The Major Assignment: A Paper

The Major Assignment: A Paper

Your major assignment for this course is to produce a scholarly paper on an issue relevant to learning theory. My hope is that this will be an interesting and engaging piece of writing that can be developed into a conference paper or a journal article and that will be relevant to your emerging identity in the field. It should be a “new” contribution to knowledge. For the paper, you might select a controversial issue that was debated in the past or is currently being debated. Topics might be, for example, theories undergirding different positions in the “math wars,” the issue of “developmentally appropriate practice” in early childhood education, or competing learning theories in ESL.

Instead of a paper focused on a controversial issue, you might examine the impact or the potential of a particular theory on scholarship or teaching of a particular type. For instance, you could examine the notion of distributed cognition as it is used in online instruction. You could even consider the conflicting learning theories supporting, for instance, classroom discussions. You might also look at the influence of “indigenous foreigners” (term from T. Popkewitz) in a particular field of inquiry.