learntolearn

Foundation 3: What do children learn?
It is true that when we think of “what” children learn, we are usually referring to learning “content.” In the realm of meta learning, we also need to consider what children know/learn about their own affective and cognitive approaches to learning, their “learning to learn” skills. Do they, for example, know about attributions (why they are successful or not – how they “explain” unsuccessful learning?

Equally important is their knowledge of their own cognitive processes and skills and the role they play in learning. For example, do they know the role of attention in learning? Are they aware that they are “not paying” attention or that they are not being “selective” in their attending. Do they know that there are several kinds of memory: short term, working, and long term. Are they aware of the importance of transferring info/ideas from short term to long term memory? Do they understanding how to maximize working memory. Do they understand the concept of generalization, how to “transfer” learning from one context to another?

When they are given a task—analyze a poem, synthesize the information on pollution, critique an author’s treatment of “the cold war”—do they know what those “cognitive verbs” mean and how to—analyze, synthesize, critique? Do they know to ask for guidance if they don’t know what the cognitive verb means? How good and extensive is their “academic vocabulary”? Do they understand all of the “terminology” in a set of directions? (See, for example, Burke’s list of assignment words: http://www.englishcompanion.com/pdfDocs/acvocabulary2.pdf

Equally important, do their teachers know what their students know about these affective and cognitive dimensions of learning? There are several frameworks for looking at these meta cognitive dimensions of learning. There are many research articles on attention, memory, and various cognitive “verbs.” I would like to focus on only frameworks here: Tomlinson’s work on Differentiation and my own work on “Diagnostic Teaching: CAERTONS”*. Both of these sources look at what makes a task difficult.

Tomlinson’s work was originally with gifted children. Her more recent work (l999, for example) that has attracted a lot of attention from teachers, focuses on differentiation within the regular classroom. Of particular interest here is reference to one of her 8 “key principles of a Differentiated Classroom (p. 48): “The teacher adjusts content, process, and product in response to students readiness, interests, and learning profile.” She says, on page 11, “Learning profile has to do with how we learn.” And then she refers us to the Appendix. Figure A-2 in the Appendix “provides some descriptors to help teachers and curriculum developers consider ways to modify curriculum and instruction along various continuums.” The Appendix lists 9 dimensions that can be manipulated by the teacher:

1. Concrete to abstract.
2. Simple to complex.
3. Basic to transformational
4. Fewer facets to multi-facets
5. Smaller leaps to greater leaps
6. More structured to more open…
7. Less independence to greater independence.
8. Quicker to slower
9. Clearly defined Problems vs fuzzy problems

Lastly to be noted here, Tomlinson writes in The Differentiated Classroom (1999): The Teacher Share the Teaching with Students. One way she suggests for doing this is “metacognitive teaching.” “That is, these teachers explain to students such things as how they plan for classes, what classroom issue they puzzle over when they go home at night, and how they chart progress.” (p. 33) In a later work she mentions executive function. See, for example: http://www.caroltomlinson.com/handouts/NELMS%20Brain%20&%20DI.pdf

A second way to look at these “cognitive” aspects of processing/processing skills has a more developmental framework. Basing my work on Piaget and other developmental psychologists, I constructed a framework to try to help teachers understand why learning was breaking down (Learning and Individual Differences: A Cognitive-Developmental Model, 1994). I suggested 7 dimensions of tasks that would make the task more or less challenging: conceptualization, abstraction, representation (remembering), engagement, tentativeness, number (working memory) and strategy.

Conceptualization: the ability to understand concepts and ideas that make up our knowledge base.

Abstraction: the ability to manipulate our conceptual knowledge—what we are able to do with our knowledge base: for example, to describe, to generalize, to infer, and to hypothesize.

Engagement: the manner and extent to which students engage in a topic/task.

Representation: the way the student takes in, stores and retrieves information; the ways a student demonstrates where she/he is in relation to the target destination.

Tentativeness: willingness to consider all of the relevant information before deciding on a response or completing a task or project.

Number: how man “pieces” of information the learner can attend to simultaneously (working memory).

Strategy: ability to use and manage the series of steps needed to carry out or complete a task.

The basic idea of this framework was to observe children as they “learn” and note if the learning seemed to be breaking down relative to the level of demands on conceptualizing , thinking abstractly, how the information was represented, and so forth. If the teacher could identify the nature of the breakdown, then he/she could: change the task objective, change the standard for judging “success”, provide support by facilitating the learner’s ability to carry out the task or “change the learner” by changing the student’s level of performance on one of the 7 characteristics: for example, learning to be more tentative or more strategic, finding representations that work for the learner, addressing working memory (number) issues. Since this was to be done on a task by task basis, the teacher could determine whether the “weakness” was in a particular skill (conceptualizing, abstracting, remembering, etc.) or the particular task. After making these “CAERTONS”* observations across several tasks and types of tasks, the teacher could see patterns. Teachers across grade levels K through High School and school districts in Vermont demonstrated the ability to use the framework.

My ultimate goal was to help students take charge of their own learning by recognizing when and why learning broke down, and to identify which processing factor/skill needed to be developed. If a student could recognize, for example, that he/she didn’t have a strategy that was working, he/she could change that strategy (initially with the teacher’s help if needed). If a student recognized that number (working memory) was regularly exceeded during a teacher’s lecture or class discussions, the student could ask the teacher for help in “controlling for number.” If a student knew that it was difficult to generalize a concept, he/she could ask or additional examples or check with the teacher about his/her level of understanding.

Chapter 2 in the Learning and Individual Differences text is “Strategy”, is introduced in the following way.
Strategic knowledge is the knowledge students have and use to carry out tasks. Generally students develop a strategy–series of steps–in order to carry out a task more efficiently, to make the task more manageable by simplifying it (Keil). When the “how to” of a task becomes routine, the student is able to focus more attention on the content. All learners have strategies; they differ in the efficiency, appropriateness and awareness with which they use strategies.

The chapter goes on to describe factors that influence strategy use and strategy management (metacognition).
The bottom line in these two frameworks is: How do we teach children to be metacognitive, to use “executive function” to take control of their learning and address breakdowns in learning. Of course the teacher must be tuned in to the affective and cognitive factors that lead to breakdowns in learning (Meta Foundation 4: Learning is most successful when it addresses both the strengths and challenges of individual learners). But that is only the first step. The second step is teaching children to use that same knowledge.

*CAERTONS. I inserted the O to make the acronym pronounceable, and to give myself the option of adding an “Other” factor.