How People Learn: Bridging Research and Practice
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| Audience/Grade: | 0-Continuing Education |
| Discipline(s): |
Engineering Education Research General General Engineering, Engineering Science |
| Special Topic(s): |
Associate Editor's Choice |
| Learning Resource Type: |
Reference - General |
| Media Type: |
Unknown |
| Author(s): |
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| Description: | "How People Learn" provides a broad overview of research on learners and learning and on teachers and teaching. This research has important implications for "how our society educates: for the design of curricula, instruction, assessments, and learning environments. The U.S. Department of Education's Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI), which funded How People Learn, has posed the next question: What research and development could help incorporate the insights from the report into classroom practice? Responding to that question is the focus of this report. To address OERI's question, the Committee on Learning Research and Educational Practice first considered how research and practice are generally linked. A small number of teachers are engaged in design experiments with researchers or explore research on their own. They constitute a direct link between research and practice. But for the most part, the influence of research on practice is filtered through educational materials, through pre-service and in-service teacher education, through public policy, and through public opinion�often gleaned from mass media reporting and from people's own experiences in schools. The committee sees the influence of research on these mediating arenas as weak. The research base on learning and teaching has not been consolidated in a way that gives consistent, clear messages in formats that are useful for practice. As a result, the various mediating arenas that influence practice are often not aligned either with research findings or with each other. In synthesizing a broad body of research, How People Learn provides an opportunity to provide research-based messages that are clear and directly relevant to classroom practice. |
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| Related Resources | |
| Keywords: | cognition learning science teaching and learning research pedagogy |
| Usage Tip | |
| Use of Resource: |
Highlights of three findings 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 new concepts and information presented in the classroom, or they may learn them for purposes of a test but revert to their preconceptions outside the classroom. Teachers must be prepared to draw out their students' existing understandings and help to shape them into an understanding that reflects the concepts and knowledge in the particular discipline of study. 2. To develop competence in an area of learning, students must have both a deep foundation of factual knowledge and a strong conceptual framework. Research that compares the performance of novices and experts, as well as research on learning and transfer, shows clearly that experts are not just "smart people"; they also draw on a richly structured information base. Key to expertise is the mastery of concepts that allow for deep understanding of that information, transforming it from a set of facts into usable knowledge. The conceptual framework allows experts to organize information into meaningful patterns and store it hierarchically in memory to facilitate retrieval for problem solving. 3. Strategies can be taught that allow students to monitor their understanding and progress in problem solving. Research on the performance of experts reveals that they monitor their understanding carefully, making note of when additional information is required, whether new information is consistent with what is already known, and what analogies can be drawn that would advance their understanding. In problem solving, they consider alternatives and are mindful of whether the one chosen is leading to the desired end. |
| Difficulty: |
Medium |
| Interactivity Level: |
Very low |
| Version Info | |
| Publication Date: | January 1999 |
| Platform/Format: |
WWW |
| Cost: |
Free |
| Download URL: | http://www.nap.edu/books/0309065364/html/ |
| Metadata: |
IEEE LOM Record |
| Collection: |
NEEDS
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