Week 7 Blog:The process of education and the myth of learning.
For this week there two readings. The first one is The Process of Education and the other is The Myth of “Learning Styles”. For the first reading’s chapter three Readiness for Learning, Bruner began with a hypothesis that any subject can be taught effectively in some intellectually honest form to any child at any stage of development. He examined three general ideas, the process of intellectual development in children, the act of learning, and the notion of the spiral curriculum.
For the first idea, the process of intellectual development in children, it refers to a person's growing ability to learn in relation to the world around him or her. Intellectual development is characterized by several stages. As a child grows, intellectual development continues whether it's evident or not. It's important to foster intellectual development all throughout life.
So, in our daily life we may find that our children often focus on only one aspect of a phenomenon at a time, and this interferes with his understanding. Last week chat with my nephew, who is three years old, I asked him to talk with me, however, he just like eating and playing never concentrate on what I am asking. We often expect children to think like adults when they are not yet capable of doing so. It is important that parents or educators know what to expect from their children as they develop and to be sure that the expectations that they may have for their children at a given age are realistic. The stages of intellectual development formulated by Piaget appear to be related to major developments in brain growth. The human brain is not fully developed until late adolescence or in the case of males sometimes early adulthood.
For the act of learning, there are three processes on learning. The first is acquisition of new knowledge. The second is transformation. The third one is evaluation. Considering about my own learning process, it also meets these processes. Prereview the books, listen to teachers’ teaching and thinking, asking questions, then review and make an evaluation to see whether I have acquired the knowledge. So, as teachers or educators, we should learn the process and know the rules of learning so that we can teaching. And what our student does is actually more important to their learning than what us, as the teacher do. Learning activities are what students actually do in our course in order to learn. And I think the types of learning activities we educators develop for our course should be based on the particular learning outcomes that we would like to achieve. Learning activities need to support students in the achievement of course learning outcomes. When choosing learning activities it is useful to reflect on the learning process and what we actually do when we learn something.
Spiral curriculum is an approach to education that introduces key concepts to students at a young age and covers these concepts repeatedly, with increasing degrees of complexity. This approach is also known as also known as a "spaced" or "distributed" approach. If the answer to both questions is negative or ambiguous, then the material is cluttering the curriculum. Students interact with the world by exploring and manipulating objects, wrestling with questions and controversies, or performing experiments. And students may be more likely to remember concepts and knowledge discovered on their own.
And there is another concept in this week’s reading, learning style. It is a range of competing and contested theory that aim to account for differences in individuals' learning. In this reading, the author mentioned Husmann and her colleagues and hundreds of students take a VARK questionnaire and found that not only did students not study in ways that seemed to reflect their learning style, those who did tailor their studying to suit their style didn’t do any better on their tests. And for another study, Willingham said people have different abilities, not styles. I think that is reasonable.
Each of us are different, so we have different habit, different ability, different style and different study idea. Some like reading, others may think that listening is better. Besides, I really like this sentence, it might help you learn about yourself, but it might not help you learn. So, as educators, we should learn more about our students, what are their advantages and what are their disadvantages, and give them advice about what may fit them better. I think it is really significant during their study even their habit and life. Thus, do you have your own learning style? Do you think they are benefit to your study, work, or even your life?
For the first idea, the process of intellectual development in children, it refers to a person's growing ability to learn in relation to the world around him or her. Intellectual development is characterized by several stages. As a child grows, intellectual development continues whether it's evident or not. It's important to foster intellectual development all throughout life.
So, in our daily life we may find that our children often focus on only one aspect of a phenomenon at a time, and this interferes with his understanding. Last week chat with my nephew, who is three years old, I asked him to talk with me, however, he just like eating and playing never concentrate on what I am asking. We often expect children to think like adults when they are not yet capable of doing so. It is important that parents or educators know what to expect from their children as they develop and to be sure that the expectations that they may have for their children at a given age are realistic. The stages of intellectual development formulated by Piaget appear to be related to major developments in brain growth. The human brain is not fully developed until late adolescence or in the case of males sometimes early adulthood.
For the act of learning, there are three processes on learning. The first is acquisition of new knowledge. The second is transformation. The third one is evaluation. Considering about my own learning process, it also meets these processes. Prereview the books, listen to teachers’ teaching and thinking, asking questions, then review and make an evaluation to see whether I have acquired the knowledge. So, as teachers or educators, we should learn the process and know the rules of learning so that we can teaching. And what our student does is actually more important to their learning than what us, as the teacher do. Learning activities are what students actually do in our course in order to learn. And I think the types of learning activities we educators develop for our course should be based on the particular learning outcomes that we would like to achieve. Learning activities need to support students in the achievement of course learning outcomes. When choosing learning activities it is useful to reflect on the learning process and what we actually do when we learn something.
Spiral curriculum is an approach to education that introduces key concepts to students at a young age and covers these concepts repeatedly, with increasing degrees of complexity. This approach is also known as also known as a "spaced" or "distributed" approach. If the answer to both questions is negative or ambiguous, then the material is cluttering the curriculum. Students interact with the world by exploring and manipulating objects, wrestling with questions and controversies, or performing experiments. And students may be more likely to remember concepts and knowledge discovered on their own.
And there is another concept in this week’s reading, learning style. It is a range of competing and contested theory that aim to account for differences in individuals' learning. In this reading, the author mentioned Husmann and her colleagues and hundreds of students take a VARK questionnaire and found that not only did students not study in ways that seemed to reflect their learning style, those who did tailor their studying to suit their style didn’t do any better on their tests. And for another study, Willingham said people have different abilities, not styles. I think that is reasonable.
Each of us are different, so we have different habit, different ability, different style and different study idea. Some like reading, others may think that listening is better. Besides, I really like this sentence, it might help you learn about yourself, but it might not help you learn. So, as educators, we should learn more about our students, what are their advantages and what are their disadvantages, and give them advice about what may fit them better. I think it is really significant during their study even their habit and life. Thus, do you have your own learning style? Do you think they are benefit to your study, work, or even your life?
Thank you very much for sharing. Learning style is a very interesting topic. In my opinion, it is just like everyone's personality. Just as there is no absolutely superior personality to another, there is no absolutely dominant learning style. What we need to do is to exert our learning style advantages to achieve the best learning effect.As for your question do I have my own learning style,I think so ,I think everyone has his own learning style.Do I think they are benefit to my study?As I just stated, everyone's learning style has its advantages and disadvantages. All we have to do is to keep the good aspects of our learning style and correct the deficiencies.
ReplyDeleteThank you for sharing! For the process of intellectual development in children, I agree with your idea about "parents or educators know what to expect from their children as they develop and to be sure that the expectations that they may have for their children at a given age are realistic". Many of the time when we taught kids about math in grade 2 or grade 3, we tended to be annoyed by children's wrong answers or slow reaction, because we thought the questions were so easy that why they did them wrong. This is an example that as adults we did not familiar with the stages of children's intellectual development, and we just judged children's learning or behaviors according to our mature intelligence and ways' of thinking.
ReplyDeleteThank you for sharing! I loved that you said that we are all different, thus we all have a different teaching style. As Willingham states, " people have different abilities, not styles." Most of the tasks teachers give students are equipped for one type of child, not all 23. As teachers, we need to be thinking about differentiation among our classrooms. One child may convey his message verbally, while another could convey the same message as a picture. Is that to say that either method is wrong? Learning styles are impacted by home life, community and school environment. I think the best way for students to learn is to immerse them in all learning styles. If we open up opportunities for all learning styles, students will be exposed to them and be great at all of them.
ReplyDeleteThank you for your post! There are so many good points to touch on throughout this post. For one, I think we absolutely place a lot of unrealistic expectations on children at an earl age. Though research show that children are being exposed to and grasping more concepts are a faster rate than in the past, we still have to understand that memorizing and conceptulaizing are two different areas. We must approach learning in a way that allows children to gain an overall understanding of topics rather than just being able to repeat and retell. The research done by Piaget and many others after him can help guide us in our approaches to teaching according to age and intellectual development. I also tie this to common core state standards. Has teaching to these standards shown any real benefit to our kids overall learning process? Do we think compentency based learning would better be a better fit with the stages of intellectual development ?
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