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Meta Foundation 3: Students Learn ABOUT Something

on September 23, 2014

Meta Found #3: Students learn about something and use a variety of cognitive and affective processes to accomplish that learning.

There is a long history about how to help kids become better learners, even life-long learners. Ideas range from separate “courses” on study skills to approaches based on “learner differences.” More recently the affective domain has directed attention of to the role of affective factors in children becoming better learners, life-long learners: motivation (intrinsic and/or extrinsic), engagement, attribution theory, and more recently grit, perseverance, mindfulness and the growth mindset. And, of course, there have been approaches labeled “Learner differences” suggesting that there is something different about individual learners that need to be addressed if we expect children to learn at their optimal rate. In the past there has been attention to learning styles (visual, auditory, kinesthetic; extrovert/introvert), multiple intelligences (Howard Gardner attempted to help us understand learners in terms of 7 (8?) domains of strength: Musical, Linguistic, Spatial, Interpersonal, Personal, Body-Kinesthetic, Logical-Mathematical), “gifted and not gifted,” differentiated instruction, and diagnostic teaching.

What is being learned!
There are also approaches to learning (meta learning if you will) that suggest that there are “laws of learning” that must be addressed if we expect all children to become achievers, life-long learners. I want to focus on two of those kinds of approaches, both of which suggest that “what” the child is learning is essential to understanding how the child learns. First is the work of two sets of experts on “learning”: Bransford, Brown, and Cocking (How People Learn) and Howard Gardner (5 Minds for the Future).

The second example focuses not on specific disciplines or conceptual networks but does look at “what” (content, topic) the child is learning while s/he is learning it: super heroes, dinosaurs, farm animals, baseball, matter, binomials. Diagnostic teaching, formative assessment, and differentiated instruction reflect this approach. This is not learning in the abstract. Nor is it leaning about a discipline, but it is about learning something in particular. With these examples the question becomes whether or not the learner can generalize the “learning to learn” skills to other “content.”

In this post, I will briefly address: The Affective Domain Approach and the “Discipline/Subject Area Approach. The next post will address Individual Differences as they are observed in learning specific “content.”

The “Affective Domain” Approach
I believe that we need to make every effort to build a learner’s intrinsic motivation, ability to analyze the relationship between effort (rather than luck or “being smart”) and learning. I think a “growth” mindset is essential for taking on challenging tasks and not giving up when mistakes are made. And I certainly think kids learn better when they have grit and perseverance. I have seen far too many children “give up” because they think they are dumb. Some even drop out of school physically as well as emotionally. We know that kids as young as preschool don’t like to “make mistakes.” And we know that some kids start paying more attention to ‘grades” than learning as young as first grade. This topic deserves its own blog post (coming later).

The “Subject (Discipline) Area” Approach
A well respected summary of “How People Learn” was published in 2000 by the National Academy of Sciences. It was edited by John D. Bransford, Ann L. Brown, and Rodney R. Cocking. They listed the three key findings from this research, documented with 63 pages of references (as in “reached based pedagogy).”
1 “Students come to the classroom with preconceptions about how the world works. If their initial understanding is not engaged, they may fail to grasp the new concepts and information that are taught, or they may learn them for purposes of a test but revert to their preconceptions outside the classroom.” (p. 15)
2 “To develop competence in an area of inquiry, students must: (a) have a deep foundation of factual knowledge, (b) understand facts and ideas in the context of a conceptual framework, and (c) organize knowledge in ways that facilitate retrieval and application.” (p. 16)
3 “A “metacognitive” approach to instruction can help students learn to take control of their own learning by defining leaning goals and monitoring their progress in achieving them.” (p. 18)

They followed with three “Implications for teaching.”
1 “Teachers must draw out and work with the preexisting understandings that their students bring with them.” (p. 19)
2 “Teachers must teach some subject matter in depth, providing many examples in which the same concept is at work and providing a firm foundation of factual knowledge.” (p. 20)
3 “The teaching of metacognitive skills should be integrated into the curriculum in a variety of subject areas.” (p. 21)

In a second example of this “discipline-based” learning, Howard Gardner writes about “5 Minds for the Future.” These five minds are: The disciplined mind, the synthesizing mind, the creating mind, the respectful mind, the ethical mind. Note the affective as well as cognitive categories. He tells us that he isn’t simply shifting from one set of intelligences to another set. Rather, he is suggesting that there are a set of minds (5 at present in his work) that we need to navigate and thrive in the current world. In response to the question: Why use the word mind? He responds.

“Admittedly, for a psychologist interested in mental processes I am stretching the usual connotation of the word mind. One could substitute “five capacities” or “five perspectives.” But the word mind reminds us that actions, thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are all products of our brain. If we want to nurture these capacities or change these perspectives, we will be trafficking in the operations of the mind.” (p. xv)

Gardner does not advocate children making a commitment to a specific discipline, but says they can learn to “think in a disciplined manner.” He lists 4 steps to becoming a “disciplined” thinker: (pp. 32-35).

1 Identify truly important topics or concepts
2 Spend a significant amount of time on this topic.
3 Approach he topic in a number of ways.
4 Most important, set up “performances of understanding.” This means” giving students ample opportunities to perform their understanding under a variety of conditions [that is, to generalize]…. publically, with formative exercises, with detailed feedback on where the performance is adequate, where it falls short, why it falls short, and what can be done to fine-tuning the performance.”


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