Idit Harel Caperton

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Idit Harel Caperton : biography

September 18, 1958 –

Academic career

Along with her first husband, David Harel (an Israeli investor, ex-fighter pilot, and Harvard MBA), she moved to the United States in 1982 for graduate study at the Harvard Graduate School of Education in Cambridge, Massachusetts after having previously received a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and Philosophy from Tel-Aviv University. She earned two graduate degrees from Harvard: an EdM in Technology in Education (1984) and a CAGS in Human Development (1985). In 1988, Harel Caperton was one of the first students to receive a Ph. D. in Epistemology and Learning Research from the new MIT Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology after helping to formulate a new, constructionist-inspired educational model called "Instructional Software Design Learning Paradigm." Caperton was instrumental in figuring out the role and meaning of computational technology for learning, education, and society, and in 1985, Caperton and her colleagues at MIT built the first model school of the future, where every student had a PC, worked on creative programming projects, and constructed knowledge through a project-based learning and social interaction.

Constructionism

During her time at MIT, Harel Caperton co-wrote and published several articles with Seymour Papert (creator of the Logo programming language), and in 1991 they co-edited and published Constructionism, the first book about constructionist learning. This book includes their articles and several other works by the first generation of MIT Media Lab researchers in the (then emerging) fields of Media Technology Arts and Sciences, and Epistemology and Learning. She continued to work at the Media Lab with Papert and Nicholas Negroponte until 1994.

Children Designers

In 1991, she published a book, Children Designers, which won the 1991 Outstanding Book Award from the American Education Research Association. In her research, Harel Caperton introduced several disadvantaged fourth grade children from the Boston area to the Logo programming language. She then facilitated their use of the language to allow them to create their own mathematical software applications that would help third graders learn fractions. The students, who included children with different levels of mathematical prowess, worked on their own pieces of software for four to eight hours per week for fifteen weeks.

Harel Caperton then observed and quantified the effect of the experience on their mathematical understanding and overall learning behavior. Her research indicated that children who learn fractions using a combination of Logo programming and the techniques of constructionist learning scored on average eight to eighteen percentage points higher on standardized post-test examinations than those taught using traditional techniques. She identified the tendency of Logo-based programming to allow for individual variations in "learning, mastery, and self-expression" in children, and further called for an expansion of research into the nature of these differences by education scholars. Such exploration would help to uncover the long-term benefits of similar academic models on the subjects as they develop into young adults. These results were later expanded upon by Yasmin Kafai who found, in a similar six month project with inner-city forth graders, that learning through design resulted in statistically significant improvements in mathematical development.