The Right Kind Of Telling: An Analysis of Feedback and Learning in a Journalism Epistemic Game

The Challenge Of Learning And Assessing 21St-Century Skills

The unprecedented pace of technological change and information production in the 21^st century presents numerous challenges. Meaningful participation at work and in the community increasingly demands interdependent skills in critical thinking, information literacy, complex problem solving, and other competencies. Though long considered important, these abilities are now often termed 21^st century skills. There is growing concern that 20^th-century theories of learning and cognition, which often focused on the acquisition of basic facts and skills, are leaving increasing numbers of young people unprepared for the future (Shaffer et al., 2005; Gee & Shaffer, 2010; Dede, 2007; Silva, 2008; Partnership, 2010).

This study examines a 21^st-century theory of learning and cognition that considers not only the possession of basic knowledge and skills but also the connections among knowledge, skills, values, and the ways that people make decisions and justify actions in the context of complex, real-world problem solving. Epistemic frame theory (EFT) (Shaffer, 2006, 2007) suggests that expertise, such as the kind involved in complex thinking and problem solving, fundamentally involves connections among different forms of knowing (Broudy, 1977), being, and acting, and these connections are informed by the norms and principles of a particular community of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991), a group of people with a common approach to framing, investigating, and solving problems.

For example, EFT suggests that “thinking as a journalist” means more than simply possessing knowledge and skills from the journalism domain. It involves acting as a journalist, understanding what matters to journalists, and understanding journalism content and practices. These skills, values, and understandings are made possible by looking at the world in a particular way—by making decisions and justifying actions as a journalist does. The same is true for other domains, but with a different way of thinking. If a community of practice is a group with a local culture—what Gee (1989) describes as a Discourse, “[a] way of being in the world…forms of life which integrate words, acts, values, beliefs, attitudes and social identities” (p. 6-7)—then the epistemic frame of the community is the grammar of that culture (Shaffer, 2010). In other words, an epistemic frame is a shared perspective that individuals internalize as they become enculturated into a community of practice.

EFT proposes that the characteristics of journalists’ thinking are denoted by specific patterns of connections among the knowledge, skills, values, identity, and ways of making decisions (the epistemic frame elements) that characterize authentic journalism practice. In other words, realistic journalism practice is characterized not by a collection of isolated elements but by a network of them, an epistemic frame, that makes the individual elements meaningful, actionable, and persistent. The associations that a person makes among elements in an epistemic frame can be modeled with epistemic network analysis (ENA) (Nash & Shaffer, 2013; Rupp et al, 2010; Rupp, Sweet, & Choi, 2010; Shaffer, 2014; Shaffer et al, 2009; Shaffer & Gee, 2012) a psychometric tool that can assess evidence from student participation in virtual internships to characterize how they think while solving a complex design problem. ENA creates a network model in which the nodes of the network represent the key components from a domain. The links between these nodes quantify how often a person has made connections between these elements at some point in time. In this way, ENA models the development over time of an individual’s epistemic frame and, in turn, quantifies and assesses their ability to think and work like professionals.