How People Learn

-By Sumeet Chaudhary

This book was compiled in order to understand 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.
Transfer of Learning:
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, non-school activities
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.
Teachers and Teaching:
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 wellorganized knowledge of concepts, principles, and procedures of inquiry.
Various subject disciplines are organized differently and require an array of
approaches to inquiry
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.
Learners and Learning:
Children are born with certain biological capacities for learning. They can
recognize human sounds; can distinguish animate from inanimate objects;
and 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
infants attention to the sounds of her or his native language.
Technology:
The different ways that technology can be used to help meet the challenges
of establishing effective learning environments are:
1. Bringing real-world problems into classrooms through the use of
videos, demonstrations, simulations, and Internet connections to
concrete data and working scientists.
2. 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.
3. Building local and global communities of teachers, administrators,
students, parents, and other interested learners.
4. Expanding opportunities for teachers learning.
Learning and Connection to Community:
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 childrens learning.