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...

"Because our methods of instruction are generally ineffective, educators have not been able to devote much time and effort to the whole child. If we can develop highly effective instructional resources (whether in books or in computers), then we can free some (more) of the teacher's time to work on the social, psychological, emotional, and moral development of our children." "Rather than having primary responsibility for a subject, the future teacher will have primary responsibility for a number of children. The teacher will become an advisor, a motivator, and someone whose major interest is the child---the whole child. The teacher will be liberated from the more routine, boring aspects of his or her profession by well-designed instructional resoureces...by better testing methods, and by better record-keeping systems. But such improvements in education cannot occur before we improve our knowledge about how to design more effective, efficient, and appealing methods of...

If we return to our observation of the child, I think we will find that imagination is the prevailing organization, and in the man of genius also, whether poet or scientist, there is just this ability to make new, free associations. The wise teacher, then, will be a person who, instead of doling out objective truths with one hand and with the other receiving back from the pupil the same idea stamped with the pupil's brain trade mark, shall rather be an interesting personality, a psychical and moral object in the pupil's environment from which the pupil can enlarge his own subjective experience. He is not to dictate the conditions of learning, but be on hand to supply the ideas which will be food for the already interesting ideas of the child, or even to help the child find his own interesting ideas. He must serve as the model for the 'trying on,' as Dickens's dolls' dressmaker, Jenny Wren, would say, of halfsubjective, half-objective ideas; and he must be on han...