Frontiers and Advances in Positive Learning in the Age of InformaTiOn (PLATO), 1st ed. 2019

Research on students? media use outside of education is just slowly taking off. Influences of information and communication technologies (ICT) on human information processing are widely assumed and particularly effects of dis- and misinformation are a current threat to democracies. Today, higher education competes with a very diverse (online) media landscape and domain-specific content from sources of varying quality, ranging from high-quality videographed lectures by top-level university lecturers, popular-scientific video talks, collaborative wikis, anonymous forum comments or blog posts to YouTube remixes of discipline factoids and unverified twitter feeds. Self-organizing learners need more knowledge, skills, and awareness on how to critically evaluate quality and select trustworthy sources, how to process information, and what cognitive, affective, attitudinal, behavioral, and neurological effects it can have on them in the long term. The PLATO program takes on the ambitious goal of uniting strands of research from various disciplines to address these questions through fundamental analyses of human information processing when learning with the Internet. This innovative interdisciplinary approach includes elements of ICT innovations and risks, learning analytics and large-scale computational modelling aimed to provide us with a better understanding of how to effectively and autonomously acquire reliable knowledge in the Information Age, how to design ICTs, and shape social and human-machine interactions for successful learning. This volume will be of interest to researchers in the fields of educational sciences, educational measurement and applied branches of the involved disciplines, including linguistics, mathematics, media studies, sociology of knowledge, philosophy of mind, business, ethics, and educational technology. 

Contents

Olga Zlatkin-Troitschanskaia…

Editorial…

Part I: Positive and Negative Learning in Higher Education

Howard Gardner and Wendy Fischman

Towards Quality Higher Education: Barriers and Enablers

David Berliner

The Role of Modeling for “Seeking Truth” in an Educational Policy Classroom

Fritz Oser

Critical Thinking in Social Domains

Part II: Learning with New Media and Technology

Marcus Maurer, Christian Schemer, Olga Zlatkin-Troitschanskaia, and Judith Jitomirski

Positive and Negative Media Effects on University Students’ Learning: Preliminary Findings and a Research Program

Vinay Chaudhri

Explicating Logic of Biology to Support Critical Thinking

Pascal Klein, Stefan Küchemann, Paul van Kampen, Leanne Doughty, and Jochen Kuhn

Picture Bias in Upper-Division Physics Education

Koichi Kise

The Role of Media Conversion for Positive Learning

Part III: Innovative Analytical Approaches for Modeling of Learning

Towards a Computational Model for Measuring the Complexity of Learning Tasks: A Combined Cognitive and Computational Approach

Michael Hoffer, Gabriel Wittum, Babett Lemke, Robert Jabs, and Arne Nägel

Automated Methods for the Comparison of Natural Languages

Andy Lücking

Grounding Educational Language: From Situation Modeling to Cognitive Structures

Successful and Positive Learning through Study Crafting: A Self-Control Perspective

Mita Banerjee

Literature, Simulation, and the Path towards Deeper Learning

Andrej Podolskiy

On the Way of Developing a Holistic Explanatory Model of Positive Learning

Part IV: Measuring of Intra- and Interindividual Learning – From Neural Correlates to Language Topology

Arne Nagels, Svenja Lüll, Lisa Friederich, Benjamin Straube, Michael Grosvald, and Silvia Hansen-Schirra

The Neural Basis of Idea Density During Natural Spoken Language

Daniela Czernochowski, John Gamboa, and Shanley E. M. Allen

What Can the Eyes and the Brain Tell Us About Learning? The Role of Information Density in the Comprehension and Retrieval of Complex Concepts

Susanne Schmidt, Olga Zlatkin-Troitschanskaia, and William Walstad

IRT Modeling of Decomposed Student Learning Patterns as Positive and Negative Learning in Higher Education Economics

Walter Bisang and Patryk Czerwinski

Performance in Knowledge Assessment Tests from the Perspective of Linguistic Typology

James Pellegrino

Challenges in the Modeling and Assessment of Complex Constructs: Some Examples from the PLATO Project

PART V: Perspectives

Olga Zlatkin-Troitschanskaia, Alexander Mehler, Walter Bisang & Gabriel Wittum

Positive Learning at Risk – Mapping Information Structures of Learning Sources in Economics and Computer Science (PLATO-i)

Richard J. Shavelson

PLATO in Search of Identity

Addresses the question of the effect of ICT on human information processing from a broad angle and integrates perspectives from multiple disciplines, while also presenting innovative approaches to their fundamental analysis

Moves the educational sciences forward to catch up with today’s learning realities

Unearths immense synergetic potentials in the humanities and social sciences, establishing an innovative field of research that will be of significant importance over the next decades