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Prepared by
Developmental Testing Service, LLC
for
Kurt W. Fischer, Ph.D., Charles Warland Bigelow Professor, Director of Mind, Brain, and Education, Harvard Graduate School of Education.
July 24, 2006
Overview
Complexity analysis of MBE essays
Content analysis of MBE essays
An account of conceptual change on two MBE themes
Discussion
This project was guided by two primary objectives. We were asked to:
To achieve the above objectives, we analyzed the developmental (complexity) levels and conceptual content of 46 students’ performances on two essays that were part of their regular MBE coursework. Although both essays required respondents to employ biological, cognitive, and educational perspectives (the MBE perspectives), essay 1 asked students to make sense of a non-standard student profile, whereas essay 2 asked students to critique a theoretical statement concerning neural-networks and human learning processes. As a result of this difference in focus, there was very little common content across the two essays. The dissimilarity of the essays did not pose any problems for the complexity analysis itself, but they did pose important problems for our analyses of conceptual and structural growth.
Despite the disappointing prospects regarding pre-post comparisons, both essays were rich with content and yielded interesting findings. First, many students demonstrated developmental progress; second, we were able to describe developmental sequences for the 6 major themes identified in the essays; and third, the 4 pre-post comparisons we were able to make reveal interesting patterns of concept acquisition and structuring.
We made some progress toward the first of our goals (mentioned above) and considerable progress toward the second.
It is clear that students’ attempts to integrate mind, brain, and education change with development. Arguments and their elements are overly simplified and shallow before the elaborated abstract systems level, when students began to demonstrate an adequately nuanced understanding of some of the important ideas underlying these perspectives. Interestingly, at the elaborated abstract systems level we also begin to see students “summarizing” abstract systems into single words or phrases. Not only does this summarizing (a form of integration) demonstrate a deepening understanding of the relations between the conceptual elements of a system, it makes it possible for students to begin relating systems to one another by reducing the number of individual elements that must be coordinated. These relations between systems take the form of systems subsuming systems at the transition to single principles, then finally, at unelaborated single principles, they take the form of co-ordinations between systems.
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