David LeasureUniversity of Maryland Global Campus | UMUC · First-Term Experience
David Leasure
PhD Computer Science
About
35
Publications
6,375
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Introduction
Leasure has led online and competency-based academics as provost at Western Governors University, Colorado Technical University and Jones International University. Leasure earned BA, MS, & PhD degrees in computer science and taught at TAMU-CC. Leasure led the creation of CTU Online. He was president of Jones International University. His core belief is that all students can learn and his passion is helping them and their institutions succeed.
His mission is to promote self-growth to empower 10M learners and 1M mentors and faculty by 2028. See more at head4knowledge.com.
Other experience: AI Research, Inc. & AT&T Bell Labs.
Additional affiliations
October 2012 - March 2017
October 2008 - September 2012
January 2008 - September 2008
Education
August 1989 - May 1993
August 1982 - June 1984
January 1980 - August 1982
Publications
Publications (35)
Self-growth requires special capabilities and consciousness in order to independently construct a life journey toward an ideal self. Self-growers have the capability to increase their own growth capability and promote growth capability in others. This article describes 13 contributing components of self-growth capability that increase growth capabi...
The focus of process educators, over the past 25 years, has been on learning-to-learn and the generalized growth of the large set of learning skills now updated and represented in the 2019 Classification of Learning Skills. Insights from earlier Process Education articles on self-growth converged around ten substantive components associated with va...
Learning by Performance (LxP) is a system for learning by performing and performing by learning rather than a specific teaching approach. The LxP system synthesizes key elements of learning-by-doing, active learning, situated learning, mastery learning, self-regulated learning, problem-based learning, competency-based education, performance managem...
For 25 years, the Learning to Learn Experience, whether offered as a Learning to Learn Camp, an Academic Recovery Course, or a First Year Seminar, has continuously and successfully focused on increasing student success. Concurrent research has resulted in the identification of seven universal principles conducive to student learning and persistence...
A primary goal of Process Education has always been to improve performance. This is accomplished by assessing specific perfor- mances and developing action plans to improve upon both processes inherent in the performance and specific supporting learn- ing skills thereby improving the performance. This article offers steps toward determining what ex...
The COVID–19 pandemic has forced institutions of higher education to replace face-to-face classes with online and hybrid offerings. Faculty and students find themselves suddenly online and isolated in remote learning environments; further, many practices successful in classrooms fail to translate to online. Relying on its deep experience with stude...
This workshop presented a work in progress on a revised framework for performance analysis that is a key component of Learning by Performing (LxP). Performance analysis supports coaching improvements by organizing 25 areas across LxP that contribute to performance quality and could serve as improvement opportunities.
The 2019 revision of the Classification of Learning Skills (CLS) incorporates and describes substantially more life-long learning skills for personal and professional growth than previous versions. An original classification in 1997 was updated in the 2007 Faculty Guidebook in which the skills were apportioned into Cognitive, Social, and Affective...
Students write a self-growth paper to capture a personal summative reflection of their learning and growth and, in addition, the self-growth paper has become a valuable, versatile tool for faculty to strengthen students’ self-growth capacity, improve their practice within Process Education, and advance scholarship in teaching and learning. The self...
Engineering education research has often tended to focus on subject matter and effective pedagogy. Lacking is research illuminating the learning process itself and development of learning skills in engineering students. This paper presents a framework for engineering learner development that leverages processes allowing learners to learn more effec...
Like the many learners who contributed the stories you’ll find in this book, we’re confident you can improve your professional characteristics, be your own life-coach, and that nothing will get in the way of your unlimited potential and achieving the goals you set for yourself.
We built our approach on these principles:
1. You and anyone else can l...
The workshop involved interactive feedback on three ideas:
* Updated Elger (2007) Theory of Performance
* Definitions and Hypotheses for a Theory of Universal Performance Potential (UPP)
* A framework for self-regulated performance (SRP)
In the spirit of Winne & Hadwin (1998) and inspired by Elger's "Theory of Performance" (2007) which has been vital in teaching learning-to-learn, the author presents a proposed Self-Regulated Performing, of which Self-Regulated Learning is an instance. Further refinement was inspired by Popper (1978) and Beaudoin (2014).
Please comment. It is to...
Every student who completed the course (184) stated the course was valuable. More telling, most of the students described the impact as, in effect, transformational. A table of student attitudes and assessments is provided. The comments illustrate the profound impacts of the experience.
Creating an environment designed for students who had failed in their past educational pursuits to succeed requires conscious thought and planning on the part of institutional administrators. This article reviews our principle findings after a 6-cycle research implementation of a CBE, online, learning-to-learn course, the Psychology of Learning and...
This is a summary of our full research report on helping dismissed online students gain the mindsets, skills, tools, and habits to succeed in college. Our longer work (185 page report) is at psychologyoflearningandsuccess.com/free-report and requires sharing name and email.
Postgraduate education is poised for rapid development and if Deans and administrators will embrace lessons from industry it can actually be a smooth transition. The cost of doing nothing is greater than it has ever been before. Hit and miss development has left Postgraduate Schools (PGS) with disjointed student analytics and student experience is...
Online, competency-based WGU has developed a model that allows the university to deliver personalized learning to its ever-increasing student body — currently over 70,000 students. All WGU faculty and systems support student success, providing individualized pacing, coaching, intervention, and support. On national surveys of graduates, WGU graduate...
Even with today’s sophisticated technologies, we usually are still exporting the classroom as if that is the ideal learning environment. Learning science has advanced a great deal in the past several centuries since the lecture became the most common form of ‘teaching’ at colleges and universities. There is a lot we know about how people learn, yet...
CTU professional courses use the construction of professional deliverables as a teaching method. CTU
PLM™ engages students in complex, real-world situations that require them to organize, research, and
solve problems. Essentially, it allows students to practice skills in near-real world situations. The CTU
PLM™ naturally answers the student ques...
Manipulatives are devices commonly found in mathematics classrooms for aiding the acquisition of abstract concepts. Historically, manipulatives played a key role in the development of mathematics from geometry to calculus. Experience shows that manipulatives aid in learning abstract concepts in computer science, as well. Rather than lessening the f...
This article presents a formal theory of concurrent actions that handles the qualification, ramification, and frame problems. The theory is capable of temporal explanation, i.e., reasoning forward and backward. The approach uses the modal logic Z to extend the work of Lifschitz and Rabinov on miracle-based temporal reasoning. The advantages of mira...
As an alternative to constraint logic programming (CLP), LOGISTICA-CFP implements constraint functional programming (CFP) by borrowing from the approach of SCREAMER and building on the nondeterministic functional programming language LOGISTICA. Although currently in the experimental stages, LOGISTICA-CFP demonstrates that a functional approach can...
Expert Witness is an expert system designed to assist attorneys and medical experts in determining the merit of medical malpractice claims in the area of obstetrics. It this by substitutes the time of the medical expert with the time of a paralegal assistant guided by the expert system during the initial investigation of the medical records and pat...
To give a standard against which to judge the limitations and possibilities of a theory of nonmonotonic reasoning, V. Lifschitz presented a paper at the 1988 Second International Workshop on Non-Monotonic Reasoning entitled "Benchmark Problems for Formal Nonmonotonic Reasoning." We show in this work the application of the modal logic Z to these ben...
Thesis (M.S.)--Kansas State University, 1984. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 107-108). Microfiche. s
Questions
Questions (7)
A recent article on attitudes and learning describes a weak relationship between attitudes and learning in Physics. What other research is there that shows a relationship between attitudes and motivation related to learning outcomes?
Our intuition tells us that the result of the study above is surprising, so what else is there?
SummitLearning is an organization that helps implement personalized learning in K12. In their curriculum I've read, the emphasis is on learning skills and growth in learning more than on measuring the distance to specific achievement levels (as in traditional grading). What references, in addition to Bloom's work on mastery learning and it's large subsequent research base, and Jain et al. are there to support this approach? Or is Mastery Learning sufficient to justify the approach of Summit Learning?
Bloom, B. S. (1968). Learning for Mastery. Instruction and Curriculum. Regional Education Laboratory for the Carolinas and Virginia, Topical Papers and Reprints, Number 1. Evaluation Comment, 1(2). Retrieved from https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED053419
Jain, C. R., Apple, D. K., & Wade, E. (2015). "What is Self Growth?" International Journal of Process Education, 7(1). Retrieved from http://www.pcrest.com/research/2015%20What%20is%20Self%20Growth.pdf
What are the components of professional identity and personal identity?
With a list of components, it's easier to design competency statements, measure degree of adoption, and design learning experiences.
What models are prominent?
I have found the paper
Small, M. L., Harding, D. J., & Lamont, M. (2010). Introduction: Reconsidering Culture and Poverty. The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 629(1), 6–27.
To contain a useful framework for analyzing causality in equitable education and it was first suggest to me Dr. Mary Moore. Particularly values, frames, narratives, and repertoire.
Are there other useful frameworks for explaining observed effects?
Permit me some imprecise definitions: a knowledge resource is a source for learning new knowledge. A knowledge tool is a resource for using performance knowledge. It is a subclass of mindtools (see David Jonassen's work by the same name).
A knowledge tool is related to instruction because it may teach while it supports performance. It is subject to at least two of the three criteria in David Merrill's 2009 First Principles of Instruction, effective and efficient. The third, engaging, need not be present, as presumably the performance is engaging.
I'd like to suggest that when we construct performance knowledge as a knowledge tool, we include the following:
1. What is the performance context? eg writing a research paper.
2. What are the performance criteria?
3. Who could be an ally or mentor in the application?
4. What is the background knowledge required to perform?
5. Are there related tools and knowledge resources?
6. Are other tools required?
7. Is some form of template needed? It may be a spreadsheet, a document template, a conceptual organizer, a mind map, etc.
8. what is the procedure (even if high level)
9. what would extend the performance?
10. what are the common mistakes and how are they fixed?
I welcome discussion of a tool for making tools. Are the above sufficient to communicate the knowledge and reduce the congnitive complexity so the tool can be effectively and efficiently applied?
The discussion that triggered this question is @chalamalla srinivas's question on writing good research papers (https://www.researchgate.net/post/What_Skills_Do_We_Need_to_Write_Good_Research_Papers2). Do tools exist? The discussion answers have criteria, knowledge resources, examples, etc. but could benefit from identifying knowledge tools for various kinds of research papers.
Learning for Mastery was described in 1968 by Bloom. What meta-studies have been done since then? I'm interested in identifying the open questions and solid conclusions and the relation between mastery learning and competency-based education.
