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1 Introduction
Pages 1-26

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From page 1...
... This foundation offers conceptions of learning processes and the development of competent performance that can help teachers support their students in the acquisition of knowledge that is the province of formal education. The research literature was synthesized in the National Research Council report How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School.1 In this volume, we focus on three fundamental and well-established principles of learning that are highlighted in How People Learn and are particularly important for teachers to understand and be able to incorporate in their teaching: 1.
From page 2...
... The frog continues with descriptions of cows, which the fish imagines as black-and-white spotted fish with horns and udders, and humans, which the fish imagines as fish walking upright and dressed in clothing. Illustra tions below from Leo Lionni's Fish Is Fish © 1970.
From page 4...
... . The understandings children carry with them into the classroom, even before the start of formal schooling, will shape significantly how they make sense of what they are BOX 1-1 The Development of Physical Concepts in Infancy Research studies have demonstrated that infants as young as 3 to 4 months of age develop understandings and expectations about the physical world.
From page 5...
... But they can impose serious constraints on understanding formal disciplines. College physics students who do well on classroom exams on the laws of motion, for example, often revert to their untrained, erroneous models outside the classroom.
From page 6...
... It will take more explaining of course, but if the fish is to see a bird as something other than a fish with feathers and wings and a human as something other than an upright fish with clothing, then feathers and clothing must be seen as adap tations that help solve the problem of maintaining body temperature, and upright posture and wings must be seen as different solutions to the prob lem of mobility outside water. Conceptual information such as a theory of adaptation represents a kind of knowledge that is unlikely to be induced from everyday experiences.
From page 7...
... Memory of factual knowledge is enhanced by con ceptual knowledge, and conceptual knowledge is clarified as it is used to help organize constellations of important details. Teaching for understand ing, then, requires that the core concepts such as adaptation that organize the knowledge of experts also organize instruction.
From page 8...
... 8 HOW STUDENTS LEARN BOX 1-4Experts Remember Considerably More Relevant Detail Than Novices in Tasks Within Their Domain
From page 9...
... When chess pieces were randomized and presented for 5 seconds, the recall of the chess master and Class A player was the same as that of the novice -- they all placed 2 to 3 positions correctly. The apparent difference in memory capacity is due to a difference in pattern recognition.
From page 10...
... Even the best instructional efforts can be successful only if the student can make use of the opportunity to learn. Helping students become effective learners is at the heart of the third key principle: a "metacognitive" or self-monitoring approach can help students develop the ability to take control of their own learning, consciously define learning goals, and moni tor their progress in achieving them.
From page 11...
... moved from laboratory settings to the classroom. One of the most striking applications of a metacognitive approach to instruction was pioneered by Palincsar and Brown in the context of "reciprocal teaching."14 Middle school students worked in groups (guided by a teacher)
From page 12...
... Such questioning models the kind of dialogue that effective learners inter nalize. Helping students explicitly understand that a major purpose of these activities is to support metacognitive learning is an important component of successful teaching strategies.17 Supporting students to become aware of and engaged in their own learning will serve them well in all learning endeavors.
From page 13...
... · The community-centered lens encourages a culture of questioning, respect, and risk taking. These aspects of the classroom environment are illustrated in Figure 1-1 and are discussed below.
From page 14...
... They must find the strengths that will help students connect with the information being taught. Unless these connections are made explicitly, they often remain inert and so do not support subsequent learning.
From page 15...
... · What are the core concepts that organize our understanding of this subject matter, and what concrete cases and detailed knowledge will allow students to master those concepts effectively? · How will we know when students achieve mastery?
From page 16...
... Be cause textbooks sometimes focus primarily on facts and details and neglect organizing principles, creating a knowledge-centered classroom will often require that a teacher go beyond the textbook to help students see a struc ture to the knowledge, mainly by introducing them to essential concepts. These chapters provide examples of how this might be done.
From page 17...
... In some cases, the formative assessments are formal, but even when informal the teaching described in the chapters involves frequent opportunities for both teachers and students to assess understanding and its progress over time. Community-Centered Classroom Environments 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.
From page 18...
... What would you say pupils would need to understand or be able to do before they could start learning subtraction with regrouping? The responses of teachers were wide-ranging, reflecting very different levels of un derstanding of the core mathematical concepts.
From page 19...
... Rather, it suggests that procedural knowledge and skills be orga nized around core concepts. Ma describes those Chinese teachers who emphasize core concepts as seeing the knowledge in "packages" in which the concepts and skills are related.
From page 20...
... It requires that mistakes be viewed not as revelations of inadequacy, but as helpful contri butions in the search for understanding.28 Similarly, effective approaches to teaching metacognitive strategies rely on initial teacher modeling of the monitoring process, with a gradual shift to students. Through asking questions of other students, skills at monitoring understanding are honed, and through answering the questions of fellow students, understanding of what one has communicated effectively is strength ened.
From page 21...
... Some approaches to instruction reduce metacognition to its simplest form, such as making note of the subtitles in a text and what they signal about what is to come, or rereading for meaning. The more challenging tasks of metacognition are difficult to reduce to an instructional recipe: to help students develop the habits of mind to reflect spontaneously on their own thinking and problem solving, to encourage them to activate relevant background knowledge and monitor their understanding, and to support them in trying the lens through which those in a particular discipline view the world.
From page 22...
... The topics in this part of the volume were chosen at the three grade levels for the opportunities they provide to explore the learning principles of interest, rather than for their common representation in a standard curricular sequences. Light as a topic might just as well appear in middle or high school as in elementary school, for ex ample, and physics is generally taught either in middle school or high school.
From page 23...
... We expect our understanding to evolve as we design new learning opportunities and observe the outcomes, as we study learning among children in different contexts and from different backgrounds, and as emerging research techniques and opportunities provide new insights. These chapters, then, might best be viewed as part of a conversation begun some years ago with the first How People Learn volume.
From page 24...
... . An effective metacognitive strategy -- Learning by doing and explaining with a computer-based cognitive tutor.
From page 25...
... Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Chase, W.G., and Simon, H.A.
From page 26...
... . Supporting learning of variable control in a com puter-based biology environment: Effects of prompting college students to re flect on their own thinking.


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