What We Don’t Know
Knowledge gaps in educational research are problematic for all educational settings and instructional strategies within any subject domain from Pre-K to PhD. In blunt terms, our survey of the research literature revealed 10 gaps in our understanding of how face-to-face, blended, and completely online educational environments can shape both individual learning outcomes as well as likelihood an individual will act on what has been learned—including instantiated misconceptions. These gaps are critical for all education, but especially salient in cases of healthcare education designed to help individuals make decisions about their health issues and help families in which one or more members has a serious health issue.
The second underdeveloped research area—creation of evidence-based, inclusive, adaptive education across all cognitive development stages—covers a broad domain. In 1997, Tashiro and colleagues posed a complex question: “what really works” in education, for whom, at what time, under what conditions, with what outcomes that minimize development of misconceptions, and with what levels of knowledge transfer (accurate or with misconceptions) into daily life. While parts of this complex question have been answered other parts have not. We discovered that knowledge gaps confound our understanding of “what really works.”
Based on earlier work, we simplify the 10 knowledge gaps. gaps as follows:
1. We seldom have evidence about how an educational experience impacts disposition to learn;
2. Levels of realism and relevance in educational environments and instructional practices (including educational materials) can impact many facets of learning and acting on learning—but we don’t know enough about this area;
3. Thresholds of learning experiences have always been difficult to assess and we still do not know enough about how specific educational experiences lead to measurable learning outcomes;
4. Though improvements are emerging, we believe there is still much to understand about how to assess authentic learning outcomes;
5. A great deal more work needs to be completed in the area of an individual’s cognitive processing during learning, knowledge retention, and knowledge transferability;
6. Even when we can assess learning outcomes we still know little about a learner’s disposition to act on what has been learned;
7. We know very little about factors shaping knowledge transfer;
8. For practical application in design of educational methods and materials, we have underdeveloped knowledge about how learning outcomes and skills development occur during cognitive processing that results in learning;
9. A critical gap is our ignorance of how misconceptions develop, both during learning and subsequent transfer of knowledge retained;
10. In general, educators have an incomplete understanding of how learning is instantiated and retained during engagements within educator-learner and learner-learner social networks and learning management system discussion groups.
Though many advances continue to emerge in educational theory and praxis, Tashiro’s research team does not see evidence that the above 10 gaps have been bridged. Our approach to the knowledge gaps problem has been to redesign educational technologies by envisioning ways and means to bridge such gaps with a focus on the complexity involved during designing, building, and evaluating evidence-based, inclusive, adaptive educational environments, including face-to-face, blended, and totally on line models to figure out what really works for each cognitive stage of learners from pre-K through PhD and into continuing education for life-long learning.