Humans are learners. Humans are also the products of their environments, and once something from the environment is learned it is very difficult to unlearn it and what we have learned influences what we learn in the future.
Category: Learning
What Gould Said About Intelligence
Education is based on a simple idea: we want to make people smart. “Smart” is the general term that we use to describe an individual who has greater than usual skill and knowledge. Smart is approximately aligned with intelligence which is approximately aligned with the ability to think and learn. I am being nebulous here Read More
Deconstructing Correct Answers
Multiple choice test questions and students’ answers to them seem perhaps the simplest data we encounter as teachers. We pose a question. Students read it. Students give the correct answer or the incorrect answer. Tally the correct answers to measure each student’s understanding. We can deconstruct the process into three components. We assume students: Understood Read More
Elevators Pitch on Brains
In his 2013 book, Social: Why Our Brains are Wired to Learn, Matthew Lieberman described research from late in the 20th century that determined the default areas of brain activity. When a person stops trying to do something else, and the rest of the brain goes quite, the default areas are active. If one begins Read More
Elevator Pitch on Brains and Technology
Human brains are adaptable organs. They are designed to absorb and process information, to find patterns and generalize, and store information in the many forms it finds and creates. As a social species, communication is an essential aspect of human life as well. Human brains are born into a social group and that groups form Read More
A Rationale for Social Learning
Intelligence has been perceived to be a cognitive activity originating the brains of an individual for generations. While there is surely a cognitive component, learning science is telling us that human brains evolved to learn from and with other brains. While methods that find students learning together continue to be contentious, it is clear that Read More
On Learners
Learners and their brains are the natural phenomena in which the technology of education is grounded. To be educative, an experience must be compatible with the physiology and psychology of their bodies and brains. For the 21st century educator, the classroom is filled with learners who have much different relationships with technology compared to those Read More
Elevator Pitch: Conditioning
One of the earliest psychological theories to be applied to schooling was behaviorism. According to this idea, humans learn by associating rewards with actions; we tend to continue to do (learn) that which is positively rewarded and avoid that which is negatively rewarded. The type of learning associated with behaviorism is called conditioning. Conditioning is Read More
On Social Interaction in Learning
The concept of the “blank slate” has been discredited among philosophers, psychologist, and other scientists for several decades, but many educators continue to assume students arrive in classrooms with no relevant experiences and that students need only pay sufficient attention to learn the information teachers tell them. Educators with a more sophisticated understanding of learning Read More
On Scaffolding
When the curriculum is organized around problems and complex tasks, it is inevitable that students will encounter situations that challenge their current knowledge. There will be ideas they do not yet understand, tasks they cannot complete with competence, and resources they cannot comprehend, and tools they are unable to use. It can be reasoned that students who do not Read More