Monday, December 19, 2011

North Korean Kim Jong-Il died

I heard the North Korean director Kim Jong-Il died last night - it's a breaking news during the late news program. It was also predicted that the director's youngest son, Kim Jong-Un would be his successor. Kim Jong-Un was educated in Switzerland. I was so angry when I read the few lines of intrioduction. So while most people in North Krean are suffering from starvation and deprived from going to school, Kim Jong-Un enjoyed his life in Switzerland and had a good education over there. I was devastated when I saw Kim Jong-Un's overweight photos on the new ...  I was so sick in my stomach.

Life is surely not fair. But the contrast of the picture of the starving North Korean children and the well-fed Kim Jong-Un photos just makes me angry and keep asking, "why? why?".

Thursday, December 15, 2011

Chinese Children Books and dragon

The semester is officially over! - now I am studying the Asian American children books, especially the picture books. I instantly realize that dragon is a common animal in Chinese legenary stories. Yet most Chinese culture picture books at the local public library are Chinese New yYear or Mid-Autumn Harvest Festival.

Useful APA style websites...

APA style: http://www.apastyle.org/

KU writing center: http://www.writing.ku.edu/~writing/guides/APA.shtml

Purdue University Writing Lab: http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/18/

Among these three website, I personally found that the Purdue Owl is the most useful one.

Try it and make yuor own judgement.

it's official...

The Iraq War is over! FINALLY... after 10 years long of war, American soldiers are now leaving Iraq.
Thank you, Mr President Obama.

Thursday, December 8, 2011

Self-assessment for class participation

It is the first time in my graduate school experience that professor asked us to submit a self-assessment for class participation.

When we talk about class participation, we refer to the discussion in the class. Yet, in my opinion, class participation should not be defined or limited to class verbal discussion; all the non-verbal activities in the course should be included such as readings, assignments, chats, and students' individual blogs. Those non-verbal dialogs among students and instructors are the vital elements of learning communications. When assessing an individual's class participation for a course, all the verbal and non-verbal participation should be included. 

Shooting at Virginia Tech AGAIN?

On mhy way to work this evening, I heard from NPR that there was a shooting at Virginia tech University. Two people were dead. Another deadly shooting at Virginia Tech? My heart was just dropped and could not believe what I just heard form the NPR reporter.

It brought back all the bad memory of the 2007 shooting on the same campus.

Sociocultural Theory of Motivation - one of my interesting assignments at iSchool

VARIABLES
Motivation theories that focus strongly on context are often described as sociocultural theories of motivation (Hickey, [n.d.]). Sociocultural views of learning and motivation are social in nature (McInerney et al, p., 3), emphasizing the interdependence of social and the individual's genetic inheritance in the construction of knowledge (John-Steiner & Mahn, 1996, p. 191).

DOMAINS:
Educational Psychology, Human Development and Learning, Situate Theory, Sociohistoric Context, Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD), More Knowledge Other (MKO), Cognitive Development Theories, Engaged Participation

DEVELOPERS:
Socio-cultural theory was first systematized and applied by Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934) and his collaborators (Leontiev, A., Luria, A., Rubinstein, S., and Bakhtin, M.) in Russia in the 1920s and 1930s (McInerney, 2011, p. 3). They addressed how history and society influenced the way that humans develop and learn. Their work was not accessible and did not gain recognition until the 1950s and early 1960s. The influence of this theory began after Vygotsky's earlier works were translated into English in 1978 (John-Steiner & Mahn, 1996, p. 192).

BACKGROUND AND SOCIOCULTURALK THEORIES:
Sociocultural contexts in motivation and education reflect the influence of VyGotsky. Yet, the interpretations and expansions in the recent years have led to diverse perspectives on socio-cultural theory (Ibid):
(1) Sociohistoric context: Sivan (1986) proposed that individual goals and values that motivate learning originate in sociohistoric context.
(2) Situational interest: Weiner (1990), Hidi & Anderson (1992), Naehr & Ointrich (1995), and Bandura (2000) increased concern with classroom and cultural contexts, focusing on the ways that classroom context, ethnicity, and culture influenced goals, efficacy, and interests. The implication of this trend for teachers was that their students' motivation was much more influenced by classroom and sociocultural context.
(3) Adaptive learning and co-regulated learning: McCaslin & Murdock (1991) and McCaslin & Good (1996) studied social and instructional environments found in the home and classroom, addressing that motivation begins with the classroom and home rather than the individual.
(4) Social context: Other socio-cultural studies such as Yowell & Smylie (1999), Turner & Meyer (2000), Järvelä & Salovaara (2004), and Nolen (2007) focused on the relationships that students had with other participants (students) in the classroom and cultural context. Their studies identified the source of motivation as the relationships that students developed. This included relationships with school activities and other participants in school learning. Therefore, motivating classroom learners meant helping them coordinate the goals implied by a range of different relationships, and recognizing that some of the goals will conflict with other goals. Teachers need to help students learn to negotiate worthwhile goals for themselves and their classmates (Hickey, [n.d.]).
(5) Situative theories of cognitive: These theories assume that knowledge originates in social interaction and cultural activity and are distributed across tools, technologies, and social rituals that human cultures construct to let them work together. Knowledge and meaning are primarily rooted in the actual collective experiences people have in the world. Gee (2004) addressed that students' learning is strongly attached to their participation in the construction of situated knowledge in socially meaningful activity.
(6) Engaged participation: Hickey (2003) applied the sociocultural assumption that knowledge resides in contexts of its use to the study of achievement motivation. He used this participatory view of knowing and learning to define a stridently sociocultural approach to "motivation-in-context." (p. 401)
(7) Constructivist theory suggests one should attend to the learning and mental representations of the individual while sociocultural theory is more concerned with the ways in which learning is an act of enculturation (Piaget, 1955).
(8) More Knowledgeable Other (MKO:): MKO refers to anyone who has a better understanding or a higher quality ability level than the learner, with respect to a particular task, process, or concept. The MKO is normally thought of as being a teacher, coach, or older adult, but the MKO can be peers, a younger person, or even computers (Wertsch & Sohmer, 1995).
(9) Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD): Vygotsky's definition states that the ZPD is the difference between what a person can achieve when acting alone and what the same person can accomplish when acting with support from someone else and/or cultural artifacts (Vygosky, 1978, p. 86; Lantolf, 2000, p. 17). Sociocultural theorists expanded the concept of ZPD and conceptualized learning as distributed (Cole & Engestrom, 1993), interactive (Chang-Wells & Wells, 1993), contextual (John-Steiner, Panofsky & Smith, 1994), and the result of the learners' participation in a community of practice (Rogoff, 1994). Lantolf concluded that teaching in the ZPD means developing sensitivity to students' current abilities and their potential development (Lantolf, 2000, p. 25).

THE IMPLICATIONS OF SOCIOCULTURAL THEORY
According to Tharp & Gallimore (1988), the view of sociocultural theory "has profound implications for teaching, schooling, and education. A key feature of this emergent view of human development is that higher order functions develop out of social interaction" (pp. 6-7). It is no surprise that most sociocultural theory researchers have drawn heavily from learners and education. Here are some of the educational implications of the sociocultural perspective:
(1) Sociocultural theory and L2 learning motivation: For instance, Kim (2005) focused on Korean adult ESL students' learning motivation from a Vygotskian sociocultural theory perspective. Additionally, the Center for Language Acquisition at the Pennsylvania State University provides a complete list of sociocultural theory and a L2 learning bibliography, which can be accessed via http://language.la.psu.edu/Sociocultural_Theory_Biblio.pdf
(2) Sociocultural aspects and web-based inquiry learning environment: Furberg, A. (2009) demonstrated the value of the sociocultural theory for gaining a better understanding of students' engagement with web-based learning environments.
(3) Sociocultural perspective and e-learning: Remtulla (2008) focused on social theory and its relationship with a socio-culturally engaged look at e-learning for workplace and pedagogy.
(4) Instructional practice: Lee (2007) argued that sociocultural theory advances instructional practice and helps teachers understand the situational specificity of literacy practice.
(5) According to Scott ([n.d.]), "the sociocultural theory has been taken into consideration in the design of online distance education technologies. Research on the social context of learning has provided ample evidence that traditional teacher-centered approaches would be inappropriate in an online setting. Brigham Young University (BYU), a large provider of accredited online distance education in the United States, has adopted a model of online distance learning that is designed with sociocultural theory in mind."
(6) Improving individual motivation: Hickey (2011) focused on sociocultural contexts on the regulation of learning. In this article, he summarized a decade of efforts to consider the implications of contextual theories of cognition for fostering motivation and introduced an emerging participatory vies of learning (McInerney, 2011, p. 138).
(7)Teacher education: Wells, G. (2011) applied the sociocultural perspective to motive and motivation in learning to teach. He addressed that the applications of the sociocultural theory enable prospective teachers "to appropriate and sustain the motivation to bring about a change in the motive of public education" (McInerney, 2011, p. 105)
(8) Learning as identity construction: Vadeboncoeur, Vellos & Goessling (2011) advanced "identity construction as one process that, together with the construction of knowledge and values, defines a sociocultural perspective on learning" (McInerney, 2011, p. 224).

RELATIONSHIP IN OTHER THEORIES
The work of sociocultural theory is to explain how individual's learning is related to cultural, institutional, and historical context (Scott, [n.d.]); hence the focus of the sociocultural theories of motivation is related to human development and learning. Recently, researchers have widely applied the theories to learning, particularly in education with differential interpretation. From this perspective, the sociocultural theories of motivation, in many ways are related to other learner's motivation theories such as:
• ARCS Model of Motivation
• Goal setting theory
• Maslow's social need theory of motivation: as it refers to the social needs

OTHER FINDINGS AND IMPLICATIONS:
• Sociocultural approaches to conceptual change learning, Sainsbury & Walker (2011)
• The significance of sociocultural context in influencing how students make meaning of their educational experiences (Bempehat, J. et al, 2011)
• Future direction and needed research of sociocultural theories (Schoen, 2011)


REFERENCES:

Bandura, A. (2000). Exercise of human agency through collective efficacy. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 9(3), 75-78.

Bempechat, J., Mirny, A., Li J., Wenk, K.A., & Holloway, S.D. (2011). Learning together: The educational experiences of adolescents in Moscow (pp. 283-307). In D.M. McInerney, Walker, R.A., & Liem, G. (eds). Sociocultural theories of learning and motivation: Looking back, looking forward. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing Inc.

Center for Language Acquisition at the Pennsylvania State University (2011). Sociocultural theory & L2 learning bibliography. Retrieved November 24, 2011 from http://language.la.psu.edu/Sociocultural_Theory_Biblio.pdf

Chang-Wells, G. L. M., & Wells, G. (1993). Dynamics of discourse: Literacy and the construction of knowledge. In E. A. Forman, N. Minick & C. A. Stone (eds.), Contexts for learning: Sociocultural dynamics in children's development (pp. 58-90). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Cole, M., & Engestrom, Y. (1993). A cultural-historical approach to distributed cognition. In G. Salomom (ed.), Distributed cognitions: Psychological considerations (pp. 1-46). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

Furberg, A. (2009). Socio-cultural aspects of prompting student reflection in web-based inquiry learning environments. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 25(4), 397-409.

Gee, J. P. (2004). Situated learning and language: A critique of traditional schooling. London: Routledge.

Hickey, D.T. (n.d.). Sociocultural theories of motivation. Retrieved September 1, 2011 from http://www.education.com/reference/article/sociocultural-theories-of-motivation/

Hickey, D.T. (2003). Engaged participation versus marginal nonparticipation: A stridently sociocultural approach to achievement motivation. The Elementary School Journal, 103(4), 401-429.

Hickey, D.T. (2011). Participation by design: Improving individual motivation by looking beyond it (pp. 137-161). In D.M. McInerney, Walker, R.A., & Liem, G. (eds). Sociocultural theories of learning and motivation: Looking back, looking forward. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing Inc.

Hidi, S., & Anderson, R. (1992). Situational interest and its impact on reading and expository writing. In K. A. Renninger, S. Hidi. & A. Krapp (eds.). The role of interest in earning and development (pp. 215-238). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Järvelä, S., & Salovaara, H. (2004). The interplay of motivational goals and cognitive strategies in a new pedagogical culture: A context-oriented and qualitative approach. European Psychologist, 9(4), 232-244.

John-Steiner, V., Panofsky, C. P., & Smith, L.W. (1994). Sociocultural approaches to language and literacy: An interactionist perspective. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

John-Steiner, V., & Mahn, H. (1996), Sociocultural approaches to learning and development: a Vygotskian framework. Educational Psychologist, 31(3/4), 191-206.

Kim, T.Y. (2006). L2 learning motivation from a sociocultural theory perspective: Theory, concepts, and empirical evidence. English Teaching, 61(4), 51-78.

Lantolf, J. P. (2000). Sociocultural Theory & Second Language Learning. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Lee, C. D. (2007). Culture, literacy, and learning: Blooming in the midst of the whirlwind. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

MaCaslin, M., & Good, T. (1996). The informal curriculum. In D. Berliner & R. Calfee (Eds.), The handbooks of educational psychology (pp. 622-673). New York, NY: MacMillan.

MaCaslin, M., & Murdock, T.B. (1991). The emergent interaction of home and school in the development of adaptive learning. In M. L. Marhr & P. Pintrich (Eds.), Advances in motivation and achievement (pp. 213-259). Greenwich, CT: JAI Press.

Maehr, M.L., & Pintrich, P.R. (Eds.) (1995). Advances in motivation and achievement: Culture, motivation, and achievement. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press.

McInerney, D.M., Walker, R.A., & Liem, G. (2011). Sociocultural theories of learning and motivation: Looking back, looking forward. Hong Kong: Hong Kong Institute of Education.

Nolen, S.B. (2007). Young children's motivation to read and write: Development in social contexts. Cognitive and Instruction, 25(2), 219-270.

Piaget, J. (1955). The child's construction of reality. London, UK: Rutledge and Kegan Paul.

Remtulla, K.A. (2008). A social theory perspective on e-learning. Learning Inquiry, 2(2), 139-149. doi: 10.1007/s11519-008-0032-6

Rogoff, B. (1994). Developing understanding of the idea of communities of learners. Mind, Culture, and Activity, 1, 209-229.

Scott, S. (n.d.). Sociocultural theory. Retrieved November 24, 2011 from http://www.education.com/reference/article/sociocultural-theory/

Sainsbury, E., & Walker, R.A. (2011) The changing face of conceptual change learning: An emerging sociocultural approach (pp. 253-282). In D.M. McInerney, Walker, R.A., & Liem, G. (eds). Sociocultural theories of learning and motivation: Looking back, looking forward. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing Inc.

Schoen, L.T. (2011). Conceptual and methodological issues in sociocultural research and theory development in education (pp. 11-40). In D.M. McInerney, Walker, R.A., & Liem, G. (eds). Sociocultural theories of learning and motivation: Looking back, looking forward. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing Inc.

Sivan, E. (1986). Motivation in social constructivist theory. Educational Psychologist, 21(3/4), 290-233.

Tharp, R.G., & Gallimore, R. (1988). Rousing minds to life: Teaching, learning, and schooling in social context. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Turner, J.C., & Meyer, D. K. (2000). Studying and understanding the instructional contexts of classrooms: Using our past to forge our future. Educational Psychologist, 35(2), 69-85.

Vadeboncoeur, J.A., Vellos, R.E., & Goessling, K.P. (2011). Learning as identity construction: Educational implications of a sociocultural perspective (pp. 223-251). In D.M. McInerney, Walker, R.A., & Liem, G. (eds). Sociocultural theories of learning and motivation: Looking back, looking forward. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing Inc.

Vygotsky, L.S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Weiner, B. (1990). The history of motivation research in education, Journal of Educational Psychology, 82(4), 616-622.

Wells, G. (2011). Motive and motivation in learning to teach (pp. 87-107). In D.M. McInerney, Walker, R.A., & Liem, G. (eds). Sociocultural theories of learning and motivation: Looking back, looking forward. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing Inc.

Wertsch, J. V., & Sohmer, R. (1995). Vygotsky on learning and development. Human Development, 38, 332-337.

Yowell, C. M., & Smylie, M. (1999). Self regulation in democratic communities. The Elementary School Journal, 99(5), 469-490.

Tora! Tora! Tora!

Yesterday marked the 70th anniversary the Japanese troops attacked US Pearl Harbour military base. I am wondering how many young Americans will know this event in American history.

Out of my curosity, I asked a few students who were at the library. None of them knows the Pearl Harbor Attack. But if you asked them whether they heard a movie called "Tora! Tora! Tora!" they all said, "yes! I have watched that movie!"

- :))