Power of stories
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- Mental Projection and the Power of Imagineering
- Pushing the Learner to the "Development Zone" in an Educational Simulation
- Advanced Training at the Edge - Communities of Practice
- Stories for Organizing Memory
- Stories for Extracting Meaning
- Stories to Provide Motivation in Learning
- Scenarios and the Real (Constrained) World
- Keeping the Client "On the Storyline"
- Stories, Simulation-based Training and Serious Games
| Understanding Learning in Scenario-Based Training
Austin Tate, ULOE11, 18th November 2011 The "power of stories" is a compelling theme in education and many of us have recollections of the things we have learned in the context of a story or real world grounding of some experience. It is used in training through play out of scenarios in ways which are intended to draw out educational outcomes for the learner. This essay will explore the roots of educational cognitive psychology that seeks to explain the powerful effect which story telling has in educational contexts. Keywords: Stories, Grounding, Embodiment Motivation I approach this topic as a researcher supporting communities who engage in training and experimentation with new tools through role play in simulations or with detailed scenarios. These sometimes take a long time to produce and are costly, but are often considered worthwhile in terms of the overall programme aims. I would like to understand more about why scenario-driven training and learning is considered effective, and to understand something about why it works. It is clear from even a short exploration of the literature, Internet references and readings provided by course tutors and fellow students that there is a well known association between stories and learning sometimes referred to as “The Power of Stories”. As a search term in Google this gets over 1 million hits. The nature of stories and storytelling, the place of prototypical stories in our culture and the links to “Theories of Mind” is frequently written about (e.g., Booker, 2004). Early educational psychologists like Piaget (1954) observed that children learn about the world by exploring it and playing with it. He claimed that an environment that is set up to encourage appropriate discovery can accelerate learning. But let’s examine some of the useful properties of stories. And in this regard I want to focus on the use of real-world grounded scenarios for educational purposes. Mental Projection and the Power of Imagineering Reality provides the context and the constraints under which a trainee can make sense of the choices available. Trainees or students need to have enough knowledge to make sense of the current situation, understand what can happen, and mentally project forward what the results might be of decisions they make or activities they perform. This kind of mental projection exercises the knowledge they already have, and forces them to confront situations they may not have encountered before. It introduces options unfamiliar to the trainee which have to be confronted, and pros and cons have to be argued in a shared social setting. That is often what a well designed training scenario seeks to introduce to a trainee. Pushing the Learner to the "Development Zone" in an Educational Simulation I was involved in a project under the "UK Alvey Programme" in the 1980s which encouraged work between academia and industry. Schlumberger/Solartron, Rediffusion Simulation, Smiths Industries and some academic groups worked on one project that involved training naval officers commanding their ships in complex shipping lanes such as the English Channel. The ship bridge simulator in which the person being trained was placed was surrounded by a very comprehensive environment largely made up of people who guided other ships, vehicles, and provided dynamic events into the training scenario. The project was trying to provide some scripted and reactive intelligent agents to reduce significantly the costs of providing this sort of training envelope. But for the purposes of the current essay, the interesting thing was that the role of the trainers was really to constrain the environment and change it as the trainee made decisions to keep him or her "on track" to force a position where certain decisions were before the trainee and that had to be confronted. If the trainee got out of the situation too easily, they changed things to get the trainee back into the problem area. There was therefore a plausible real situated world in which the trainee had a space of decisions, but these were grounded in a picture around the trainee and not in some abstract formulation. Use of simulation-based training which employs teams of “synthetic agents” to provide the surrounding realistic context and push learners into the appropriate learning pathways has also been studied at USC ISI in California over the years (e.g. Traum et al., 2003). We can see a link here to Vygotsky's (1934) work where he emphasised the role in learning played by the social context and the importance of experience through interaction. Vygotsky described the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) in which he believes really valuable learning takes place. This is a situation where a learner is just beyond their comfort zone of existing knowledge and where, with suitable training and perhaps a constrained context and set of choices, they can acquire new knowledge or refine their existing knowledge through their grounded experiences. Advanced Training at the Edge - Communities of Practice A story is a means in our cultural to communicate and share, it provides a basis for understanding of our roles in the community. Lave and Wenger (1998) continue the approach of Vygotsky and describe learning as a situated process in the context of social engagement with “communities of practice”. Such communities are a basis for knowledge transfer in many professional areas, and often form the basis for group training exercises on tasks which push those involved. Such exercises often use relevant scenarios to reinforce the learning that takes place across such groups. Rheingold (1993) also shows examples of learning being encouraged through exploring worlds and well written scenarios in them. In his research he has been in a number of simulated exercises involving communities of practice which are designed to reinforce learning. Wegner (1998) notes the benefit of viewing learning as taking place "in the context of our lived experience of participation in the world", and that learning is fundamentally "social" in nature. Stories for Organizing Memory For many years scientists involved in cognitive studies have sought to employ stories as an organizing method for human memory and recall. Stories have been a focus for understanding the world, for representing potential activity in the world and for communicating intentions and plans between people. Schank (1977) with his idea of "Scripts" shows us that we often have some quite fixed story boards or processes in mind when we are engaged in activity, and we adapt these to the situations we encounter. Such as what happens when we visit a restaurant. We expect certain things to happen at certain times and in noisy environments or in some unfamiliar foreign restaurants which (from personal experience) can be helpful in understanding the interactions we will have. So much so that we can have very amusing experience when encountering a really different culture or eating at a restaurant that does not follow our usual script. We can also "debug" those scripts when we come across new situations and adapt them for future more general uses. It is the power of those scripts and how we assimilate them that lets us cope better in new situations. Scripts and story outlines are also a focus for us making sense of what we observe in the world. We try to fit what we observe into what makes sense in terms of our "scripts" for the situation. Stories for Extracting Meaning When different tasks that people and organisations perform are studied they can be considered to fall into the categories of “analysis” and “synthesis” tasks, e.g., as described in the KADS methodology (Schreiber et al., 2000). Analysis tasks typically are convergent and are good for prediction and control. But synthesis tasks, which include design, planning and configuring artefacts, are divergent. They often have open ended possibilities and are under-constrained. Stories and plausible projections within the space of the scenario are a powerful means to limit the options available, and constrain them to those that mean something in the real world, i.e. that are grounded. Tom Atlee at the Co-Intelligence Institute (2011) promotes the “Story Paradigm” as “a powerful way of organizing and sharing individual experience and co-creating shared realities”. He considers stories to be one of the “underlying structures of reality” and addresses the use of such stories for making sense of the situation and understanding the underlying meaning and the roles of those involved. Stories to Provide Motivation in Learning Educators have observed that learners can have a number of intrinsic motivation factors when engaged in a game or simulation if it provides a challenge, stimulates curiosity, gives a sense of control and even encourages a fantasy element in the storyline. Additional factors were observed in some scenario-based social learning environments such as identity presentation, social relationships, helping others, immersion and creativity (Barab et al., 2005). They discuss their approach as exercising three aspects – learning, helping and playing – and see this as a way to encourage the natural behaviour of children to engage in play and to learn through that (as described by Piaget, 1954). In a more mature context we might see this as “Learning through Experience” in an immersive story-based scenario. Scenarios and the Real (Constrained) World Scenarios leverage our knowledge of the real world. They can powerfully draw on the natural "knowledge in the world" (Norman, 2002), that is, the natural understanding of the constraints under which activity can take place in a real setting. Contrast the following different situations. Imagine someone trying to describe to you how to navigate a complex maze... turn left, turn left, turn right, turn right, turn left... (as an aside any maze can be run by running one hand along the wall and never letting go... though that may not be very efficient). Now imagine someone describing how to get to a castle on a hill in a city. Keep going uphill, if you see the church with the square tower go past it, etc. We are using grounded knowledge of the real world to strictly limit the routes we should take; we have knowledge of processes to walk through towns; and we use constraints in limiting the routes we will consider. This is quite different to when we problem solve in abstract and mathematical puzzle spaces, which are often designed to not have such semantics and be highly combinatoric. Gee (2003) analyses video games and identifies many (the appendix is a short cut to all 36 gradually exposed through the book) learning principles which make them powerful bases for learning. Many of these principles rely on the grounding offered by a real world scenario or constrained world in which the action takes place. The ability for the player/learner to probe (“poke”) the world through the actions they take, often when several are possible, get feedback and reformulate their hypotheses about the situation all stimulate learning. Keeping the Client "On the Storyline" Pamela Rutledge (2011) finds a number of psychological reasons why stories act as so powerful a learning metaphor and seeks to put them to profitable use. She believes that stories play to our deepest and oldest methods of communication and culture. They are about collaboration and connections. They share meaning, purpose and order. She summarises: "Stories are how we think. They are how we make meaning of life. Call them schemas, scripts, cognitive maps, mental models, metaphors, or narratives. Stories are how we explain how things work, how we make decisions, how we justify our decisions, how we persuade others, how we understand our place in the world, create our identities, and define and teach social values." Rutledge seeks to put this powerful paradigm to work via her involvement in A Think Lab (2011) who draw on the power of story telling in their work to use multi-media and multi-modal presentations of a company's offerings... they seek to weave the presentations of a company and its products into a story that can be absorbed more easily whatever medium is used to communicate it, and in whatever way a client comes upon it. Their web site introduction indicates that: "A story captures the essence of who you are and what you do. The human brain organizes information using narrative structure – a story. If there is no story, it’s just facts. No one ever remembers facts. With story, you add emotion and purpose". Stories, Simulation-based Training and Serious Games A very wide range of studies have been performed over the last three decades comparing different forms of learning in a wide range of domains. Simulation-based training has been employed in the defence and engineering sectors for some time. A famous example from the field of using AI in such simulation training systems is STEAMER (Hollan et al., 1984). Simulation-based training also is heavily used in the medical profession. A more recent sample study in medical acute care assessment is typical (Steadman et al., 2006). A sampling of such case studies on-line indicates that a number of authors and scientists observe that that scenario-based training when compared to control groups using other methods led to improved learning outcomes. The term “Serious Games” is sometimes used to describe the application of scenario-based training to professional sector. The application areas and platforms used can be very varied. Some examples are shown at (Designing Digitally, 2011). Serious Games also are finding their place in classrooms. Alex Games (2011) (his real name), Education Design Director at Microsoft Studios, works on using games for augmented reality and embodied learning in the classroom and comments: “Nearly three decades of scientific research in games and learning have shown evidence that game play can help players develop a systemic understanding of world phenomena, creativity and strategic problem solving skills. In the sequence of solving complex problems, the act of playing engages players cognitively and emotionally, and assesses knowledge where it is highly relevant to those problems' solution”. Summary I started this study with the assumption that scenario-based training was a beneficial approach. I have seen such training in use in some of the professional emergency responder communities I work with and support via advanced collaboration tools in my research. But I have never read into the literature that supports that assumption. It has been a most useful to see the breadth of evidence as to why this is so, and to go back over educational psychological approaches which underlie “The Power of Stories”. References A Think Lab (2011) “Transmedia Storytelling Workshops for Organizations and Advocacy – The Psychology of Storytelling”. http://athinklab.com/the-psychological-power-of-transmedia-storytelling/ Atlee, Tom (2011) “The Power of Story - The Story Paradigm” http://www.co-intelligence.org/I-powerofstory.html Barab, Sasha, Arici, Anne and Jackson, Craig (2005) “Eat Your Vegetables and Do Your Homework: A Design-Based Investigation of Enjoyment and meaning in Learning”, Educational Technology, January-February 2005, pp. 15-21. Booker, C. (2004) “The Seven Basic Plots - Why We Tell Stories”, Continuum. Google Books Preview on http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=tujDvUEpY10C Designing Digitally, Inc. (2011) “3D Serious Game and Simulation Development Showcase”. http://www.3dseriousgamesandsimulations.com/showcase/ Games, A. (2011) “Play It Forward” in “How To Bring Serious Games Into The Classroom”, e-Newsletter 2nd November 2011. http://www.edutopia.org/ and http://www.edutopia.org/blog/new-xbox-games-for-learning-alex-games Gee, James Paul (2003) “What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy”, New York, Palgrave Macmillan. Hollan, James D., Hutchins, Edwin L. and Weitzman, Louis (1984) STEAMER: An Interactive Inspectable Simulation-Based Training System, Artificial Intelligence Vol. 5(2), Summer 1984. http://www.aaai.org/ojs/index.php/aimagazine/article/view/434
http://www.psychologytoday.com/collections/201106/the-power-stories Rheingold, Howard (1993) "The Virtual Community", Internet Edition. http://www.rheingold.com/vc/book/ Rutledge, Pamela B. (2011) “The Psychological Power of Storytelling”, Psychology Today. June 2011. http://www.psychologytoday.com/collections/201106/the-power-stories/direct-hit http://athinklab.com/the-psychological-power-of-transmedia-storytelling/ Schank, Roger, C. and Abelson, Robert P. (1977) "Scripts, Plans, Goals, and Understanding: An Inquiry into Human Knowledge Structures" (Artificial Intelligence Series) Psychology Press. Schreiber, Guus , Akkermans, Hans , Anjewierden, Anjo ., de Hoog, Robert, Shadbolt, Nigel , Van de Velde, Walter and Wielinga, Bob (2000) “Knowledge Engineering and Management: The CommonKADS Methodology”, MIT Press. http://www.commonkads.uva.nl Steadman, R.H., Coates, W.C., Huang, Y.M., Matevosian, R., Larmon, B.R., McCullough, L. and Ariel, D. (2006) “Simulation-based training is superior to problem-based learning for the acquisition of critical assessment and management skills”, Critical Care Medicine, January 2006 34(1):151-7. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16374169 Traum, David, Rickel, Jeff, Gratch, Jonathan and Marsella, Stacy (2003) “Negotiation over Tasks in Hybrid Human-agent Teams for Simulation-based Training”, in Proceedings of the Second International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS '03), ACM, New York, NY, USA. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=860646 Vygotsky, Les (1934) “Thought and Language” (aka “Thinking and Speaking”), MIT Press (published in English in 1962). Internet version and translation by Eugenia Hanfmann and Gertrude Vakar. http://www.marxists.org/archive/vygotsky/works/words/ Wenger, E. (1998) “Communities of Practice - Learning, Meaning, and Identity”, Cambridge University Press. See also http://www.ewenger.com/theory Download 29 Kb. Share with your friends:
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