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What Is John Dewey's Theory Of Interaction?

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This study is anchored on John Dewey’s Theory of Experience (Fishman & McCarthy, 1998). Dewey postulated that while “all genuine education comes about through experience it does not mean that all experiences are genuinely or equally educative.” (Dewey, 1938) This conviction that many experiences were miseducative led him to develop a criteria for defining educative quality of experience. He elaborated on these criteria as the two fundamental principles of experience. He created a dialectic that linked experience and education; these linkages are called Principle of Continuity and Principle of Interaction. According to Dewey (Aedo, 2002), the key idea is that interaction and continuity are two core characteristics of effective teaching and learning gained through experiences. The characteristic of interaction highlights the importance of the dialogue and communication underlying learning; the continuity characteristic emphasizes that the individual learner must be viewed as the key design element in the whole process. In other words, instruction must be designed so that individual learner can effectively build on what he or she knows, and have sufficient resources and assistance to learn. Under the Principle of Interaction, factors that affect student experience include those that are internal to the student, and those that are “objective” parts of the environment. The students’ perceptions of, and reactions to, the objective factors are influenced by their attitudes,
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