Abstract
[This paper is part of the Focused Collection on Curriculum Development: Theory into Design.] When we examined student responses to questions about the direction of the static friction force in various situations, we both had strong ideas about how to write a tutorial to promote deeper understanding. But our ideas were quite different. In this theoretical paper, we present the two contrasting tutorials and show how their differences can be traced to different theoretical orientations toward cognition and learning. We do not claim that one tutorial—or the theoretical framework loosely associated with it—is superior. Instead, we hope to illustrate two claims. One, we show in detail how curriculum designers’ cognitive “theories” (frameworks), even if largely tacit during the act of creation, shape the resulting tutorials. Two, we show how, at least for us, articulating and discussing our respective theoretical orientations and their influence on our tutorial writing enables a rethinking of long-standing tutorial-writing habits. We argue that instructional intuition—shaped by explicit and tacit theoretical assumptions—functions well in guiding the design of curriculum, as our contrasting tutorials illustrate; but more systematic attention to the underlying theoretical assumptions can productively inform refinements.
- Received 9 July 2019
- Accepted 23 December 2019
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevPhysEducRes.16.020144
Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI.
Published by the American Physical Society
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This article appears in the following collection:
Curriculum Development: Theory into Design
A special collection on theory and design of curriculum.