How Learning Works

How Learning Works

This module is based primarily on the excellent book by Susan Ambrose and colleagues, How Learning Works: Seven Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching (2010). Jossey-Bass: San Francisco.

“Learning results from what the student does and thinks and only from what the student does and thinks. The teacher can advance learning only by influencing what the student does to learn.”

– Herbert A Simon

The seven principles of how learning works are:

• Students’ prior knowledge can help or hinder learning.
• How students organize knowledge influences how they learn and apply what they know.
• Students’ motivation determines, directs, and sustains what they do to learn.
• To develop mastery, students must acquire component skills, practice integrating them, and know when to apply what they have learned.
• Goal-directed practice coupled with targeted feedback enhances the quality of students’ learning.
• Students’ current level of development interacts with the social, emotional, and intellectual climate of the course to impact learning.
• To become self-directed learners, students must learn to monitor and adjust their approaches to learning.

This module includes activities to explore all these principles.

Prior Knowledge

We know without a doubt that the single most important thing your students bring to class is their prior learning and experience. This knowledge is a special kind of baggage that can either contain essential building blocks to advance toward mastery or be a heavy weight that slows down learning.

Prior knowledge can help or hinder learning

Help

Using students’ own experiences to generate examples helps learners to make connections and increase retention. Examples include scaffolding learning from earlier classes and experiences.

Hinder

Insufficient, inaccurate, or incorrect information can slow or halt learning. For example, you may have heard of the famous physics education study where scientific misconceptions persist even in Harvard graduates about why we have seasons or whether a feather dropped from a height would fall slower than an anvil that is dropped. Even after having learned and been tested, students persist on reverting back to “intuitive” stances about scientific misconceptions, which ultimately can hinder any potential learning that would need to scaffold onto these basic grade school concepts.

Strategies to determine and acknowledge students’ prior knowledge

You can identify some common misconceptions in your discipline by considering your student’s prior learning and connecting new knowledge to prior knowledge.

• Determine your students’ prior learning:
  • Use diagnostic assessments such as self- and peer assessments, brainstorming, and mind maps. Look for patterns among the students’ responses.
• Connect new knowledge to prior knowledge:
  • Be explicit about connections.
  • Link between courses.
  • Links within courses.
  • Links to students’ own knowledge and experience.

Extend Activity – Misunderstood

A Teacher for Learning Small Stretch (optional)

Here is one of our chances to just do some stretching.