Verner Von Croy mentors Lara Croft directly within the main game play of Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation. Most games have dedicated training modules and are therefore less compliant with cognitive apprenticeship theory.
In leading up to my presentation at IA Summit 2010, “Think Like an Instructional Designer,” I’m posting on the important learning theories that any interaction designer would be well served to know the basics of.
Theory #3 – Cognitive Apprenticeship Theory
Cognitive Apprenticeship Theory can be a powerful instructional framework for interaction design, in fact it’s one of my favorites to think about, but it’s best not to take the theory too literally. Collins and Brown, most closely associated with the theory, were writing some 20-odd years ago and they did not have computerized environments in mind at the time (they were mostly interested in classroom pedagogy.) Their genius lay in the recognition of a theoretical gap between students’ learning to integrate sub-skills and conceptual knowledge. Despite the educator’s best intentions, when the two were unintegrated, the information remained inert. They started to notice that the most successful in-school learning had very similar characteristics to out-of-school learning (most notably the concept of “apprenticeship”.) They observed a strong interplay between observation, scaffolding, and increasing amounts of independent practice. And while many before them had emphasized the power of conceptual learning and independent practice (see Lave), they thought more about how to provide “internalized guides” during periods of relatively independent practice. CAT is an extension of situated learning theory, but rather than leave things as a purely sociological construct (e.g. Lave & Wegner’s “communities of practice”) they placed a strong emphasis on methods (modeling, coaching, scaffolding, fading, articulation) and sequence (global before local, increasing complexity, increasing diversity.)
The reciprocal teaching method in reading instruction is the most famous example of Cognitive Apprenticeship Theory in action.
Its weaknesses lie in the limitations of its description: dated, hard to extrapolate beyond well-structured domains, overlapping with similar-sounding theories, and too committed to it’s inspiration within the apprentice-master models found in non-formal instructional environments (you know, traditional crafts like blacksmithing). Unfortunately, the theory is not well applied to technological environments and modern notions of interactivity. When it has been applied, it’s been done so mostly in classrooms in highly rigid lesson formats such as those used in Palincsar and Brown’s reciprocal teaching methods for reading instruction. But the theory does an excellent job of abstracting successful non-formal (or “out-of-school”) learning attributes into a set of principles for instructional designers to work with. In fact, the theory does exactly what Collins and Brown claim a good educator should do – “make the invisible visible.” It is also one of the only formal learning theories that strikes the right balance between discovery learning and structured learning – the sort of balance that video game designers have intuitively found but educational designers seem woefully behind in. What attributes does a learning environment have if it’s influenced by cognitive apprenticeship theory?
- Expert modeling (particularly the notion of “distributed expertise” – or multiple mentors to learn from)
- Combination of scaffolding (adding help when needed) + fading (removing help gradually)
- Reflection on performance (e.g. replay and abstracted replay)
- Articulation (student demonstrations of expert performance)
- Exploration (relatively independent practice)
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