How People Learn:
Brain, Mind,
Experience, and School
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Part IV: Future Directions for the Science of
Learning
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10
Conclusions and Recommendations for
Research
The pace at which
science proceeds sometimes seems alarmingly slow and impatience and
hopes both run high when discussions turn to issues of learning and
education. In the field of learning, the past quarter century has been
a period of major research advances. Because of the many new
developments, the Office of Educational Research and Improvement of the
U.S. Department of Education requested an appraisal of the scientific
knowledge base on human learning and its application to education. In
response to the request, the National Research Council established our
committee which, over 2 years, conducted a study of the research fields
that have contributed to understanding human learning, to distill the
knowledge and insights most relevant to education in the elementary and
secondary grades. The primary goal of the project is to convey to
teachers, school officials, parents, and policymakers the most
immediately useful findings from the cognitive sciences, developmental
psychology, neuroscience, anthropology, and research on learning in
subject areas such as science, mathematics, and history.
The committee evaluated
the best and most current scientific data on learning, teaching, and
learning environments. The objective of the analysis was to ascertain
what is required for learners to reach deep understanding, to determine
what leads to effective teaching, and to evaluate the conditions that
lead to supportive environments for teaching and learning.
A scientific
understanding of learning includes understanding about learning
processes, learning environments, teaching, sociocultural processes, and
the many other factors that contribute to learning. Research on all of
these topics, both in the field and in laboratories, provides the
fundamental knowledge base for understanding and implementing changes in
education.
The report discusses
research in six areas that are relevant to a deeper understanding of
students' learning processes: the role of prior knowledge in learning;
plasticity and related issues of early experience upon brain
development; learning as an active process; learning for understanding;
adaptive expertise; and learning as a time-consuming endeavor. The
report discusses research in another five areas that are relevant to
teaching and environments that support effective learning: the
importance of social and cultural contexts; transfer and the conditions
for wide application of learning; subject matter uniqueness; assessment
to support learning; and the new educational technologies.
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LEARNERS AND LEARNING |
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Development and Learning Competencies |
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Children are born with
certain biological capacities for learning. They can recognize human
sounds, distinguish animate from inanimate objects, and they have an
inherent sense of space, motion, number, and causality. These raw
capacities of the human infant are actualized by the environment
surrounding a newborn. The environment supplies information, and
equally important, provides structure to the information, as when
parents draw an infant's attention to the sounds of her or his native
language.
Thus, developmental
processes involve interactions between children's early competencies and
their environmental and interpersonal supports. These supports serve to
strengthen the capacities that are relevant to a child's surroundings
and to prune those that are not. Learning is promoted and regulated by
the children's biology and their environments. The brain of a
developing child is a product, at the molecular level, of interactions
between biological and ecological factors. Mind is created in this
process.
The term "development"
is critical to understanding the changes in children's conceptual
growth. Cognitive changes do not result from mere accretion of
information, but are due to processes involved in conceptual
reorganization. Research from many fields has supplied the key findings
about how early cognitive abilities relate to learning. These include
the following:
- "Privileged domains:" Young children actively engage in making
sense of their worlds. In some domains, most obviously language, but
also for biological and physical causality and number, they seem
predisposed to learn.
- Children are ignorant but not stupid: Young children lack
knowledge, but they do have abilities to reason with the knowledge they
understand.
- Children are problem solvers and, through curiosity, generate
questions and problems: Children attempt to solve problems presented to
them, and they also seek novel challenges. They persist because success
and understanding are motivating in their own right.
- Children develop knowledge of their own learning
capacities--metacognition--very early. This metacognitive capacity gives
them the ability to plan and monitor their success and to correct errors
when necessary.
- Children' natural capabilities require assistance for learning:
Children's early capacities are dependent on catalysts and mediation.
Adults play a critical role in promoting children's curiosity and
persistence by directing children's attention, structuring their
experiences, supporting their learning attempts, and regulating the
complexity and difficulty of levels of information for them.
Neurocognitive research
has contributed evidence that both the developing and the mature brain
are structurally altered during learning. For example, the weight and
thickness of the cerebral cortex of rats is altered when they have
direct contact with a stimulating physical environment and an
interactive social group. The structure of the nerve cells themselves
is correspondingly altered: under some conditions, both the cells that
provide support to the neurons and the capillaries that supply blood to
the nerve cells may be altered as well. Learning specific tasks appears
to alter the specific regions of the brain appropriate to the task. In
humans, for example, brain reorganization has been demonstrated in the
language functions of deaf individuals, in rehabilitated stroke
patients, and in the visual cortex of people who are blind from birth.
These findings suggest that the brain is a dynamic organ, shaped to a
great extent by experience and by what a living being does.
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Transfer of Learning |
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A major goal of
schooling is to prepare students for flexible adaptation to new problems
and settings. Students' abilities to transfer what they have learned to
new situations provides an important index of adaptive, flexible
learning; seeing how well they do this can help educators evaluate and
improve their instruction. Many approaches to instruction look
equivalent when the only measure of learning is memory for facts that
were specifically presented. Instructional differences become more
apparent when evaluated from the perspective of how well the learning
transfers to new problems and settings. Transfer can be explored at a
variety of levels, including transfer from one set of concepts to
another, one school subject to another, one year of school to another,
and across school and everyday, nonschool activities.
People's abilities to
transfer what they have learned depends upon a number of factors:
1. People must achieve a threshold of initial learning that is
sufficient to support transfer. This obvious point is often overlooked
and can lead to erroneous conclusions about the effectiveness of various
instructional approaches. It takes time to learn complex subject
matter, and assessments of transfer must take into account the degree to
which original learning with understanding was accomplished.
2. Spending a lot of time ("time on task") in and of itself is not
sufficient to ensure effective learning. Practice and getting familiar
with subject matter take time, but most important is how people use
their time while learning. Concepts such as "deliberate practice"
emphasize the importance of helping students monitor their learning so
that they seek feedback and actively evaluate their strategies and
current levels of understanding. Such activities are very different from
simply reading and rereading a text.
3. Learning with understanding is more likely to promote transfer
than simply memorizing information from a text or a lecture. Many
classroom activities stress the importance of memorization over learning
with understanding. Many, as well, focus on facts and details rather
than larger themes of causes and consequences of events. The shortfalls
of these approaches are not apparent if the only test of learning
involves tests of memory, but when the transfer of learning is measured,
the advantages of learning with understanding are likely to be revealed.
4. Knowledge that is taught in a variety of contexts is more likely
to support flexible transfer than knowledge that is taught in a single
context. Information can become "context-bound" when taught with
context-specific examples. When material is taught in multiple
contexts, people are more likely to extract the relevant features of the
concepts and develop a more flexible representation of knowledge that
can be used more generally.
5. Students develop flexible understanding of when, where, why, and
how to use their knowledge to solve new problems if they learn how to
extract underlying themes and principles from their learning exercises.
Understanding how and when to put knowledge to use--known as conditions
of applicability--is an important characteristic of expertise. Learning
in multiple contexts most likely affects this aspect of transfer.
6. Transfer of learning is an active process. Learning and transfer
should not be evaluated by "one-shot" tests of transfer. An alternative
assessment approach is to consider how learning affects subsequent
learning, such as increased speed of learning in a new domain. Often,
evidence for positive transfer does not appear until people have had a
chance to learn about the new domain--and then transfer occurs and is
evident in the learner's ability to grasp the new information more
quickly.
7. All learning involves transfer from previous experiences. Even
initial learning involves transfer that is based on previous experiences
and prior knowledge. Transfer is not simply something that may or may
not appear after initial learning has occurred. For example, knowledge
relevant to a particular task may not automatically be activated by
learners and may not serve as a source of positive transfer for learning
new information. Effective teachers attempt to support positive
transfer by actively identifying the strengths that students bring to a
learning situation and building on them, thereby building bridges
between students' knowledge and the learning objectives set out by the
teacher.
8. Sometimes the knowledge that people bring to a new situation
impedes subsequent learning because it guides thinking in wrong
directions. For example, young children's knowledge of everyday
counting-based arithmetic can make it difficult for them to deal with
rational numbers (a larger number in the numerator of a fraction does
not mean the same thing as a larger number in the denominator);
assumptions based on everyday physical experiences can make it difficult
for students to understand physics concepts (they think a rock falls
faster than a leaf because everyday experiences include other variables,
such as resistance, that are not present in the vacuum conditions that
physicists study), and so forth. In these kinds of situations, teachers
must help students change their original conceptions rather than simply
use the misconceptions as a basis for further understanding or leaving
new material unconnected to current understanding.
The idea that all
learning involves transfer from previous experiences must include more
than an analysis of the individual concepts and beliefs that students
bring with them; it must include an analysis of cultural practices.
Many aspects of school failure can be explained as a mismatch between
what students have learned in their home cultures and what is required
of them in the school culture. Issues of cultural practice are
extremely important for understanding the multiple ways that students
learn and for helping them achieve learning fluency.
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Competent and Expert Performance |
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Cognitive science
research has helped us understand how learners develop a knowledge base
as they learn. An individual moves from being a novice in a subject
area toward developing competency in that area through a series of
learning processes. An understanding of the structure of knowledge
provides guidelines for ways to assist learners acquire a knowledge base
effectively and efficiently. Eight factors affect the development of
expertise and competent performance:
1. Relevant knowledge helps people organize information in ways that
support their abilities to remember.
2. Learners do not always relate the knowledge they possess to new
tasks, despite its potential relevance. This "disconnect" has important
implications for understanding differences between usable knowledge
(which is the kind of knowledge that experts have developed) and
less-organized knowledge, which tends to remain "inert."
3. Relevant knowledge helps people to go beyond the information
given and to think in problem representations, to engage in the mental
work of making inferences, and to relate various kinds of information
for the purpose of drawing conclusions.
4. An important way that knowledge affects performances is through
its influences on people's representations of problems and situations.
Different representations of the same problem can make it easy,
difficult, or impossible to solve.
5. The sophisticated problem representations of experts are the
result of well-organized knowledge structures. Experts know the
conditions of applicability of their knowledge, and they are able to
access the relevant knowledge with considerable ease.
6. Different domains of knowledge, such as science, mathematics, and
history, have different organizing properties. It follows, therefore,
that to have an in-depth grasp of an area requires knowledge about both
the content of the subject and the broader structural organization of
the subject.
7. Competent learners and problem solvers monitor and regulate their
own processing and change their strategies as necessary. They are able
to make estimates and "educated guesses."
8. The study of ordinary people under everyday cognition provides
valuable information about competent cognitive performances in routine
settings. Like the work of experts, everyday competencies are supported
by sets of tools and social norms that allow people to perform tasks in
specific contexts that they often cannot perform elsewhere.
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Conclusions |
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Everyone has
understanding, resources, and interests on which to build. Learning a
topic does not begin from knowing nothing to learning that is based on
entirely new information. Many kinds of learning require transforming
existing understanding, especially when one's understanding needs to be
applied in new situations. Teachers have a critical role in assisting
learners to engage their understanding, building on learners'
understandings, correcting misconceptions, and observing and engaging
with learners during the processes of learning.
This view of the
interactions of learners with one another and with teachers derives from
generalizations about learning mechanisms and the conditions that
promote understanding. It begins with the obvious: learning is
embedded in many contexts. The most effective learning occurs when
learners transport what they have learned to various and diverse new
situations. This view of learning also includes the not so obvious:
young learners arrive at school with prior knowledge that can facilitate
or impede learning. The implications for schooling are many, not the
least of which is that teachers must address the multiple levels of
knowledge and perspectives of children's prior knowledge, with all of
its inaccuracies and misconceptions.
- Effective comprehension and thinking require a coherent
understanding of the organizing principles in any subject matter;
understanding the essential features of the problems of various school
subjects will lead to better reasoning and problem solving; early
competencies are foundational to later complex learning; self-regulatory
processes enable self-monitoring and control of learning processes by
learners themselves.
- Transfer and wide application of learning are most likely to
occur when learners achieve an organized and coherent understanding of
the material; when the situations for transfer share the structure of
the original learning; when the subject matter has been mastered and
practiced; when subject domains overlap and share cognitive elements;
when instruction includes specific attention to underlying principles;
and when instruction explicitly and directly emphasizes transfer.
- Learning and understanding can be facilitated in learners by
emphasizing organized, coherent bodies of knowledge (in which specific
facts and details are embedded), by helping learners learn how to
transfer their learning, and by helping them use what they learn.
- In-depth understanding requires detailed knowledge of the facts
within a domain. The key attribute of expertise is a detailed and
organized understanding of the important facts within a specific domain.
Education needs to provide children with sufficient mastery of the
details of particular subject matters so that they have a foundation for
further exploration within those domains.
- Expertise can be promoted in learners. The predominant
indicator of expert status is the amount of time spent learning and
working in a subject area to gain mastery of the content. Secondarily,
the more one knows about a subject, the easier it is to learn additional
knowledge.
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TEACHERS AND TEACHING |
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The portrait we have
sketched of human learning and cognition emphasizes learning for
in-depth comprehension. The major ideas that have transformed
understanding of learning also have implications for teaching.
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Teaching for In-Depth Learning |
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Traditional education
has tended to emphasize memorization and mastery of text. Research on
the development of expertise, however, indicates that more than a set of
general problem-solving skills or memory for an array of facts is
necessary to achieve deep understanding. Expertise requires
well-organized knowledge of concepts, principles, and procedures of
inquiry. Various subject disciplines are organized differently and
require an array of approaches to inquiry. We presented a discussion of
the three subject areas of history, mathematics, and science learning to
illustrate how the structure of the knowledge domain guides both
learning and teaching.
Proponents of the new
approaches to teaching engage students in a variety of different
activities for constructing a knowledge base in the subject domain.
Such approaches involve both a set of facts and clearly defined
principles. The teacher's goal is to develop students' understanding of
a given topic, as well as to help them develop into independent and
thoughtful problem solvers. One way to do this is by showing students
that they already have relevant knowledge. As students work through
different problems that a teacher presents, they develop their
understanding into principles that govern the topic.
In mathematics for
younger (first- and second-grade) students, for example, cognitively
guided instruction uses a variety of classroom activities to bring
number and counting principles into students' awareness, including
snack-time sharing for fractions, lunch count for number, and attendance
for part-whole relationships. Through these activities, a teacher has
many opportunities to observe what students know and how they approach
solutions to problems, to introduce common misconceptions to challenge
students' thinking, and to present more advanced discussions when the
students are ready.
For older students,
model-based reasoning in mathematics is an effective approach.
Beginning with the building of physical models, this approach develops
abstract symbol system-based models, such as algebraic equations or
geometry-based solutions. Model-based approaches entail selecting and
exploring the properties of a model and then applying the model to
answer a question that interests the student. This important approach
emphasizes understanding over routine memorization and provides students
with a learning tool that enables them to figure out new solutions as
old ones become obsolete.
These new approaches to
mathematics operate from knowledge that learning involves extending
understanding to new situations, a guiding principle of transfer (Chapter 3); that young children come to school with
early mathematics concepts (Chapter 4); that
learners cannot always identify and call up relevant knowledge (Chapters 2, 3, and 4); and that learning is promoted by encouraging
children to try out the ideas and strategies they bring with them to
school-based learning (Chapter 6). Students in
classes that use the new approaches do not begin learning mathematics by
sitting at desks and only doing computational problems. Rather, they
are encouraged to explore their own knowledge and to invent strategies
for solving problems and to discuss with others why their strategies
work or do not work.
A key aspect of the new
ways of teaching science is to focus on helping students overcome deeply
rooted misconceptions that interfere with learning. Especially in
people's knowledge of the physical, it is clear that prior knowledge,
constructed out of personal experiences and observations--such as the
conception that heavy objects fall faster than light objects--can
conflict with new learning. Casual observations are useful for
explaining why a rock falls faster than a leaf, but they can lead to
misconceptions that are difficult to overcome. Misconceptions, however,
are also the starting point for new approaches to teaching scientific
thinking. By probing students' beliefs and helping them develop ways to
resolve conflicting views, teachers can guide students to construct
coherent and broad understandings of scientific concepts. This and
other new approaches are major breakthroughs in teaching science.
Students can often answer fact-based questions on tests that imply
understanding, but misconceptions will surface as the students are
questioned about scientific concepts.
Chèche Konnen
("search for knowledge" in Haitian Creole) was presented as an example
of new approaches to science learning for grade school children. The
approach focuses upon students' personal knowledge as the foundations of
sense-making. Further, the approach emphasizes the role of the
specialized functions of language, including the students' own language
for communication when it is other than English; the role of language in
developing skills of how to "argue" the scientific "evidence" they
arrive at; the role of dialogue in sharing information and learning from
others; and finally, how the specialized, scientific language of the
subject matter, including technical terms and definitions, promote deep
understanding of the concepts.
Teaching history for
depth of understanding has generated new approaches that recognize that
students need to learn about the assumptions any historian makes for
connecting events and schemes into a narrative. The process involves
learning that any historical account is a history and not
the history. A core concept guiding history learning is how to
determine, from all of the events possible to enumerate, the ones to
single out as significant. The "rules for determining historical
significance" become a lightening rod for class discussions in one
innovative approach to teaching history. Through this process, students
learn to understand the interpretative nature of history and to
understand history as an evidentiary form of knowledge. Such an
approach runs counter to the image of history as clusters of fixed names
and dates that students need to memorize. As with the Chèche
Konnen example of science learning, mastering the concepts of historical
analysis, developing an evidentiary base, and debating the evidence all
become tools in the history toolbox that students carry with them to
analyze and solve new problems.
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Expert Teachers |
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Expert teachers know
the structure of the knowledge in their disciplines. This knowledge
provides them with cognitive roadmaps to guide the assignments they give
students, the assessments they use to gauge student progress, and the
questions they ask in the give-and-take of classroom life. Expert
teachers are sensitive to the aspects of the subject matter that are
especially difficult and easy for students to grasp: they know the
conceptual barriers that are likely to hinder learning, so they watch
for these tell-tale signs of students' misconceptions. In this way,
both students' prior knowledge and teachers' knowledge of subject
content become critical components of learners' growth.
Subject-matter
expertise requires well-organized knowledge of concepts and inquiry
procedures. Similarly, studies of teaching conclude that expertise
consists of more than a set of general methods that can be applied
across all subject matter. These two sets of research-based findings
contradict the common misconception about what teachers need to know in
order to design effective learning environments for students. Both
subject-matter knowledge and pedagogical knowledge are important for
expert teaching because knowledge domains have unique structures and
methods of inquiry associated with them.
Accomplished teachers
also assess their own effectiveness with their students. They reflect
on what goes on in the classroom and modify their teaching plans
accordingly. Thinking about teaching is not an abstract or esoteric
activity. It is a disciplined, systematic approach to professional
development. By reflecting on and evaluating one's own practices,
either alone or in the company of a critical colleague, teachers develop
ways to change and improve their practices, like any other opportunity
for learning with feedback.
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Conclusions |
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- Teachers need expertise in both subject matter content and in
teaching.
- Teachers need to develop understanding of the theories of
knowledge (epistemologies) that guide the subject-matter disciplines in
which they work.
- Teachers need a knowledge base (an epistemology) of pedagogy,
including knowledge of how cultural beliefs and the personal
characteristics of learners influence learning.
- Teachers are learners and the principles of learning and
transfer for student learners apply to teachers.
- Teachers need opportunities to learn about children's cognitive
development and children's development of thought (children's
epistemologies) in order to know how teaching practices build on
learners' prior knowledge.
- Teachers need to develop models of their own professional
development that are based on lifelong learning, rather than on an
"updating" model of learning, in order to have frameworks to guide their
career planning.
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LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS |
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Tools of Technology |
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Technology has become
an important instrument in education. Computer-based technologies hold
great promise both for increasing access to knowledge and as a means of
promoting learning. The public imagination has been captured by the
capacity of information technologies to centralize and organize large
bodies of knowledge; people are excited by the prospect of information
networks, such as the Internet, for linking students around the globe
into communities of learners.
There are five ways
that technology can be used to help meet the challenges of establishing
effective learning environments:
1. Bringing real-world problems into classrooms through the use of
videos, demonstrations, simulations, and Internet connections to
concrete data and working scientists.
2. Providing "scaffolding" support to augment what learners can do
and reason about on their path to understanding. Scaffolding allows
learners to participate in complex cognitive performances, such as
scientific visualization and model-based learning, that is more
difficult or impossible without technical support.
3. Increasing opportunities for learners to receive feedback from
software tutors, teachers, and peers; to engage in reflection on their
own learning processes; and to receive guidance toward progressive
revisions that improve their learning and reasoning.
4. Building local and global communities of teachers,
administrators, students, parents, and other interested learners.
5. Expanding opportunities for teachers' learning.
An important function
of some of the new technologies is their use as tools of
representation. Representational thinking is central to in-depth
understanding and problem representation is one of the skills that
distinguish subject experts from novices. Many of the tools also have
the potential to provide multiple contexts and opportunities for
learning and transfer, for both student-learners and teacher-learners.
Technologies can be used as learning and problem-solving tools to
promote both independent learning and collaborative networks of learners
and practitioners.
The use of new
technologies in classrooms, or the use of any learning aid for that
matter, is never solely a technical matter. The new electronic
technologies, like any other educational resource, are used in a social
environment and are, therefore, mediated by the dialogues that students
have with each other and the teacher.
Educational software
needs to be developed and implemented with a full understanding of the
principles of learning and developmental psychology. Many new issues
arise when one considers how to educate teachers to use new technologies
effectively: What do they need to know about learning processes? What
do they need to know about the technologies? What kinds of training are
most effective for helping teachers use high-quality instructional
programs? Understanding the issues that affect teachers who will be
using new technologies is just as pressing as questions of the learning
potential and developmental appropriateness of the technologies for
children.
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Assessment to Support Learning |
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Assessment and feedback
are crucial for helping people learn. Assessment that is consistent
with principles of learning and understanding should:
- mirror good instruction;
- happen continuously, but not intrusively, as a part of
instruction; and
- provide information (to teachers, students, and parents) about
the levels of understanding that students are reaching.
Assessment should
reflect the quality of students' thinking, as well as what
specific content they have learned. For this purpose, achievement
measurement must consider cognitive theories of performance. Frameworks
that integrate cognition and context in assessing achievement in
science, for example, describe performance in terms of the content and
process task demands of the subject matter and the nature and extent of
cognitive activities likely to be observed in a particular assessment
situation. The frameworks provide a basis for examining performance
assessments that are designed to measure reasoning, understanding, and
complex problem solving.
The nature and purposes
of an assessment also influence the specific cognitive activities that
are expressed by the student. Some assessment tasks emphasize a
particular performance, such as explanation, but deemphasize others,
such as self-monitoring. The kind and quality of cognitive activities
observed in an assessment situation are functions of the content and
process demands of the tasks involved. Similarly, the task demands for
process skills can be conceived along a continuum from constrained to
open. In open situations, explicit directions are minimized in order to
see how students generate and carry out appropriate process skills as
they solve problems. Characterizing assessments in terms of components
of competence and the content and process demands of the subject matter
brings specificity to assessment objectives, such as "higher level
thinking" and "deep understanding." This approach links specific
content with the underlying cognitive processes and the performance
objectives that the teacher has in mind. With articulated objectives
and an understanding of the correspondence between task features and
cognitive activities, the content and process demands of tasks are
brought into alignment with the performance objectives.
Effective teachers see
assessment opportunities in ongoing classroom learning situations. They
continually attempt to learn about students' thinking and understanding
and make it relevant to current learning tasks. They do a great deal of
on-line monitoring of both group work and individual performances, and
they attempt to link current activities to other parts of the curriculum
and to students' daily life experiences.
Students at all levels,
but increasingly so as they progress through the grades, focus their
learning attention and energies on the parts of the curriculum that are
assessed. In fact, the art of being a good student, at least in the
sense of getting good grades, is tied to being able to anticipate what
will be tested. This means that the information to be tested has the
greatest influence on guiding students' learning. If teachers stress
the importance of understanding but then test for memory of facts and
procedures, it is the latter that students will focus on. Many
assessments developed by teachers overemphasize memory for procedures
and facts; expert teachers, by contrast, align their assessment
practices with their instructional goals of depth-of-understanding.
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Learning and Connections to Community |
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Outside of formal
school settings, children participate in many institutions that foster
their learning. For some of these institutions, promoting learning is
part of their goals, including after-school programs, as in such
organizations as Boy and Girl Scout Associations and 4-H Clubs, museums,
and religious education. In other institutions or activities, learning
is more incidental, but learning takes place nevertheless. These
learning experiences are fundamental to children's--and adults'--lives
since they are embedded in the culture and the social structures that
organize their daily activities. None of the following points about the
importance of out-of-school learning institutions, however, should be
taken to deemphasize the central role of schools and the kinds of
information that can be most efficiently and effectively taught there.
A key environment for
learning is the family. In the United States, many families hold a
learning agenda for their children and seek opportunities for their
children to engage with the skills, ideas, and information in their
communities. Even when family members do not focus consciously on
instructional roles, they provide resources for children's learning that
are relevant to school and out-of-school ideas through family
activities, the funds of knowledge available within extended families
and their communities, and the attitudes that family members display
toward the skills and values of schooling.
The success of the
family as a learning environment, especially in the early years, has
provided inspiration and guidance for some of the changes recommended in
schools. The rapid development of children from birth to ages 4 or 5 is
generally supported by family interactions in which children learn by
observing and interacting with others in shared endeavors.
Conversations and other interactions that occur around events of
interest with trusted and skilled adults and child companions are
especially powerful environments for learning. Many of the
recommendations for changes in schools can be seen as extensions of the
learning activities that occur within families. In addition,
recommendations to include families in classroom activities and
educational planning hold promise of bringing together two powerful
systems for supporting children's learning.
Classroom
environments are positively influenced by opportunities to interact with
parents and community members who take interest in what they are doing.
Teachers and students more easily develop a sense of community as they
prepare to discuss their projects with people who come from outside the
school and its routines. Outsiders can help students appreciate
similarities and differences between classroom environments and everyday
environments; such experiences promote transfer of learning by
illustrating the many contexts for applying what they know.
Parents and business
leaders represent examples of outside people who can have a major impact
on student learning. Broad-scale participation in school-based learning
rarely happens by accident. It requires clear goals and schedules and
relevant curricula that permit and guide adults in ways to help children
learn.
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Conclusions |
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Designing effective
learning environments includes considering the goals for learning and
goals for students. This comparison highlights the fact that there are
various means for approaching goals of learning, and furthermore, that
goals for students change over time. As goals and objectives have
changed, so has the research base on effective learning and the tools
that students use. Student populations have also shifted over the years.
Given these many changes in student populations, tools of technology,
and society's requirements, different curricula have emerged along with
needs for new pedagogical approaches that are more child-centered and
more culturally sensitive, all with the objectives of promoting
effective learning and adaptation (transfer). The requirement for
teachers to meet such a diversity of challenges also illustrates why
assessment needs to be a tool to help teachers determine if they have
achieved their objectives. Assessment can guide teachers in tailoring
their instruction to individual students' learning needs and,
collaterally, inform parents of their children's progress.
- Supportive learning environments, which are the social and
organizational structures in which students and teachers operate, need
to focus on the characteristics of classroom environments that affect
learning; the environments as created by teachers for learning and
feedback; and the range of learning environments in which students
participate, both in and out of school.
- Classroom environments can be positively influenced by
opportunities to interact with others who affect learners, particularly
families and community members, around school-based learning goals.
- New tools of technology have the potential of enhancing learning
in many ways. The tools of technology are creating new learning
environments, which need to be assessed carefully, including how their
use can facilitate learning, the types of assistance that teachers need
in order to incorporate the tools into their classroom practices, the
changes in classroom organization that are necessary for using
technologies, and the cognitive, social, and learning consequences of
using these new tools.
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RESEARCH AGENDA |
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It will take time and
effort to communicate the new approaches to learning and teaching
throughout the very decentralized U.S. education system. We suggest a
number of ways to begin the process through a research agenda, comprised
of a set of priorities that follow from our conclusions. There are
various ways to implement these research priorities; however, the
research will have greatest potential for impact in the field if it is
implemented as a program of research. Throughout this book, it
has been shown that advances in the science of learning have had their
greatest effect when they involved collaborative and multidiciplinary
efforts. The research priorities and recommendations are made here with
the intent of promoting basic research, research training, and research
collaborations. What is needed in the further development of the
science of learning is an initiative to make educational research an
integrative activity.
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STRENGTHENING THE RESEARCH FOUNDATIONS OF THE LEARNING
SCIENCES |
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Significant progress in
cognitive development and cognitive science in the past 30 years has led
the way in establishing an information base on learning and thinking.
- The committee recommends a commitment to basic research
programs in cognition, learning, and teaching.
Our study has shown the
payoff from investing in research on such topics as the foundational
role of learners' prior knowledge in acquiring new information;
plasticity and adaptability of learning; the importance of social and
cultural contexts in learning; understanding the conditions of transfer
of learning; how the organizational structure of a discipline affects
learning; how time, familiarity, and exploration affect fluency in
learning; and many other topics. While these areas have produced a
substantial body of research findings, the research remains incomplete.
The framework has been constructed from the earlier research; details
now need to be provided in order to advance the science of learning by
refining the principles.
- The committee recommends establishing new research programs
in emerging areas, including technology, neurocognition, and
sociocultural factors that mediate learning. Research is needed on the
interrelations between learning and learning environments and between
teaching and learning.
This research will
build on current findings in areas such as: how children learn to apply
their competencies as they encounter new information; how early
competencies relate to later school learning; the conditions and
experiences that support knowledge scaffolding; how representational
systems are challenged by new tools of technology, such as visual
cognition and other types of symbolic thinking:
- The committee recommends new assessment research to focus on
improving and implementing formative assessments.
Research conclusions
indicate that teachers need a variety of supports and learning
opportunities for making their classrooms assessment centered in ways
that support learning. Research questions that remain to be addressed
include: How does a teacher use assessment? What skills do teachers
need in order to be able to use formative assessments in ways that will
improve their teaching? What kinds of supports do teachers need for
learning and adopting innovative assessment processes?
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The Foundations for Science Learning |
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The committee held a
workshop on children's cognitive development and the ways in which
cognitive science research has influenced science instruction in recent
years. The workshop explored ways in which new research findings can
facilitate new directions in areas of science and mathematics learning.
Research issues that grew out of the workshop included the following
kinds of questions:
- How can the field "scale up" successful demonstrations of
research-based curricula so that they can be implemented in many diverse
settings under the guidance of many different kinds of teachers?
- Which factors influence the conversion of research knowledge
into effective instructional methods in real settings?
- Do strategies that work for science education also work to
improve instruction in other subject areas?
- How can preschool children be assisted in developing
representational structures so that there are bridges, rather than gaps,
between early and later school learning?
- How can collaborative learning environments be organized in ways
that counteract societal stereotypes and tap diversity as a positive
resource for learning?
- Which kinds of assessments can effectively measure new kinds of
science learning?
- How do the features of a constructivist curriculum interact with
other social factors in classrooms?
- What is the impact of new technologies on school performance?
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Methodologies of Learning Sciences |
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The research areas
relevant to the science of learning are demonstratively broad, including
cognitive development, cognitive science, developmental psychology,
neuroscience, anthropology, social psychology, sociology, cross-cultural
research, research on learning in subject areas such as science,
mathematics, history, and research on effective teaching, pedagogy, and
the design of learning environments. New technologies for assessing
learning in ways that track the growth of learning, not just cumulative
of facts, are needed. Developing effective research methodologies is
particularly important for research from this diverse array of
disciplines. Advancement of learning research methodologies is critical
for such diverse and complex data.
- The committee recommends that government agencies and
research foundations develop initiatives and mechanisms of support
specifically aimed at strengthening the methodological underpinnings of
the learning sciences. Such mechanisms should include cross-field
collaborations, internships, visiting scholar programs, training junior
scholars in interdisciplinary approaches, and other procedures to foster
collaborations for learning and developing new methodologies that can
lead to more rigorous investigations in the science of learning.
- The committee recommends research aimed at developing and
standardizing new measures and methods. Studies should be conducted and
validated with diverse populations. New statistical techniques should
be developed for analyzing the complex systems of learning. New
qualitative measurement techniques need to be developed.
- The committee recommends new research that is focused on ways
to integrate qualitative and quantitative methods across the learning
sciences.
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Collaborations in the Science of Learning |
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This report emphasizes
the breadth of knowledge areas that affect learners and the significant
advances that have been the direct result of collaborative research
efforts across disciplines. That kind of collaboration is critical to
further development of the learning sciences.
- The committee recommends that government agencies and
research foundations explicitly support a wide variety of
interdisciplinary collaborations in the learning sciences. Such work
should include teachers.
The field of learning
research needs to become more integrated in focus and draw together
relevant fields for interdisciplinary collaborations. To this end,
mechanisms are needed to prepare a new generation of learning scientists
by supporting interdisciplinary training for students and scientists to
work together. It is important to expand the research scope so that
basic researchers and educational researchers can work together on basic
and applied issues and to facilitate ways for teachers and researchers
to work together. While fields such as neuroscience and cognitive
science have made important advances through their joint efforts,
researchers had to learn the methodologies and techniques of each
discipline before new research studies could be conducted. Efforts are
needed to direct training programs in order to foster such
interdisciplinary learning.
- The committee recommends establishing national databases to
encourage collaboration.
To capitalize on the
new developments in information systems, research scientists of varying
disciplines should be linked together, and teachers should be included
in these virtual dialogues. In addition to electronic linkages,
scientists should begin to share databases with one another and to work
with national databases that they can access electronically.
Databases that link
physics researchers with classroom physics educators, for example, have
the potential to bring the two sectors closer to the core issues of the
field. Basic researchers often have poor understanding of why learners
fail to grasp basic concepts of the field; teachers often fail to see
relationships of core concepts that, if better understood from the
standpoint of theory, could facilitate their teaching. National
databases can foster interdisciplinary collaboration and uses of
cross-disciplinary data; promote broader exploration of testable
questions across datasets; increase the quality of data by maintaining
accurate and uniform records; and promote cost-effectiveness through the
sharing of research data. Furthermore, national databases that are
built from representative samples of the changing school population have
the potential of broadening the scope and power of research findings.
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Technology Research to Enhance Learning |
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Because many
computer-based technologies are relatively new to classrooms, basic
premises about learning with these tools need to be examined with
respect to the principles of learning described in this report.
- The committee recommends extensive evaluation research be
conducted through both small-scale studies and large-scale evaluations,
to determine the goals, assumptions, and uses of technologies in
classrooms and the match or mismatch of these uses with the principles
of learning and the transfer of learning.
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Teachers' Professional Development |
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Much of what
constitutes the typical approach to formal teacher professional
development is antithetical to what promotes teacher learning.
Research studies are
needed to determine the efficacy of various types of professional
development activities, including pre-service and in-service seminars,
workshops, and summer institutes. Studies should include professional
activities that are extended over time and across broad teacher learning
communities in order to identify the processes and mechanisms that
contribute to the development of teachers' learning communities.
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EPILOGUE |
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Developments from a
diverse array of sciences have altered conceptions of learning in
fundamental ways. The cumulative knowledge from these sciences delineate
the factors that contribute to competencies in reasoning and thinking.
The new developments are ready to take learning science another step and
focus on processes that promote learning with understanding.
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