Dewey’s Yardstick

Abstract

Although experience and context are omnibus terms, the relationship between them provides some guidance on how each can be used to inform an understanding of the other. This article presents contextualization, or the degree to which content and context are connected through experience, as a measurable outcome of learning, education, or situated cognition. Contextualization is proposed here as a construct that (a) indicates curricular intention, cognitive process, and learning outcomes; (b) is a measurable variable that can be correlated to measures of learning; (c) is broadly applicable and thus represents a comparison variable across diverse scenarios; and (d) represents an important link between existing theory and practice. A contextualization spectrum framework is proposed to align curricular intentions for student experience to the resulting disposition of knowledge, as connected through contextualization.