More than 50 higher education professionals joined me during the ACBSP Excellence in Teaching Track for a presentation on the impact that synchronous activities can have on students in online classrooms. The presentation explored literature on the tradeoffs students face for the convenience of online learning and opportunities that live interaction might offer to students in online environments. We also reviewed the results of a project to test the impact of live sessions on the psychological factors that serve as predictors of student success in otherwise asynchronous environments. The results found significant improvement in student learning outcomes and faculty satisfaction in comparison to control groups. The following are a link to the presentation slides and a summary of the research.
Gisela Labouvie-Vief (1980) extended Jean Piaget’s cognitive-development theory into adulthood by offering a theory of pragmatic thought and cognitive-emotional complexity that sees adult development as an active process of constructing successively more adaptive levels of activity. As a neo-Piagetian theory, Goldhaber (2000) classified Labouvie-Vief's theory of programmatic thought and cognitive-emotional under an organismic lens. Because Labouvie-Vief demonstrated how contextual factors can influence cognitive development, Merriam (2007) classified the theory as contextualist. Seemingly then, Labouvie-Vief's theory belongs under a contextualist-organismic lens.
Click here for more information about Gisela Labouvie-Vief's Integrating Emotions and Cognition Throughout the LIfespan >