A propos of our brief discussion of "teaching to the test", incidentally, you may be interested in this article about GCSE exam practices from today's Telegraph.
What is learned?
So many ideas and points were raised that I can’t cover all of them: I’ve tried to summarise them in a separate handout, which is here, but includes some observations from earlier runs of the exercise, too:
(Incidentally, the rationale of the exercise, which uses concrete instances to get an underlying themes, is described at http://www.learningandteaching.info/teaching/exercises_definitions.htm )
The major themes which came up concerned
- the relationship between what is “hard-wired” into us genetically and what we learn. As we saw, it is not a simple either/or; our inheritance may equip us or pre-dispose us to something but it is our environment and experience which determined the form it will take. So we are equipped to learn a language from soon after birth, but which language is an environmental matter. The most accessible and fascinating discussion of this is to be found in Ridley M (2003) Nature via Nurture; genes, experience and what makes us human London; Fourth Estate. (The fact that he was Chairman of Northern Rock when it collapsed is neither here nor there!)
- the other major theme was that not all change is learning; take the example of language acquisition above. The baby has to grow a bit before she acquires the motor control of voice to babble and then speak, and the integration of brain function to master language. You can’t learn what are you are not yet ready for. That does not concern us a great deal on a PCE course, but it’s very important for teachers of children. The great figure in exploring the developmental changes in understanding and learning capacity throughout childhood was Jean Piaget. (Lesley--if there are any links on developmental psychology you think others might find interesting/useful, feel free to add them as comments, or to send them to me and I'll post them.)
- http://www.learningandteaching.info/learning/a_a_learning.htm on anticipatory-avoidance learning and OCD
We came back to finish off the presentation from last week on defining learning. As part of that we looked at Bloom's taxonomy in a little more detail than hitherto.
- With particular reference to skill acquisition and the psychomotor domain, there was also the matter of getting to the stage–through practice, of course–where performance is “second nature”, where it takes more effort to get something wrong rather than to get it right. That is briefly touched on here.
- We concluded by looking at the "range of convenience" of different theories of learning, briefly covered here--including a note on the brain-based material. And on that point--I was rather dismissive of some of the claims for "accelerated learning" and the like. A more nuanced account of the area can be found at http://www.neuroeducational.net/ Some more specific links have now been added in the "Points" section below.
Here is the presentation from the session last year, annotated and slightly edited:
The principal links to expand a little on the basic material are:
- http://www.learningandteaching.info/learning/memory.htm and links onwards from that page
- And going back a bit to the sensory buffer and selective attention, here comes the gorilla!
- The book I showed you is; Chabris C and Simons D (2011) The Invisible Gorilla and other ways our intuition deceives us London; Harper
- See also this page for Piaget's ideas about Assimilation and Accommodation.
- So to a consideration of the difficulties of changing your mind; we talked about cognitive dissonance (and here's a link to the book about Mrs Keech and the UFOs).
- And that in turn led on to "supplantive learning": the short account of that is here, and a fuller one here. That discussion provided an initial skirmish with the topics of emotion and learning, and resistance to learning, which you mentioned as matters of interest last week, but we hadn't scheduled. We'll no doubt consider that in more detail when we look at motivation next week.
- For a more detailed account, the most accessible but authoritative book is probably still Rose S (2003) The Making of Memory; from molecules to mind (revised edition) London; Vintage. (Amazon link)
- The visual cliff experiment: video and notes.
- The education/training distinction: see graphics on slides 12 and 13 of this presentation (sorry it's jumping ahead a bit). The Dewey graphic is based on his ideas in Experience and Education (1938).
- The case study of Paul West's loss of language and recovery of it is told here.
- The Ramachandran mirror-box for the treatment of phantom-limb pain is described in this video.
- The experiment on prejudice between blue-eyed and brown-eyed children was devised by Jane Elliott.
- I've spent a while trying to find suitable links concerning Neuro-Linguistic Programming. As I rather expected, it is a bitterly contentious field. So I'm just posting a link to wikipedia, because this is where its strengths show. Because a wiki can be edited by anyone, extremely partial accounts of a topic don't survive long. You can also check how much activity there has been on editing the page: this one has been edited over 10,000 times in the almost ten years it has existed.
- Most of the stuff on Accelerated Learning is simply advocacy, rather than dispassionate evaluation, but this article is a little more even-handed, even if the author is a little credulous about "learning styles" in general.
- The basic page is http://www.learningandteaching.info/learning/motivation.htm with links to other pages on the topic, including http://www.learningandteaching.info/learning/motivanx.htm Please read those at least, and come prepared with any questions they pose for you, and ideas about how they relate to your practice of teaching.
- Extrinsic motivation in the form of rewards do not always work: a couple of the studies which explore the limitations of extrinsic motivation on children's learning are abstracted here. (I mention this because it's likely to come up in the discussions, and you can be prepared for it.
- "Learned helplessness" provides a perspective on motivation which may apply to some prisoners in particular, so you might like to look at http://www.learningandteaching.info/learning/learned_helplessness.htm with some further links.
- ...and of course we'll relate these to Zull. You'll know by now that he is accessible (if a little folksy and cheesy at times), but he does over-simplify occasionally and is now rather dated. If you want something a little more up-to-date and authoritative try Fine C (2007) A Mind of Its Own: How Your Brain Distorts and Deceives London; Icon Books (Amazon link).
- If you fancy a little heavier lifting, this recent article puts Abraham Maslow in context.
No comments:
Post a Comment