Exploring the Role of Emotion in Propelling the SMET Learning Process

The current educational system is constructed so as to emphasize the evolution of rule-based reasoners (students who understand the ‘what’ of a task/problem). However scientists, mathematicians, engineers, and technologists are not rule-based reasoners. They are model-based reasoners/thinkers (e.g., they do recursion, diagnostic reasoning, cognitive assessment, cognitive appraisal). To provide for the development of SMET (science, math, engineering, technology) learners, teachers and mentors who are reflective of the educational system’s pedagogy must not model directive teaching, which develops rule-based thinkers, but they should model how to learn. The educational pedagogy of a teacher and of the curriculum must include an understanding of learning intelligence-the ability to understand and model how-to-learn, how to solve a unique problem even when confronted with discouraging setbacks during its solution; in other words, they must be able to do model-based reasoning. Based upon this hypothesis, we propose to explore and evolve current educational pedagogy such that SMET learning will move toward a model-based reasoning pedagogy.