Diss4

SCCS and Transfer
Campione, Shapiro, and Brown (1995) pointed out that transfer occurs when students have the opportunity “to explain the resources (knowledge and processes) they are acquiring and to make flexible use of them” (p. 38). Erik’s renewable resources project gave him the opportunity to explain his knowledge of renewable resources to his classmates because the assignment allowed him to use his cognitive-connectedness schema construct of discovery-based learning. The assignment also allowed him to employ his navigation literacy in order to collect the information. Erik had acquired most of his knowledge about compiling resources and creating his project through interaction with his peers, making use of his social-connectedness schema. The final form of his project, the iMovie, allowed him to make flexible use of this knowledge and these processes. As shown in this example, instructional strategies that invoke the use of students’ SCCS will provide students with opportunities to employ their navigation literacy and preference for discovery-based learning. These strategies will also give students opportunities to make judgments about what resources and processes they need to acquire for specific projects, and how they will reassemble these resources in order to share their new-found information with others.

In conclusion, the affordances of today’s technologies have effected changes in students’ social and cognitive-connectedness schemata. The formation of new social and cognitive-connectedness schemata calls for instructional design strategies that reflect these changes. Reigeluth (1999) stated that new instructional design theories and models are needed in response to the “advances in information technologies, which have made new methods of instruction both possible and necessary” (p. ix). He urged designers to develop theories and models that “subsume current theory and ... offer flexible guidelines” (Reigeluth, p. 20).