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The instructional technology community is in the midst of a philosophical shift from a behaviorist to a constructivist framework, a move that may begin to address the growing rift between formal school learning and reallife learning. One theory of learning that has the capacity to promote authentic learning is that of situated learning.
The purpose of this three-part study was first, to identify critical characteristics of a situated learning environment from the extensive literature base on the subject; second, to operationalize the critical characteristics of a situated learning environment by designing a multimedia program that incorporated the identified characteristics; and third, to investigate students' perceptions of their experiences using a multimedia package based on a situated learning framework.
The learning environment, for preservice teachers, comprised a multimedia program on assessment in mathematics together with recommended implementation conditions for the classroom. Eight students were observed and interviewed to explore their perceptions of the situated learning environment. Findings suggest that the use of the situated learning framework provided effective instructional design guidelines for the design of an environment for the acquisition of advanced knowledge.
The separation between knowing and doing traditionally has been the hallmark of school and university learning (Resnick, 1987). The emphasis in school and university has been on extracting essential principles, concepts, and facts, and teaching them in an abstract and decontextualized form. The inadequacies of this approach abound in everyday experience, for example: the driver with a physics degree, attempting to dig the car out of sand instead of partially deflating the tires. In cases such as this, there is a failure to access knowledge that is clearly relevant to solve the problem in hand. Information has been stored as facts rather than as tools (Bransford, Sherwood, Hasselbring, Kinzer, & Williams, 1990), is "welded" to its original occasion of use (Brown, 1997), or as Whitehead (1932) suggested, the knowledge has remained "inert."
These studies suggest that much of the abstract knowledge taught in schools and universities is not retrievable in real-life, problemsolving contexts, because this approach ignores the interdependence of situation and cognition. When learning and context are separated, knowledge itself is seen by learners as the final product of education rather than a tool to be used dynamically to solve problems....