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Journal of the Learning Sciences
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Practicality Studies: How to Move From What Works in
Principle to What Works in Practice
Fred Janssena, Hanna Westbroekb & Walter Doylec
a ICLON, Leiden University Graduate School of Teaching
b Centre for Educational Training, Assessment and Research, VU University of Amsterdam
c Department of Teaching and Teacher Education, University of Arizona
Accepted author version posted online: 25 Aug 2014.
To cite this article: Fred Janssen, Hanna Westbroek & Walter Doyle (2014): Practicality Studies: How to Move From What
Works in Principle to What Works in Practice, Journal of the Learning Sciences, DOI: 10.1080/10508406.2014.954751
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10508406.2014.954751
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Accepted Manuscript
1
Reports and Reflections
Practicality Studies: How to Move From What Works in
Principle to What Works in Practice
Fred Janssen
ICLON
Leiden University Graduate School of Teaching
Hanna Westbroek
Centre for Educational Training, Assessment and Research
VU University of Amsterdam
Walter Doyle
Department of Teaching and Teacher Education
University of Arizona
Correspondence should be addressed to Fred Janssen. E-mail: fjanssen@iclon.leidenuniv.nl
Abstract: In his article, "Principled practical knowledge: Not a bridge but a ladder," Bereiter
(2014) argues that theoretical knowledge is too shallow to support the generation of innovative
learning activities. He makes a case for principled practical knowledge (PPK)-"principled know-
how and know-why"- to fulfill this practical generative role. We argue and illustrate in this
commentary that PPK as portrayed by Bereiter does not offer much practical guidance for two
potential users: professional designers and teachers. For professional designers PPK should be
further specified in order to fulfill its generative role. But even this enriched form of PPK still
does not suffice to address the challenging issues of practicality teachers face. We explain the
magnitude and dimensions that underlie practicality in the everyday work of teachers and
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suggest how recent work on fast and frugal heuristics can contribute to helping teachers to make
instructional innovations practical.
In his article, “Principled practical knowledge: Not a bridge but a ladder,” Carl Bereiter (2014)
observes that researchers in the learning science have largely replaced the theory-first and
practice-second approach with design research that originates in an effort to solve a real-life
educational problem. As he notes, there are many such real-world educational challenges for
which “theoretical knowledge is too shallow to support the generation of new and improved
learning activities” (p. 9). He argues, however, for the development of principled practical
knowledge (PPK), which is practical in the sense that it offers generalized knowledge about how
to achieve particular learning goals and is principled because this knowledge should meet the
standards of explanatory coherence as well. Such systematic, verifiable knowledge (“principled
know-how and know-why”) provides explanation, but unlike formal theoretical knowledge, its
main purpose is not explanation or prediction but practical guidance (p. 6).
In this commentary we focus on the practical generative role that PPK is supposed to fulfill for
two potential users of PPK: professional designers and teachers. First, using an example of
integrative inquiry scaffolds (Sandoval, 2004), we argue that PPK as portrayed by Bereiter is
underspecified to support the generation of innovative learning activities by professional
designers. In turn, we suggest how PPK should be specified in order to fulfill its generative role
for professional designers. In the second part of this commentary we contend that PPK, even as
enriched for professional designers, still does not provide sufficient practical guidance for
teachers. Bereiter acknowledges this limitation for PPK and argues that usability engineering is
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needed to provide this additional type of knowledge. Since he places usability engineering
outside the learning sciences, he understandably does not explicate its content. However, we
contend that Bereiter and with him a large part of the design research community in the learning
sciences underestimate the magnitude of these usability issues and in fact believe that much of
the task of usability is already solved by design research in the learning sciences. As Bereiter
states: “The most notable thing about the learning sciences, (…), is that they have largely
abandoned the theory-into-practice model and followed the Wright brothers in creating PPK on
the way solving real life educational problems. When successful, such knowledge eliminates the
gap between theory and practice” (p. 9). On the contrary, we maintain that the space between
what the learning sciences produce and what teachers need to make innovative design practical is
huge. To demonstrate the validity of this view, we explicate usability issues, or as we prefer to
call them, practicality issues, more fully. Our overall purpose is to raise awareness in the learning
sciences of the dimensions and magnitude of the issues teachers face when implementing a
change proposal in their classrooms. Drawing on recent theoretical advances in decision-making
research, we discuss an additional type of knowledge—fast and frugal heuristics--that should
complement PPK in order to support teachers with implementing innovative change proposals.
We illustrate how this type of knowledge can be used for implementing adaptive teaching in
classrooms.
PPK is underspecified for designers
Bereiter posits that PPK should go ‘beyond what is required for the task at hand yet not so far
beyond as to be unusable by practitioners’ (p. 4). The question then is: on what level of
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generality should PPK be specified to be applicable for a substantial number of tasks and provide
practical guidance as well. This problem reflects a fundamental issue in cognitive sciences
known as the power-generality trade off (Newell, 1990). If knowledge and methods are
formulated on a higher level of generality, the range of applicability increases but the power
(guidance) for solving specific tasks decreases. We contend that PPK as portrayed in Bereiter’s
article is formulated on a too high level of generality to provide powerful practical guidance for
professional designers. We will argue that PPK should be specified on an intermediate level of
generality to offer practical guidance for professional designers. We will illustrate our position
with the example from Sandoval (2004) on promoting student’s explanatory-driven inquiry
because Bereiter used Sandavol’s work as a positive example of knowledge that counts as PPK.
Sandoval (2004) proposed that epistemic knowledge about the type of explanatory questions
scientists try to answer about specific phenomena and corresponding criteria that an adequate
explanation should meet should be formulated as explanatory guides to support students’
explanation-driven inquiry. Sandoval (2004) states that this is the case because epistemic ideals
constrain the space for constructing and evaluating explanations for specific phenomena. Such
explanation guides represent a particular type of explanation as a set of connected prompts that
highlight both the conceptual content and their epistemic structure and therefore act as an
integrated conceptual and epistemic scaffold for explanation driven inquiry.
Bereiter cites Sandoval’s conjecture on this level of generality as a good example of the type of
PPK (p. 10) he considers to be an important outcome of design research in the learning sciences.
We, however, contend that PPK formulated on this very general level still does not provide
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adequate guidance for professional designers for generating concrete tools and lesson activities
for a specific topic and grade level. In order to be able to develop concrete lesson materials that
reflect this general idea of integrated epistemic and conceptual scaffolds, you first have to
analyze and formulate the epistemic ideals related to the target type of explanation in a way that
is potentially accessible for students. Only after general PPK on integrated scaffolds is specified
on this more intermediate level of generality does it provide guidance for generating lesson
activities.
Sandoval and colleagues did develop an explanation guide on such intermediate level of analysis
for natural selection explanations, but in the context of a design research, not as professional
designers who need to develop concrete lesson activities within reasonable time and resources.
The explanation guide they developed includes prompts such as (Sandoval & Reiser, 2004):
Existing variation in the population before the pressure is…
The change that introduced the selection pressure is…
The organisms that are more likely to die are….
This explanation guide specified on an intermediate level of generality, in turn, guided the
development of concrete tools and accompanying lesson activities aimed at helping students
construct and evaluate natural selection explanations for the evolution of Galapagos finches,
bacteria and panthers.
We want to emphasize that specifying PPK on this intermediate level of generality is often a very
difficult and time consuming task that cannot be left over to professional designers, who’s
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primary task is to develop concrete lesson materials for a specific topic and grad level. For
example, the first author conducted a four-year design research project in order to develop
integrating scaffolds to support student’s construction and evaluation of an important type of
explanation in biology, viz., design explanations (Wouters, 2007). The project focused, in
particular, on developing design explanations of biological systems consisting of multiple
interrelated parts on different levels of organization, such as the immune system, blood
circulation, the respiratory system, etc (Janssen & Waarlo, 2010; Janssen et al, 2014). Once
integrated scaffolds for design explanations in biology were formulated and tested with
exemplary designs (i.e. on the immune system), professional designers could use this PPK on an
intermediate level of generality to develop learning activities for different topics (human heart,
kidney, lungs, etc.) and grade levels.
In summary, we agree with Bereiter that PPK is a valuable outcome of design research in the
learning sciences but the PPK as portrayed in Bereiter’s article is too general to provide practical
guidance for professional designers. Design research should result in PPK specified on an
intermediate level of generality in order to pair powerful practical guidance for professional
designers with relatively broad applicability. Studies of experts provide support for this argument
showing that experts often organize their knowledge on intermediate levels of generality since
this type of knowledge provides the much needed link between high level abstractions and low
level specific problems (Zeitz, 1997).
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PPK is not sufficient for teachers to implement innovative
teaching approaches
PPK is not only meant for professional designers but for teachers as well. In the second and most
important part of this commentary we focus on PPK’s practical value for teachers. We will argue
that PPK even enriched for professional designers in the way described above is not sufficient
for supporting teachers to design and enact innovative learning activities.
To a certain extent Bereiter acknowledges this when he states that learning scientists “produce
ideal strategies that work under the optimal conditions found in experimental classrooms” (p.
13). He goes on to argue that besides PPK produced by the learning sciences we need usability
engineering to support the implementation of new designs in regular classroom with regular
teachers. We agree that usability engineering, or what we prefer to call “practicality studies,” is
needed to make innovative designs practical for teachers. However, by appropriating the term
“practical” in PPK and by claiming that PPK successfully eliminates the gap between theory and
practice (p. 9), Bereiter implies, as do many design researchers, that much of the usability
problem is solved once researchers involve teachers in the creation of PPK, testing designs in
real classrooms, and produce not only PPK but also accompanying exemplary teaching materials
and teacher guides. It is acknowledged that teachers still need to make local adaptations in order
to fit ideas and materials to their circumstances (Barab & Luehmann, 2003), but the complexity
of this task is largely underestimated. In order to unpack our claim, we will first explicate both
the dimensions and magnitude of practicality issues teachers face when trying to implement a
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change proposal. We then show how a special kind of knowledge, fast and frugal heuristics, as
the outcome of practicality studies, should complement PPK in order to support teachers to
generate concrete learning activities that both fit local circumstances and reflect ideas embodied
in the PPK of the innovation.
Teachers’ Sense of Practicality
Doyle and Ponder (1977) developed practicality theory to better understand why teachers tend to
reject innovation proposals or adapt them in such a way that the core of the innovation is lost.
Practicality theory posits that the chance that an innovation proposal is implemented depends
upon whether, from a teacher’s perspective, it exhibits practicality. The theory further posits that
there are three interrelated dimensions of practicality: (a) instrumentality; (b) congruence; and (c)
cost. We first describe the three dimensions briefly and then explain against this background
why PPK even when enriched and complemented with exemplary materials and teacher guides
will generally not be consider practical by regular teachers in regular classrooms.
Instrumentality refers to the extent to which recognizable classroom procedures accompany an
innovation proposal. Teachers need ideas and criteria in order to be able to recognize learning
environments that meet the desired characteristics. However, these are not sufficient because
teachers need procedures too in order to create learning environments with the desired
characteristics.
Instrumentality, however, is not sufficient for practicality. Innovations must also have
congruence, i.e., fit the circumstances in which teachers work. Classrooms are complex
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ecologies with histories, relationships, and cultures that define and hold in place the structures
and actions of daily life (Doyle, 2006). Moreover, teachers need to realize several goals
simultaneously. In addition to optimizing learning, teachers need to address such demands as,
covering content in time, sustaining student willingness to participate, maintaining lesson
momentum, promoting classroom norms of civility, holding students accountable (Kennedy,
2005). If a teacher perceives that a particular design for instruction will make covering the
content of the course difficult, demand large amounts of individualized attention in a group
context, put pressure on the teacher-student relationships that have evolved, or complicate the
process of judging individual student performance, then the innovation is likely to be seen to lack
congruence.
Finally, teachers are understandably sensitive to the cost of adopting an instructional design.
Cost here refers to the time, knowledge, and resources that would be required to adopt the
innovation compared to the perceived benefits the practice would bring. In most real-world
situations, these commodities are limited. In the Netherlands, for example, teachers have an
average of only 15 minutes paid time available for preparing a lesson (Bergen, Meer & Otterloo,
2009). Moreover, teachers do more than teach students in classrooms. They also meet students
one-on-one for special help, talk with parents, collaborate with colleagues, attend meetings, etc.
Taken together teachers will only consider a change proposal as practical if it is accompanied by
cost-effective procedures for design and enactment while simultaneously realizing teacher’s
other important goals. PPK, even specified on an intermediate level of generality and including
exemplary teaching materials and guides, falls short of meeting these practicality criteria for
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three interrelated reasons. First, it is more an exception than a rule that exemplary materials fit
the topic and grade level a teacher has to teach, so a teacher in most cases has to design new
lessons based on the criteria described in PPK. Second even if specified on an intermediate level
of generality, PPK often only specifies criteria a learning environment should meet but does not
explicate cost-effective procedures for developing the learning environments that meet the
desired characteristics. Finally PPK focuses mainly on optimizing student learning and does not
take explicitly into account the other goals teachers need to realize simultaneously. This implies
that outcomes of learning sciences should be complemented with knowledge to be developed by
practicality studies. The space of practicality studies, then, is circumscribed by the tasks of
defining ecologically valid procedures, linking an alternative design to existing conditions, and
estimating the time and resources needed to design and enact an innovation.
The Idea of Heuristics: A Foundation for Practicality
Studies
Recent work in the decision sciences on fast and frugal heuristics (for reviews see Gigerenzer &
Gaissmaier, 2011; Todd & Gigerenzer, 2012) provides a foundation for the type of knowledge
practicality studies should develop to help teachers design and enact instructional innovations.
Gigerenzer and colleagues have demonstrated that people in complex real-world settings,
including professional situations such as medicine, law and management, do not make decisions
by extensively weighing alternatives, but mainly by using fast and frugal heuristics. Fast and
frugal heuristics are procedures that allow a person to ignore information in order to make quick
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and generally more accurate decisions in complex situations. Examples of heuristic decision-
making include the following (Todd & Gigerenzer, 2012):
1. An investor tries to earn money with shares. How can he/she best divide money over
different funds? The following simple heuristic has proven to be more effective than complex
optimizing strategies: divide your money equally over N funds (1/N heuristic).
2. A baseball player wants to catch a high fly ball. How does he/she establish were to stand
in the field? It is impossible to calculate the complex relationships among data on wind velocity,
velocity of the ball, trajectories, etc. in order to determine where to stand. Baseball players,
therefore, use a simple gaze heuristic: fix your eyes on the ball and start running at a speed that
keeps the gaze angle constant.
3. A doctor who needs to decide whether a patient should be admitted to coronary care.
There are complex strategies available to calculate more than 50 factors to determine the
probability that a patient needs to be admitted to coronary care. A fast and frugal heuristic
utilizing only three yes or no questions, however, is more accurate.
These examples point to a core idea in the work of Gigerenzer and his colleagues: the less-is-
more effect (Gigerenzer & Gaissmaier, 2011). A widespread belief among lay people and
decision scientists is that decision making in complex situations requires complex strategies that
enable one to generate as many alternatives as possible based on as complete information of the
situation as possible, and then the weighing of all alternatives to choose the best one. Gigerenzer
and his colleagues have shown that people are not able to make decisions this way simply
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because they do not have the time, resources, and capacity. They have also shown that complex
strategies do not lead to better decision than those made using fast and frugal heuristics that
utilize limited but well selected information about the situation.
This less-is-more effect can be understood using the concept of bounded rationality developed by
Simon (1957) and elaborated by Gigerenzer and colleagues. Simon argued that the rationality of
people is bounded by mental factors (limited knowledge and information processing capacity) as
well as contextual factors (multiple goals that emerge from context demands and limited time
and resources). These bounds do not operate independently but rather work together as two
blades in a pair of scissors (Simon, 1990). Fast and frugal heuristics, such as the gaze heuristic,
make such a fit possible because they enable us to effectively use crucial and easily accessible
information about a context. So instead of trying to overcome and change the bounds of
rationality, we can provide teachers with tools to make the most of their skills and circumstances.
A Foundation for Practicality Studies
The work on fast and frugal heuristics has provided a basis for practicality studies aimed at
helping to make innovative instructional designs useable for teachers. We have recently
developed and validated with teachers several fast and frugal heuristics for different innovative
teaching practices, including task-centered instruction (Janssen, Westbroek, Doyle & van Driel,
2013), open inquiry labs (Janssen, Westbroek & Doyle, 2014), adaptive teaching (Janssen,
Westbroek & Doyle, submitted), and context-based education (Dam, Janssen & van Driel, 2013).
Furthermore, Janssen and colleagues have also developed and validated fast and frugal heuristics
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to complement the PPK for constructing and evaluating design explanations on complex
biological systems (Janssen, Westbroek & van Driel, 2014).
For the construction of these fast and frugal heuristics we used the following meta-heuristic:
1. Represent a teacher’s regular practice for teaching a lesson as a series of lesson segments.
2. Represent the desired teaching practice in a similar way as series of lesson segments.
3. Establish how, by recombination and/or adaptation of lesson segments, the regular lesson
of a teacher can be redesigned to create the desired lesson.
We conclude with an example of how we used this meta-heuristic to construct two fast and
frugal heuristics for making PPK of adaptive teaching practical for teachers. Table 1 describes
some important principles for teaching adaptively according to Randi and Corno (2005). For an
extended theoretical and empirical justification of these principles we refer to Corno & Snow
(1986) and Corno (2008).
Randi and Corno (2005) argue that the success of a teaching practice depends on the fit between
task demands and student potential. Support must, therefore, be adapted to realize this fit. At
the same time, each task accomplishment must result in enhancing students’ potential for
increasingly independent performance on subsequent tasks.
Many teachers typically use the following sequence of lesson segments: (a) explain new theory
(b) partial tasks for students focused on components of the theory; (c) whole tasks in which
students apply the theory in a more complex higher order task. Two heuristics can be used to
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redesign this regular practice and create adaptive teaching lessons: (1) the reverse heuristic; (2)
the remove-and-build heuristic.
With the reverse heuristic the teacher selects an existing whole task, which he or she tends to
assign at the end of the lesson or as homework, and brings it to the fore to start the lesson. A
biology teacher, for example, might begin with the following task about the human eye: why
does the eyesight of older people degenerate and what can be done about that? All students work
on this whole task, which creates common and shared experiences (design principle 1). The
remove-and-build heuristic prescribes that all remaining lesson segments are to be considered as
support for completing the whole task (explain theory, work on part tasks) and as building blocks
for constructing a continuum of increasing support. The biology teacher, for example, could
formulate three forms of increasing support: a) refer the students to two schemes in the method
that represent working of the eye and the lens, with the question “what does not work well with
older people?”; b) refer the students to two part tasks about the working of lenses; c) offer
students lists of concepts that they need to solve the whole task, including feedback of the
teacher. The three types of support build up step-wise only if students ask for it or have not
proceeded sufficiently with the task in a given time. This means that high performers can
complete the task with relatively little support and this will serve as a reference point for the
teacher (design principle 2). With the remove-and-build heuristic a teacher can relatively easily
construct a support continuum using easy accessible information, and he or she can relatively
easily establish which students need which support (design principle 3).
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This example shows that fast and frugal heuristics provide teachers a means to realize a
learning design in their class (instrumentality), in a way that builds on the teachers already does
and considers important (congruence), within limited time and with limited resources (cost). This
way, fast and frugal heuristics help ensure that valuable learning designs can be implemented by
regular teachers in their regular classes.
Conclusion
The main purpose of PPK, beyond explanation, is to provide practical guidance for both
professional designers and teachers for generating innovative learning activities. In these
comments we have outlined why and how PPK produced by the learning sciences should be
specified in order to be of practical guidance for professional designers. Furthermore we have
attempted to outline the dimensions and magnitude of the issues of practicality that teachers
necessarily face in doing practical work in classrooms and suggest task and direction for
practical studies to support teachers in the challenging task of instructional innovation.
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Table 1: Some design principles for adaptive teaching according to Randi and Corno (2005, p.
67)
1.
Providing opportunities for common and shared experiences when students do not
bring them into the classroom
2. Building on knowledge of higher performers to as a point of reference for the entire
group
3. Moving back and forth to the support continuum, providing support when needed and
withdrawing support for more able students
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