finding the Fit: Shifting Story Logic in

Todd Berliner

in Hollywood Aesthetic: Pleasure in American Cinema

Chapter 4 illustrates the theory of narration presented in the previous chapter, offering an extended analysis of an unusual narrative pattern in Red River, which violates Hollywood’s cardinal rules ... More

Chapter 4 illustrates the theory of narration presented in the previous chapter, offering an extended analysis of an unusual narrative pattern in Red River, which violates Hollywood’s cardinal rules regarding narrative unity, probability, causality, and story logic. Disunity in this classical Hollywood narrative adds variety to our filmgoing experience; stimulates our imagination, curiosity, and creative problem-solving processes; and liberates our thinking from the burdens and limitations of good sense.Less