Mainely Middle
Journal of the Maine Association for Middle
Level Education
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2001/2002 |
How People Learn:A ParadoxEarly in my teaching career, I was presented with a paradox which continues to shape my interests in education. When I was teaching high school computer application courses, my students would learn to use a word processor. I was very thorough and made sure they learned how to use nearly every feature (although word processors then had fewer features than they do today). We spent a lot of time on it and together we worked hard so that nearly everyone would be successful on the challenging test over word processing. What surprised me, however, was that a few weeks later, students would return to me, announce that they had a paper to write, and ask me to show them how to use the word processor again! I couldn't understand why these students didn't remember how to use the program. These were bright students who had had no problems during class, and who had done well on the test. Very little time had gone by since we had last used the word processor. There was no reason that they should not know how to use it. There was obviously something I didn't understand about learning. It was the first time I started to question how learning took place, and prompted my inquiry into how people learn.
Memory and Understanding Many people, including many educators, think of learning as acquiring knowledge, and teaching as passing a teacher's knowledge on to the students. This has been called the banking model (students collect facts, like money in the bank, for use at some unspecified later date) or the transfer model (information is transferred from the teacher to the student). The assumption about memory is that facts are being indexed in the mind much like the index in the back of a textbook or the directory of a computer disk. If someone asks you something about George Washington, for example, your mind would scan down some hypothetical listing in memory until it came to "Washington, George" and retrieved the appropriate answer. Experts currently believe there are two kinds of memory, and the banking or transfer model relates to one of them. That kind of memory is used to store relatively unrelated information. Think of it as rote memory. Some cognitive scientists call it the taxon memory (Caine & Caine 1997), named for taxonomies or lists. It can handle items in chunks of up to about seven units. Its capacity is finite; when it is filled, some items must be "forgotten" in order to store other, new information. The rote memory is very stable and difficult to change. Teaching to it requires lots of practice and rehearsal, and is closely linked with extrinsic motivation, i.e. punishments and rewards (Caine & Caine 1991). Rote memory is well suited to relatively isolated facts like phone numbers, or to routines and procedures, like driving. The mind prefers to use rote memory only for these purposes. But learning has two parts: 1) acquisition of knowledge, attitudes, and skills; and This second component is crucial. It both requires and strengthens depth of understanding and ready transference of information. It is also important to remember that we want students to be able to recall facts and skills, not just to have them, but to actually use them for something. Even the banking model, with its focus on rote learning, recognizes the importance of being able to use that information later. But, rote memory isn't well suited for this kind of work. It is geared toward isolated information and there is very limited transfer to other contexts. Transfer and the ability to apply knowledge happens naturally when people make meaning of their learning by finding patterns within their life experiences. The second kind of memory is where your life experiences are stored. Think of it as story memory. This is where complex networks of connections are made between facts, skills, and ideas. It transfers knowledge easily and naturally, and has no practical limit to what can be learned. Brain researchers know now that instead of making use of a linear index, our minds prefer to organize ideas by connecting them to the various other ideas associated with them. Instead of a table of contents, this is more like CD-ROM encyclopedia entries being linked by hypertext, or how web sites are linked to each other on the Internet. It is not enough, however, to simply make a connection or to find meaning. Just as muscles need to be exercised, memory is greatly improved when the connection is strengthened through use. If the new knowledge is not refined and used, the connection atrophies and the idea finally is lost to the learner. The learner must have the opportunity through rich experiences to refine that knowledge and use it meaningfully before the knowledge becomes an integral part of the learner's accumulated learnings. Since the brain is constantly looking for meaningful connections, story memory is how the mind most often learns naturally.
The Natural Learning Process The natural learning of story memory functions through patterning, or developing a collection of cases and rules. A case is a single experience you have, for example, the first time you look for information on the Internet. A rule is a generalization or theory you develop based on related experiences. Maybe after using the Internet a few times, you develop a preference for a particular search engine because it finds sites which are more like what you wanted or because it works in a way which seems easier to you. Or perhaps you decide that when you are on the web, you need to remain focused, because you know how easy it is for you to go off on some tangent. Story memory adapts easily, making it flexible and readily modified. This happens through experiences (cases) which make us expand or refine our generalizations. If the first few times you are on the web, you simply go to web sites based on TV shows or entertainment sites, you might develop a theory that the Internet is frivolous and has little use in school. If the next time, however, you come across the Discovery Channel's web site or CNN's web site, and you find a few ideas you could use in your classroom, you might still think of the Internet as superficial, but create a special rule for the sites of organizations which you already thought of as having some educational value. You might even generalize from your experience that trivial sites far out number sites of value to teachers and schools. Your Internet theory might become, "The Internet is frivolous, unless you go to one of the few educational sites." Your initial theory about the Internet wasn't complex enough to allow for the Discovery Channel's potential educational use, so you expanded your theory to allow for the special case.
Complex Experiences Your mind tries to connect every new experience you have to other related experiences. The next time you are on the web looking for an online project your students can participate in, the experience will be indexed with your theory on web searches, your theory on lesson planning, generalizations about using computers, your personal rules about how your students learn, etc. The brain requires a great deal of input in order to detect patterns. You need three to five experiences just to start to build a generalization. A theory without cases to back it up will fall apart quickly as new experiences contradict it. Generalizations are strongest, and most useful, when they are based on lots of rich experiences. The richer and more complex the experience, the more rules or theories it will be connected to. Everyone is an expert in something because of having numerous experiences. I have a young friend who I have known for many years and who is very active in living history, participating in Civil War reenactments throughout her middle and high school years. Her involvement has led to her strong interest in Civil War medicine, as well as the role of women on the battlefield. She has researched and read extensively, attended seminars, and had the opportunity to take part in reenacting some of the most famous battles at their original sites. Through reenacting, she gets access to parts of historic parks and to the expertise of park rangers and other experts that many people don't usually get access to. The breadth and depth of her knowledge about the Civil War is breath taking. Story memory, however, doesn't record just the facts you find. Story memory is sometimes called spatial memory because it makes a 3-D and multisensory recording of your experiences. A memory in story memory contains information about where you were, what the environment was like, what your attitudes were at the time, and what you saw, heard, tasted, and touched. All these elements help to build and shape theories and generalizations. Having fun at a Gettysburg reenactment will lead to your fondly recalling facts about that battle. Doing Internet searches in a claustrophobic space, or on slow equipment can lead you to feeling anxious and frustrated when you think later about the information you found from that search.
What Directs Our Learning? Contradictions to our rules is one source for learning. Let's say the teacher in the next classroom tells you about her unit on Antarctica and the environment. She tells you about how her kids are sending e-mail to an expedition of scientists who are now crossing Antarctica. The scientists are taking ice core samples to study global climate and pollution levels, and are sharing their results with the students at the same time they are making them available to the scientific community. She sits you down at her computer and shows you some of the sites she has found which relate to Antarctica. From a few web sites, you find out about the scientific stations and from others about the ice cutters that bring supplies and provide transportation. She helps you visit the web sites of schools who are also part of the Antarctica learning project and shows you some of the electronic communications between their students and hers. When you ask her if this project is unique, she says, "no," and tells you about following archeologists exploring Mayan ruins, about schools helping to collect data about the migration of various North American birds, animals, and insects, and about several other online projects. On your drive home, you think about what you saw in her classroom and you start asking yourself where she had learned so much about the Internet and how you might learn more, how your students can use it, and what kinds of other educational resources there might be hidden on the web. You start thinking about signing up for an Internet course, or about the projects you want to learn how to involve your students in. Your experience and your questions contradicted your old theory of the Internet, causing it to change. Your new rule might be, "there are some frivolous things I can do with the Internet, but there are lots of exciting educational things that it can do for my classroom." Failures also help generate questions, modify our theories, and direct our learning. We all learned to walk by falling down a few times. My son, Chris, when he was six, would say something like, "I writed the card myself." I might smile and say, "You wrote the card yourself?" and then continue to look at the card he made and praise him for the work he did. As a neophyte at the computer, you might save your work. You are proud of yourself because you remembered all the steps and it seemed to work. But the next time you return to work on it, you can't find the file, even though you know it is there somewhere. You ask yourself, "How do I make sure I save the file where I can find it again? Is there something I'm forgetting to do? Is there a trick I can use? How can I keep from feeling foolish again?" You are now ready to learn more about saving a file and are likely to never forget how, once you find the answers to your questions. Among the most powerful sources for motivation to learn are our own personal goals and interests. As teachers, we sign up for conferences and courses because they will teach us about topics we are interested in or which we think will help us meet our professional aspirations. We will be more likely to pursue something if it matches several of our goals or interests. Perhaps a conference with topics that match your professional goals is also in a city you would like to visit. And, sometimes one interest can distract us from another. In the process of looking for resources for your students on the Internet, you discover you have just spent half an hour visiting sites related to your hobby. Contradictions, failures, and our goals and interests focus how we sort through all the data generated by our numerous complex experiences. Our own questions are the sorting mechanism. According to cognitive scientist Roger Schank: Like all questions, they play a central role in learning. They point to holes in our memory structures that we wish to fill. They provide the starting point for the processes through which we integrate new information into memory, tie old information together in new ways, and correct our faulty generalizations. It is probably not too strong to say that until we ask a question, we are unable to integrate an answer into our memories. Further, the more questions we ask about an item, the more ways we index that item in our memories. Better indexing allows our memories to be more flexible. So the more questions we ask, the more easily we can recall the items that we think about. (Schank & Cleary 1995, p. 41)
How Learning Is Processed With the exception of people with certain diseases or damage to the brain, everyone can learn, and learn well, from the time he is born until he dies. It sounds ridiculously obvious, but other than running the human body, learning is one of the major on-going functions of the brain. Its role is finding patterns in the complexity and confusion of life around us. The brain no more needs to be prodded to learn than the lungs need to be prodded to breathe (Willis 1991). In Insult to Intelligence, Frank Smith (1986) explains, "Reluctance to learn cannot be attributed to the brain. Learning is the brain's primary function, its constant concern, and we become restless and frustrated if there is no learning to be done. We're all capable of huge and unsuspected learning accomplishments without effort." It is not that some people learn well and that others don't, but that there are different ways to learn. Educators are discovering that people are diverse in their thinking and learning. There are various abilities, or intelligences, we use to process and apply our learning. We use the abilities we are most successful with and comfortable using to get the most from our experiences as we pursue our goals and try to answer our questions. As Howard Gardner says (ABC 1993), it is no longer "How smart are you?" but "How are you smart?" Different theorists classify these abilities differently. Some learning style inventories break the abilities into verbal, auditory, and tactile. Jungian personality types are classified around our preferences within four scales: Extroversion/Introversion (Source of Energy), Sensing/Feeling (What is Observed), Thinking/Feeling (Evaluation Style), and Judging/Perceiving (Energy Direction and Flow) (Fairhurst & Fairhurst 1995). Robert Sternberg's categories include the analytical, practical, and creative aspects of intelligence. He points out that there are four things we can ask students to do with information (1997): • Recall who did something, what was done, when it was done, where it was done, or how it was done; Howard Gardner (1983) proposes seven different kinds of intelligence, or approaches to working and learning. Each person has all seven intelligences but they are each of various strengths. Every student has at least one, and usually several, strong intelligences, and if allowed to work within those strengths can make significant contributions to problem solving and producing. Those seven intelligences are described below (Armstrong 1987): • Linguistic Intelligence - highly developed auditory skills, enjoy playing with words and language, like to read, write, or tell stories, learn best by verbalizing or hearing and seeing words. The idea of multiple intelligences was brought home to me during a plumbing crisis. Like many people, I used to view lawyers, doctors, scientists, and professors as professions held by the most intelligent people; the trades were held by people who were not as intelligent. Although it may be true that many tradesmen do not do as well in school, I no longer view them as less intelligent. One morning, I entered the bathroom to find disgusting things backed up into my bathtub. When a plumber was finally available, I was fascinated to watch him trouble shoot my situation. He often thought out loud and with his hands, and listening to him narrow down where the problems were (unfortunately, there was more than one), then plan and prioritize their solutions was a real treat. It became obvious that he thought spatially most of the time; you could almost see the water rushing through a holographic projection of my piles before him!
Conditions That Promote Learning Besides learning styles and environmental factors, what conditions facilitate learning? Environmental factors, for example, impact an individual's ability to learn. Hard chairs, cold or hot rooms, and infrequent breaks can all inhibit learning. Further, individuals all have preferences for learning within diverse environmental conditions: silence or background music, bright or low light, sitting up at a table or lounging in a soft chair, extended work periods or frequent breaks, working in the morning or afternoon. A small rural K-8 school used to survey its students each year and then modified each classroom's learning environment to accommodate its students. Students who work well with quiet background music were permitted to wear Walkmans. If most students work best in low light, the overhead lights were kept off and students who preferred bright light were seated near the window. This responsive approach helps to insure that all students can learn. Much can be learned by investigating how students, themselves, believe they learn well. Richard Strong (1995) asked teachers and students what kind of work they found totally engaging. "Engaging work, respondents said, was work that stimulated their curiosity, permitted them to express their creativity, and fostered positive relationships with others. It was also work at which they were good." (Strong, Silver, & Robinson 1995) The Good Learning Experiences Activity is one of the ways I've been exploring students' perspectives on how they think they learn well. The activity grows from the work of Foxfire teachers. The Foxfire approach to teaching and learning is a democratic and learning-centered approach, which involves the students in deciding how they will learn the curriculum. I first experienced the Good Learning Experiences Activity in a Foxfire course in 1992. Since then, I've been asking students, parents, and teachers about their good learning experiences. "Think of a good learning experience," the script for the activity begins. "It can be in school or out of school, but think of a time when you had an 'ah-ha!' or when everything fell into place. Maybe you could finally do something you had been struggling with, or something finally made sense. Maybe it was your English teacher who finally taught you how to write a good essay, or maybe it was when your grandfather taught you how to fly fish. So whether it was in school or out, think of a time that you had a really good learning experience." I give small groups of students a few minutes to share their stories. Next, I ask them to jot down on scratch paper what it was that made it a good learning experience. What were the characteristics of the experience? After a few more minutes to share their lists with their neighbors, we compile a class list on chart paper or on the overhead. Below is a typical list, this one compiled in the practicum seminar in the Spring of 1997. Characteristics of Good Learning Experiences
I have conducted the activity with people of nearly every age group: upper elementary students, middle school students, high school students, college students, teachers, and parents. Only a few learners state that they can't think of any good learning experience. Many of the learners state that their best learning experiences have taken place outside of school. No one has ever said that their best learning experience came from a terrific lecture, or an interesting textbook, or an engaging worksheet (although I believe each of these can be a useful teaching tool). Having conducted this activity with so many groups, I am intrigued by the results. I was surprised to find that, regardless of the group involved, there were common elements with other groups' lists. I started keeping the charts to show new groups how much their list was like previous groups'. For five years, I informally tracked the results and found that certain characteristics of good learning experiences come up in nearly every list.
Characteristics of Good Learning Experiences
Pulling It Together So, although influenced by outside conditions and environmental factors, rich experiences will help students produce well indexed knowledge and theories about the world. The process is driven by the learners questions, interests and goals, and is executed within the framework of the learner's most competent abilities and intelligences. I am struck by how the process belongs to the learner, not the teacher. Roger Schank and Chip Cleary remind us: The secret to why people are able to learn so much in their daily lives is really no secret at all. They learn about things that pertain to their goals &emdash; they learn about things in which they are interested. Because they are interested, they try things out and sometimes fail. These failures, along with their interests, cause them to ask questions. Sometimes these questions are directed to outside sources like friends or books. But, often, these questions are internally-oriented, as when we ask ourselves, "Why did I do it that way?" or "How could I avoid looking so foolish again?" Once we have developed a question about some topic in which we are interested, then we are ready to learn the answer. After we have developed an answer (or are given one), we then have little trouble remembering it. (Schank & Cleary 1995, p. 68-69) The questions must be their own, the learner's. "It is important to recognize that it is internally generated questions that drive memory and hence drive learning." (Schank & Cleary 1995, p. 42) Further, "human beings innately organize their thinking and perception around what they regard to be important." (Caine & Caine 1997, p. 112) It is the student's own personal interests, curiosities, and goals which drive their learning. "When we disregard student purposes and values, we are tossing out the essential glue that acts as the key to the depth of understanding we wish students to acquire. We then obstruct meaningful learning." (Caine & Caine 1997, p. 112) Learning isn't going to happen just because a teacher wants a student to learn, no matter how badly that teacher wants them to. Roger Schank (1995, p. 42) explains: "memory is obsessive process enough to fail to pay attention to information provided that is not an answer to any question it may have, thus making learning of information it is not seeking fairly difficult." The learner is in ultimate control of what is learned and what is not, even if that control is subconscious and directed by the natural learning process. The personal nature of how people learn certainly has strong implications for schools: Our whole policy of compulsory education rises or falls with our ability to make school life an interesting and absorbing experience to the child. In one sense there is no such thing as compulsory education. We can have compulsory physical attendance at school; but education comes only through willing attention to and participation in school activities. It follows that the teacher must select these activities with reference to the child's interests, powers, and capacities. In no other way can she guarantee that the child will be present. (Dewey 1913, p. ix)
Resources ABC News. (1993). Common miracles: The American revolution in learning. Special aired on ABC. Armstrong, T. (1987). In their own way. New York: J. P. Tarcher. Caine, R.N. & Caine, G. (1997). Education on the edge of possibility. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. Caine, R.N., & Caine, G. (1991). Making connections: Teaching and the human brain. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. Dewey, J. (1913). Interest and effort in education. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Company. Fairhurst, A. & Fairhurst, L. (1995). Effective teaching effective learning: Making the personality connection in your classroom. Palo Alto, CA: Davies-Black Pub. Gardner, H. (1983). Frames of mind. New York: Basic Books. Schank, R. & Cleary, C. (1995). Engines for education. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. Smith, F. (1986). Insult to intelligence. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann Educational Books, Inc. Sternberg, R. (1997). What does it mean to be smart? Educational leadership. v54 n6 p20-24 Mar 1997 Strong, R. (1995).What Do Students Want? Educational leadership; v53 n1 p8-12 Sep 1995 Willis, S. (1991). Teaching to the brain. ASCD update, November. Association of Supervision and Curriculum Development.
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