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Situated Cognition - A Reviewer Definition Situated cognition is the assumption that thinking is located (situated) in physical and social contexts, not within an individual’s mind (Santrock, 2006). This concept therefore expands the whole idea of what thinking is all about by merging and encapsulating it with the context without which a specific way of thinking or cognition could not have happened. Situated cognition is a vital proposition for a social constructivist approach which view learners as authors or architects of their own knowledge. Like authors and architects, learners need a context of praxis that inspires, interacts (negotiates meaning) and provides appurtenances (tools) and especially the immersive ambiance for relevant cognition to eventuate. We could then say with Rowe and Wertsch (2004) that situated cognition conveys the idea that knowledge is embedded in and connected to the context in which the knowledge was developed. If this is so, it makes sense to create learning situations that are as close to the real-world circumstances as possible (Santrock, 2006) since the experiences in social contexts provide an important mechanism for the development of students’ thinking. An implication of this is that learning has not only to be seen as something to be flexibly structured but also as something to be situated. Thus is had situated learning. Situated cognition is a theory of instruction that suggests learning is naturally tied to authentic activity, context, and culture. The three (activity, context and culture) are interdependent, learning must involve all three. Appropriate use of tools is not only based on culture but also on the activities where the concept was developed. Activities are authentic if these are coherent, meaningful and purposeful based on the culture of an organization/institution/group or a social structure. Hence, authentic activity/ies are the ordinary practices of a culture. These practices of a group or a culture are picked-up, imitated and gradually practiced also of the members of the same culture. (Brown, Collins, & Duguid, 1989) The sociological view of learning is a critical element of situated cognition (Lave & Wenger, 1991). It denotes the involvement of dynamic learning communities consisting of not only teachers and students but also experts from schools, the business, local and virtual communities. Moreover, these learning communities assume varying roles at different times to cater to the needs of the learners. One of the ways to cater to the needs of learners, is to encourage members of learning communities to create authentic networking activities, which will enhance collaborative actions through sharing of information, ideas, resources and services among individuals and groups in support of common learning interest. Through these networking activities, members of the learning communities will be able to broaden their learning horizon due to the infuse of knowledge from among them (Armedilla, 2001). Situated cognition posits that knowing and doing are inseparable entities, in which knowledge is situated in an activity. It entails principles such as knowledge needs to be presented in an authentic context and learning requires social interaction and collaboration. (Brown, Collins & Duguid, 1989) With these principles, learning becomes authentic not just subjective or individually but rather “intersubjectively” since the learner is engaged with interaction with other subjects. Learning becomes communitarian in a sense since there is participation or involvement of individuals in a given instance or activity such as our wiki activity for example.

Historical Background

While situated cognition gained recognition in the field of educational psychology  in the late twentieth century Brown, Collins, & Duguid, 1989), it shares many principles with older fields such as critical theory, (Frankfurt School, 1930; Freire, 1968) anthropology   (Jean Lave  & Wenger, 1991), philosophy (Martin Heidegger, 1968), critical discourse analysis  (Fairclough, 1989), and sociolinguistics  theories (Bhaktin, 1981) that rejected the notion of truly objective knowledge and the principles of Kantian empiricism.

Situated cognition draws a variety of perspectives, from an anthropological study of human behavior within communities of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991) to the ecological psychology of the perception-action cycle (J. J. Gibson, 1986) and intentional dynamics (Shaw, Kadar, Sim & Reppenger, 1992), and even research on robotics with work on autonomous agents at NASA and elsewhere (e.g., work by W. J. Clancey). Early attempts to define situated cognition focused on contrasting the emerging theory with information processing theories dominant in cognitive psychology (Bredo, 1994).

Recent perspectives of situated cognition have focused on and draw from the concept of identity formation (Lave & Wenger, 1991) as people negotiate meaning (Brown & Duguid, 2000; Clancey, 1994) through interactions within communities of practice. Situated cognition perspectives have been adopted in education (Brown, Collins, & Duguid, 1989), instructional design (Young, 2004), online communities and artificial intelligence (see Brooks, Clancey). Grounded Cognition, concerned with the role of simulations and embodiment in cognition, encompasses Cognitive Linguistics, Situated Action, Simulation and Social Simulation theories. Research has contributed to the understanding of embodied language, memory, and the representation of knowledge (Barsalou, 2007).

Recently theorists have recognized a natural affinity between situated cognition, New Literacy Studies and new literacies research (Gee, 2010). This connection is made by understanding that situated cognition maintains that individuals learn through experiences. It could be stated that these experiences, and more importantly the mediators that affect attention during these experiences is affected by the tools, technologies and languages used by a socio-cultural group and the meanings given to these by the collective group. New literacies research examines the context and contingencies that language and tool use by individuals and how this changes as the Internet and other communication technologies affect literacy (Leu et al., 2009). Framework and Principles of Situated Cognition Elements of Situated Learning Content Situated learning emphasizes higher-order thinking processes rather than the acquisition of facts independent of the real lives of the participants (Choi and Hannafin 1995). Content situated in learner's daily experiences becomes the means to engage in reflective thinking (Shor 1996). Retention of content is not the goal of learning. By placing content within the daily transactions of life, the instructor, in dialogue with learners, negotiates the meaning of content, frames it in terms of the issues and concerns within the learners, provides opportunities for learners to cooperate in investigating problem situations, and makes content applicable to the ways in which learners will approach the environment. Application rather than retention becomes the mark of a successful instructional encounter. Context Learning in context refers to building an instructional environment sensitive to the tasks learners must complete to be successful in practice. Context embraces notions of power relationships, politics, competing priorities, the learner's interaction with the values, norms, culture, of a community, organization, or family (Courtney, Speck, and Holtorf 1996). Boud (1994) describes context as drawing out and using experiences as a means of engaging with and intervening in the social, psychological, and material environment in which the learner is situated. Context is not just bringing life events to the classroom but reexperiencing events from multiple perspectives. Learners are in the experience rather than being external to the event (Wilson 1993). Context provides the setting for examining experience; community provides the shaping of the learning. Application rather than retention becomes the mark of a successful instructional encounter. Community of Practice Through community, learners interpret, reflect, and form meaning. Community provides the setting for the social interaction needed to engage in dialogue with others to see various and diverse perspectives on any issue (Brown 1994; Lave and Wenger 1991). Community is the joining of practice with analysis and reflection to share the tacit understandings and to create shared knowledge from the experiences among participants in a learning opportunity. Community also refers to the body of knowledge created by an individual entering an area of inquiry. Jacobson (1996) identifies practitioner knowledge and cultural knowledge as communities in which a new member must learn to perceive, interpret, and communicate experience through interactions with other members of that community. Community provides the opportunity for the interaction; participation provides the learner with the meaning of the experience. Participation Participation describes the interchange of ideas, attempts at problem solving, and active engagement of learners with each other and with the materials of instruction. It is the process of interaction with others that produces and establishes meaning systems among learners. From a situated cognition perspective, learning occurs in a social setting through dialogue with others in the community (Lave 1988). Learning becomes a process of reflecting, interpreting, and negotiating meaning among the participants of a community. Learning is the sharing of the narratives produced by a group of learners. Principles of Situated Cognition

Enculturation Enculturation is the process where the culture that is currently established teaches an individual the accepted norms and values of the culture or society in which the individual lives. The individual can become an accepted member and fulfils the needed functions and roles of the group. Most importantly the individual knows and establishes a context of boundaries and accepted behaviour that dictates what is acceptable and not acceptable within the framework of that society. It teaches the individual their role within society as well as what is accepted behaviour within that society and lifestyle" Enculturation can be conscious or unconscious. There are three ways a person learns a culture. Direct teaching of a culture is done; this is what happens when you don't pay attention, mostly by the parents, when a person is told to do something because it is right and to not do something because it is bad. For example, when children ask for something, they are constantly asked "What do you say?" and the child is expected to remember to say "please." The second conscious way a person learns a culture is to watch others around them and to emulate their behaviour. An example would be using different slang with different cliques in school. Enculturation also happens unconsciously, through events and behaviours that prevail in their culture. All three kinds of culturation happen simultaneously and all the time. Enculturation helps mold a person into an acceptable member of society. Culture influences everything that a person does, whether they are aware of it or not. Enculturation is a life-long process that helps unify people. Even as a culture changes, core beliefs, values, worldviews, and child-rearing practices stay the same. How many times has a parent said "If all your friends jumped off a bridge, would you?" when their child wanted to fit in with the crowd? Both are playing roles in the enculturation. The child wants to be included in the subculture of their peers, and the parent wants to instil individualism in the child, through direct teaching. Not only does one become encultured, but also makes someone else encultured. --Conrad Phillip Kottak (Window on Humanity) Traditional Cognitive vs. Situated Cognition Who controls knowledge? This is one of the many questions between traditional cognition (individual) against situated cognition. What is the main goal of individual theory against social theory of cognition in reference to the learner? The figure above differentiates traditional cognition against situated cognition. In traditional cognition learner could influence the nature of the society or how the society is. It is more individualistic approach. The constructed representation of learner influences the society according to his/her understanding. The society where the learner belongs has no impact on learner’s knowledge repository which raised the questions – • What is the nature of the knowledge that the learner contributes to society? • How this contributed knowledge influence an experienced event? The second question is a challenge between what learner knows in his/her mind against an experienced society/event. How will the learner react in an experienced event that questions the validity of the knowledge contributed against the experience and knowledge of the questioning party. Traditional cognition considers ability of a learner as a function of intelligence that affects the society which is peculiar to individuals. What is intelligence then? Synderman and Rothman (1988) defined intelligence “as mental adaptation to changing environmental stimuli ...sometimes called capacity to change”. With this definition, “which influence which?”. Traditional cognition and situated cognition has argument on one portion of this definition. Can you identify what? Situated cognition on the other hand considers the socio-cognitive milieu’s effect on the learning and knowledge building of the individual. The effect of the society does not only affect the schemata of what was initially known to the learner but also affects the constructive processing of response to a stimulus (See figure 1). In situated cognition, the mental representations of experiences, previous interaction with environment, can be used to increase the efficiency of interpreting and/or experiencing related situations. The previous sentence is indicative that learners create knowledge from relationships within the context of experiences or interaction with society. It is a fact that individual initially acquire learning from traditional method of learning, formal education. However, it is also a fact that learning improves more with interaction from environment. Beverly J. Moore from Auburn University post this question, “Is the aim of learning experience to develop more pragmatic returns or to nurture the abstract and symbolic mind?”. This question can be answered in two ways, on the emphasis of individual or social because it is actually a concern of who controls knowledge. It is an argument that no one will win. The difference between the two is that situated cognition response is more adaptive the environment where the learner is part of while traditional cognition’s response is according to what the learner knows factoring out the culture of the environment.

Pedagogical Implications of Situated Cognition Medical Technology Theoretical Implication As the above examples show, recent research has amply documented the situation specificity and flexibility of many types of social-cognitive processes. Yet in many cases, context sensitivity has been regarded as a kind of noise, as an inessential distraction—even a barrier—to the study of the hypothesized invariant representations considered by many researchers to be the most fundamental causes of social judgment and social behavior. As a result, context sensitivity has often been explained (if at all) with unintegrated theoretical ‘‘add-ons’’—secondary, often paradigm-specific processes that merely moderate the mental processes of fundamental interest. For example, the context sensitivity of stereotypes has often been thought to reflect participants’ intentional shaping of their responses to avoid revealing socially undesirable stereotypic or prejudiced thoughts (Fazio & Olson, 2003). This explanation has recently lost much of its appeal in the face of evidence that (a) even implicitly measured stereotypes, less subject to intentional response biases, are highly context sensitive (Blair, 2002) and that (b) nonsocial concepts, for which social-desirability concerns are not an issue, are also context sensitive (Yeh & Barsalou, 2006). More progress might be made with a theoretical approach that makes interdependence and mutual constraint between person and context a central focus rather than a mere distraction from the inner representations and processes assumed to be of primary interest. In our view, the most promising approach is that of situated cognition (Clark, 1997). This movement as been influential across many areas of psychology and the cognitive and social sciences in general, but it has had relatively little impact within social psychology. Yet, as we have argued (Smith & Semin, 2004), its major themes offer a number of points of contact and similarity with the enduring concerns of social psychology. Situated cognition offers not only a powerful and fundamental critique of the idea that cognition is simply abstract, amodal information processing, but also a number of more positive principles and points of focus. We suggest three broad principles as desiderata for theoretical integration and progress in social-cognition research. First, we urge theorists to avoid the language and metaphor of the ‘‘storage’’ and ‘‘retrieval’’ of representations, which imply that representations are static, inert ‘‘things,’’ and to instead conceptualize representations as states that are constructed online in specific contexts. Human cognitive systems produce situated versions of concepts that have context-specific functions rather than activating the same, context-independent configuration in every situation (Yeh & Barsalou, 2006). Second, researchers should acknowledge that adaptive cognition involves perceptual–motor loops that pass through the environment (Clark, 1997) rather than being mostly implemented by autonomous inner processes. Strong support for this principle comes from recent work placing sensory and motor information at the heart of both conceptual representations in general (Barsalou, 1999) and particular social-cognitive processes like understanding other people (Semin, 2007). For example, the recent discovery of mirror-neuron systems in the brain suggests that we use our bodies—covertly in the form of activity in motor cortex, or overtly in bodily movements—in the process of understanding other people’s actions and emotions. Third, theory should reflect the ways that cognition is socially enabled and distributed through communication (Hutchins, 1995). Communication fundamentally shapes and even institutes cognition, making cognition truly social. Many tasks, such as performing heart surgery or navigating a large ship, supersede the capabilities of an individual and require the collaborative operation of a group that has a shared reality facilitating the coordination of its actions. In such situations, cognition is to be found in collaborative communication rather than in any one single individual’s head. Cognitive processes draw not only on resources in the social environment but also on technical equipment (monitors, readouts, maps, etc.) into which considerable knowledge is downloaded. Tasks such as these involve truly social cognition, extended beyond the individual through environmental scaffolds, both social and nonsocial. The situated-cognition approach may ultimately provide general explanatory principles that can take us beyond the ad hoc explanations often offered for such findings. Situated cognition is not yet a unified theoretical framework by any means, but it is an approach that offers general principles and emphases that cut broadly across many scientific disciplines. We believe that social-psychological findings demonstrating the adaptiveness, context sensitivity, and socially situated nature of social cognition can find satisfying and integrative explanations within such an approach. Critiques of Situated Cognition Critique Anderson, et al, have listed what they see as the four central claims of a situated learning perspective and have argued each is flawed:

Action is grounded in the concrete situation in which it occurs. Objection: It is true that Brazilian street sellers, who correctly calculate the cost of items which they sell in the streets, are unable to answer similar questions at school. But this is a demonstration that skills practiced outside of schools do not generalize to schools, not that arithmetic procedures taught in the classroom cannot be used by shop keepers. Indeed, skills like reading clearly transfer from one context to another.

Knowledge does not transfer between tasks. Objection: The psychological literature contains both success and failures to achieve transfer. Transfer between tasks depends on the amount of practice in the initial domain and the degree of shared cognitive elements. For example, subjects who learned one text editor learned subsequent editors more rapidly, with the number of procedural elements shared by two text editors predicting the amount of transfer.

Training in abstraction is of little use. Objection: This, Anderson, et al, say has been extended into an advocacy for apprenticeship training by those taking a situated perspective. In contrast, Anderson, et al, advocate a combination of abstract instruction and concrete examples. When they introduced real-world-like problems to situate high school algebra, they felt much class time was wasted on such clerical tasks as tabling and graphing, while relatively little time was spent relating algebraic expressions to the real-world situations. [Koedinger, et al, "Intelligent tutoring goes to school in the big city," in Proceedings of the 7th World Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education, AACE, 1995, pp. 421-428.] We wonder whether their observation was due to the kinds of problems used or the teaching.

Instruction must be done in complex, social environments. Objection: Research in psychology shows training is often more effective when nearly independent parts are practiced first, before combining them. In team sports and orchestras, more time is spent on individual practice than group practice, although both are necessary. (Shouldn't the kind of knowledge, whether procedural or conceptual, matter? Learning how to factor and understanding the nature and uses of functions seem quite different.) Anderson, et al, also question the efficacy of cooperative learning when applied without requisite structuring or scripting.

Response From The Situated View The thrust of Greeno's response is, not so much to take issue with the objections of Anderson, et al, as to note that the purported claims are not those of situated cognition. Their critique seems to have missed the point about what adherents of situated cognition are actually studying and claiming -- they present a straw man, or caricature, which they knock down. Whereas the cognitive perspective attempts to explain processes and structures at the level of individuals, the situated perspective focuses on interactive systems and the resulting "trajectories" of individual participation. It borrows research methods and conceptual frameworks from ethnography, discourse analysis, symbolic interactionism, and sociocultural psychology. Greeno sees the significance of studies like that of the Brazilian street sellers who can successfully make change, but do not use the algorithms taught in school, as showing that reasoning is adaptive in ways that are not well explained by current cognitive theory.

Knowledge is not just "in the head," if it is to be found there at all, rather knowledge consists in the ways a person interacts with other people and situations. The situated perspective does not say that group learning will always be productive, regardless of how it is organized, or that individual practice cannot contribute to a person's becoming a more successful participant in social practices. It does call for more varied learning situations. For mathematics, this means more than collective watching and listening, doing exercises individually, and displaying individual knowledge on tests. Students need opportunities to participate actively by formulating and evaluating problems, questions, conjectures, conclusions, arguments, and examples.

>From the situative perspective, successful transfer means improved participation. Whether transfer occurs depends on how the situation is transformed. Whether it is difficult or easy for the learner depends on how the learner was "attuned to the constraints and affordances" in the initial learning activity. For example, when students are given instruction about refraction prior to shooting targets under water, they are more likely to become attuned to the apparent angular disparity of a projectile's trajectory before and after entering the water, and hence, perform better. Greeno also distinguishes between abstraction and generality using an example from mathematics. If students learn correct rules for manipulating symbols without learning that mathematical expressions represent concepts and relationships, what they learn may be abstract, but it is not general (i.e., cannot be widely used).

What is needed, according to Greeno, is an integration of the cognitive and situative research perspectives that, until recently, have developed quite separately.

[Cf. Greeno, "On Claims that Answer the Wrong Questions," Educational Researcher, January/February 1997, pp. 5-17. Anderson, et al's response follows on pp. 18-21.]

Suggested Readings References
 * Problem-based Learning by Ronald Purser, http://online.sfsu.edu/~rpurser/revised/pages/problem.htm
 * Clancey William J., Scientific Antecedents of Situated Cognition, NASA – Ames Research Center and The Florida Institute for Human Machine Cognition, 2006.
 * Jeong-Im & Michael Hannafin, Situated Cognition and learning Environments: Roles, Structures, and Implications for design, http://tecfa.unige.ch/staf/staf-e/pellerin/staf15/situacogn.htm
 * Stein David, Situated Learning in Adult Education, ERIC Digest, http://www.ericdigests.org/1998-3/adult-education.html
 * Funderstanding, About Learning, Content, Theories (Constructivism), http://www.funderstanding.com/content/constructivism
 * Wikipedia, Social Constructivism, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_constructivism
 * Ronald Purser, Problem-based Learning, http://online.sfsu.edu/~rpurser/revised/pages/problem.htm
 * English!Info, Enculturation, http://english.turkcebilgi.com/Enculturation
 * Absolute Astronomy, Situated Cognition, http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/Situated_cognition
 * Mathematical Association of America, A crtique on Situated Cognition, http://www.maa.org/t_and_l/sampler/rs_2add.html
 * Smith Elliot, Situated Social Cognition,Indiana University, Bloomington, and 2Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, http://www.indiana.edu/~smithlab/articles/CDPS.pdf