Interrogating Learning Over Time: Inquiring Into How We Know What Students Learn and Know

• In Event: Learning as Being/Learning as Identity Making

Abstract

This paper takes up a current intensely debated yet persistent question: “What do students today learn and know from their studies within a class, or course, or even a college education?” Learning over time increasingly interrogated is, surprisingly, seldom researched. Yet as James Pellegrino of the National Research Council argues, knowing what people learn over time is especially critical “… to determining what people know…and how they are able to use that knowledge...” (Pellegrino, 2001, 3). This project explores making students’ learning and knowledge visible—over a class, a course, or a several years’ program. The author presents case studies of learning in two time settings and examines implications for identifying what students know and their uses of this knowledge.

Author

• Nona M. Lyons, University College Cork