Let me just say first, that I think this set of readings is one of the best that I think we have looked at in this class. The contributors to CL seem to have real answers to some of the most difficult questions that we were asking in the first couple of weeks of the course. They also provide concrete strategies (including technological strategies) for improving educational practice. (The ones I liked best were reciprocal teaching, creating leaning communities, distributed expertise, and getting students to think about how they are thinking)

Yesterday in class Roger brought up the question of what makes Computer Science different than other disciplines, like biology or physics, with respect to its use of theories. One author, arguing against the computational theory of mind in the process, argues that Computer science suffers from an inadequate metaphysics. He argues that there is little consensus in the discipline as to what the objects of computer science are. If you dont know what a program is, how can you judge a good one? Answer: see what works. I think that educational theory/discourse suffers from a similar lack in its foundations, having diverse answers to the questions: what is a learner, what is understanding, what is explanation. Cognitive theorys entrance onto the educational scene brings with it certain answers to these foundational questions. But these answers, I would argue, are fundamentally partial, due to the multiple goals of education. McGilly brings up a few in CLs first chapter; education must serve the business community, the universities, parents, and the government. If cognitive science should, as McGilly hopes it will, serve as the foundation for structural innovation and as the basis for educational reform will education remain education, or will it become practical cog sci? Is it possible to make the foundations for one discipline is the laboratories of another?

What are cognitive theoretical assumptions about learning? Earlier in the course we wanted to dispel the notion that teachers were transmitters of informational content to students. Does Cognitive theory reintroduce this notion in a way that makes it less problematic?

In addition to cognitive theories informing educational practice, at the end of the chapter, McGilly writes that educational practice is similarly informing cognitive theory. Principles garnered from successful practices are going into making a new theory of learning. How could the success of many of the practices in this book be accounted for in terms of other theories? Will cog sci jargon and assumptions turn teachers off to the valuable practices that follow from these theoretical assumptions?

One concern that McGilly brings up is of course of the most difficult: how are these educational strategies going to be implemented in real schools and will they revolutionize education. Will they improve educational practice in public and private schools around the country? After hearing about each innovative private or charter school I hear about, and each individual classroom lesson in CL, one cant help coming away feeling fairly optimistic that the problems of education can be solved, or at least that there are real ways that education can be improved. But this optimism is kept in check by thinking about how many other schools wont be reached by such reform.

The interaction between cognitive science (which as a discipline is so self consciously scientific) is so interesting because it raises the question, to what extent does the success of widespread reform depend on education theorys being organized like a science (with prevailing theories, convergent thinkers, research, etc.)? Should the classroom become a laboratory, and for whom? Am I the only one who thinks it's weird that cognitive theorists are stalking the hallways of middle schools? Can you imagine what elementary school would have been like with a research scientist's station at the back table, near the fish?