How Children Learn FULL Flashcards
Active Involvement
It is a challenge for teachers to create interesting and challenging learning environments that encourage the active involvement of students. The following are some suggestions as to how this can be done:
• Avoid situations where the students are passive listeners for long periods of time.
• Provide students with hands-on activities, such as experiments, observations, projects, etc.
• Encourage participation in classroom discussions and other collaborative activities.
• Organize school visits to museums and technological parks.
• Allow students to take some control over their own learning. Taking control over one’s learning means allowing students to make some decisions about what to learn and how.
• Assist students in creating learning goals that are consistent with their interests and future aspirations.
Social Participation
Teachers can do many things to encourage social participation in ways that facilitate learning:
• They can assign students to work in groups and assume the role of a coach/co-ordinator who provides guidance and support to the groups.
• They can create a classroom environment that includes group workspaces where resources are shared.
• Through modelling and coaching, they can teach students how to co-operate with each other.
• They can create circumstances for students to interact with each other, to express their opinions and to evaluate other students’ arguments.
• An important aspect of social learning is to link the school to the community at large. In this way, students’ opportunities for social participation are enlarged.
Meaningful Activities
Teachers can make classroom activities more meaningful by situating them in an authentic context. An example of an authentic context is one in which the activity is typically used in real life. For example, students can improve their oral language and communication skills by participating in debates. They can improve their writing skills by being involved in the preparation of a classroom newspaper. Students can learn science by participating in a community or school environmental project.
The school can be in contact with local scientists and invite them to lecture, or allow the students to visit their laboratories.
It is also important for teachers to be aware of the cultural
differences of the children in their classroom and to respect these differences. They must see them as strengths to build on, rather than as defects. Children will feel differently in the classroom if their culture is reflected in the common activities. School routines that are unfamiliar to some children can be introduced
gradually so that the transition can be less traumatic for ethnically diverse groups.
Relating New Information to Prior Knowledge
Teachers can help students activate prior knowledge and use it for the task at hand. This can be done in a number of ways.
• Teachers can discuss the content of a lesson before starting in order to ensure that the students have the necessary prior knowledge and in order to activate this knowledge.
• Often students’ prior knowledge is incomplete or there are false beliefs and critical misconceptions. Teachers do not simply need to know that students know something about the topic to be introduced. They need to investigate students’ prior knowledge in detail so that false beliefs and misconceptions can be identified.
• Teachers may need to go back to cover important prerequisite material or ask the students to do some preparatory work on their own.
• Teachers can ask the kind of question that helps students see relationships between what they are reading and what they already know.
• Effective teachers can help students to grasp relationships and make connections. They can do so by providing a model or a scaffold that students can use as support in their efforts to improve their performance.
Being Strategic
Teachers must recognize the importance of students knowing and using a variety of strategies. The teaching of strategies can be done directly or indirectly. In the latter case, the teacher can give students a task and provide a model of the inquiry process or ask key questions. For example, in reading, teachers can explicitly show students how to outline the important points in
a text and how to summarize them. Alternatively, they can ask a group of students to discuss a text and summarize it. They can help in this process by participating in the discussion and by asking critical questions. In science, teachers can show students how to conduct experiments: how to form hypotheses, how to keep a systematic record of their findings, and how to evaluate them.
It is important to ensure that students learn to use these
strategies on their own and do not always rely on teachers to provide the necessary support. Teachers need to gradually fade their assistance and allow students to take greater responsibility for their learning.
Engaging in Self-Regulation and Being Reflective
Teachers can help students become self-regulated and reflective by providing opportunities:
• To plan how to solve problems, design experiments and
read books;
• To evaluate the statements, arguments, solutions to problems of others, as well as of one’s self;
• To check their thinking and ask themselves questions about their understanding— (Why am I doing what I am doing? How well am I doing? What remains to be done?);
• To develop realistic knowledge of themselves as learners— (I am good in reading, but need to work on my mathematics);
• To set their own learning goals;
• To know what are the most effective strategies to use and when to use them.
Restructuring Prior Knowledge
What can teachers do to facilitate the understanding of counterintuitive information?
• Teachers need to be aware that students have prior beliefs and incomplete understandings that can conflict with what is being taught at school.
• It is important to create the circumstances where alternative beliefs and explanations can be externalized and expressed.
• Teachers need to build on the existing ideas of students and slowly lead them to more mature understandings. Ignoring prior beliefs can lead to the formation of misconceptions.
• Students must be provided with observations and experiments that have the potential of showing to them that some of their beliefs can be wrong. Examples from the history of science can be used for this purpose.
• Scientific explanations must be presented with clarity and, when possible, exemplified with models.
• Students must be given enough time to restructure their
prior conceptions. In order to do this, it is better to design
curricula that deal with fewer topics in greater depth than
attempting to cover a great deal of topics in a superficial
manner.
Aiming Towards Understanding Rather than Memorization
How does one teach for understanding? The following are some tasks teachers can carry out in order to promote understanding of the material that has been taught:
• Ask students to explain a phenomenon or a concept in their own words.
• Show students how to provide examples that illustrate how a principle applies or how a law works.
• Students must be able to solve characteristic problems in the subject-matter area. Problems can increase in difficulty as students acquire greater expertise.
• When students understand the material, they can see similarities and differences, they can compare and contrast, and they can understand and generate analogies.
• Teach students how to abstract general principles from
specific cases and generalize from specific examples.
Helping Students Learn to Transfer
Teachers can improve students’ ability to transfer what they have learned at school by:
• Insisting on mastery of subject matter. Without an adequate degree of understanding, transfer cannot take place (see previous principle).
• Helping students see the transfer implications of the information they have learned.
• Applying what has been learned in one subject-matter area to other areas to which it may be related.
• Showing students how to abstract general principles from concrete examples.
• Helping students learn how to monitor their learning and
how to seek and use feedback about their progress.
• Teach for understanding rather than for memorization (see previous principle).
Taking Time to Practice
Many educational programmes are designed to increase one’s exposure to learning situations preferably at an early age. Here are some recommendations for teachers that can help students spend more time on learning tasks.
• Increase the amount of time students spend on learning in the classroom.
• Give students learning tasks that are consistent with what they already know.
• Do not try to cover too many topics at once. Give students time to understand the new information.
• Help students engage in ‘deliberate practice’ that includes active thinking and monitoring of their own learning (see sections on self-regulation).
• Give students access to books so that they can practice reading at home.
• Be in contact with parents so that they can learn to provide richer educational experiences for their children.
Developmental and Individual Differences
The following are recommendations for creating the best environment for the development of children, while recognizing their individual differences:
• Learn how to assess children’s knowledge, strategies and modes of learning adequately.
• Introduce children to a wide range of materials, activities and learning tasks that include language, mathematics, natural sciences, social sciences, art, music, movement, social understanding, etc.
• Identify students’ areas of strength, paying particular attention to the interest, persistence and confidence they demonstrate in different kinds of activities.
• Support students’ areas of strength and utilize these areas to improve overall academic performance.
• Guide and challenge students’ thinking and learning.
• Ask children thought-provoking questions and give them problems to solve. Urge children to test hypotheses in a variety of ways.
• Create connections to the real world by introducing problems and materials drawn from everyday situations.
• Show children how they can use their unique profiles of
intelligence to solve real-world problems.
• Create circumstances for students to interact with people in the community, and particularly with adults who are knowledgeable and enthusiastic about the kinds of things that are of interest to the students.
Creating Motivated Learners
Teachers must use encouraging statements that reflect an honest evaluation of learner performance:
• Recognize student accomplishments.
• Attribute student achievement to internal and not external factors (e.g. ‘You have good ideas’).
• Help students believe in themselves (e.g. ‘You are putting a lot of effort on math and your grades have much
improved’).
• Provide feedback to children about the strategies they use and instruction as to how to improve them.
• Help learners set realistic goals.
It is also important to:
• Refrain from grouping students according to their ability.
Ability grouping gives the message that ability is valued
more than effort.
• Promote co-operation rather than competition. Research
suggests that competitive arrangements that encourage
students to work alone to achieve high grades and rewards tend to give the message that what is valued is ability and diminish intrinsic motivation.
• Provide novel and interesting tasks that challenge learners’ curiosity and higher-order thinking skills at the appropriate level of difficulty.
