1. Meaningful Learning in Vocational Education
David Jonassen

3. Goal: Educate Vocational Students
Electricians
Auto mechanics
Accounting

4. Educational Goals To perform procedures in the correct way
 To use procedures in different real-world contexts
To understand and explain why they are performing procedures
Make decisions, solve problems

5. Challenges of Vocational Students
Under-motivated
Concrete thinkers (Piaget - concrete operational)
Do not like theories
Not skilled at abstract thinking

6. So, how do we help vocational students make sense?
Embed instruction in cases (situations in which ideas are applied)
Cases represent experiences
Cases are focus of learning.
Cases based on practice (what people do) vs. theory (formal descriptions)

7. Cases as Stories Cases related as stories
Stories are most natural form of sense making: workers rely on stories for negotiating and problem solving
Humans have innate ability to organize and represent their experiences in the form of stories.
Stories can function as a substitute for direct experience

8. Functions of Cases

9. Cases as Examples
Prototype which others can use to understand a topic better
Animals: bears, lions, tigers

10. Cases as Analogies

11. Case Studies Ex post facto analysis of story
A teacher was instructing 24 students in an introductory physics course during the summer. She was using a version of cooperative learning where students worked in small groups throughout the term. She gave daily quizzes, first individually and then in groups. The professor had a habit of leaving the classroom during the quizzes. All went well until the last day of class when she heard from one of her best students that cheating had occurred during the quizzes. When she gave out peer evaluation forms for the students to rank their teammates, she gained additional information. Two Asian students in adjoining groups had been cheating. Six separate students wrote about how the two friends had cheated and that they had been told to stop by their teammates but to no avail. There were no more class periods left, only the final exam. What should the teacher do?

12. Cases as Problems to Solve

13. Cases as Remindings
Case-based Reasoning

14. Student Produced Cases
Documentaries
interviews

15. Cases Applied to Vocational Education

16. Program
10:30 – 11:00 Organizing Structural Knowledge with Concept Maps
11:30- 12:00 Analogies
12:00 – 13:00 Questions and Ask Systems
14:00 – 15:00 Building Simulations in SimQuest
15:00 – 15:45 How do we assess meaningful learning?