Situated cognition describes a perspective of human cognition that asserts learning happens as human beings interact with the living world. Also referred to as the "situativity theory of cognition" (Greeno, 1998), it is a theory of thinking as mainly "on the fly" and "in the moment," rather than off line and mainly in our heads. It is a context and situation-bound theory of cognition—a theory that claims thinking is complex, radical, individual, yet inextricably bound to, and motivated by, the conviviality social human interaction affords.

Its origins can be seen in the field of educational psychology beginning in the 1990s when research began to demonstrate qualitatively and empirically how 'rule bound' approaches to understanding and explicating thinking (i.e. schema theories) were inadequate at describing the complex ways human learning takes place in the 'real world.' The situativity theory of cognition suggested that learning was "situated" and "on the fly" (e.g., Brown, Collins, & Duguid, 1989; Lave & Wenger, 1991; Greeno, 1998) that is, it always takes place in a specific context, with learners (agents) possessing specific intentions, and in response to specific affordances of the learning environment (Gibson 1979/1986). Others have argued that both cognitive and situative perspective have value (Anderson, Greeno, Reder, & Simon 2000). Overall, the goal of research on situated cognition is to investigate learning (and learners) in situ, for example Yucatec midwives in training (Lave & Wenger, 1991), or children solving complex math and science problems (e.g., Lave, 1988; The Cognition and Technology Group at Vanderbilt, 1990; Roth, 1996).

Definitions

Scholars and researchers from many fields e.g. anthropology, psychology, and education have described and defined situated cognition variously, for example:

• "Situations might be said to co-produce knowledge through activity. Learning and cognition, it is now possible to argue, are fundamentally situated" (Brown et al., 1989, p.32).
• "Activities, tasks, functions, and understandings do not exist in isolation; they are part of broader systems of relations in which they have meaning. These systems of relations arise out of and are reproduced and developed within social communities, which are in part systems of relations among persons. Learning thus implies becoming a different person with respect to the possibilities enabled by these systems of relations" (Lave & Wenger, 1991, p. 53).
• "All action is embodied because perception and action arise together automatically: Learning is inherently 'situated' because every new activation is part of an ongoing perception-action coordination. Situated activity is not a kind of action, but the nature of animal interaction at all times, in contrast with most machines we know. This is not merely a claim that context is important, but what constitutes the context, how you categorize the world arises together with processes that are coordinating physical activity" (Clancey, 1993, p.95).
• "Rather than a person being 'in' an environment, the activities of person and environment are viewed as parts of a mutual-constructed whole. Put simply, the inside/outside relationship between person and environment is replaced by a part/whole relationship" (Bredo, 1994, p28).
• "Thinking is situated in physical and social contexts. Cognition, including thinking, knowing, and learning, can be considered as a relation involving an agent in a situation, rather than as an activity in an individual's mind" (Greeno, 1989, p.135).
• "'Cognition' observed in everyday practice is distributed--stretched over, not divided among--mind, body, activity and culturally organized settings (which include other actors)" (Lave, 1988, p. 1).
• "Simply put, situated cognition is cognition that takes place in the context of task-relevant inputs and outputs. That is, while a cognitive process is being carried out, perceptual information continues to come in that affects processing, and motor activity is executed that affects the environment in task-relevant ways" (Wilson, 2002, p.626).
• "Situated cognition theory, by contrast, shifts the focus from the individual to the sociocultural setting and the activities of the people within that setting. Knowledge accrues through the live practice of the people in a society" (Discroll, 2004, p.158)

Situativity contrasted with schema and information processing approaches

Key Phenomena	Situated Cognition	Schema, info. processing)
Intelligence	Intelligence can be defined as an increasingly sophisticated interaction with the world. This sophisticated behavior, that we call intelligence, is an emergent property of an interaction. The interaction gets smarter, more sophisticated, and more differentiated, as the agent and environment potentially evolve over time (Gibson 1979/1986; Greeno, 1994; Young Kulikowich, & Barab, 1997).	Jeanne Ormrod (2004) highlighted the controversy among psychologists on the issue of intelligence when she stated, "some have an entity view: They believe that intelligence is a 'thing' that is fairly permanent and unchangeable. Others have an incremental view: They believe that intelligence can and does improve with effort and practice" (Dweck & Leggett, 1988; Weiner, 1994).
Motivation	Motivation is described in terms of intentional dynamics. "Intentions denote a mismatch between the presence of a goal-state attractor (a possible final condition) and the actual state of the environment (the initial condition)...As the goal-states are created or annihilated, the intersection set will shift" (Kugler, Shaw, Vicente & Kinsella-Shaw, 1991, p.425). The agent's immediate or future goals influence his intentions, and serve as a guide in his interaction with the world. "Successful goal-directed behavior is possible whenever goal-specific information, made available by the environment, can be matched by the control of action exercised by the organism. This dual information/control field that couples the organism and environment provides the lawful basis for intentional dynamics" (Kugler et al., 1991, p.427).	"Most contemporary [cognitive] theorists describe human motivation as being a function of human cognition. For example, people set specific goals toward which they strive. They form expectations regarding likelihood of success in different activities. They construct interpretations of why certain consequences come their way, and they make predictions about the future consequences of their behavior" (Ormrod, 2004, p.440)
Memory	Situated Cognition understands memory as an interaction with the world (perception). The agent can represent things in his head and problem-solve, but he does so in a situation that is meaningfully bounded, and that brings himself towards a specified goal (intention). Perception and action are co-determined by the effectivities and affordances, which act 'in the moment' together (Gibson 1979/1986; Greeno, 1994; Young Kulikowich, & Barab, 1997). Therefore, the agent directly perceives and interacts with the environment, determining what affordances can be picked up, based on his effectivities.	"Memory is related to the ability to recall information that has previously been learned. In some instances, the word memory is used to refer to the process of retaining information for a period of time. In other instances, it is used to refer to a particular 'location' where learned information is kept (e.g. working memory and long-term memory)" (Ormrod, 2004, p.186).
Problem Solving & Transfer	Problems are ill-defined, context bound, and real-world. The relationship between the solver and the environment affords multiple and various solutions. Transfer is an act of creation; it is an "advantageous effect of learning in one situation upon learning in a later situation" (Greeno, 2006, p. 545).	Problems are typically discrete and general. Solutions are figured right or wrong. Success is defined by following an orderly process to produce and then re-produce a solution(s) across various domains.
How People Learn	Learning is a process of increasing differentiation, a tuning at attention to finer and finer distinctions (E.J. Gibson, 2000). John Dewey (1938) described education as an essentially "social process" through which a mature individual "surveys the capacities and needs" of learners and creates experiences for them to further develop. Quality of education (learning) is realized in the, "...degree in which individuals form a community group" (Dewey, 1938, p. 58). Contemporary definitions share similar beliefs about the social construction of learning for example, Driscoll (2004), "Fundamental to situated cognition theory is the assumption that learning involves social participation..." (p. 170). And, "...learning is an integral part of generative social practice in the lived-in world" (Lave & Wenger, 1991, p. 35).	Learning is a process of accumulating facts and an increasingly sophisticated network of connections (semantic net) among those facts. "Processes occurring during the presentation of the learning material are known as 'encoding'. Learning occurs in three stages: encoding, storage, and retrieval which, "...involves recovering or extracting stored information from the memory system" (Eysenck & Keane, 2005, p. 189).
Implications for Classroom Teaching	In the classroom (or other formal learning environments) the application of a situated learning "...emphasizes aspects of problem spaces that emerge in activity, the interactive construction of understanding, and people's engagement in activities, including their contributions to group functions and their development of individual identities" (Greeno, 1998, p. 14). As such, the approach includes attendance to learners' sociocultural experience, prior experience, and the embodiment of cognitive activity. Examples include anchored instruction using richly complex problems to situate and enliven students' learning across multiple content areas (e.g., Cognition and Technology Group at Vanderbilt, 1990); knowledge building which allows students to build extensive webs of understanding or cognitive maps alone or in collaborative groups (Beretimer & Scardamalia, 2003); and cognitive apprenticeship through which expert learners aka teachers (or more advanced peers) take thinking "outside the head" by speaking aloud strategies they use to tackle the task at hand (e.g. Reciprocal Teaching; Collins, Brown, and Newman, 1989).	Robert Gagne's Nine Events of Instruction is a model which defines instruction as, "A deliberately arranged set of external events designed to support internal learning processes" (Gagne, Wager, Golas, & Keller, 2005, p. 10). Learning is described as "staged based information processing" (Gagne et al, 2005, p.7). Other views of learning, brain-based learning for example, assert teachers must have an awareness of "how the brain learns" in order to create effective learning experiences (Hart, 1990). In the classroom, teachers focus on how to present information in ways to increase retention to include: getting students attention thereby accessing appropriate schema (prior knowledge), providing opportunities for practice (to increase retention in long-term memory), and conducting domain-specific assessments to determine whether students retained the information and the likelihood of transfer (Gagne et al, 2005).
Research Methodologies	Research takes place in situ and in real-world settings reflecting assumptions that knowledge is constructed within specific contexts which have specific situational affordances. Qualitative methodologies (see Association for Qualitative Research) are the most prominently used by researchers including: phenomenological inquiry, grounded theory building, ethnography, case studies, participant-observation, participatory action research, and in-depth interviewing. Populations are typically made up of a single community of practice (e.g., Vai and Gola tailors' apprentices in Liberia, Lave, 1977).	Experimentation with human subjects takes place in laboratory settings (including classroom or other well-defined environments) with an intervention group (for example, the children who were exposed to "aggressive behavior" in the now infamous Bobo doll experiment of Albert Bandura) and a control group. Results on psychometric measures (e.g., the Stanford-Binet IQ test) are examined and used to predict future behavior or performance in the individual. "Today, the key feature common to all experiments is still to deliberately vary something as to discover what happens to something else later--to discover the effects of presumed causes" (Shadish, Cook, & Campbell, 2002, p. 3).
Mind-Body Connection (Embodiment)	"The mind must be understood in the context of its relationship to a physical body that interacts with the world" (Wilson, 2002, p.625). Situated cognition acknowledges the existence of an agent/environment interaction, where the agent acts on information that is available. Therefore, direct perception keeps the agent in touch with the world, and perception and action interact directly ‘on the fly.’	The cognitivist viewpoint approached "the mind as an abstract information processor, whose connections to the outside world were of little theoretical importance" (Wilson, 2002, p.625). Perception and motor systems are merely peripheral input and output devices (Niedenthal, 2007; Wilson, 2002), which essentially implies that "sensory, motor, and affective systems are not required for thinking or language use" (Niedenthal, 2007, p.1003).
Models of Knowledge	Situated cognition focuses on dynamic interactions as a model of knowledge. The Dynamics of Intentions involves goal-adoption. It is where the agent intentionally adopts a specific goal. There may be many levels of intentions (goals), but at the moment of vision, the agent has just one intention, and that intention will control his behavior until it is fulfilled (Kugler et al., 1991; Shaw, Kadar, Sim & Repperger, 1992; Young et al., 1997). Once a goal has been adopted, the agent proceeds into what is known as, Intentional Dynamics. These are the dynamics that unfold when the agent has that one intention (goal). The agent is now beginning to perceive and act towards that goal (Gibson 1979/1986). It is a trajectory towards the achievement of a solution or goal, the process of tuning one’s perception (attention). Each intention is meaningfully bounded, where the dynamics of that intention inform the agent of whether or not he is getting closer to achieving his goal (Kugler et al, 1991; Shaw et al., 1992; Young, et al., 1997). This is the agent’s intentional dynamics, and continues on until he achieves his goal.	Nature versus nurture is a long standing dichotomy which describes knowledge as either innate or experiential. Schema and information processing models depend heavily upon the premise that knowledge exists in the mind (stored figuratively in schemata and literally in the synapses of the brain) and is abstract and symbolic, therefore decontextualized (see Eysenck & Keane, 2005). A common metaphor for this type of knowledge is a computer, according to this view "people (and computers) process information sequentially in a number of steps or stages. Humans selectively input information from the environment, then allow for some of that information to be reflected on and acted on" (Wilson & Meyers, 2000, p. 63).

Key principles

Legitimate peripheral participation

According to Lave and Wenger (1991) legitimate peripheral participation (LPP) provides a framework to describe how individuals ('newcomers') become part of a community of learners. Legitimate peripheral participation was central to Lave and Wenger's take on situated cognition (referred to as "situated activity") because it introduced socio-cultural and historical realizations of power and access to the way thinking and knowing are legitimated. They stated, "Hegemony over resources for learning and alienation from full participation are inherent in the shaping of the legitimacy and peripherality of participation in its historical realizations" (p. 42). Lave and Wenger's (1991) research on the phenomenon of apprenticeship in communities of practice not only provided a unit of analysis for locating an individual's multiple, changing levels and ways of participation, but also implied that all participants, through increased involvement, have access to, acquire, and use resources available to their particular community.

To illustrate the role of LPP in situated activity, Lave and Wenger (1991) examined five apprenticeship scenarios (Yucatec midwives, Vai and Gola tailors, naval quartermasters, meat cutters, and nondrinking alcoholics involved in AA). Their analysis of apprenticeship across five different communities of learners lead them to several conclusions about the situatedness of LPP and its relationship to successful learning. Key to newcomers' success included:

• access to all that community membership entails,
• involvement in productive activity,
• learning the discourse(s) of the community including "talking about and talking within a practice," (p. 109), and
• willingness of the community to capitalize on the inexperience of newcomers, "Insofar as this continual interaction of new perspectives is sanctioned, everyone's participation is legitimately peripheral in some respect. In other words, everyone can to some degree be considered a 'newcomer' to the future of a changing community" (Lave & Wenger, 1991, p. 117).

Reciprocal teaching

A method of teaching that involves one teacher and up to seven students. Both teacher and student take turns playing the role of teacher. Instruction includes "modeling and coaching students in four strategic skills: formulating questions based on the text, summarizing the text, making predictions about what will come next, and clarifying difficulties with the text" (Collins et al., 1989, p.460).

Collins, Brown, and Newman (1989) emphasized six critical features of a cognitive apprenticeship that included observation, coaching, scaffolding, modeling, fading, and reflection. Using these critical features, expert(s) guided students on their journey to acquire the cognitive and metacognitive processes and skills necessary to handle a variety of tasks, in a range of situations (Collins et al., 1989). One example of a successful cognitive apprenticeship was Reciprocal Teaching of reading.

Results from a pilot study on the effectiveness of Reciprocal Teaching found that reading comprehension test scores of poor readers increased from pre-test to post-test following a Reciprocal Teaching training session. Further investigation revealed that students retained the majority of the information learned over time; with test scores remaining relatively stable (Collins et al., 1989. The success of this reading intervention was attributed to five factors:

• students had the opportunity to form a new conceptual model of reading,
• students actively utilized expert reader skills and strategies,
• the teacher modeled expert reader strategies directly with the students,
• the teacher utilized successful scaffolding techniques, and
• the student played the dual role as producer and critic (Collins et al., 1989).

Affordances and effectivities

The situated cognition perspective focused on "perception-action instead of memory and retrieval…A perceiving/acting agent is coupled with a developing/adapting environment and what matters is how the two interact" (Young, Kulikowich, & Barab, 1997, p.139).

James Gibson first developed this concept of perceiving and acting (1979/1986) in his theory of information pickup. He defined the term affordances as properties in the environment that presented possibilities for action and were available for an agent to perceive directly and act upon (Gibson 1979/1986). Shaw, Turvey, & Mace (as cited by Greeno, 1994) later introduced the term effectivities, the abilities of the agent that determined what the agent could do, and consequently, the interaction that could take place.

Perception and action were co-determined by the effectivities and affordances, which acted 'in the moment' together (Gibson 1979/1986; Greeno, 1994; Young et al., 1997). Therefore, the agent directly perceived and interacted with the environment, determining what affordances could be picked up, based on his effectivities.

Problem solving

"Successful problem solving often occurs in groups and requires the social construction of knowledge" (Young & McNeese, 1995, p. 360). From the perspective of research in situated cognition, problem solving must be real-world (aka authentic) in its complexity, 'ill-defined,' and 'interactive' between the learner and the context (including other learners); making it a process through which "...perceiving and acting create meaning on the fly, rather than reading it back from something (representational or schematic) in the head" (Young & McNeese, 1995, p. 368). Formal schooling typically teaches 'problem solving' as a single skill with problems that are 'straight forward and bounded' (as math story problems, for example) with the belief students will be equip to 'transfer' those skills to 'everyday practice' like planning a family budget (Lave, 1988). To the contrary a situated cognitive approach to teaching problem solving would recognize that, "It is the relationship between the agent and the problem that is problem solving" (Young et al., 1997, p. 140), therefore would attend to the problem-solver's abilities (aka effectivities) and to the resources available in the environment (aka affordances).

Problem solving in the real-world of schooling takes place all of the time, like when the 7th grader figures out how little money he can spend on lunch (to not have his stomach grumbling all day) so he can catch the city bus after school (which takes 30 minutes each way), and spend what's left of his lunch money on video games and candy, and ultimately make it home before his parents at 6:30p.m. Yet curriculum designers and teachers insist on "teaching" kids problem solving by asking them to figure out how long its going to take the A Train to get to the Hometown Station and back. The problem with the latter approach is solvers and their problems need to be embedded in environments that "...afford the problem-solving actions that students would normally engage" (Young & McNeese, 1995, p. 371). For example, The Jasper Woodbury Problem Solving Series videodiscs created by The Cognition and Technology Group at Vanderbilt (1990, 1993, 1994) to examine potential relationship(s) between situated cognition and situated learning and "anchored instruction" (i.e., "situating instruction in the context of information-rich environments that encouraged students and teachers to pose and solve complex, realistic problems").

Anchored Instruction

Instructional design is the education of intention (dynamics of intentions) and attention (intentional dynamics). It is where educators provide opportunities necessary for students to create or adopt meaningful goals (intentions). Thus, one of the educator’s objectives can be to set a goal through the use of an anchor problem (Barab & Roth, 2006; Young et al., 1997).

“The major goal of anchored instruction is to overcome the inert knowledge problem. We attempt to do so by creating environments that permit sustained exploration by students and teachers and enable them to understand the kinds of problems and opportunities that experts in various areas encounter and the knowledge that these experts use as tools. We also attempt to help students experience the value of exploring the same setting from multiple perspectives” (The Cognition and Technology Group at Vanderbilt, 1990, p.3). One example of anchored instruction is the Jasper series (The Cognition and Technology Group at Vanderbilt, 1990; Young et al., 1997; Young & McNeese, 1995). The Jasper series includes a variety of videodisc adventures focused on problem formulation and problem solving. Each videodisc uses a visual narrative to present an authentic, real-world problem. The objective is for students to adopt specific goals (intentions) after viewing the disc. These newly adopted goals will now guide students through the collaborative process of problem formulation and problem solving (see #Goals, Intentions, & Attention).

Goals, Intentions, & Attention

The Young-Barab Model (1998) pictured to the left, illustrates the dynamics of intentions and intentional dynamics involved in the agent’s interaction with his environment.

Dynamics of Intentions (Kugler et al., 1991; Shaw et al., 1992; Young et al., 1997): goal (intention) adoption. It is where the anchor problem is presented and the learner decides whether or not to adopt a particular goal. Once a goal is adopted, the learner proceeds towards the intentional dynamics. There are many levels of intentions, but at the moment of vision, the agent has just one intention, and that intention controls his behavior until it is fulfilled.

Intentional Dynamics (Kugler et al, 1991; Shaw et al., 1992; Young, et al., 1997): dynamics that unfold when the agent has only one intention (goal) and begins to act towards it, perceiving and acting (Gibson 1979/1986). It is a trajectory towards the achievement of a solution or goal, the process of tuning one’s perception (attention). Each intention is meaningfully bounded, where the dynamics of that intention inform the agent of whether or not he is getting closer to achieving his goal. If the agent is not getting closer to his goal, he will take corrective action, and then continue forward. This is the agent’s intentional dynamics, and continues on until he achieves his goal.

Embodiment

The traditional cognition approach assumes that perception and motor systems are merely peripheral input and output devices (Niedenthal, 2007; Wilson, 2002). However, embodied cognition posits that the mind and body interact ‘on the fly’ as a single entity. An example of embodied cognition is seen in the area of robotics, where movements are not based on internal representations, rather, they are based on the robot’s direct and immediate interaction with its environment (Wilson, 2002). Additionally, research has shown that embodied facial expressions influence judgments (Niedenthal, 2007), and arm movements are related to a person’s evaluation of a word or concept (Markman, & Brendl, 2005). In the later example, the individual would pull or push a lever towards his name at a faster rate for positive words, then for negative words. These results appeal to the embodied nature of situated cognition, where knowledge is the achievement of the whole body in its interaction with the world.

Transfer

A variety of definitions for the term transfer appear in the literature and research on Situated Cognition.

• Jean Lave on transfer stated, "Learning transfer is assumed to be the central mechanism for bringing school-taught knowledge to bear in life after school" (Lave, 1988, p. 23).
• Greeno (1991 as cited in Greeno, 2006) described knowing using the metaphor of a neighborhood or workshop and stated, "The idea is that knowing a conceptual domain includes knowing what resources are available (p. 543). Thusly described transfer to "...therefore, involve having or taking authority to go beyond what one has been taught" (p. 546). Put simply, Greeno viewed transfer as an elegant, creative act that affords learners agency (via his concept of authoritative agency) and authorship (via his concept of accountable positioning) (2006).
• "In a certain sense every experience should do something to prepare a person for later experiences of a deeper and more expansive quality. That is the very meaning of growth, continuity, reconstruction of experience" (Dewey, 1938, p. 47).
• Young and McNeese (1995) stated that "analyzing transfer from an ecological perspective leads us to consider that detection of invariance across a 'generator set' of situations would be required for transfer across content areas" (p.384).
• "Learning in multiple contexts induces the abstraction of knowledge, so that students acquire knowledge in a dual form, both tied to the contexts of its uses and independent of any particular context. This unbinding of knowledge from a specific context fosters its transfer to new problems and new domains" (Collins et al., 1989, p.487).
• "We have come to believe that we should expect transfer only when there is a confluence of an individual's goals and objectives, their acquired abilities to act, and a set of affordances for action (specified by information) available within an environment. That is, whatever tuning of attention that leads to the initial occurrence of a behavior, transfer will occur when the agent has a similar goal, their abilities to act are similar, and the environment affords the goal-relevant action" (Young et al., 1997, p.147).
• "...Transfer is more likely to occur when learning contexts are framed as part of a larger ongoing intellectual conversation in which students are actively involved" (Engle, 2006, p.451).

Critiques of Situativity

Further reading

• Anderson, J. R., Greeno, J. G., Reder, L. M., & Simon, H. A. (2000). Perspectives on learning, thinking, and activity. Educational Researcher, 29, 11-13.
• Brown, A. L. (1992). "Design experiments:Theoretical and methodological challenges in creating in complext interventions in classroom settings". Journal of the Learning Sciences 2 (2): 141–178.
• Clancey, William J. (1997). Situated Cognition: On Human Knowledge and Computer Representation. New York: Cambridge University Press.
• "Special Issue: Situated Action". Cognitive Science 17 (1):
• Dewey, J. (1938). Experience & Education.
• Greeno, J. G. (1997). On claims that answer the wrong question. Educational Research, 26(1), 5-17.
• Greeno, J. G. (2006). Authoritative, accountable positioning and connected, general knowing: Progressive themes in understanding transfer. Journal of the Learning Sciences 15(4) 539-550.
• Griffin, M. M. (1995). You can't get there from here: Situated learning, transfer, and map skills. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 20, 65-87.
• Hutchins, E. (1995). Cognition in the Wild.
• Kirshner, D. & Whitson, J. A. (1997) Situated Cognition: Social, semiotic, and psychological perspectives. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum (ISBN# 0-8058-2038-8)
• Kirshner, D., & Whitson, J. A. (1998). Obstacles to understanding cognition as situated. Educational Researcher, 27(8), 22-28.
• Lave, J. (1988). Cognition in Practice.
• Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation.

See also

• Activity theory
• Distributed cognition
• Ecological psychology
• Embodied cognition
• Enactivism
• Relational frame theory
• Situational awareness
• Situated learning

References

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• Clancey, W. J (1993). "Situated action: A neuropsychological interpretation response to Vera and Simon". Cognitive Science 17 87–116.
• Cognition and Technology Group at Vanderbilt (1990). "Anchored instruction and its relationship to situated cognition". Educational Research 19 (6): 2–10.
• Cognition and Technology Group at Vanderbilt. (1993). Anchored instruction and situated cognition revisited. Educational Technology March Issue, 52-70.
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