TUTOR MARKED ASSIGNMENTS

Tutor Marked Assignments

Tutor Marked Assignments

Introduction

Current perspectives on learning in classrooms make clear that students learn best when they are engaged in their learning and helped to develop rich conceptual understanding. These views on learning, often referred to as constructivist perspectives, propose that students actively and socially construct their knowledge. A challenge facing educators is how to create classrooms that support this learning.

Increasingly, educators have recognized the need to reconfigure classrooms as environments that encompass the complex individual and social processes necessary to promote understanding. For a learning environment to succeed, teachers need to change their traditional role of information delivery to effective scaffolding that supports students in integrating and applying ideas. In this type of learning environment, students also have new roles. They need to be more invested and responsible in their learning as they engage in authentic tasks, collaborate with classmates, and use technology for research and problem solving. This paper discusses tutor marked assignments in a concise and comprehensive way.

Learning Theory and Learning Environments

In contrast to previous views that emphasized learning as a process of transferring information from teachers or texts to learners, new views emphasize that learners are active constructors of knowledge. Accordingly, learning occurs through a constructive process in which students modify and refine what they know as they explore and try to make sense of the world around them. Students possess prior knowledge that they use to interpret learning experiences and construct new knowledge.

There are various formulations of constructivism and they explain different aspects of learning. Under this broad constructivist umbrella are two major perspectives on human learning. The first is cognitive in nature and focuses on individual thinking and learning. The second is social in nature and focuses on social interaction and the role of interactions within social contexts. Both perspectives are central in informing the design of new environments.

Cognitive Perspective

The cognitive perspective emphasizes the role of the individual in learning and is concerned with how complex information is handled mentally by learners, including how learners remember information, relate new information to prior knowledge to build schémas or knowledge networks that organize ideas, and develop understanding. Research on cognition suggests that prior knowledge and its organization plays a considerable role in learning and performance. For example, cognitive research provides insight into the skills and knowledge that underlie expert and novice performance. This research indicates that experts and novices differ in the amount and organization of knowledge and in their ability to apply knowledge to solve problems, comprehend text, and respond to situations. Simply put, experts and novices differ in their cognitive resources, especially strategies for learning and performing tasks. Experts from all disciplines draw from a richly structured information base and are more likely to recognize meaningful patterns of information when problem solving. Experts know their disciplines thoroughly and their understanding of subject matter allows them to see patterns, identify relevant information, and notice inconsistencies or discrepancies that are not apparent to novices.

Many new environments for learning are designed to help students develop ...