Обсуждение:The ABCs of How We Learn
Belonging
Other studies have found that helping people to think about themselves as having multiple identities, in particular, focusing on those facets of their identity that are in-group (e.g., college student) rather than out-group (e.g., female), improves performance for those at risk of stereotype threat (Rydell, McConnell, & Beilock, 2009; for more examples, see http://www.reducingstereotypethreat.org
CONTRASTING CASES
ARE close examples that help people notice features they might otherwise overlook. They increase the precision and usability of knowledge.
DELIBERATE PRACTICE
IS characterized by a high degree of focused effort to develop specific skills and concepts beyond one’s current abilities.
ELABORATION
IMPROVES MEMORY by making connections between new information and prior knowledge.
FEEDBACK
IS INFORMATION that flows back to learners about the quality of their ideas and behaviors. Learners can then use the feedback to make adjustments.
For instance, an iPad game called Critter Corral lets students see how far their answer is from correct (Figure F.2). In one of the games, children need to decide how much food to serve to the restaurant patrons, and they can see if they served too much or too little. Ideally, this helps children learn the relative sizes of the numbers while also providing some guidance for how to revise. With only right/wrong feedback, learners can only guess at how to fix a mistake.
But this is a short-term effect that depends on putting the learner in the “right mood.” Can we help people learn to seek constructive criticism more generally? We addressed this question by making a game-based assessment called Posterlet. In the game, players create posters for booths at a funfair. They choose a booth and then design a poster. When done, they select a focus group of animal characters to assess their design. Each member of the focus group shows up with two thought bubbles, as shown in Figure F.3. One says, “I don’t like …” and one says, “I like …” Players can choose either the constructive negative feedback or the positive feedback about their graphic design for each character, but not both. Students then get a chance to revise if they want. Finally, they send their poster to the booth, and they learn how many tickets sold. Students repeat the cycle three times. All told, players have nine chances to choose between constructive criticism and praise (three per poster). The assessment is unique because the goal is not to test students’ factual or procedural knowledge but, rather, to assess students’ free choices relevant to learning (see Schwartz & Arena, 2013).
GENERATION
IS A memorization technique that relies on the fact that remembering something makes it easier to remember the next time.
HANDS-ON
LEARNING OCCURS when people use their bodies and senses in the learning process. It recruits perceptual-motor intelligence to give meaning to words and symbols.
Does a hands-on activity need to be hands on? There are many computer simulations of hands-on activities that include mathematical and science manipulatives
- National Library of Virtual Manipulatives at http://nlvm.usu.edu/en/nav/vlibrary.html
- PhET Interactive Simulations at http://phet.colorado.edu
The answer to this question depends on whether learners can elicit the right perceptual-motor experiences without physically touching.
IMAGINATIVE PLAY
INVOLVES creating a story that is different from the world at hand, often letting one thing stand for another (e.g., a stick becomes a swooshing plane). Theoretically, imaginative play should improve a number of developmental outcomes, such as verbal abilities, symbolic creativity, intelligence, cognitive control, and social competence. (Below we explain why we say “theoretically.”)
How to Use Imaginative Play to Enhance Learning There is a prevailing hypothesis that improving children’s executive functioning, a major component of socioemotional functioning, will have cumulative effects on future learning. Children will be better able to control their attention, concentration, and impulsivity when learning and interacting with others. People have looked to play-centered curricula to strengthen executive functioning in four- and five-year-olds. The Tools of the Mind curriculum wraps executive function exercises around imaginative play (see http://www.toolsofthemind.org/
For example, children may be asked to play specific roles (e.g., doctors) and behave like doctors (and not patients). This differs from immature play where children do not try to play within rules. Rule-based behavior, by its very nature, is not stimulus driven.
Game play for learning has received increasing attention lately. For instance, the Quest to Learn schools in New York and Chicago frame a public school curriculum around games (see http://www.instituteofplay.org/work/projects/quest-schools/quest-to-learn/
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JUST-IN-TIME TELLING
ENABLES students to first experience problems before they hear or read the solutions and explanations. Lectures and readings are more effective when they address a problem students have experienced. This chapter considers how to provide those problem-solving experiences. When students appreciate the details of the problem, they learn the expository information more precisely, and they can use it to learn future material efficiently and solve novel problems effectively. Freely available science simulations (see, e.g., PhET Interactive Simulations at http://phet.colorado.edu) can also set the stage for just-in-time telling. If this is the intent, do not ask students to only explore a simulation on their own, because they may not experience a useful problem to be solved. Instead, let them explore for a few minutes, so they can learn the various controls and general simulation behavior
A second risk is that people may discount compelling experiences, because they do not show an immediate benefit. For instance, Arena (2012) showed that commercial video games, such as Civilization and Call of Duty, prepare students to learn about World War II. Students who had played the games for several hours did not initially exhibit any more WWII knowledge than students who had not, so the games seemed useless. However, this would have been a premature conclusion. While the video games do not portray WWII history per se, students do engage in strategic and tactical problems that can prepare them to learn about those types of issuerom a lecture on WWII. The video games revealed their value only when they were coupled with a subsequent explanation. Students who had played the games learned more from a lecture on WWII than those who had not. The benefit of many experiential activities is that they prepare people for future learning, and not that they are a complete lesson on their own.
Blikstein, P., & Wilensky, U. (2010). MaterialSim: A constructionist agent-based modeling approach to engineering education. In M. J. Jacobson & P. Reimann (Eds.), Designs for learning environments of the future: International perspectives from the learning sciences (pp. 17–60). New York: Springer. Bonawitz,
KNOWLEDGE INFUSES
ALL of learning. Prior knowledge enables people to make sense of new information, and “post” knowledge enables people to imagine and achieve goals they previously could not. Because of knowledge’s central importance, we decided to break form. Rather than presenting a chapter for the letter K in our usual style, we offer a brief essay on the broad outcomes of knowledge. Our goal is to help untangle a tacit dichotomy that leads to confusion about the design of educational experiences and desirable learning outcomes.
WITH LISTENING AND sharing learners try to construct joint understandings. Listening and sharing are the cornerstones of collaborative learning. We can learn more working together than working alone.
Determining whether students have learned to cooperate is daunting. Gillies (2002) recorded group member behaviors every 10 seconds—it is not an easily adopted methodology. People are working on more efficient solutions. Basketball has a solution. It is possible to measure the performance of teammates when player X is on the floor versus not. For example, do the teammates score more points when player X is on the floor? It is fun to think of how to do something similar for learning settings. The Programme for the International Student Assessment (see http://www.oecd.org/pisa) is a common test taken by many nations (and causes consternation among officials when their country does poorly). The test makers are trying to measure cooperative skills in negotiation, consensus building, and divide-and-conquer tasks. In a fascinating sample item, a student interacts with three simulated team members in a computer-based task. The team is planning a welcoming activity for visitors. One of their tasks is to decide among several options offered by their simulated teacher, Ms. Cosmo. One of the simulated students, Brad, says, “Who cares? All thehoices are boring. Let’s take our visitors someplace they’ll actually enjoy.” The real student, the one being measured, has four choices:
MAKING
CREATING shareable products, such as gardens, works of art, and computer programs. Making is motivating, yields practical knowledge, and may lead to sustained interest. Being able to create things is both useful and satisfying. Dale Dougherty, who started Make magazine, clairs, “The maker movement has come about in part because of people’s need to engage passionately with objects in ways that make them more than just consumers” (2012, p. 12). Making starts with production, not consumption. People make many things. Beer brewing is a fine example. A Karl Marx (yes, we really are bringing in Marx) wrote of two great forces that constitute a person. One is appropriation—we become what we are by taking up the ideas and artifacts of those around us. The second is production. With Aristotle, he viewed humans quintessentially as builders. We want to produce and create ourselves in the world, whether through ideas or products. This way we can put our element in the social matrix, and other people may appropriate our ideas. Marx did not advocate for a welfare state in which people only had access to appropriation. He advocated for a productive state where people could contribute and impress themselves upon the world. For Marx, the critical political issue was always who owned the means of production, which is oddly consistent with arguments for student-centered classrooms. This does not imply that student-centered teachers are communists! But Marx did capture the essence of making and how it can contribute to learning.
Making happens in clubs, museums, homes, and even school. One fun example is the SparkTruck (see http://sparktruck.org)—a big mobile truck carrying tools and materials that delivers maker projects to kids across the country, logging over 20,000 miles as of 2015.
We take the example of Scratch, a visual programming language developed at the MIT Media Lab (Resnick et al., 2009). Scratch includes the essential ingredients of productive agency. There are resources for making, namely, the learner-friendly programming
NORMS
ARE RULES of social interaction. They are often culture specific and can vary by intellectual tradition and setting. Good norms enable productive learning interactions. Norms of intellectual engagement shape what people learn and what they value.
As Richard Posner put it, “If you don’t play chess by the rules, you’re not playing it at all” (1997, p. 365). Norms allow people to play the game of social life. If players have different rules of the game, it is a recipe for frustration and no game play at all. In a learning setting, productive norms increase the effective exchange of information and ideas. Shared goals and methods of interaction ensure that learners are playing the same game, smoothing out the process of learning and problem solving together. Shared norms reduce the need to enforce rules of engagement.
.PEOPLE LEARN BY watching other people’s attitudes and behaviors. Learning by watching is called observational learning. It is especially effective for overt procedural skills, affective responses, and social values. Observational learning occurs naturally without explicit instruction—people learn to imitate both good and bad behaviors by watching those around them.
What Is Participation? PARTICIPATION REFERS TO engaging in an existing cultural activity. The major benefit of learning through participation is that it involves a rich and purposeful social context, often with a trajectory of continued participation and growth.
Developmental psychologist Lev Vygotsky stated, “What a child is able to do in collaboration today he will be able to do independently tomorrow” (1934/1987, p. 211). This thought undergirds his most influential idea, the zone of proximal development (the ZPD, as it is fondly called), a region along a trajectory of growth where, with a little social help, learners can begin participating in an activity. Participating, in turn, further drives the processes of development and learning so that eventually the learner can participate without help.
This brings up an important point. Good learning environments provide a trajectory for continued learning and deeper involvement. Sports provide an impressive example: children can begin in little leagues and move through clubs of increasing abilities until they become professional athletes. The best video games make extensive use of the ZPD to create trajectories for more complex participation (Gee, 2003). At early levels, the computer accomplishes many of the tasks of the game, such as maneuvering additional players and offering a lax opposition. Players have a chance to experience why one would play such a game while also learning some of the basic game mechanics. As the player moves up in skill level, the game reveals more complexity along a “Goldilocks” ramp that is neither too hard nor too easy. (See Chapter R for why this is also very motivating.) II. How to Use Participation to Enhance Learning
Gee, J. (2003). What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
QUESTION-DRIVEN LEARNING
The Jasper Woodbury videos are carefully constructed problem-based learning activities with two key features: they introduce a rich and compelling video-based problem-solving context that does not handicap children with poor reading skills, and they are self-contained and provide sufficient information to address the question. This latter feature is in contrast to more open-ended, project-based approaches that have students work on real-world problems, such as, “How can we increase the percentage of students who recycle at school?” This is more authentic, in the sense that it has a potential impact on people’s lives. Projects can be very rewarding, but they are also more demanding for the instructor, because the space of subproblems and possible relevant resources can become unruly.
REWARD
IS a desirable outcome received in response to behavior. As might be expected, rewarding a behavior drives people to adopt that behavior. Punishing a behavior leads to the opposite. People often think about learning in terms of improved understanding. Another important outcome of learning involves simply taking on good behaviors. If only parents could get their teenagers to do homework instead of playing video games all the time! progression of appropriately applied rewards can produce complex behaviors. B. F. Skinner (1986), a major proponent of behaviorism, tells the story of nurturing art appreciation. Two undergraduates wanted to place a painting on their dormitory wall, but their roommate wanted to put up his sports awards. The undergraduates decided to change their roommate’s behavior by rewarding pro-art behaviors surreptitiously. During a party, they paid a young woman to ask the roommate about art and to hang on his every word. They later took him to a museum and covertly dropped a $5 bill on the floor next to a painting he was observing. They also paid more attention to him when he discussed art. As the story goes, a month later the roommate had bought his first painting for the dorm room.
reward. Different people find different things intrinsically rewarding. A cook likes making a good meal, whereas a sports fan likes cheering a good game. One ideal is personalizing instruction to match each student’s individual interests. This is a good idea, but can be hard to achieve when there are many different students, each of whom finds personal relevance and interest in different things. Fortunately, we can rely on situations that nearly everyone finds intrinsically motivating. Ryan and Deci (2000) have proposed three foundational intrinsic motivators: autonomy, competence, and social relatedness. Autonomy relates to a feeling of control over your own decisions and actions. The authors found that classrooms where students had more autonomy showed higher levels of curiosity, desire for challenge, and sustained motivation than did classrooms where teachers were very directive and controlling. Competence relates to the feeling that one is capable of achieving desired goals and gaining mastery. Positive feedback that one’s free-throw percentage is improving can motivate further practice. Social relatedness taps into the human desire to connect with others (see Chapter B). While relatedness is not necessary for intrinsic motivation (many solitary activities are inherently motivating), it can help support motivation. For example, many hobbyists find the opportunity to share the fruits of their labor, such as a painting or a brewed beer, a strong source of motivation (see Chapter M). Activities that foster any or all of these feelings will be highly motivating because they tap into human psychological needs...
Self-explanation is a constructive process. People build knowledge that goes beyond the information given. For example, self-explainers generate inferences to fill in missing information. They also make connections to their own knowledge (e.g., the lungs oxygenate blood). Ineffective readers do not take these extra efforts to construct an interpretation of a text. If anything, they merely paraphrase or reread sentences. Ineffective readers are learning a text, whereas effective readers are learning from a text.
.What is the core learning mechanic?
- Silently talking through expository materials to improve comprehension.
Teaching
LEARNING BY TEACHING occurs when people accept the responsibility of teaching others and develop their own understanding so they can teach well. Teaching is not just for pupils; the teacher learns too. Teaching creates a confluence of felicitous conditions for learning. These include a motivating sense of responsibility, a need to organize and explain information, and feedback based on one’s pupils’ performances. When learning by teaching, people develop chains of connected ideas. Professors often say they never really understood a topic until they had to teach it. Students can also benefit when they have a chance to teach. In peer tutoring, students teach other students face-to-face. In a review of thirty-eight peer-tutoring studies, Cohen, Kulik, and Kulik (1982) found that 87 percent of the studies exhibited a learning benefit for the tutors that was nearly as large as the benefit for the tutees! Engaging in teaching can be a powerful way for students to learn.
Figure T.2 shows a useful collaborative learning arrangement called Jigsaw. In Jigsaw, all the students have an opportunity to teach. This arrangement is nice because there is interdependence within the group—no student can complete the task alone, and success depends on the teaching of the other students.
A technology called a Teachable Agent (TA) fosters chains of ideas in the extreme (Blair, Schwartz, Biswas, & Leelawong, 2007). With TA, students teach a computer character. Figure T.3 shows some components of the teaching interface. To teach a TA, students build their agent’s brain by adding nodes and connecting them.
Teachable Agent. Students teach a computer character by creating a concept map that shows the causal relations among nodes in the map. Once they have taught their agent, they can ask it questions, as shown in the foreground panel. The agent visually reasons through the concept map to determine the answer.
UNDOING
HELPS TO weaken mistaken ideas that are often resistant to change. People regularly develop beliefs and ways of reasoning that work much of the time but are still formally incorrect and can occasionally cause problems. This includes bad habits, misconceptions, and faulty ways of reasoning. It is important to undo this prior learning lest it interfere with future learning. Undoing requires identifying and replacing the source of the incorrect thinking, rather than just correcting each mistaken answer.
How Undoing Works Jean Piaget, the famous developmental psychologist who proposed stages of cognitive development, theorized that children improve their reasoning about the world through processes of assimilation and accommodation. Assimilation occurs when people make new information fit their current ideas. Accommodation occurs when people change their ideas to fit new information. Undoing depends on accommodation, which can be difficult—changing beliefs is harder than confirming them. There are two reasons Inventing structure for complex information
VISUALIZATION
IS THE process of making an external spatial representation of information. Visualizing is a useful strategy for discovering structure and organizing information efficiently. People often want to know the best way to communicate effectively with visualizations (McElhaney, Chang, Chiu, & Linn, 2014). In this chapter, we discuss a different matter: getting learners to create their own visualizations. It has many benefits and is rarely included in instruction, so we emphasize it here. Maps, diagrams, sketches,
VISUALIZATION
IS THE process of making an external spatial representation of information. Visualizing is a useful strategy for discovering structure and organizing information efficiently. People often want to know the best way to communicate effectively with visualizations (McElhaney, Chang, Chiu, & Linn, 2014). In this chapter, we discuss a different matter: getting learners to create their own visualizations. It has many benefits and is rarely included in instruction, so we emphasize it here. Maps, diagrams, sketches,
WORKED EXAMPLES ARE models of expert solutions. Novices can follow the expert’s procedures and explanations to learn how to solve similar problems on their own. A
EXCITEMENT IS A physiological state of heightened arousal. It comes with increased heart rate, increased blood pressure, moist palms, focused attention, higher emotion. Moderate levels of arousal improve performance and memory encoding. Too much arousal leads to performance impairments, espec
ially during difficult activities. Imagine you are
YES I CAN refers to self-efficacy—people’s belief that they have what it takes to accomplish a goal. When people believe success is within reach, they approach activities more readily, persist longer, persevere in the face of failures, and accomplish more. How do you convince yourself to try something? One argument is the payoff—a million-dollar lottery has an attractive payoff, so you try it. This part of the calculus is often called the utility or value. Sometimes, students do not perceive any utility in what they are supposed to learn, so they don’t bother. (Chapters M, P, Q, and R address this issue.) The second part of the calculus is whether you can succeed or not—your expectancy. This partially involves estimating the probability of success: maybe buying the lottery ticket wasn’t such a good idea after all. People also have expectations about their abilities to cause success (self-efficacy): maybe you believe you can rig the lottery, so you play. If the utility of an endeavor is high and your expectancy for accomplishing that endeavor is high, you approach and persist.
In Bandura’s formulation, self-efficacy differs from self-esteem and self-confidence, which both involve people’s overall sense of worth. People can have different feelings of self-efficacy for different tasks. Chase (2013) studied relatively accomplished scholars in mathematics and literature. She gave both groups of scholars an accessible but difficult problem in math (a tricky math problem) and in literature (a tricky poem). The mathematicians persisted on the math problem and noted the components of the problem that made it tricky. But when they received the poem, they said, “I’ve never been good at this stuff.” Conversely, the literature scholars persisted on the poem and blamed the poet for being bloated, but blamed themselves for not being able to do the math problems, which they said they were never good at anyway. Perceived self-efficacy in one domain does not entail self-efficacy in another. This is a good thing, because few things are more dangerous than ignorant overconfidence. Bandura nails the point again: “The objective of education is not the production of self-confident fools” (1997, p. 65). Bandura (1997) described four factors that influence people’s self-efficacy: (1) mastery experiences: having had past success; (2) vicarious experiences: seeing others like you achieve the goal; (3) social persuasion: hearing you are efficacious; and (4) physiological signals: noticing the effort and time involved while doing an activity. Since Bandura’s original work, most contemporary versions of self-efficacy include some form of self-attribution. People attribute a causal role to themselves for successes and failures. An example of attributional thinking comes from the fundamental attribution error (Ross, 1977): Americans tend to believe that other people’s bad behavior is caused by bad personalities, whereas their own bad behavior is caused by the environment. For example, when driving to work, a car cuts you off, and you think the driver is a jerk and a bully, but when you cut someone off, it is because your boss would fire you for being late again. People regularly make motivation-relevant attributions that reveal the fundamental attribution error: “I cannot do this task well because my teacher is being mean.”
One approach to improving self-efficacy is to change people’s causal attributions about their abilities to control their own success. Just telling students they can succeed may be insufficient. But if we can teach students a simple causal mechanism for how their actions can control their success, it may improve their attributions dramatically. The premiere example comes from Brainology, a program that instills a growth mind-set (see http://www.mindsetworks.com). It teaches students that our brain grows and the neurons make connections when we try, emphasizing the malleability of the mind. The intent is to convince students to work hard to cause their brains to grow, rather than just worrying about how smart they are. Brainology has been successful with children grades 5–9, as well as older ages
