Assignments

You will earn credit for completing the assignments described below. As you can see, you will do five exercises. You will report on each exercise by writing an essay. These exercises are the most important element of your performance in the class.You will have one week to complete the first exercise and two weeks to work on the other four exercises. Spread your effort over the available time. The general theme of each exercise is given below. The specific exercise instructions will be posted when the exercise is presented in class. Please read the instructions carefully as soon as they are posted.

The grading process

When I teach this course, I have two main goals in mind. First, I hope to give each of you an opportunity to improve your thinking and learning skills. Second, I want you to learn a specific set of ways of seeing the world that will forever change your understanding of human cognition. Because the first goal is the most important one, this course will be different from most you have taken in the past. The instructional team is dedicated to helping you develop your thinking skills. Read on to learn what we expect you to do and what we will be looking for when we assign grades to your assignments.

Dimensions of Learning

Learning theorists have argued that learning and development are not like an assembly-line which can be broken down into discrete steps occurring with machine-time precision, but an organic process that unfolds in complex ways according to its own pace and rhythm. Teaching and learning occurs in complex ecosystems, dynamic environments where teachers, students, materials and supplies, texts, technologies, concepts, social structures, and architectures are interdependently related and interactive. In this course instructors and students should be working together to achieve and document positive evidence of student development across six dimensions of learning: confidence and independence, knowledge and understanding, skills and strategies, use of prior and emerging experience, critical reflection, and creativity. These six dimensions cannot be "separated out" and treated individually; rather, they are dynamically interwoven. We have designed the assignments and the evaluation procedures in this class to enable you to make progress along these six dimensions.

Read the descriptions below carefully. They describe both what you should be striving to achieve and what we will be looking for in evaluating your work. You should keep these dimensions in mind when filling out your written exercise self-evaluation form.

Confidence and independence
As you develop as a scholar, you can expect to gain more confidence in your own thinking and more independence from the views of others. However, this growth is not a simple case of "more (confidence and independence) is better." Examples of development in this dimension would include an overconfident student who encounters the limits of his or her knowledge and learns to seek help when facing an obstacle; or a shy student who begins to trust her own abilities, and to insist on presenting her own point of view in discussion. In both cases, students are developing along the dimension of confidence and independence. Be honest about what you know and what you do not know. This sort of honesty is difficult to achieve, but it is essential to effective thinking. Making accurate estimates of your own strengths and weaknesses will enable you to focus your learning efforts.

Skills and strategies
Skills and strategies represent the "know-how" aspect of learning. When we speak of "performance" or "mastery," we generally mean that learners have developed skills and strategies to function successfully in certain situations. Skills and strategies are not only specific to particular disciplines, but often cross disciplinary boundaries. A university education is as much about acquiring thinking and writing skills as it is about learning any particular subject. You should consciously set out to develop the skills and strategies involved in thinking critically and in composing and communicating effectively, from research to concept development to organization to polishing grammar and correctness. Treat this course and its assignments as an opportunity to develop effective thinking skills. This will require effort and practice.

Knowledge and Understanding
Knowledge and understanding refers to the "content" knowledge gained in particular subject areas. Knowledge and understanding is the most familiar dimension of learning, focusing on the "know-what" aspect of learning. This is what one normally thinks a class is about. In this class, knowledge and understanding might answer a wide range of questions such as, “What are the essential features of the Hypothesis of Extended Cognition (HEC)? What are the most common criticisms of the HEC? What kinds of behavioral data are relevant to the evaluation of this hypothesis?” These are typical content questions. Knowledge and understanding in this class includes the topics; research methods; the theories, concepts, history, and practices of cognitive science.

Use of prior and emerging experience
The use of prior and emerging experience involves your ability to draw on your own experience and connect it to your work. In this class, the use of prior experience will include both your own life experiences outside the classroom and principles and procedures you have already learned in the class. It is really important to USE your prior experience in the sense of taking it as a starting point, but not an ending point. You must move beyond prior experience. If your prior experience suggests a claim or assertion about the phenomena of interest in this class, you must then represent the claim explicitly and examine the claim asking, “Is that correct?” “What evidence would be needed to know whether or not this claim is correct?” “What implications does this claim have for cognition?” Rather than assuming that your prior experience provides answers to questions about cognition you must treat it skeptically. Your present knowledge and beliefs are not a form of analysis, they are simply data waiting to be analyzed!

Reflection
Reflection refers to your developing awareness of your own learning process, as well as more analytical approaches to the subject being studied. When we speak of reflection as a crucial component of learning, we are not using the term in its commonsense meaning of reverie or abstract introspection. We are referring to the development of your ability to step back and consider a situation critically and analytically, with growing insight into your own learning processes, a kind of meta-cognition. It provides the "big picture" for the specific details. For example, students in this class should understand that the principles of distributed cognition concern your very own lives and your own activities as students. Learning in this class is an instance of distributed cognition. You need to develop this capability in order to use what you are learning in other contexts, to recognize the limitations or obstacles confronting you in a given situation, to take advantage of your prior knowledge and experience, and to strengthen your own performance.

Creativity, originality, imagination
As you gain confidence and independence, knowledge and understanding, skills and strategies, ability to use prior and emerging experience in new situations, and reflectiveness, you may become more playful and experimental, more creative in the expression of that learning. This is true not only in "creative" fields such as the arts, but in nearly all domains. In all fields the primary contributions to the field at the highest levels are the result of creative or imaginative work. This dimension recognizes the value of creative experimentation even when the final result of the work may not succeed as you had hoped.

[The material on this page is adapted from an approach to teaching and learning called the “Learning Record.” I learned about the learning record from my colleague at the University of Texas Austin, Margaret Syverson. Professor Syverson directs the writing program at UT Austin. She is also an expert on distributed cognition. The ideas above come straight from Professor Syverson, although I have changed the wording in places to make them specifically applicable to my own courses.]

The grading process

Dimensions of Learning

The Assignments