Asian researchers who desire to bring about a significant impact on education will face a great barrier to resistance: a considerable part of formal education in Asia remains “examination-driven”. Across Asia, educational practice is largely governed by the short-term goal: obtaining high scores on public examinations. This leads to an over-emphasis on cognitive outcomes, resulting in some severe drawbacks: learning and teaching are distorted; many students do not enjoy learning; it is difficult for students to develop 21st century competencies.
The 21st Century, however, marks an era of exponential change. Our world demands from its citizens a lifetime of creative and critical thinking, perpetually delivering innovations, productivity and new values to thrust social and economic development. Have our societies, schools and families found the right ways to prepare the young generation for the 21st century?
IDC Theory is a macro-level theory to guide design and research, intending to impart a broad and lasting impact on educational practices that will lead to a form of quality education in the twenty-first century. The theory hypothesizes that, with the support of technology, driven by interest, our students can be engaged in creation of knowledge or things, and, by repeating this process in their daily learning activities, their learning habits are being developed, our future generations will become lifelong interest-driven creators. In short, IDC theory suggests how to nurture our young learners as lifelong interest-driven creators by engaging them to create with strong interests habitually.
In IDC theory, the three concepts──interest, creation, habit──are regarded as “anchored concepts”, with which designers can begin a design while the detailed parts or components of these concepts are revealed and dealt with progressively in the design process. For each anchored concept, a loop illustrates its components in a circulated process. These three loops are interconnected in a variety of ways when designing learning activities.
The interest loop consists of three components, triggering interest, immersing interest, and extending interest (Figure 1). “Triggering interest” concerns designing a pre-activity that induces interest in the forthcoming learning activity. Because curiosity, mainly evoked in humans by gaps in knowledge, is a desire to know, arousing curiosity is perhaps the general design strategy for triggering interest. “Immersing interest” pertains to designing learning activities that engage the full attention of students. The main design strategy related to this component is enabling learners to be immersed in the learning activity. Thus, the learners will fully enjoy tackling the task at hand while devote more attention to stretch their skills to confronting challenges arisen, resulting in personal development and growth as well as feelings of competency and efficacy. “Extending interest” relates to designing a post-activity to extend student interest in the domain after immersion in the learning activity. It predisposes students to reengage in similar activities when the opportunity arises for deepening or broadening their knowledge or skills about the subject in the future.
The 21st Century, however, marks an era of exponential change. Our world demands from its citizens a lifetime of creative and critical thinking, perpetually delivering innovations, productivity and new values to thrust social and economic development. Have our societies, schools and families found the right ways to prepare the young generation for the 21st century?
IDC Theory is a macro-level theory to guide design and research, intending to impart a broad and lasting impact on educational practices that will lead to a form of quality education in the twenty-first century. The theory hypothesizes that, with the support of technology, driven by interest, our students can be engaged in creation of knowledge or things, and, by repeating this process in their daily learning activities, their learning habits are being developed, our future generations will become lifelong interest-driven creators. In short, IDC theory suggests how to nurture our young learners as lifelong interest-driven creators by engaging them to create with strong interests habitually.
In IDC theory, the three concepts──interest, creation, habit──are regarded as “anchored concepts”, with which designers can begin a design while the detailed parts or components of these concepts are revealed and dealt with progressively in the design process. For each anchored concept, a loop illustrates its components in a circulated process. These three loops are interconnected in a variety of ways when designing learning activities.
The interest loop consists of three components, triggering interest, immersing interest, and extending interest (Figure 1). “Triggering interest” concerns designing a pre-activity that induces interest in the forthcoming learning activity. Because curiosity, mainly evoked in humans by gaps in knowledge, is a desire to know, arousing curiosity is perhaps the general design strategy for triggering interest. “Immersing interest” pertains to designing learning activities that engage the full attention of students. The main design strategy related to this component is enabling learners to be immersed in the learning activity. Thus, the learners will fully enjoy tackling the task at hand while devote more attention to stretch their skills to confronting challenges arisen, resulting in personal development and growth as well as feelings of competency and efficacy. “Extending interest” relates to designing a post-activity to extend student interest in the domain after immersion in the learning activity. It predisposes students to reengage in similar activities when the opportunity arises for deepening or broadening their knowledge or skills about the subject in the future.
Figure 1: The Interest Loop
For the creation loop, we view that learning is creating, and creating is learning. Creation or creativity is not mysterious capability, limited to a small group of people who are labeled as geniuses. Indeed, in the long history of human development, humans themselves are natural and genuine creators──observing how other people do things and then mimicking themselves; using tools and creating tools; communicating with each other via gestures (initially in the ancient times), then via oral language, then via written language, and, now, via digital media. Given this view of learning, “creation” consists of three components──imitating (observing others, adopting examples, or absorbing information through any means to mimic or emulate somebody or something), combining (synthesizing the thought or ideas of others and the self’s own to form something different or new), and staging (displaying products, presenting new thoughts, or demonstrating achieved outcomes to others) ──forming the creation loop (Figure 2).
Figure 2: The Creation Loop
Habit loop is needed because learning driven by interest with process mimicking in the creation process will produce no lasting effect on students unless it is repeated regularly in daily learning activities. To exert a long-term impact on student learning, a natural way is to cultivate creation with interest as a habit, desirably a lifelong habit. “Habit”, the third anchored concept of IDC theory, speaks of nurturing habits of creation. If students learn with interest incessantly and habitually (as when following a school timetable that regulates daily routines), and their learning process emulates the creation process, then students will become creators, lifelong IDCs. The habit concept consists of two components: routine (repetitive pattern of activities) and triggering environment (arrangement of place, time, people, or incidents), forming the habit loop (Figure 3).
Figure 3: The Habit Loop
With IDC theory underlying the design of the learning process, with proper support of technology in the 21st Century, we hypothesize that most students will become lifelong learners, enjoying and gaining a sense of achievement throughout their life. Moreover, they will excel in cognitive performance, exceeding the standards in public examinations. Thus, if we can validate this hypothesis by designing compelling cases that embody the IDC theory, the disadvantages of examination-driven education will be lessened and school education will undergo fundamental transformation. At the least, a more favorable balance between examination-driven education and “quality education” in Asia will emerge.