Principles of Learning

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...

Subsumes: - prerequisites (two kinds: essential, supporting -- from Aronson and Briggs 1983 p. 85) ex. Pole vaulting (essential: strength and coordination; supporting: positive attitude (something subsumed in my model of learning by principles of engagement) - learning hierarchies, Gagne (Aronson and Briggs 1983, p. 86); terminal skill is at the top and below it are all the essential prerequisites (note: I disagree with the poitn Aronson makes about learning hierarchies being only pertinent in the intellectual-skills domain; it seems like they also apply to motor skills and attitude and other types of learning) - Gagne's instructional event "stimulating recall of prerequisite learnings"

Way back in 1813, John Freeman described a method of teaching adult persons to read in which printed cards were used. The first card contained 7 lessons. The first six lessons, together, contained 100 words (like an, can, man, than, as, has, on, up-on, ...). The seventh lesson was made up of words selected from the previous 6. (Freeman, 1813, p. 12) Additional repetition was built in as follows (from pg. 14): The first line of the first lesson, should be repeatedly gone over, till it be perfectly known; and then be dismissed, and the second learned in the same manner. Afterwards, the remaining lines in this lesson, should be learned, one at a time. When this is accomplished, the whole of the first lesson is to be repeated, the words being spelled before they are pronounced. The second lesson should then be learned in the same manner as the first. When that is done, proceed to the third, and then to the fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh; taking one at a time, in the order in which they ...

Too often pedagogy has taken it for granted that consciousness is dealing with exactly the same material in the same form while learning that it does later when the subject is learned, and hence it has given rules for the arrangement of definite ideas instead of for forming the clear, definite ideas out of the vague, confused state popularly called feeling, through a transition stage which we call interest, until the ideas stand out clear and well defined and expressible in words. (Boggs, 1907)