Book Notes: How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience and School by John D. Bransford

NOTES
Abstract[ “Above all, information and knowledge are growing at a far more rapid rate than ever before in the history of humankind. As Nobel laureate Herbert Simon wisely stated, the meaning of “knowing” has shifted from being able to remember and repeat information to being able to find it and use it (Simon, 1996). More than ever, the sheer magnitude of human knowledge renders its coverage by education an impossibility; rather, the goal of education is better conceived as helping students develop the intellectual tools and learning strategies needed to acquire the knowledge that allows people to think productively about history, science and technology, social phenomena, mathematics, and the arts. Fundamental understanding about subjects, including how to frame and ask meaningful questions about various subject areas, contributes to individuals’ more basic understanding of principles of learning that can assist them in becoming self-sustaining, lifelong learners.” p. 5

FOCUS: PEOPLE, SCHOOLS, AND THE POTENTIAL TO LEARN
DEVELOPMENT OF THE SCIENCE OF LEARNING
school of behaviorism . . . stimuli and responses (A Cat’s Learning)
“A limitation of early behaviorism stemmed from its focus on observable stimulus conditions and the behaviors associated with those conditions.” p. 8

Learning with Understanding
“However, the research also shows clearly that “usable knowledge” is not the same as a mere list of disconnected facts. Experts’ knowledge is connected and organized around important concepts (e.g., Newton’s second law of motion); it is “conditionalized” to specify the contexts in which it is applicable; it supports understanding and transfer (to other contexts) rather than only the ability to remember.” p. 9

Pre-Existing Knowledge
Fish is Fish
“A common misconception regarding “constructivist” theories of knowing (that existing knowledge is used to build new knowledge) is that teachers should never tell students anything directly but, instead, should always allow them to construct knowledge for themselves. This perspective confuses a theory of pedagogy (teaching) with a theory of knowing. Constructivists assume that all knowledge is constructed from previous knowledge, irrespective of how one is taught (e.g., Cobb, 1994)—even listening to a lecture involves active attempts to construct new knowledge. Fish Is Fish (Lionni, 1970) and attempts to teach children that the earth is round (Vosniadou and Brewer, 1989) show why simply providing lectures frequently does not work. Nevertheless, there are times, usually after people have first grappled with issues on their own, that “teaching by telling” can work extremely well (e.g., Schwartz and Bransford, 1998). However, teachers still need to pay attention to students’ interpretations and provide guidance when necessary.”

Active Learning
“Teacher A’s goal is to get the students to produce work . . . Teacher B assumes responsibility for what the students are learning as they carry out their activities . . . Teacher C does this as well, but with the added objective of continually turning more of the learning process over to the students.” p. 12

Implications for Education
An Evolving Science

Key Findings
1. Students come to the classroom with preconceptions about how the world works. If their initial understanding is not engaged, they may fail to grasp the new concepts and information that are taught, or they may learn them for purposes of a test but revert to their preconceptions outside the classroom. (p.14)
2. To develop competence in an area of inquiry, students must: (a) have a deep foundation of factual knowledge, (b) understand facts and ideas in the context of a conceptual framework, and (c) organize knowledge in ways that facilitate retrieval and application. (p.16)
3. A “metacognitive” approach to instruction can help students learn to take control of their own learning by defining learning goals and monitoring their progress in achieving them. (p.18)

Throwing Darts Under Water

Implications for Teaching
1. Teachers must draw out and work with the preexisting understandings that their students bring with them. (p.19)
2. Teachers must teach some subject matter in depth, providing many examples in which the same concept is at work and providing a firm foundation of factual knowledge. (p.20)
3. The teaching of metacognitive skills should be integrated into the curriculum in a variety of subject areas. (p.21)

Bringing Order to Chaos
“Are some of these teaching techniques better than others? Is lecturing a poor way to teacher, as many seem to claim? Is cooperative learning effective? Do attempts to use computers (technology-enhanced teaching) help achievement or hurt it? . . . This volume suggest that these are the wrong questions. Asking which teaching technique is best is analogous to asking which tool is best—a hammer, a screwdriver, a knife, or pliers. In teaching as in carpentry, the selection of tools depends on the task at hand and the materials one is working with.” p.22

Designing Classroom Environments
1. Schools and classrooms must be learner centered. (p.23)
2. To provide a knowledge-centered classroom environment, attention must be given to what is taught (information, subject matter), why it is taught (understanding), and what competence or mastery looks like. (p.24)
3. Formative assessments—ongoing assessments designed to make students’ thinking visible to both teachers and students—are essential. They permit the teacher to grasp the students’ preconceptions, understand where the students are in the “developmental corridor” from informal to formal thinking, and design instruction accordingly. In the assessment-centered classroom environment, formative assessments help both teachers and students monitor progress. (p.24)
4. Learning is influenced in fundamental ways by the context in which it takes place. A community-centered approach requires the development of norms for the classroom and school, as well as connections to the outside world, that support core learning values. (p.25)

Applying the Design Framework to Adult Learning ]

Title[ PART II: LEARNERS AND LEARNING
Chapter 2: How Experts Differ from Novices ]

NOTES
Abstract[
“We consider several key principles of experts’ knowledge and their potential implications for learning and instruction:
1. Experts notice features and meaningful patterns of information that are not noticed by novices.
2. Experts have acquired a great deal of content knowledge that is organized in ways that reflect a deep understanding of their subject matter.
3. Experts’ knowledge cannot be reduced to sets of isolated facts or propositions but, instead, reflects contexts of applicability: that is, the knowledge is “conditionalized” on a set of circumstances.
4. Experts are able to flexibly retrieve important aspects of their knowledge with little attentional effort.
5. Though experts know their disciplines thoroughly, this does not guarantee that they are able to teach others.
6. Experts have varying levels of flexibility in their approach to new situations.” p.31

“People who have developed expertise in particular areas are, by definition, able to think effectively about problems in those areas.” p. 31

MEANINGFUL PATTERNS OF INFORMATION “Chunking” “learning how to see” p. 36

ORGANIZATION OF KNOWLEDGE
“When solving problems, experts in physics often pause to draw a simple qualitative diagram—they do not simply attempt to plug numbers into a formula. . . Experts’ problem piles are arranged on the basis of the principles that can be applied to solve the problems; novices’ piles are arranged on the basis of the problems’ surface attributes.” p.38

“The fact that experts’ knowledge is organized around important ideas or concepts suggest that curricula should also be organized in ways that lead to conceptual understanding . . . The Third International Mathematics and Science Survey criticized curricula that were ‘a mile wide and an inch deep’ arguing that this is much more of a problem in America than in most other countries.” p. 42

CONTEXT AND ACCESS TO KNOWLEDGE
“Experts have a vast repertoire of knowledge that is relevant to their domain or discipline, but only a subset of that knowledge is relevant to any particular problem. Experts do not have to search through everything they know in order to find what is relevant; such an approach would overwhelm their working memory . . . Experts have not only acquired knowledge, but are also good at retrieving the knowledge that is relevant to a particular task. In the language of cognitive scientists, experts’ knowledge is “conditionalized”—it includes a specification of the contexts in which it is useful. Knowledge that is not conditionalized is often “inert” because it is not activated, even though it is relevant.” p. 43

FLUENT RETRIEVAL
“An important aspect of learning is to become fluent at recognizing problem types in particular domains—such as problems involving Newton’s second law or concepts of rate and functions—so that appropriate solutions can be easily retrieved from memory.” p. 44

EXPERTS AND TEACHING
Expertise in a particular domain does not guarantee that one is good at helping others learn it . . . The content knowledge necessary for expertise in a discipline needs to be differentiated from the pedagogical content knowledge that underlies effective teaching.” p. 45

ADAPTIVE EXPERTISE
artisans vs. virtuosos . . . “Artisan experts seek to identify the functions that clients want automated; they tend to accept the problem and its limits as stated by the clients. They approach new problems as opportunities to use their existing expertise to do familiar tasks more efficiently. It is important to emphasize that artisans’ skills are often extensive and should not be underestimated. In contrast, however, the virtuoso experts treat the client’s statement of the problem with respect, but consider it “a point for departure and exploration.” p. 46

“An important characteristic exhibited by the history expert involves what is known as “metacognition”—the ability to monitor one’s current level of understanding and decide when it is not adequate.” p.47 ]

Author[ Bransford
Title[ Chapter 3: Learning and Transfer ]

NOTES
Abstract[
“Assumptions about transfer accompany the belief that it is better to broadly “educate” people than simply “train” them to perform particular tasks.” p. 51

“‘Formal discipline’ . . . practice by learning Latin and other difficult subjects had broad-based effects, such as developing general skills of learning and attention. . . Rather than developing some kind of ‘general skill’ or ‘mental muscle’ that affected a wide range of performances, people seemed to learn things that were more specific.

“Early research on the transfer of learning was guided by theories that emphasized the similarity between conditions of learning and conditions of transfer.” p.51

“In the discussion below we explore key characteristics of learning and transfer that have important implications for education:
* Initial learning is necessary for transfer, and a considerable amount is known about the kinds of learning experiences that support transfer.
* Knowledge that is overly contextualized can reduce transfer; abstract representations of knowledge can help promote transfer.
* Transfer is best viewed as an active, dynamic process rather than a passive end-product of a particular set of learning experiences.
* All new learning involves transfer based on previous learning, and this fact has important implications for the design of instruction that helps students learn.” p.53

ELEMENTS THAT PROMOTE INITIAL LEARNING

UNDERSTANDING VERSUS MEMORIZING “‘Imagine trying to design an artificial artery. Would it have to be elastic? Why or why not?’” p.56

TIME TO LEARN “Learners, especially in school settings, are often faced with tasks that do not have apparent meaning or logic . . . Providing students with opportunities to first grapple with specific information relevant to a topic has been shown to create a ‘time for telling’ that enables them to learn much more from a organizing lecture.” p.58

“The implication is that learning cannot be rushed; the complex cognitive activity of information integration requires time.” p.58

BEYOND TIME ON TASK “Understanding when, where, and why to use new knowledge can be enhanced through the use of “contrasting cases.” a concept from the field of perceptual learning.” p.60

MOTIVATION TO LEARN “Motivation affects the amount of time that people are willing to devote to learning. . . Challenges, however, must be at the proper level of difficulty in order to be and to remain motivating: tasks that are too easy become boring; tasks that are too difficult cause frustration. In addition, learners’ tendencies to persist in the face of difficulty are strongly affected by whether they are ‘performance oriented’ or ‘learning oriented.’” pp 60-61

“Social opportunities also affect motivation.” p. 61

“Learners of all ages are more motivated when they can see the usefulness of what they are learning and when they can use that information to do something that has a impact on others—especially their local community.” p.61

OTHER FACTORS THAT INFLUENCE TRANSFER
CONTEXT “One way to deal with the lack of flexibility is to ask learners to solve a specific case; the goal is to help them abstract general principles that lead to more flexible transfer. . . A second way to improve flexibility is to let students learn in a specific context and then help them engage in “what if” problem solving. . . A third way is to generalize the case so that learners are asked to create a solution that applies not simple to a single problem, but to a whole class of related problems.” pp. 62-63

PROBLEM REPRESENTATIONS
RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN LEARNING AND TRANSFER CONDITIONS
“Singley and Anderson taught students several text editors, one after another, and sought to predict transfer, defined as the savings in time of learning a new editor when it was not taught first. They found that students learned subsequent text editors more rapidly and that the number of procedural elements shared by two text editors predicted the amount of this transfer.” p. 65 Question: is this really “transfer” or were they just using the same keystrokes in a different program?

ACTIVE VERSUS PASSIVE APPROACHES TO TRANSFER
TRANSFER AND METACOGNITION “Reciprocal teaching to increase reading comprehension is designed to help students acquire specific knowledge and also to learn a set of strategies for explicating, elaborating, and monitoring the understanding necessary for independent learning. The three major components of reciprocal teaching are instruction and practice with strategies that enable students to monitor their understanding; provision, initially by a teacher, of an expert model of metacognitive processes; and a social setting that enables joint negotiation for understanding.” p.67

“A program of procedural facilitation for teaching written composition shares many features with reciprocal teaching. The method prompts learners to adopt the metacognitive activities embedded in sophisticated writing strategies.” p.67

“Alan Schoenfeld teachers heuristic methods for mathematical problems solving to college students . . He teachers and demonstrates control or managerial strategies and makes explicit such processes as generating alternative courses of action, evaluating which course one will be able to carry out and whether it can be managed in the time available, and assessing one’s progress. Again, elements of modeling, coaching, and scaffolding, as well as collective problem solving and whole-class and small group discussions, are used.” pp. 57-68

LEARNING AS TRANSFER FROM PREVIOUS EXPERIENCES
BUILDING ON EXISTING KNOWLEDGE
UNDERSTANDING CONCEPTUAL CHANGE “Consider learning about fractions. The mathematical principles underlying the numberhood of fractions are not consistent with the principles of counting and children’s ideas that numbers are sets of things that are counted and addition involves “putting together” two sets. . . The fact all learners construct new understandings based on their current knowledge highlights some of the dangers in “teaching by telling.” Lectures and other forms of direct instruction can sometimes be very useful, but only under the right conditions. Often, students construct understanding like those noted above. To counteract these problems, teachers must strive to make students’ thinking visible and find ways to help them reconceptualize faulty conceptions.” p.71

TRANSFER AND CULTURAL PRACTICES “School failure may be partly explained by the mismatch between what students have learned in their home cultures and what is required of them in school. . . These differences have their roots in early adult-infant interactions. Whereas middle-class Anglo mothers tend to have frequent language interactions that are focused on didactic naming and pointing with their infants around objects (“Look at that red truck!”), African American mothers show comparable frequency levels of language interactions with their infants, but focused on affective dimensions of language (“Isn’t that a pretty toy? Doesn’t it make you feel happy?”). The language that children bring with them to school involves a broad set of skills rooted in the early context of adult-child interactions. What happens when the adults, peers,and contexts change? This is an important question that relates to the transfer of learning.” p.73

TRANSFER BETWEEN SCHOOL AND EVERYDAY LIFE
“One major contrast between everyday settings and school environments is that the latter place much more emphasis on individual work than most other environments. . . A second major contrast between schools and everyday settings is the heavy use of tools to solve problems in everyday settings, compared with “mental work” in school settings. . . A third contrast . . . is that abstract reasoning is often emphasized in school, whereas contextualized reasoning is often used in everyday settings.” pp.73-74

“There are many appealing strengths to the idea that learning should organized around authentic problems and projects that are frequently encountered in non-school settings: in John Dewey’s vision, ‘School should be less about preparation for life and more like life itself.’ The use of problem-based learning in medical schools is an excellent example of the benefits of looking at what people need to do once they graduate and then crafting educational experiences that best prepare them for these competencies. Opportunities to engage in problem-based learning during the first year of medical school lead to greater ability to diagnose and understand medical problems than do opportunities to learn in typical lecture-based medical courses.” p.77 ]

Author[ Bransford
Title[ Chapter 4: How Children Learn ]

NOTES
Abstract[
INFANT CAPABILITIES THEORIES
“While Piaget observed that infants actually seek environmental stimulation that promotes their intellectual development, he thought that their initial representations of objects, space, time, causality, and self are constructed only gradually during the first two years. He concluded that the world of young infants is an egocentric fusion of the internal and external worlds and that the development of an accurate representation of physical reality depends on the gradual coordination of schemes of looking, listening, and touching.” p.80

“The active role of learners was also emphasized by Vygotsky (1978), who pointed to other supports for learning. Vygotsky was deeply interested in the role of the social environment, included tools and cultural objects, as well as people, as agents in developing thinking. Perhaps the most powerful idea from Vygotsky to influence developmental psychology was that of a zone of proximal development (Vygotsky, 1978). It refers to a bandwidth of competence that learners can navigate with aid from a supportive context, including the assistance of others.” p.80

ZONE OF PROXIMAL DEVELOPMENT
“The zone of proximal development is the distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance, or in collaboration with more capable peers. What children can do with the assistance of others is even more indicative of their mental development than what they can do alone.

“The zone of proximal development embodies a concept of readiness to learn that emphasizes upper levels of competence. These upper boundaries are not immutable, however, but constantly changing with the learner’s increasing independent competence. What a child can perform today with assistance she will be able to perform tomorrow independently, thus preparing her for entry into a new and more demanding collaboration. These functions could be called the “buds,” rather than the fruits of development. The actual developmental level characterizes mental development retrospectively, while the zone of proximal development characterizes mental development respectively.” p.81

“As a result of these theoretical and methodological developments, great strides have been made in studying young children’s learning capacities. To summarize an enormous body of research, illustrated in this chapter:
1. Early predisposition to learn about some things but not others.
2. Strategies and metacognition
3. Theories of mind
4. Children and community

METHODOLOGICAL ADVANCES “Because infants are so limited physically, experimenters interested in finding out how babies think had to find methods suitable to an infant’s motor capabilities. New ways were developed for measuring what infants prefer to look at and detecting changes in events to which they are sensitive. Three such methods are non-nutritive sucking, habituation, and visual expectation. . . Because infants will look at things they find interesting, researchers developed the method of visual expectation to study infants’ comprehension of events. . . Thus, using infants’ capacities for looking, sucking, and interest in novelty, developmental psychologists devised methods for reliably studying early aspects of infant cognition.” p.83

EARLY COMPETENCIES IN THE PRIVILEGED DOMAINS
PHYSICAL CONCEPTS “How do infants learn about the physical world? Research studies have demonstrated that infants as early as 3-4 months of age have the beginnings of useful knowledge. Three examples from many: they understand that objects need support to prevent them from falling; that stationary objects are displaced when they come into contact with moving objects; and that inanimate objects need to be propelled into motion.” p.84

BIOLOGICAL CAUSALITY “Infants learn rapidly about the differences between inanimate and animate: as we have seen, they know that inanimate objects need to be pushed or propelled into motion. Infants as young as 6 months can distinguish animate versus inanimate movements as patterns of lights attached to forces or people.” p.88

“These are only a handful of findings from a large body of research that goes a long way to challenge the idea that young children are incapable of considering non-perceptual data in scientific areas. Given that there is a mounting body of evidence showing that youngsters are busy constructing coherent accounts of their physical and biological worlds, one needs to ask to what extent these early competencies serve as a bridge for further learning when they enter school.” p.89

EARLY NUMBER CONCEPTS “An ever-increasing body of evidence shows that the human mind is endowed with an implicit mental ability that facilitates attention to and use of representations of the number of items in a visual array, sequence of drumbeats, jumps of a toy bunny, numerical values represented in arrays, etc.” p.89

“But just because children have some knowledge of numbers before they enter school is not to say that there is little need for careful learning later. Early understanding of numbers can guide their entry into school-based learning about number concepts. . . Rational numbers (fractions) do not behave like whole numbers, and attempting to treat them as such leads to serious problems. It is therefore noteworthy that many children experience just these sorts of problems in mathematics when they encounter “fractions”: They believe the larger number always represents a bigger quantity or larger unit.” p.91

EARLY ATTENTION TO LANGUAGE “Infants have to be able to distinguish information from nonlinguistic stimuli: they attribute meaning and linguistic function to words and not to dog barks or telephone rings. By four months of age, infants clearly show a preference for listening to words over other sounds. And they can distinguish changes in language.” p.93

“Young children also actively attempt to understand the meaning of the language that is spoken around them. Roger Brown discussed ‘The Original Word Game’ that children play with parents. Successful participation involves the child’s making inferences about what someone must mean by paying attention to the surrounding context. . . (Eat the apple) The child uses meaning as a clue to language rather than language as a clue to meaning.” p.94

“Language development studies illustrate that children’s biological capacities are set into motion by their environments. The biological underpinnings enable children to become fluent in language by about age three, but if they are not in a language-using environment, they will not develop this capacity. Experience is important; but the opportunity to use the skills—practice—is also important. Janellen Huttenlocker, for example, has shown that language has to be practiced as an ongoing and active process and not merely passively observed by watching television.” p.95

STRATEGIES FOR LEARNING AND METACOGNITION
THE IMPORTANCE OF CAPACITY, STRATEGIES, KNOWLEDGE, AND METACOGNITION
“All human learners have limitations to their short-term memory for remembering and solving problems. . . One view is that children’s short-term memory capacity, or the amount of mental space they have (M-space), increases as children mature. With more mental space, they can retain more information and perform more complex mental operations. . . A second view is that children and adults have roughly the same mental capacity, but that with development children acquire knowledge and develop effective activities to use their minds well.” p.96

“Perhaps the most pervasive strategy used to improve memory performances is clustering: organizing disparate pieces of information into meaningful units. Clustering is a strategy that depends on organizing knowledge. In a classic paper, Miller described the persistence of a phenomenon he called the ‘magical number 7 +/- 2’ in human mental processing. Given a list of numbers to remember, sounds (phonemes) to distinguish from one another, or a set of unrelated facts to recall, there is a critical change in performance at around seven items. Up to seven items (between five and nine, actually, hence Miller’s title), people can readily handle a variety of tasks; with more than seven, they simply cannot process them handily. People have developed ways around this memory constraint by organizing information, such as grouping together or ‘chunking’ disparate elements into sets of letters, numbers, or pictures that make sense to them.” p.96

” . . . A group of 8- to 12-year-old ‘slow learners’ performed much better than ‘normal’ adults on a task of recalling large numbers of pop stars because of a clustering strategy.” p.97

“Metacognition is another important aspect of children’s learning. The importance of prior knowledge in determining performance, crucial to adults as well as children, includes knowledge about learning, knowledge of their own learning strengths and weaknesses, and the demands of the learning task at hand. Metacognition also includes self-regulation—the ability to orchestrate one’s learning: to plan, monitor success, and correct errors when appropriate—all necessary for effective intentional learning.” p.97

“Attempts at deliberate remembering in preschool children provide glimpses of the early emergence of the ability to plan, orchestrate, and apply strategies. In a famous example, 3- and 4-year-old children were asked to watch while a small toy dog was hidden under one of three cups. The children were instructed to remember where the dog was. The children were anything but passive as they waited alone during a delay interval. Some children displayed various behaviors that resembled well-known mnemonic strategies, including clear attempts at retrieval practice, such as looking at the target cup and nodding yes, looking at the non-target cup and nodding no, and retrieval cueing, such as marking the correct cup by resting a hand on it or moving it to a salient position. Both of these strategies are precursors to more mature rehearsal activities. These efforts were rewarded: children who prepared actively for retrieval in these ways more often remembered the location of the hidden dog.” p.98

MULTIPLE STRATEGIES, STRATEGY CHOICES
“Three key findings have emerged from these studies: (1) discoveries are often made not in response to impasses or failures but rather in the context of successful performance; (2) short-lived transition strategies often precede more enduring approaches; and (3) generalization of new approaches often occurs very slowly, even when children can provide compelling rationales for their usefulness.” p. 100

“A common feature of such innovations as reciprocal teaching, communities of learners, the ideal student and Project Rightstart is that they recognize the importance of students’ knowing and using diverse strategies.” pp. 100-101

MULTIPLE INTELLIGENCES
CHILDREN’S VIEWS OF INTELLIGENCE AND THEIR LEARNING: MOTIVATION TO LEARN AND UNDERSTAND
SELF-DIRECTED AND OTHER-DIRECTED LEARNING “Children are both problem solvers and problem generators; they not only attempt to solve problems presented to them, but they also seek and create novel challenges. An adult struggling to solve a crossword puzzle has much in common with a young child trying to assemble a jigsaw puzzle. Why do they bother? It seems that humans have a need to solve problems. One of the challenges of schools is to build on children’s motivation to explore, succeed, understanding and harness it in the service of learning.” p.102

GUIDING CHILDREN’S LEARNING “An extremely important role of caregivers involves efforts to help children connect new situations to more familiar ones. In our discussion of competent performance and transfer, we noted that knowledge appropriate to a particular situation is not necessarily accessed despite being relevant. Effective teachers help people of all ages make connections among different aspects of their knowledge. . . Caregivers attempt to build on what children know and extend their competencies by providing supporting structures or scaffolds for the child’s performance. Scaffolding involves several activities and tasks, such as:
* interesting the child in the task;
* reducing the number of steps required to solve problems by simplifying the task , so that a child can manage components of the process and recognize when a fit with task requirements is achieved;
* maintaining the pursuit of the goal, through motivation of the child and direction of the activity;
* marking critical features of discrepancies between what a child has produced and the ideal solution;
* controlling frustration and risk in problem solving; and
* demonstrating an idealized version of the act to be performed.

“Scaffolding can be characterized as acting on a motto ‘Where before there was a spectator, let there now be a participant.’” p.104

LEARNING TO READ AND TELL STORIES “Reminiscing also enables children to relate upsetting experiences; such narratives act as ‘cooling vessels’, distancing the experience and confirming the safe haven of homes and other supportive environments. This early interest in sharing experience, joint picture book reading, and narrative, in general, have obvious implications for literary appreciation in preschool and early grade. Indeed, the KEEP program in Hawaii and the Reciprocal Teaching Program in urban U.S. cities were both explicitly modeled after the natural interactions; they attempted to build on them and model the style. Connection-making and scaffolding by parents to support children’s mathematical learning has also proved a successful intervention that has been mimicked in school settings.” p.108

CULTURAL VARIATIONS IN COMMUNICATION “There are great cultural variations in the ways in which adults and children communicate, and there are wide individual differences in communication styles within any cultural community. All cultural variations provide strong supports for children’s development. However, some variations are more likely than other to encourage development of the specific kinds of knowledge and interaction styles that are expected in typical U.S. school environments. It is extremely important for educators—and parents—to take these differences into account.”

CONVERSING, OBSERVING AND EAVESDROPPING “In an African-American community of Louisiana, in which children are expected to be “seen and not heard,” language learning occurs by eavesdropping. ‘The silent absorption in community life, the participation in the daily commercial rituals, and the hours spent overhearing adults’ conversations should not be underestimated in their impact on a child’s language growth.’” p.109

SCHOOLING AND THE ROLE OF QUESTIONING “The middle-class mothers began the questioning game almost from birth and well before a child could be expected to answer. For example, a mother questions her 8-week-old infant, “You want your teddy bear?” and responds for the child, “Yes, you want your bear.” These rituals set the stage for a general reliance on questions and pseudo-questioning interactions that serve a variety of social functions. . . Such ‘known-answer’ questions, where the interrogator has the information being requested, occur frequently in classroom dialogues.” p.110

“In general, questions played a less central role in the home social interaction patterns of the African-American children; in particular, there was a notable lack of known-answer rituals. The verbal interactions served a different function, and they were embedded within different communicative and interpersonal contexts. Common questioning forms were analogy, story-starting, and accusatory; these forms rarely occurred in the white homes. For example, the African-American children were commonly asked to engage in the sophisticated use of metaphors by responding to questions that asked for analogical comparisons. The children were more likely to be asked, “What’s that like?” or “Who’s he acting like?” rather than “What’s that?” . . . The adults were asked about and value metaphorical thinking and narrative exposition initiated by a story-telling question: one participant indicated a willingness to tell a story using the question form, “Did you see Maggie’s dog yesterday?” The appropriate answer to such a query is not “yes” or “no,” but another question, “No, what happened to Maggie’s dog yesterday?” that sets the stage for the initiator’s narrative.” pp. 110-111

“As the middle-class teachers practiced their familiar questioning routines with their pupils, it is not surprising that the middle-class pupils, who shared the teacher’s background, successfully fulfilled the answerer role, while the working-class African-American children were often perplexed. Moreover, teachers were sometimes bewildered by what they regarded as the lack of responsible answering behavior on the part of their black pupils. They commented: ‘They can’t be as dumb as they seem in my class . . . ‘I sometimes feel that when I look at them and ask a question I’m staring at a wall I can’t break through.’ . . . “However, as the teachers learned about the types of metaphoric and narrative question sequences with which the children are familiar, they were able to gradually introduce the unfamiliar known-answer routines. This is an excellent example of the ‘two-way path, from school to the community and from the community to the school.’ that is needed if the transition to formal schooling is to be made less traumatic for ethnically diverse groups. Not only can interventions be devised to help minority-culture parents prepare children for school, but schools themselves can be sensitive to the problems of cultural mismatches. The answer is not to concentrate exclusively on changing children or changing schools, but to encourage adaptive flexibility in both directions.” p.111 ]

Author[ Bransford
Title[ Chapter 5: Mind and Brain ]

NOTES
Abstract[
“In considering which finding s from brain research are relevant to human learning or, by extension, to education, one must be careful to avoid adopting faddish concepts that have not been demonstrated to be of value in classroom practice . . . left and right hemispheres . . . holistic “spurts” . . people only use 20 percent of their brains . . . ” p114

“Three main ponts guide the discussion in this chapter:
1. Learning changes the physical sttructure of the brain.
2. These structural changes alter the functional organization of the brain, in other words, leaning organizes and reorganizes the brain.
3. Different parts of the brain may be ready to learn at different times.” p115

“Brain development and psychological development involve continuous interactions between a child and the external environment—or, more accurately, a hierarchy of environments, extending from the level of the individual body cells to the most obvious boundary of the skin. Greater understanding of the nature of this interaction process renders moot such questions as how much depends on genes and how much on environment As various developmental researchers have suggested, this question is much like asking which contributes most to the area of a rectangle, its height or its width.” p115

THE BRAIN: FOUNDATION FOR LEARNING
SOME BASICS
“During the development process, the “wiring diagram” of the brain is created through the formation of synapses. At birth, the human brain has in place only a relatively small proportion of the trillions of synapses it will eventually have; it gains about two-thirds of its adult size after birth, and a portion of this process is guided by experience.

“Synaptic connections are added to the brain in two basic ways. The first way is that synapses are overproduced, then selectively lost. Synapse over-production and loss is a fundamental mechanism that the brain uses to incorporate information from experience.” p116

“The second method of synapse formation is through the addition of new synapses—like the artist who creates a sculpture by adding things together until the form is complete. Unlike synapse overproduction and loss, the process of synapse addition operates throughout the entire human life span and is especially important in later life. The process is not only sensitive to experience, it is actually driven by experience . . . memory.” p117

WIRING THE BRAIN
“The role of experience in wiring the brain has been illuminated by research on the visual cortex in animals and humans . . . Neuroscientists discovered this phenomenon by studying humans with visual abnormalities, such as a cataract or a muscle irregularity that deviates the eye . . . In the case of deprivation from birth, one eye completely takes over. The later the deprivation occurs after birth, the less effect it has. By about 6 months of age, closing one eye for weeks on end will produce no effect whatsoever. The critical period has passed; the connections have already sorted themselves out, and the overlapping connections have been eliminated. . . The brain development process actually usesvisual information entering from outside to become more precisely organized than it could with intrinsic molecular mechanisms alone. This external information is even more important for later cognitive development. The more a person interacts with the world, the more a person needs information from the world incorporated into the brain structures.” pp117-118

“Research evidence suggests that activity in the nervous system associated with learning experiences somehow cause nerve cells to create new synapses. Unlike the process of synapse overproduction and loss, synapse addition and modification are life-long processes, driven by experienc. In essence, the quality of information to which one is exposed and the amount of information one acquires is reflected throughtou one’s life in the structure of the brain.” p118

EXPERIENCES AND ENVIRONMENTS FOR BRAIN DEVELOPMENT

“Animals raised in complex environments have a greater volume of capillaries per nerve cell—and therefore a greater suply of blood to the brain—than the caged animals, regardless of whether the caged animal lived alone or with companions.” p118

DOES MERE NEURAL ACTIVITY CHANGE THE BRAIN OR IS LEARNING REQUIRED?
“Are the changes in the brain due to actual learning or to variations in aggregate levels of neural activity? Animals in a complex environment not only learn from experiences, but they also run, play, and exercise, which activates the brain.” acrobat rats experiments . . “Learning adds synapses; exercise does not. Thus, different kinds of experience condition the brain in different ways. Synapse formation and blood vessel formation (vascularization) are two important forms of brain adaptation, but they are driven by different physiological mechanisms and by different behavioral events.” pp119-120

LOCALIZED CHANGES
” . . . when young adult animals were taught a maze, structural changes occurred in the visual area of the cerebral cortex . . . learning imposes new patterns of organization on the brain . . . ” p121

ROLE OF INSTRUCTION IN BRAIN DEVELOPMENT

LANGUAGE AND BRAIN DEVELOPMENT
“Brain development is often timed to take advantage of particular experiences, such that information from the environment helps to organize the brain. The development of language in humans is an example of a natural process that is guided by a timetable with certain limiting conditions. Like the development of the visual system, parallel processes occur in human language development for the capacity to perceive phonemes . . . Very young children discriminate many more phonemic boundaries than adults, but they lose their discriminatory powers when certain boundaries are not supported by experience with spoken language. . . It is not known whether synapse overproduction and elimination underlies this process, but it certainly seems plausible.” pp121-122

EXAMPLES OF EFFECTS ON INSTRUCTION ON BRAIN DEVELOPMENT
” . . . there appear to be separate brain areas that specialize in subtasks such as hearing words (spoken language of others), seeing words (reading), speaking words (speech), and generating words (thinking with language). Whether these patterns of brain organization for oral, written, and listening skills require separate exercises to promote the component skills of language and literacy remains to be determined.” p122

“In the nervous system of a hearing person, auditory system pathways appear to be closely connected to the brain regions that process the features of spoken language, while visual pathways appear to go through several stages of processing before features of written language are extracted. When a deaf individual learns to communicate with manual signs, different nervous system processes have replaced the ones normally used for language—a significant achievement.” p123

MEMORY AND BRAIN PROCESSES
“Most of the research advances in memory that help scientists understand learning come from two major groups of studies: studies that show that memory is not a unitary construct and studies that relate features of learning to later effectiveness in recall. . . “Memory is neither a single entity nor a phenomenon that occurs in a single area of the brain. There are tow basic memory processes: declarative memory or memory for facts and events which occurs primarily in brain systems involving the hippocampus, and procedural or declarative memory, which is memory for skills and other cognitive operations, or memory that cannot be represented in declarative sentences, which occurs principally in the brain systems involving the neostriatum.” p124

“Research has also indicated that the mind is not just a passive recorder of events, rather, it is actively at work both in sorting and in recalling information. There is research demonstrating that when a series of events are presented in a random sequence, people reorder them into sequences that make sense when they try to recall them. . . In view of the fact that experience alters brain structures and that specific experiences have specific effects on the brain, the nature of “experience” becomes an interesting question in relation to memory processes.” Non-event becomes “real” memory after 12 weeks of discussions. p125

CONCLUSION
“Several findings about the brain and the mind are clear and lead to the next research topics:
1. The functional organization of the brain and the mind depends on and benefits positively from experience.
2. Development is not merely a biologically driven unfolding process, but also an active process that derives essential information from experience.
3. Research has shown that some experiences have the most powerful effects during specific sensitive periods, while others can affect the brain over a much longer time span.
4. An important issue that needs to be determined in relation to education is which things are tied to critical periods (e.g., some aspects of phonemic perception and language learning) and for which things is the time of exposure less critical.” p127

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