Martin Taylor

Five studies examined how interacting with the physical environment can support the development of fraction concepts. Nine‐ and 10‐year‐old children worked on fraction problems they could not complete mentally. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that manipulating physical pieces facilitated children's ability to develop an interpretation of fractions. Experiment 3 demonstrated that when children understood a content area well, they used their interpretations to repurpose many environments to support problem solving, whereas when they needed to learn, they were prone to the structure of the environment. Experiments 4 and 5 examined transfer after children had learned by manipulating physical pieces. Children who learned by adapting relatively unstructured environments transferred to new materials better than children who learned with “well‐structured” environments that did not require equivalent adaptation. Together, the findings reveal that during physically distributed learning, the opportunity to adapt an environment permits the development of new interpretations that can advance learning.

If distributed cognition is to become a general analytic frame, it needs to handle more aspects of cognition than just highly efficient problem solving. It should also handle learning. We identify four classes of distributed learning: induction, repurposing, symbiotic tuning, and mutual adaptation. The four classes of distributed learning fit into a two-dimensional space defined by the stability and adaptability of individuals and their environments. In all four classes of learning, people and their environments are highly interdependent during initial learning. At the same time, we present evidence indicating that certain types of interdependence in early learning, most notably mutual adaptation, can help prepare people to be less dependent on their immediate environment and more adaptive when they confront new environments. We also describe and test examples of learning technologies that implement mutual adaptation.

This paper considers an approach to teaching ethics in bioengineering based on the How People Learn (HPL) framework. Curricula based on this framework have been effective in mathematics and science instruction from the kindergarten to the college levels. This framework is well suited to teaching bioengineering ethics because it helps learners develop “adaptive expertise”. Adaptive expertise refers to the ability to use knowledge and experience in a domain to learn in unanticipated situations. It differs from routine expertise, which requires using knowledge appropriately to solve routine problems. Adaptive expertise is an important educational objective for bioengineers because the regulations and knowledge base in the discipline are likely to change significantly over the course of their careers. This study compares the performance of undergraduate bioengineering students who learned about ethics for stem cell research using the HPL method of instruction to the performance of students who learned following a standard lecture sequence. Both groups learned the factual material equally well, but the HPL group was more prepared to act adaptively when presented with a novel situation.