Brown Bag Lecture

Toward a Knowledge Web for Collaborative Learning in Secondary Teacher Education

Presented by Sharon Derry

April 27, 1999 12:00 - 1:00pm
Room 253 Educational Sciences Building

The Secondary Teacher Education Project (STEP), part of the National Institute for Science Education, is developing and evaluating a state-of-the-art technology-based model for better educating future secondary teachers in cognitive-instructional science. STEP will also educate those teachers in the application of the model in designing technology-based learning environments that promote scientific literacy. The project includes developing a major World Wide Web resource to support collaborative, project, and case-based learning within secondary teacher education. The STEP model will be implemented and tested in Year 2000 within the University of Wisconsin-Madison Secondary Teacher Education Program. In her Brown Bag presentation, Derry will describe progress on STEP and the program of research that has evolved to support it.

Sharon J. Derry, professor of educational psychology at UW-Madison, researches the application of cognitive science theories to problems in education and training. Her expertise includes cognitive-theoretical approaches to the study of human problem solving, including collaborative problem solving. Derry is leading the Secondary Teacher Education Project Team in an effort to analyze cross-disciplinary communication among members of target working teams within the Institute. The purpose of these studies is to understand the nature and development of knowledge, problem solving, and group cognition within interdisciplinary teams.