Developing Explicit Learning in Assisted Instruction release_rev_846f79d9-c3fa-49c3-85f5-b57033172589

Abstract

In the twentieth century mankind has made sustained attempts to develop and apply "scientific method" to investigations in many areas of human knowledge. In each area, researchers have eventually had to change, adapt or recreate their own forms of "scientific methods" before their methods began to yield the quality of results and understanding that these researchers were seeking. In the area of applied science, the use of the scientific method initially often seems to yield spectacular results. Innovations in atomic science, space research, medical practice, transport , management science, agriculture and biotechnology appeared to make rapid and groundbreaking progress. But each has suffered from more and more unexpected and sometimes disastrous side-effects. One of these attempts has been completely successful becoming a "computer" and thirty years later a "personal computer" as a reflection of a social life in an inanimate physical world where it had to be storage. In developing their chosen forms of knowledge, pure and applied scientists often isolate their subject matter from its natural context. Education is one of the obvious area in which this oversimplified approach has had scientifically unanticipated consequences in the twenty one century. It may well define a "stage 1" view of the scientific method. A more general systems-oriented approach was needed. The "stage 2" form of the scientific method takes the "de-fault" system properties of the phenomena into account by investigating it in its context. One purpose of this paper is to suggest that if the term "science" is to be applied across a wider range of studies in education, and we firmly believe that it should, then each of these areas of study needs to be re-construed, both in terms of how scientific knowledge in this area is recognised and defined, and in terms of how its particular forms of scientific method are made manifest and can be viewed one in relation to the other. These re-construals of the nature of the scientific endeavour are requiring and producing methodologies that go far beyond stage 2, to an over-arching framework for a new "stage 3" view. We call this "explicit learning" in assisted instruction.
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