Principles of Learning

The tremendous amount of progress toward an improved educational system in the U.S. over the past few years is amazing. A movement is now in place to define education based on valued outcomes or objectives. Objectives, of course, are not new to the 21st century. They've been around in public education for many decades. What's new is the increased accountability and ownership that has begun to spread very quickly into all K-12 public institutions. The result is increased awareness of what should be taught, and what kids should be learning. However, there is still a big missing piece. Educational content production is objective-focused---meaning content is created in alignment with a specific objective, or set of objectives. This is good for educational practitioners who need to assess student ability at a given level of expected competency, but not helpful for a student who does not have the prerequisite knowledge or skill for content aligned to a given objective to be meaningfu

In his book, What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy , James Paul Gee identifies 36 principles of learning: Active, Critical Learning principle All aspects of the learning environment (including the ways in which the semiotic domain is designed and presented) are set up to encourage active and critical, not passive, learning. Design Principle Learning about and coming to appreciate design and design principles is core to the learning experience. Semiotic Principle Learning about and coming to appreciate interrelations within and across multiple sign systems (images, words, actions, symbols, artifacts, etc) as a complex system is core to the learning experience. Semiotic Domains Principle Learning involves mastering, at some level, semiotic domains, and being able to participate, at some level, in the affinity group or groups connected to them. Metalevel Thinking about Semiotic Domains Principle Learning involves active and cr

How important is it for students to learn things correctly the first time? Here's an answer that comes to us from a study reported in October 1910: Very early in the experimental work, it was noticed that if a learner got a point wrong in the first or any early repetition, the error consistently reappeared after future repetitions. In the early presentations, certain words, phrases or sentences would be given particular interpretations, and when the words came again in later readings, the first interpretation came again also. It seemed that the first meaning conveyed by the words would come as a matter of course in future readings and prevent any other interpretation. Since it was impossible to get more than about half of the facts at one reading, many erroneous meanings were usually conveyed by the word symbols in the first reading; these errors were on a low level of attention in later readings, the focus of attention being occupied with facts not gotten at all in the first readi

My method for analyzing existing theories to identify principles of learning: 1) Select appropriate theories and sources of literature for review (justification for selecting sources to be analyzed) 2) Method of analysis (described in detail)

"a combination of the intensity of the mental effort being expended by the learners and the level of performance attained by the learners, constitutes the best estimator of instructional efficiency" (p. 266) (Sweller, van Merrienboer, Paas)

A heuristic is a way of thinking about a topic which is convenient even if not absolutely true. We use a heuristic when we talk about the sun rising and setting as if the sun moved around the earth, even though we know it doesn't. "Heuristic" is both a noun and an adjective; to use a heuristic is to think in heuristic terms. The previous examples can be used to illustrate a useful distinction--between absolute and heuristic uses of factor analysis. Spearman's g theory of intelligence, and the activation theory of autonomic functioning, can be thought of as absolute theories which are or were hypothesized to give complete descriptions of the pattern of relationships among variables. On the other hand, Rubenstein never claimed that her list of the seven major factors of curiosity offered a complete description of curiosity. Rather those factors merely appear to be the most important seven factors--the best way of summarizing a body of data. Factor analysis can suggest e