Many are familiar with the observation that (for example) outside of the mathematics classroom, students are less able to solve mathematics problems than they are in the mathematics classroom. Also, when asked to perform mathematics on a test, a student may score well, but when given a real-world situation (even in a word problem closely related to the topic under study), the student cannot recognize the mathematics as relevant and will be less able to solve problems. I attribute this, in large part, to the reduction of mathematics to an activity useful for answering questions on mathematics tests; the academic skill is available to the learner only in the context of the classroom but not in natural situations.
Reduction of the complex natural problems to simplified problems for the classroom is a common approach to designing curriculum. Rushkoff observed, “This reductionist thought literally reduces the complex to manageable, if artificial, components. For many applications… this works splendidly” (1999, 19), and he concludes, “We’ve applied reductionist thinking to so many real-world problems that we’ve dangerously reduced many of our real world’s problems” (19). Naturalistic learning gives students experience applying academic skills to build knowledge about complex problems rather than curriculum that has been simplified. Compared to a curriculum grounded in reduced and simplified problems, natural settings more closely resemble the expectation of educative experiences and the goal of preparing flexible specialists that will be necessary for workers and citizens in the future.
Naturalistic teaching and learning exists within a continuum. A test in which students evaluate mathematics equations is an excellent example of a highly reduced task that typifies one extreme of the continuum. On the other extreme of the continuum would be naturalistic tasks. A mathematics student who is working in an office and writing and solving equations to predict productivity might illustrate the experiences on that end of the continuum. Between these extremes are word problems and cases studies, and similar materials that introduce the mathematics with accompanying situations explained or described (see figure 1). In some cases, completely naturalistic teaching and learning is not appropriate, but effective curriculum does provide opportunity for (and expectation that) students study complex problems.
Figure 1. Continuum of reduced to naturalistic tasks
A heuristic that can be applied differentiate reduced tasks from naturalistic tasks is the professional recognition heuristic. If a professional would recognize the curriculum as part of his or her professional domain, then the task is naturalistic. This can also be an approximate measure of the degree to which the task is naturalistic: the easier it is recognized as part of the profession then the more naturalistic it is.