Designing Instruction to Support Recognition Learning

Through education, we convey a vast array of patterns valued by our culture. Although our recognition networks are very efficient, patterns such as alphabetic symbols, the format for writing a research paper, scientific and mathematical theories, and geographical or geological facts require specific study. Because students aren't all on equal footing when it comes to recognizing such patterns, teachers need to provide differentiated instruction. Let's examine how applying insights into recognition networks and new technologies can help us succeed.

Teaching Method 1: Provide Multiple Examples

To learn the key characteristics that define a pattern, whether that pattern be the letter A, the structure of a sonnet, or a concept such as justice or sarcasm, recognition networks need exposure to multiple examples. By seeing, hearing, smelling, or touching many instances of a pattern, recognition networks can extract the critical features that define that pattern and identify new instances that share those features. Thus, exposure to multiple examples supports bottom-up recognition processes.

For example, suppose we tell you that this symbol (~) is a wug. If we then ask you whether this symbol (-) is also a wug, you will have trouble deciding. The second symbol is horizontal like a wug, but shorter, and it's straight instead of wavy. Is it a wug? You don't have enough information to judge.

But if we now show you these examples and tell you that they are also wugs ( ~, -, _ ), you can begin to derive the features that define "wugness." You might hypothesize that wugs are horizontal symbols and decide that it doesn't matter whether they are long or short, wavy or straight, or where they are located in space. If we then offer the following counter-examples of things that are not wugs ( / and [ ), your hypothesis is supported. The more examples and counter-examples you see, the more clearly you understand the essence of wugness.

Much of the art of teaching patterns lies in selecting and presenting numerous, effective examples. Digital media and tools can facilitate finding and presenting these examples in the form of text, image, sound, or video. Unlike a printed textbook, in which the examples are limited in number and selected by the publisher, the array of materials available in digital form (online and on multimedia disks) lets us build expansive collections of examples suited to our instructional needs and the needs of our students. These digital resources can be saved and shared from class to class and from year to year. Additionally, because students can edit and manipulate digital materials, they can learn about patterns by interacting with and changing them. Thus, the flexible nature of digital media expands teachers' ability to collect many varied examples that are personally and topically relevant and provides new ways for students to interact with those examples.

Teaching Method 2: Highlight Critical Features

Left to their own devices, recognition networks exposed to multiple examples derive key features and identify patterns. But this is laborious work, and students have much to learn. Good teachers make this process easier by highlighting the critical features of a pattern as a way of directing students' learning.

For example, students of architectural history know that Federal-style buildings may share certain key characteristics, including a central hall plan, stone lintels over windows, a fanlight over the front door, and a Palladian window centrally located on the second story. By viewing enough examples, and some counter-examples for contrast, students can learn to extract the critical features that define the Federal style. But teachers can make the process more efficient by explicitly identifying the critical features in the examples they present. Traditionally, they do this by pointing out these key features in a photographs or a drawing (see Figure 6.3). Bruner and his colleagues (Wood, Bruner, & Ross, 1976) long ago described this "marking of critical features" as one of the key ways to scaffold learning in the tutorial context. Good teaching includes much of this kind of bottom-up scaffolding.

d - Figure 6.3 - Critical Features of a Federal-Style Building Image created by Historic Salem, Inc. Reprinted with permission from The Salem Handbook, A Renovation Guide for Homeowners. (1977). Salem, MA: Historic Salem, Inc.

Teachers also highlight critical features when they speak—using pitch, volume, pauses, intonation, pointing, gesturing, and facial expressions. In text, conventions such as italics, bold-faced type, font size, and color highlighting can draw learners' attention to the most important parts. But conventional marking methods—whether visual or auditory—will not work for everyone: textual cues only help those facile with text, spoken words are gone after class, and neither medium may be optimal for working with some kinds of patterns, such as musical themes or geographical features.

Digital media and tools offer teachers a wider variety of ways to highlight key features. Animations, color highlighting, graphic elements that add emphasis, and the capacity to "zoom in" on photographic images are just a few examples. We can also overlay text and images onto video to emphasize particular elements of content. Even more significant for individualizing, with the flexibility of digital tools, we can select different sets of highlighting options for different learners and show or hide these scaffolds depending on the student and his or her particular stage of learning.

Teaching Method 3: Provide Multiple Media and Formats

Because learners' recognition networks have varying abilities to process visual, aural, olfactory, or tactile patterns, a single means of presentation doesn't work for all students. In the case of the wugs, we presented all examples visually, with textual commentary—an effective format for those able to perceive the marks and decode the words. Presenting the examples through speech alone would provide someone with visual problems access to this information, but would then exclude learners with hearing or language processing disorders.

Providing multiple representations of patterns through a variety of media, formats, organizations, levels of detail, and degree of depth includes more learners by offering both choice and redundancy. Choice enables those with disabilities affecting a particular modality to access the information via another one. It also enables students to find the format or medium that appeals to and works best for them—increasing their access to learning. Redundancy offers opportunities to discern patterns in a variety of ways, thereby increasing the understanding about what matters in the pattern. In the words of Howard Gardner, "The best representations are multiple. And so our search should be for the family of representations that can convey core ideas in a multiplicity of ways at once accurate and complementary" (1999, p. 202). Research has shown that teaching in multiple modalities (a technique sometimes called transmediation) not only increases access for students with difficulties but also improves learning generally among all students (Siegil, 1995).

Presenting information in multiple formats and media is perhaps the most researched facet of UDL. This is partly because access standards developed for building design have extended into the world of information design. International standards for Web site design specify exactly how to represent information in multiple media for maximum access and usability. With increasing frequency, the kinds of standards and practices that emerged out of the need for access are being applied to educational materials. In fact, citing the need for flexible presentation to serve the learning needs of all students, Florida's 2001-2002 Instructional Materials Specifications for Reading, Grades K-12 and California's Criteria for 2002 Language Arts Adoption call for "universal design" and "universal access" respectively.

Resource: Guidelines and policies pertaining to access.

The multiple representations that fulfill access requirements are a step in the right direction. But evaluating the suitability of materials or Web sites to support UDL-based teaching requires us to consider a broader set of questions. It's important to evaluate all materials in light of learning goals, the nature of the information, and the characteristics of learners. Do the multiple representations suit the content? Do they tie closely to instructional goals? For example, students studying the impact of interest rate changes on the broader economy could learn about this topic by reading text, hearing a lecture, or viewing images representing that relationship. However, a manipulable, animated graph that dynamically links changes in interest rates to changes in other economic indicators would be a more effective way to explore these interactions. Fortunately, it is becoming easier to find suitable digital materials tied to standards and goals, thanks to ever-increasing online collections of digital resources, which provide high-quality materials ready to integrate into curriculum.

Resource: Access technology resources, articles, and chapters from Donald Leu and Deborah Diadiun Leu's essential Teaching with the Internet.

Teaching Method 4: Support Background Knowledge

When we learn, we incorporate new knowledge into old knowledge. In neural network terms, new learning is integrated into networks that have been shaped by previous learning. Consequently, what the brain already knows can influence what it will learn from a new example or experience.

Of course, as in all other arenas, students differ significantly in the background knowledge they bring to a new situation. For example, those who have learned to recognize several letters of the alphabet learn more readily to recognize a new letter than those who haven't yet mastered their first. Students who have studied other architectural periods and have learned to seek distinguishing architectural elements learn to identify Federal-style buildings more readily than novices to the discipline. And learners who have developed and can articulate an understanding of fair play and mutuality are better prepared to learn about the nature of justice than those who have never learned about these abstract concepts.

Teachers help students tie their background knowledge to new patterns (a top-down recognition process) and help fill in gaps by providing related information. Some of the familiar ways of doing this are by asking students to reflect on their own experiences that relate to reading material, reviewing key vocabulary prior to reading assignments, and directing students to relevant additional materials.

Digital materials provide an ideal vehicle for supporting background knowledge because they are flexible and because they can be linked to other information resources such as those on the Web. In this context, students can access background knowledge if and when they need to, on their own schedule. Further, digital background supports can be provided in multiple media.

For example, CAST's Universal Learning Edition prototype (see page 171) of Ambrose Bierce's Civil War short story Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge contains links to an online glossary with text, graphics, and video to illustrate unfamiliar vocabulary. It also contains links to a timeline of Civil War events; links to related Web pages; explanations of unfamiliar idioms and language use; a translator to other languages; and links to information about the author and the actual incident upon which the story is based.

Example: CAST demonstrates the potential of embedded instructional supports in its Universal Learning Edition prototypes.

Good teachers already practice the four techniques we’ve described for teaching recognition:

(1) Providing multiple examples. (2) Highlighting critical features. (3) Providing multiple media and formats. (4) Supporting background knowledge.

But individualizing these techniques so that each learner finds suitable presentations and supports is nearly impossible without digital content and flexible learning tools. With such resources, teachers can provide diverse pathways to recognition learning and meet the diverse needs of their students. Let's see how Ms. Sablan is doing this in her classroom, with a particular focus on Paula.

Supporting Recognition Learning with UDL

Ms. Sablan has set the following language arts goal for her 3rd graders: "Students will organize information sequentially from stories and pictures." To achieve this goal, Paula and her classmates must be able to recognize a story's major structural elements (beginning, middle, and end). This is will be a challenge for Paula, whose reading comprehension is poor.

Because she wants Paula and her peers to focus on story structure, not story content, Ms. Sablan chooses a familiar and popular story, "The Three Little Pigs." She collects three printed versions, including Jon Scieszka's humorous tale told from the wolf's point of the view (see Figure 6.4), two digital versions downloaded from the Web, and a CD-ROM version from Reader Rabbit's Reading Development Library (see Figure 6.5).

> d - Figure 6.4 - An Alternate Version of a Familiar Story "Cover" by Lane Smith, Copyright © 1989 by Lane Smith, from The True Story of the Three Little Pigs by Jon Sciezka, illustrated by Lane Smith. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, an imprint of Penguin Putnam Books for Young Readers, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.

d - Figure 6.5 - A Digital Alternative with Supports Taken from Reader Rabbit's Reading Development Library ®

The downloaded digital versions provide reading support, further helping to focus the challenge on the learning goal by scaffolding decoding. The CD-ROM provides several versions of the story, including narrations from the perspective of each pig and the wolf. And even more germane to Ms. Sablan's goal, this program uses animation to highlight sentence meaning. As the two screenshots in Figures 6.6 suggest, when a student selects each sentence, the animated characters onscreen perform the action the sentence describes. Because the program scaffolds text-meaning connections in larger chunks than individual words, it helps Paula focus on the meaning of connected text.

d - Figure 6.5 - A Digital Alternative with Supports Taken from Reader Rabbit's Reading Development Library ®

Together, the multiple versions of "The Three Little Pigs"—with their varied wording, illustrations, formats, and narrators—provide multiple examples of beginning, middle, and end, helping the students build an implicit understanding of the central features of these structural components. Ms. Sablan reinforces this understanding (and helps students focus attention on these critical narrative patterns) by using the eReader highlighter tool to color-code the beginning, middle, and end of the digital versions of the story. Then, with HyperStudio, she creates a three-page template with color-coded borders, labeled Beginning, Middle, and End. After reading the stories several times, Paula uses the computer microphone to record her voice as she retells the key segments of the story, then draws images on each page of the template and presents her summary to the class.

By providing the story itself through print, digital text, digital images, and animation, Ms. Sablan can offer multiple media and formats without having to invest a lot of money or time. Finally, because she has used this story with her class before, she knows that everyone shares the necessary background knowledge, enabling them to focus on the goal of the lesson: understanding story structures.