Practice in Learning

Practice includes: tasks, activities, exercise, experience, and experimentation.

The principles that will make a given learning experience effective are captured in (or at least, they should be capture in) the practice activity.

Practice can be defined by the learner, the instructor, a peer, an activity in a textbook, an instructional video, an exercise routine.

Practice also happens informally in the everyday experiences of our lives.

Practice, in my use of the term, also includes one-time learning experiences like burning yourself on a hot stove and saying, I'll never do that again. And then never doing it again.

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Learning Environment

The learning environment can be one or both of the following: 1) Content providing: e.g. other skiers provide good and bad examples, mountain provides visual input to understand skiing (compared to talking about skiiing in a classroom, chalkboard drawings, pictures, video, etc...) 2) Performance enabling: e.g. the mountain, snow, a ski lift, provide a place to ski; skis, boots and poles provide equipment to ski. e.g. a harness can help a diver safely learn a new dive, e.g. a foam pit can help a gymnast safely learn a new move

Trait vs state

"A useful distinction in the discussion of student characteristics is trait versus state. Traits are student characteristics that are relatively constant over time...whereas states are student characteristics that tend to vary during individual learning experiences, such as level of content-specific knowledge." (Reigeluth, 1983, p. 32) Reigeluth also states that "many strategy components have been shown to help students with all kinds of traits to learn" [p. 32]. My position is that we do not know a priori which aspects of our instructional strategies, learning environment, motivator, etc... will generalize across many or all students. However, with a localized learning theory we can learn over time which do and which do not. At the same time, we will likely find ways of grouping students that we never would have before imagined.

James Paul Gee's 36 principls of learning from What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy

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...

Principles of Learning

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