Bibliography Database
Type[ Book
Primary Information
Title[ How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School.
]
Additional Authors
Author2[ M. Suzanne Donovan
Author3[ James W. Pellegrino
Author4[
Book Information
Publisher[ National Academy Press
Location[ Washington D.C.
Year[ 2000
Edition[
Pages[ 374
Content Description
Keywords[ 1. Learning, Psychology of. 2. Learning —Social Aspects
]
Abstract[
Part One: Introduction
Chapter 1: Learning: From Speculation to Science
Part Two: Learners and Learning
Chapter 2: How Experts Differ from Novices
Chapter 3: Learning and Transfer
Part Three: Teachers and Teaching
Chapter 6: The Design of Learning Environments
Chapter 7: Effective Teaching: Examples in History, Mathematics, and Science
Chapter 9: Technology to Support Learning
Part Four: Future Directions for the Science of Learning
Chapter 11: Next Steps for Research
]
Type[ Notes
Primary Information
Author[ Bransford
Title[ Part One: Introduction
Chapter 1: Learning: From Speculation to Science
]
Book Information
Book_Author[ Bransford
Book_Title[ How People Learn
Pages[
Content Description
Keywords[
]
Abstract[ “Above all, information and knowledge are growing at a far more rapid rate than ever before in the history of humakind. 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 histroy, 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 transer (to other contexts) rather than only the ability to remember.” p. 9
Pre-Existing Knowlege
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 acitivites . . . Teacher C does this as well, but with the added objective of contnually 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 infomation 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 insruction 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 assesments designed to make students’ thinking visible to both teachers and students—are essential. They permit the teacher to grasp the students’ preconceptions, undertand 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
]
Type[ Notes
Primary Information
Author[ Bransford
Title[ Chapter 2: How Experts Differ from Novices
]
Book Information
Book_Author[ Bransford
Book_Title[ How People Learn
Pages[
Content Description
Keywords[
]
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. Experfts 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 teir knowledge with little attentional effort.
5. Though experts know their disciplines thoroughly, this does not guarentee 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 INFORMATIONS “Chunking” “learning how to see” p. 36
ORGAINIZATION 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 thaey 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 doman 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 involveswhat is known as “metacognition”—the ability to monitor one’s current level of understanding and decide when it is not adequate.” p.47
]
Type[ Notes
Primary Information
Author[ Bransford
Title[ Chapter 3: Learning and Transfer
]
Book Information
Book_Author[ Bransford
Book_Title[ How People Learn
Pages[
Content Description
Keywords[
]
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 thesimilarity between conditions of learning and conditions of transfer.” p.51
“In the discussion below we explore key coharacteristics 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 whenb, wehre, and why to use new knwoledge 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 difficultgy are strongly affectged by whether they are ‘performance oriented’ or ‘learning oriented.'” pp 60-61
“Social opportunites also affect motivation.” p. 61
“Ldarners 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 anbd 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 REPRESTENTATIONS
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 procdural facilitation for teaching writen 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, coasching, and scaffolding, as well ascollective 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 learing about fractions. Thge 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 ath learners construct new understandings based on their current knowledge highlights some of the dnagers 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 helpthem reconceptualize faulty conceptions.” p.71
TRANSFER AND CULTURAL PRACTICES “School failure may be aprtly explained by the msimatch betwen what students have learned in their home cultures and what is required of thiem in school. . . These differences have their roots in earfly adult-infantg intereactions. 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 borad set of skills rooted in the early context of adultg-child interacitons. What happens when the adults, peers,a dn 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 empahsis 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 aroundauthentic problems and projects that are frequently encountered in nonschool 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 crafing educational experiencdes that best prepare them for these conpetencies. Opportunites to engage in problem-based learning during the first year of medical shcol lead to greater ability to diagnose and understand medical problems than do opportunities to learn in typical lecture-based medical courses.” p.77
]
Type[ Notes
Primary Information
Author[ Bransford
Title[ Chapter 4: How Children Learn
]
Book Information
Book_Author[ Bransford
Book_Title[ How People Learn
Pages[
Content Description
Keywords[
]
Abstract[
INFANT CAPABILITIES
THEORIES
“While Piaget observed that infants actually seek environmental stimulation that promotes their intellectual development, he thoughtthat 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 theinternal 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 tghe 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 navigvate with aid from a supportive context, including the assistance of others.” p.80
ZONE OF PROXIMAL DEVELOPMENT
“The zone of proximal developmet is the distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and tghe 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 competencde. What a child can perform today with assistnace 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 prespectively.” p.81
“As a result of these theoretical and methodological developemtns, 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 werre 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, havituation, 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’ capabities for looking, sucking, and interest in novelty, developemtnal psychologists devised methods for reliably studying early aspects of infant congition.” 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 contacgt 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 evidencde shows that the hman 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 drmbeats, jumps of a toy bunny, numerical values represented in arrays, etc.” p.89
“But just because children have some knowledge ofnumbers before they enter school is not to say that there is little need for careful learning latger. Eaqrly understanding of numbers can guide their entry into school-based learning about numbe 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 ATTTENTION 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 attentinon 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 inot 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 improtant; 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 wathing 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 ahve ro9ughly the same mental capacity, but that with development children acquirte knowledge and develop effecgtive activites 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’ dispoarate elements into sets of letters, numbers, or pictures that make sense to them.” p.96
” . . . A group of 8- to 12-year-old ‘slow learne3rs’ 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, knowedge 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 apropriate—all necesary for effective intentional learning.” p.97
“Attempts at deliverate remembering in preschool children provide glimpses of the early emerfgence of the ability to plan, or=chestrate, 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 remembe whefre 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 thed hidden dog.” p.98
MULTIPLE STRATEGIES, STRATEGY CHOICES
“Three key findings have emerged from these studies: (1) discoveries ared 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 conect 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 diffeent aspects of their knowledge. . . Caregivers attempt to build on what children know and extend their competencies by providing supportiung structures or scaffolds for the child’s perfomance. Scaffolding involves several activites 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 tghe process and recognize when a fit with task requiremenhts is achieved;
* maintaining the pursuit of the goal, through motivation of the child and direction of the acitivity;
* 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 amotto ‘Where before there was a spectator, let there now be a participant.'” p.104
LEARNING TO READ AND TELL STORIES “Reminiscing also enablexs children to relate upsegtting 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 uran 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 partents 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 communitcation styles wintin anyt cultural community. All culktural variations provide strong supports for children’s developemtn. 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 environmengts. It is extrememly important for educators—and parents—to take these differencxes 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 expecte 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 ffrequently in classroom dialogues.” p.110
“In general, questions palyed 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 veral interactions served a different function, and they were embedded within different commincative and interpersonal contexts. Common questioning forms were analogy, story-starting, and accusatory; these forms rarely ocurred in the white homes. For example, the African-American children were commonly asked to engage in the sophisticated use of etaphors by responding to questions that asked for analogical comparisons. The children werfe mroe 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 probloems 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
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Title[ Chapter 5: Mind and Brain
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Title[ Chapter 6: The Design of Learning Environments
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Title[ Chapter 7: Effective Teaching: Examples in History, Mathematics, and Science
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Title[ Chapter 8: Teacher Learning
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Title[ Chapter 9: Technology to Support Learning
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Title[ Chapter 10: Conclusions
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Title[ Chapter 11: Next Steps for Research
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