In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

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  • Developing Student Expertise and Community: Lessons from How People Learn
  • G. Case Willoughby III (bio)
Anthony J. Petrosino, Taylor Martin, and Vanessa Svihla (Eds.). Developing Student Expertise and Community: Lessons from How People Learn. New Directions for Teaching and Learning, No. 108. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2007. 128 pp. Paper: $29.00. ISBN: 978-0-7879-9574-4.

This offering by Jossey-Bass represents a welcome contribution to the literature by offering theory, examples, and sound research on student learning in context. The context, however, is exclusively engineering despite the curious omission of engineering from the title. The educational framework "How People Learn" (HPL), created by Bransford, Brown, and Cocking (1999) is applicable to other disciplines, but the monograph does not stray outside of engineering.

Regardless, the educator in other disciplines can still learn useful concepts and transfer them to his or her specialty. The educational researcher will look to this work as an important step on a journey of documenting the effectiveness of HPL that should be continued into other areas of study.

The work in this monograph occurred under the auspices of the Vanderbilt-Northwestern-Texas-Harvard/MIT Engineering Research Center (VaNTH-ERC) funded by the National Science Foundation. HPL serves as the primary theoretical base contending that teaching should be knowledge-centered, learner-centered, assessment-centered, and community-centered. The "Legacy Cycle," a flexible curricular design structure founded upon HPL principles, is discussed in several chapters. As a problem-based format, it consists of a cycle that moves from challenge, to collaborative brainstorming, to researching, testing, and presenting findings. The stages are formally called: (a) present challenge statement, (b) generate ideas, (c) multiple perspectives, (d) research and revise, (e) test your mettle, and (f) go public.

Because each chapter describes a unique study or concept, I briefly summarize them below. With multiple authors for most chapters, the limitations of this review prevents including the names of every contributor.

The first chapter, "The Emergence of a Community of Practice in Engineering Education," describes collaborative efforts by engineering domain experts (DE) and learning scientists (LS). In part, the chapter documents a cross-cultural encounter between the two groups. As they move from creating discrete, content-bound lessons, applying the legacy cycle to entire courses, the DEs become increasing proficient in learning theory and the LSs have increasing access to engineering content. This qualitative chapter concludes with conditions for success in such collaborations.

Chapter 2, "Desegregated Learning: An Innovative Framework for Programs of Study," offers six areas in which to desegregate learning: course content (semester-long increments as artificial); educational programs (limitations of the lack of interdisciplinary work); educational settings (failure to cross out of classrooms into the broader world); student involvement (lack of connections between lower- and upper-division students); faculty involvement (lack of involvement in teaching and learning); and student-faculty demographics (race, gender, geographic, and others). Following with an ambitious plan for desegregated learning in one department at the University of Texas Pan-American, the chapter illuminates its theoretical ambitions with cutting-edge examples. No evaluation of the effectiveness is included, but it merits additional research.

The impressive third chapter, "The Development of Adaptive Expertise in Biotransport," contends that content knowledge includes adaptive expertise, defined as the ability to utilize knowledge effectively to solve problems in various contexts. The researchers posit and successfully test a continuous developmental model for adaptive expertise, in which the promotion of innovation and knowledge are thought to be key elements.

"Establishing Experiences to Develop a Wisdom of Professional Practice," Chapter 4, studies ways to develop social competencies and ethical thinking in engineering curricula. The study contrasts control and experimental groups on a course module designed to teach these competencies. The experimental design includes a video reenactment of the decision-making that resulted in the ill-fated launch of Challenger space shuttle. The results for the experimental group showed a statistically significant positive impact on the responses of first-year students, although not for seniors.

Chapter 5 tackles the issue of mastering technical writing in "Teaching Writing in a Laboratory-Based Engineering Course with a 'How People Learn' Framework." The researchers contrast the development of writing skills of advanced undergraduate and...

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