The Multisource Nature of Learning: An Introduction

Both psychology experiments and school curriculum have often focused on memory for isolated facts and definitions. In psychology, the most heated debate concerning this problem has been between the proponents of experimental and naturalistic traditions. Neisser (1978), for instance, questioned the value of laboratory research on memory for real-life situations arguing that "if X is an interesting or socially significant aspect of memory, then psychologists have hardly ever studied X' (p. 4). He noted that this is not only true of preBartlett associationism but also of the more recent research on schema theory (e.g., Anderson, 1977; Bransford & Johnson, 1972; Mandler & Johnson, 1977; Rumelhart, 1975). Banaji and Crowder (1989), on the other hand, stated that real-life inquiry alone "would lead the psychology of memory into the same stultification as studying backyard astronomy with the naked eye, chemistry in the kitchen, and biology with a walk through the forest" (p. 1188). A similar debate goes on in the area of professional practice. Schon (1987) sums up the problem in an analogy. The area of professional practice, he notes, consists of the high, hard hill of research-based knowledge overlooking the soft, slimy swamp of real-life problems. Up on the hill, simpler problems respond to the techniques of basic science whereas down in the swamp complex problems defy technical solution. Thus, the educational practitioner faces a rigor-or-relevance dilemma. Should "he remain on the high ground where he can solve relatively unimportant problems according to prevailing standards of rigor, or shall he descend to the swamp of important problems and nonrigorous inquiry" (Schon, 1987, p. 3)? Whether or not one must choose between rigor and relevance is debatable. For example, a distinction is possible between the (occasionally misused) rigor that preexists in certain methodological tools of science (to which Schon, 1987, seems to refer) and the rigor that the investigator can build flexibly, creatively, or even artistically into the process of systematic observation-using whatever methodological tools, existing or new, that fit the situation. If this is true, research-based systematic inquiry is unlikely to be the inevitable cause of the gulf that divides professional education and real-world problem solving. A more likely cause is what Bartlett (1932) called the assumption of simplification by isolation: In order to