Cognitive apprenticeship and its application to the teaching of Smalltalk in a multimedia interactive learning environment

With the rise of the situated cognition paradigm in cognitive science, cognitive apprenticeship has become increasingly prominent as a model of instruction. This paper critically reviews traditional approaches to learning and education to motivate the need for fresh ways of thinking about these topics. Cognitive apprenticeship as an approach to improving learning and education is described. We present an overview of SMALLTALKER, a learning environment for Smalltalk programming, and illustrate how the instructional methods of cognitive apprenticeship have been applied in developing that system. The paper concludes with a discussion of issues related to system development effort, evaluation, perceived limitations, and plans for related work.