oriented term served that end. Second, the focus of the MDL is on academic
domains and I wanted to capture the sense that students new to an academic
domain must become oriented (i.e., acclimated) to that unfamiliar terrain, a
process that demands their time and energy. Further, unlike certain problem-
solving arenas, such as chess, students in the educational system are not free
to explore academic domains or not. This is a requirement of the formal edu-
cational system. Therefore, each student in postindustrial societies will expe-
rience this period of acclimation for multiple academic domains.
Jason, the second grader introduced in the opening scenario, exemplifies
many of the characteristics of learners acclimating to an academic domain.
His overall perception of history as a domain is understandably underdevel-
oped. History, as a domain, has little meaning to Jason beyond this class text.
If we were to test Jason, as we have in other studies, we would expect to find
his domain and topic knowledge to be limited and fragmented. Like Jason,
learners in the throes of acclimation lack principled knowledge (Gelman &
Greeno, 1989)—a conceptually integrated body of domain-specific knowl-
edge. Jason’s limited and unprincipled knowledge means that he will likely
experience difficulty distinguishing between information that is relevant ver-
sus tangential or accurate versus inaccurate (Alexander, Kulikowich, &
Schulze, 1994; Jetton & Alexander, 1997).
Also, Jason’s unfamiliarity with the domain and its typical problems
means that he would have to rely on surface-level strategies to make sense of
his history tests and to begin the process of building a foundation of subject-
matter knowledge. Finally, we would expect to find that Jason relies on situa-
tional interest to maintain his attention and stimulate his engagement in his-
tory learning. Jason’s reliance on situational interest makes sense since any
seed of individual interest planted by stimulating instruction, would have had
limited opportunity to take root and grow (Mitchell, 1993).
Competence. The MDL builds on the presumption that most learners
should be able to make the journey from acclimation to competence with the
benefits of meaningful formal instruction. Specifically, I hypothesized that the
boundary between acclimation and competence can be crossed if learners
achieve either a sufficient base of subject-matter knowledge, an effective reper-
toire of surface-level and deep-processing strategies, or a growing personal as-
sociation with the domain. The base of knowledge provides the learner with a
foothold in the domain—a sense of its structure and lexicon. The repertoire of
strategies permits the individual management of problems representative of the
domain, whereas the rising interest sparks further exploration or maintains
learner investment when subsequent difficulties are encountered.
Of course, the journey toward competence is much easier for those stu-
dents with profiles that reveal a positive trend in all three of these model di-
mensions (Alexander, Jetton, & Kulikowich, 1995; Alexander & Murphy,
- MODEL OF DOMAIN LEARNING 289