VITAL Symposium at 2009 SRCD Biennial Meeting

Partners in our VITAL project will be presenting at the 2009 biennial meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD), in Denver, CO, April 2-4.

We are scheduled to present on Friday, April 3, 10:20 AM - 12:00 PM, in Hyatt Capitol 4 at the Hyatt Regency Denver. The title of our paper symposium is "A Video-Based Pedagogy for Improving College Students' Understanding of Development and Education." The symposium will be chaired by Prof. Herbert P. Ginsburg of Teachers College, Columbia University and Carol Copple of the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC). There will be four papers:

1. Observation as Contexts for Student Interpretation and Critical Thinking (Prof. Lori Custodero and Prof. Ann Cami, Teachers College, Columbia University)
2. Teaching Educational Psychology With Video Case Studies: Going Beyond Psychological Theories in Context-Specific Case Analyses (Prof. Noriyuki Inoue, University of San Diego)
3. Learning to Enter the Child's Mind: A Web-Based Video Analysis Lesson in Early Childhood Mathematics Education (Prof. Joon Sun Lee, Hunter College, CUNY)
4. Video-Based Exercises for Developing Early Childhood Educators' Use of Evidence and Interpretation (Michael Preston, Columbia Center for New Media Teaching and Learning)

Abstract: This symposium offers a cross-disciplinary, cross-university look at the teaching of development using a video-based pedagogy employed in the classroom along with a new Web-based video analysis system. Our work is a research and development project that allows us to study college student learning and how to improve the teaching of development. Our fields include early childhood mathematics, musical development, personality development, and educational psychology, and it yields several kinds of data as well as various insights from practice. We will discuss the technology involved as a model that can facilitate a pedagogy that can also be implemented in other ways.

Our focus is on using video to improve observation and interpretation as essential and complementary skills for understanding children. We believe it is possible to hone these skills through frequent, controlled opportunities to observe and interpret children's behavior in order to substantiate theories about how children think and learn. Paper 1 focuses on observation as the recognition of important moments and perceiving their "distinctive features" (Gibson, 1969). Papers 2 and 3 focus on aspects of interpretation as offering plausible explanations for observed phenomena, and whether students can develop a theoretical orientation similar to their instructor's (Strauss & Shilony, 1994). Paper 4 illustrates an empirical approach to the above by showing the development of students' argumentation skills to evaluate personal theories against evidence (Kuhn, 1999). Our discussant, an expert on early childhood education policy and research, will lead a conversation on the use of video to teach development.