Much of the cognitive and learning science research that is undertaken is conducted on young people and adolescents. These students are usually compulsory attendees and they are studying a curriculum that is prescribed. Further, the faculty are adults who are in positions of both authority and expertise. Community college students choose to attend enroll and Read More
Blumenfield, Kempler, and Krajcik (2006) suggest engagement in grounded in four factors: Value- Learners tend to be engaged with material and lessons they believe are important to them. Value is also closely related to motivation, interest, and goals, all of which are addressed in the next section. Competence- Learners tend to engage in activities they Read More
Fink (2003) proposed a taxonomy of significant learning that reflects the aspects of learning commonly cites by advocates for deeper learning. According to Fink, significant learning comprises: Foundational knowledge which is the information that is transferred in the Standard Model of Education as well as broader concepts that help organized information; Application which finds learners using the foundational knowledge to solve (or at least attempt to solve) Read More
One of the reasons there is so much debate about teaching and learning and what we should have students spend their time doing when they are in schools is that there are different theories about human learning. By theories, of course, I mean ideas supported by evidence that accurately predict and explain what we observed. Read More
We have heard for a generation “your students will have jobs that don’t exist yet.” I paid attention as my children (who are now much closer to 30 than 20) graduated from high school, went to college, and entered the workforce, and they and their friends entered fields that existed previously. Now, however, they and Read More
The culture that learners experience contributes to their views and perspectives that determine what is important to them and the people around them. These become the learned behaviors that determine what learners value, how they define learning, and other decisions about how learning occurs. Educators observe how deviation from cultural expectations affect learners’ actions in Read More
145: Social Aspects of Learning Normal brain development depends on social interaction, and the social nature of human learning continues throughout life, and deeper learning has social components. In recent decades, cognitive and learning scientists have converged on the conclusion that human cognitions is a strongly social phenomenon. Michael Gazzaniga (2008), a noted neuroscientist who Read More
While learning is familiar to all, it has become the subject of serious scientific inquiry in the last several decades. New imaging technologies have provided cognitive scientists a view into the functioning brains and they can see the results of learning as differences in patterns of brain activities. This has led both cognitive and learning Read More
The idea of deeper learning has been kicking around for a couple of decades. Various authors and groups have presented their version. Here is one that I have discovered in some past writing: Collen Carmean and Jeremy Haefner (2002), scholars from the western United States, suggested that curriculum and instruction in the 21st century will Read More
The rationale to approach the curriculum as integrated content is grounded in the observation that few problems encountered—and little of the information use in—the real-world conforms to the boundaries that delimit subjects in schools. Herrenkohl and Polman (2018) reason, “people do not experience the world from a singular disciplinary perspective” (p. 108), and they conclude Read More