Dewey, Gee, Bransford, Schwartz, & Pea

Dewey, Gee, Bransford, Schwartz, and Pea have made many similar arguments, albeit using different language.
Dewey focused on the “continuity of experience”, saying that everything we learn is affected by what we already know. Our past experiences continually impact our current and future experiences.
Gee focused on a specific subset of Dewey’s theory, arguing, in part, that students who aren’t exposed to specialized academic language early and often are at a distinct disadvantage in school.
Bransford and Schwartz focused their work on measuring transfer, but the arguments they made relate well to Dewey’s idea of continuity of experience. They claim that information presented in context, with concrete examples, can help students appreciate new knowledge and increase the chances that the information will be spontaneously used in other contexts. They also focused on an idea they termed “knowing with”, which suggests that everything we learn is tied to the context in which we learn it and the tools that are used to learn it, and that what we learn in continually influencing what we might learn in the future.
Pea focused on distributed intelligence. This is the idea that intelligence not only comes from an individual engaged in an activity, but also from the tools that an individual is using to complete said activity. What we know and what we are able to accomplish cannot be decontextualized from the tools that we use. In designed learning experiences, we Pea argues that we can use tools to offload cognitive demand. This allows learners to focus on experience rather than specific content knowledge.