Practicing Connections: A Framework to Guide Instructional Design for Developing Understanding in Complex Domains

Abstract

Research suggests that expert understanding is characterized by coherent mental representations featuring a high level of connectedness. This paper advances the idea that educators can facilitate this level of understanding in students through the practicing connections framework: a practical framework to guide instructional design for developing deep understanding and transferable knowledge in complex academic domains. We start by reviewing what we know from learning sciences about the nature and development of transferable knowledge, arguing that connectedness is key to the coherent mental schemas that underlie deep understanding and transferable skills. We then propose features of instruction that might uniquely facilitate deep understanding and suggest that the connections between a domain's core concepts, key representations, and contexts and practices of the world must be made explicit and practiced, over time, in order for students to develop coherent understanding. We illustrate the practicing connections approach to instructional design in the context of a new online interactive introductory statistics textbook developed by the authors.

Modeling First: Applying Learning Science to the Teaching of Introductory Statistics

“…Research in the learning sciences has demonstrated that flexible transfer is best supported when knowledge is coherent (for a review, see Fries et al 2020). If the goal of learning and teaching is to create coherent knowledge structures in novices, then students should not spend their time accruing bits of disconnected information (Let's learn about the median!…”

“…In this article, we describe the project that has resulted from our efforts. We base our approach on a clear theory of pedagogy, adapted from current thinking in the learning sciences, that we call the practicing connections framework (Fries et al 2020;Son, Ramos et al 2018). The practicing connections framework posits that to produce coherent transferable learning, students must practice making connections between core concepts, representations, and the world (i.e., contexts and practices involved in applying those concepts; cf.…”

Noch immer auf der Suche nach dem heiligen Gral: Wie generisch oder fachspezifisch sind Dimensionen der Unterrichtsqualität?

“…Dadurch werden sie anschlussfähiger an Diskurse in Wissenschaft und Praxis und können zu einer Weiterentwicklung der theoretischen Überlegungen führen (vgl. Fries et al 2020).…”

The importance and emergence of K-12 data science

“…Decades of research have shown that when students are given opportunities to make connections between topics and ideas as they learn, they gain deeper understandings and are better able to transfer this knowledge to novel situations (Boaler, 2002, 2015; Boaler & Staples, 2008; Fries et al, 2021). Unfortunately, mathematics is often taught as a series of disconnected facts to be memorized and reproduced, which often leads students to opt out of mathematics courses once they are no longer required.…”