The Effect Of Cognitive Apprenticeship On Nature Of Knowledge

Before schools appeared, apprenticeship was the most common means of learning. The differences between today's formal schooling are many, and one of the most important is in schools skills and knowledge have become abstracted form their uses in the world. In apprenticeship learning, on the other hand, target skills are not only continually in use by skilled practitioners, but are instrumental to the accomplishment of meaningful tasks. Said differently, apprenticeship embeds the learning of skills and knowledge in their social and functional context. The difference is not academic; it has serious implications for the nature of the knowledge that students acquire.Although schools have been relatively successful in organizing and conveying large bodies of conceptual and factual knowledge, standard pedagogical practices render key aspects of expertise invisible to students. As a result, conceptual and problem-solving knowledge acquired in school remains unintegrated or inert for many students. In some cases, knowledge remains bound to surface features of problems as they appear in textbooks, rather than to be used on demand. Therefore, psychologists proposed cognitive apprenticeship to design instructional environment, hoping to change the nature of knowledge that students acquire: to make the knowledge really accessible and usable. It's a very effective method to learn the practice of experts. Meanwhile, its focus is the important cognitive and meta-cognitive strategies and processes, rather than either low-level subskills or abstract conceptual and factual knowledge.The dissertation is aimed to study the effect of cognitive apprenticeship on the nature of knowledge: whether it can be applied on demand or just stay inert? Whether the knowledge is the purpose of learning, or it's the instrument to the ultimate goal? The dissertation is composed of for chapters.Chapter one deals with the development and framework of the cognitive apprenticeship theory. On one hand, it has the advantage of traditional apprenticeship, and can fit well into modern schools; on the other hand, it integrates the factors that made many successful instructional examples. The framework of this theory is composed of four parts: content, methods, sequencing and sociology.Chapter two discusses the experimental research and its underlying theory. First of all, it described about the research design and details to prove the use of different instructional methods; then, it focuses on the evaluating method: structural drawing (also the relational drawing) as well as its theory . It has its foundation on the theory of knowledge visualization, which proves that the pictures can indicate the internal knowledge and processChapter three analyzes the results of post-exam, especially the case problem, which asked students to plan to run an own E-Commerce business, and draw the basic relationship picture. During the analysis, the researcher draw out structural pictures based on students' business plans, and also analyses the verbal information in the plans; then, analyses the relationship pictures by students to check whether they show static or dynamic.Chapter four summarizes the whole research and proposes some instructional recommendations. The results of experiment shows clearly that the method of cognitive apprenticeship can successfully promote students to acquire usable knowledge, especially the procedural knowledge gains more remarkable development than the other two; the knowledge can be applied on demand , and it's a method and instrument to get to the ultimate goal. However, the other two classes are lagged behind far away on these aspects. Therefore, some recommendations are proposed, such as to realize the great impact of group work, and the limitation of mere case-study learning.