Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals (Illustrated)

20 psychological principles that will help your students learn more effectively

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The strategies consisted of a coherent verbal description of how a problem could be solved and contained three components: That is, the what, why, and how of solving the problem were explicitly delineated; see Box 7. Compared with students who took a traditional course, students in the strategy-based course performed significantly better in their ability to categorize problems according to the relevant principles that could be applied to solve them; see Figure 7.

Hierarchical structures are useful strategies for helping novices both recall knowledge and solve problems. For example, physics novices who had completed and received good grades in an introductory college physics course were trained to generate a problem analysis called a theoretical problem description Heller and Reif, The analysis consists of describing force problems in terms of concepts, principles, and heuristics. With such an approach, novices substantially improved in their ability to solve problems, even though the type of theoretical problem description used in the study was not a natural one for novices.

Novices untrained in the theoretical descriptions were generally unable to generate appropriate descriptions on their own—even given fairly routine problems. Skills, such as the ability to describe a problem in detail before attempting a solution, the ability to determine what relevant information should enter the analysis of a problem, and the ability to decide which procedures can be used to generate problem descriptions and analyses, are tacitly used by experts but rarely taught explicitly in physics courses. Another approach helps students organize knowledge by imposing a hierarchical organization on the performance of different tasks in physics Eylon and Reif, Students who received a particular physics argument that was organized in hierarchical form performed various recall and problem-solving tasks better than subjects who received the same argument.

Similarly, students who received a hierarchical organization of problem-solving strategies performed much better than subjects who received the same strategies organized non-hierarchically. If students had simply been given problems to solve on their own an instructional practice used in all the sciences , it is highly. Students might get stuck for minutes, or even hours, in attempting a solution to a problem and either give up or waste lots of time.

In Chapter 3 , we discussed ways in which learners profit from errors and that making mistakes is not always time wasted. However, it is not efficient if a student spends most of the problem-solving time rehearsing procedures that are not optimal for promoting skilled performance, such as finding and manipulating equations to solve the problem, rather than identifying the underlying principle and procedures that apply to the problem and then constructing the specific equations needed.

In deliberate practice, a student works under a tutor human. Students enrolled in an introductory physics course were asked to write a strategy for an exam problem. Use the conservation of energy since the only nonconservative force in the system is the tension in the rope attached to the mass M and wound around the disk assuming there is no friction between the axle and the disk, and the mass M and the air , and the work done by the tension to the disk and the mass cancel each other out.

First, set up a coordinate system so the potential energy of the system at the start can be determined. There will be no kinetic energy at the start since it starts at rest. Therefore the potential energy is all the initial energy. Now set the initial energy equal to the final energy that is made up of the kinetic energy of the disk plus the mass M and any potential energy left in the system with respect to the chosen coordinate system.

I would use conservation of mechanical energy to solve this problem. The mass M has some potential energy while it is hanging there. When the block starts to accelerate downward the potential energy is transformed into rotational kinetic energy. Through deliberate practice, computer-based tutoring environments have been designed that reduce the time it takes individuals to reach real-world performance criteria from 4 years to 25 hours see Chapter 9!

Before students can really learn new scientific concepts, they often need to re-conceptualize deeply rooted misconceptions that interfere with the learning. As reviewed above see Chapters 3 and 4 , people spend considerable time and effort constructing a view of the physical world through. Mechanical energy is conserved even with the nonconservative tension force because the tension force is internal to the system pulley, mass, rope.

In trying to find the speed of the block I would try to find angular momentum kinetic energy, use gravity. I would also use rotational kinematics and moment of inertia around the center of mass for the disk. There will be a torque about the center of mass due to the weight of the block, M. The force pulling downward is mg. The moment of inertia multiplied by the angular acceleration. By plugging these values into a kinematic expression, the angular speed can be calculated. Then, the angular speed times the radius gives you the velocity of the block. The first two strategies display an excellent understanding of the principles, justification, and procedures that could be used to solve the problem the what, why, and how for solving the problem.

The last two strategies are largely a shopping list of physics terms or equations that were covered in the course, but the students are not able to articulate why or how they apply to the problem under consideration. Having students write strategies after modeling strategy writing for them and providing suitable scaffolding to ensure progress provides an excellent formative assessment tool for monitoring whether or not students are making the appropriate links between problem contexts, and the principles and procedures that could be applied to solve them see Leonard et al.

Starting with the anchoring intuition that a spring exerts an upward force on the book resting on it, the student might be asked if a book resting on the. The fact that the bent board looks as if it is serving the same function as the spring helps many students agree that both the spring and the board exert upward forces on the book.

For a student who may not agree that the bent board exerts an upward force on the book, the instructor may ask a student to place her hand on top of a vertical spring. She would then be asked if she experienced an upward force that resisted her push in both cases.

Another effective strategy for helping students overcome persistent erroneous beliefs are interactive lecture demonstrations Sokoloff and Thornton, ; Thornton and Sokoloff, This strategy, which has been used very effectively in large introductory college physics classes, begins with an introduction to a demonstration that the instructor is about to perform, such as a collision between two air carts on an air track, one a stationary light cart, the other a heavy cart moving toward the stationary cart.

The teacher first asks the students to discuss the situation with their neighbors and then record a prediction as to whether one of the carts would exert a bigger force on the other during impact or whether the carts would exert equal forces. The vast majority of students incorrectly predict that the heavier, moving cart exerts a larger force on the lighter, stationary cart.

Again, this prediction seems quite reasonable based on experience—students know that a moving Mack truck colliding with a stationary Volkswagen beetle will result in much more damage done to the Volkswagen, and this is interpreted to mean that the Mack truck must have exerted a larger force on the Volkswagen.

After the students make and record their predictions, the instructor performs the demonstration, and the students see on the screen that the force probes record forces of equal magnitude but oppositely directed during the collision. Several other situations are discussed in the same way: What if the two carts had been moving toward each other at the same speed? What if the situation is reversed so that the heavy cart is stationary and the light cart is moving toward it? Students make predictions and then see the actual forces between the carts displayed as they collide.

Both bridging and the interactive demonstration strategies have been shown to be effective at helping students permanently overcome misconceptions. This finding is a major breakthrough in teaching science, since so much research indicates that students often can parrot back correct answers on a test that might be erroneously interpreted as displaying the eradication of a misconception, but the same misconception often resurfaces when students are probed weeks or months later see Mestre, , for a review. Minstrell uses many research-based instructional techniques e.

He does this through classroom discussions in which students construct understanding by making sense of physics concepts, with Minstrell playing a coaching role. The following quote exemplifies his innovative and effective instructional strategies Minstrell, The act of instruction can be viewed as helping the students unravel individual strands of belief, label them, and then weave them into a fabric of more complete understanding. An important point is that later understanding can be constructed, to a considerable extent, from earlier beliefs. Sometimes new strands of belief are introduced, but rarely is an earlier belief pulled out and replaced.

Rather than denying the relevancy of a belief, teachers might do better by helping students differentiate their present ideas from and integrate them into conceptual beliefs more like those of scientists.

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Describing a lesson on force, Minstrell Today we are going to try to explain some rather ordinary events that you might see any day. You will find that you already have many good ideas that will help explain those events. We will find that some of our ideas are similar to those of the scientist, but in other cases our ideas might be different. When we are finished with this unit, I expect that we will have a much clearer idea of how scientists explain those events, and I know that you will feel more comfortable about your explanations…A key idea we are going to use is the idea of force.

What does the idea of force mean to you? At some point Minstrell guides the discussion to a specific example: He asks students to individually formulate their ideas and to draw a diagram showing the major forces on the rock as arrows, with labels to denote the cause of each force.

A lengthy discussion follows in which students present their views, views that contain many irrelevant e. With this approach, Minstrell has been able to identify many erroneous beliefs of students that stand in the way of conceptual understanding. One example is the belief that only active agents e. Facets may relate to conceptual knowledge e. One of the obstacles to instructional innovation in large introductory science courses at the college level is the sheer number of students who are taught at one time.

Classroom communication systems can help the instructor of a large class accomplish these objectives. One such system, called Classtalk, consists of both hardware and software that allows up to four students to share an input device e. Answers can then be displayed anonymously in histogram. This technology has been used successfully at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst to teach physics to a range of students, from non-science majors to engineering and science majors Dufresne et al.

The technology creates an interactive learning environment in the lectures: The technology is also a natural mechanism to support formative assessment during instruction, providing both the teacher and students with feedback on how well the class is grasping the concepts under study. The approach accommodates a wider variety of learning styles than is possible by lectures and helps to foster a community of learners focused on common objectives and goals.

The examples above present some effective strategies for teaching and learning science for high school and college students. We drew some general principles of learning from these examples and stressed that the findings consistently point to the strong effect of knowledge structures on learning. The approach stresses how discourse is a primary means for the search for knowledge and scientific sense-making. It also illustrates how scientific ideas are constructed. Like other exploratory processes, [the scientific method] can be resolved into a dialogue between fact and fancy, the actual and the possible; between what could be true and what is in fact the case.

The purpose of scientific enquiry is not to compile an inventory of factual information, nor to build up a totalitarian world picture of Natural Laws in which every event that is not compulsory is forbidden. We should think of it rather as a logically articulated structure of justifiable beliefs about a Possible World— a story which we invent and criticize and modify as we go along, so that it ends by being, as nearly as we can make it, a story about real life.

In addition, students design studies, collect information, analyze data and construct evidence, and they then debate the conclusions that they derive from their evidence. In effect, the students build and argue about theories; see Box 7. Students constructed scientific understandings through an iterative process of theory building, criticism, and refinement based on their own questions, hypotheses, and data analysis activities.

Within this structure, students explored the implications of the theories they held, examined underlying assumptions, formulated and tested hypotheses, developed evidence, negotiated conflicts in belief and evidence, argued alternative interpretations, provided warrants for conclusions, and so forth. The process as a whole provided a richer, more scientifically grounded experience than the conventional focus on textbooks or laboratory demonstrations.

The emphasis on establishing communities of scientific practice builds on the fact that robust knowledge and understandings are socially constructed through talk, activity, and interaction around meaningful problems and tools Vygotsky, The teacher guides and supports students as they explore problems and define questions that are of interest to them. Students share the responsibility for thinking and doing: In addition, a community of practice can be a powerful context for constructing scientific meanings. Challenged by their teacher, the students set out to determine whether they actually preferred the water from the third floor or only thought they did.

As a first step, the students designed and took a blind taste test of the water from fountains on all three floors of the building. They found, to their surprise, that two-thirds of them chose the water from the first-floor fountain, even though they all said that they preferred drinking from the third-floor fountain. The students did not believe the data. Their teacher was also suspicious of the results because she had expected no differences among the three water fountains. These beliefs and suspicions motivated students to conduct a second taste test with a larger sample drawn from the rest of the junior high.

The students decided where, when, and how to run their experiment. They discussed methodological issues: How to collect the water, how to hide the identity of the sources, and, crucially, how many fountains to include. They decided to include the same three fountains as before so that they could compare results.

What do students learn from participating in a scientific sense-making community? Individual interviews with students before and after the water taste test investigation see Box 7. In the interviews conducted in Haitian Creole , the students were asked to think aloud about two open-ended real-world problems—pollution in the Boston Harbor and a sudden illness in an elementary school. They worried about bias in the voting process. What if some students voted more than once? Each student in the class volunteered to organize a piece of the experiment.

About 40 students participated in the blind taste test. When they analyzed their data, they found support for their earlier results 88 percent of the junior high students thought they preferred water from the third-floor fountain, but 55 percent actually chose the water from the first floor a result of 33 percent would be chance. Faced with this evidence, the students suspicions turned to curiosity.

Why was the water from the first-floor fountain preferred? How can they determine the source of the preference? They found that all the fountains had unacceptably high levels of bacteria. In fact, the first-floor fountain the one most preferred had the highest bacterial count. They also found that the water from the first-floor fountain was 20 degrees Fahrenheit colder than the water from fountains on the other floors.

Based on their findings, they concluded that temperature was probably a deciding factor in taste preference. Not surprisingly, the students knew more about water pollution and aquatic ecosystems in June than they did in September. They were also able to use this knowledge generatively.

One student explained how she would clean the water in Boston Harbor Rosebery et al. Chlorine and alum, you put in the water. Note that this explanation contains misconceptions.

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By confusing the cleaning of drinking water with the cleaning of sea water, the student suggests adding chemicals to take all microscopic life from the water good for drinking water, but bad for the ecosystem of Boston Harbor. In September, there were three ways in which the students showed little familiarity with scientific forms of reasoning.

First, the students did not understand the function of hypotheses or experiments in scientific inquiry. Ah, I could say a person, some person that gave them something…. Second, the students conceptualized evidence as information they already knew, either through personal experience or second-hand sources, rather than data produced through experimentation or observation. In the June interviews, the students showed that they had become familiar with the function of hypotheses and experiments and with reasoning within larger explanatory frameworks.

Elinor had developed a model of an integrated water system in which an action or event in one part of the system had consequences for other parts Rosebery et al. If you leave it on the ground, the water that, the earth has water underground, it will still spoil the water underground. Or when it rains it will just take it and, when it rains, the water runs, it will take it and leave it in the river, in where the water goes in. In June, the students no longer invoked anonymous agents, but put forward chains of hypotheses to explain phenomena, such as why children were getting sick page The June interviews also showed that students had begun to develop a sense of the function and form of experimentation.

They no longer depended on personal experience as evidence, but proposed experiments to test specific hypotheses. In response to a question about sick fish, Laure clearly understands how to find a scientific answer page Teaching and learning in science have been influenced very directly by research studies on expertise see Chapter 2. The examples discussed in this chapter focus on two areas of science teaching: Others illustrate ways to help students engage in deliberate practice see Chapter 3 and to monitor their progress. Learning the strategies for scientific thinking have another objective: Often, the barrier to achieving insights to new solutions is rooted in a fundamental misconception about the subject matter.

Another strategy involves the use of interactive lecture demonstrations to encourage students to make predictions, consider feedback, and then reconceptualize phenomena. Students learned to think, talk, and act scientifically, and their first and second languages mediated their learning in power-.

Using Haitian Creole, they designed their studies, interpreted data, and argued theories; using English, they collected data from their mainstream peers, read standards to interpret their scientific test results, reported their findings, and consulted with experts at the local water treatment facility. Outstanding teaching requires teachers to have a deep understanding of the subject matter and its structure, as well as an equally thorough understanding of the kinds of teaching activities that help students understand the subject matter in order to be capable of asking probing questions.

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Numerous studies demonstrate that the curriculum and its tools, including textbooks, need to be dissected and discussed in the larger contexts and framework of a discipline. In order to be able to provide such guidance, teachers themselves need a thorough understanding of the subject domain and the epistemology that guides the discipline for history, see Wineburg and Wilson, ; for math and English, see Ball, ; Grossman et al.

The examples in this chapter illustrate the principles for the design of learning environments that were discussed in Chapter 6: They are learner centered in the sense that teachers build on the knowledge students bring to the learning situation. They are knowledge centered in the sense that the teachers attempt to help students develop an organized understanding of important concepts in each discipline.

They are community centered in the sense that the teachers establish classroom norms that learning with understanding is valued and students feel free to explore what they do not understand. These examples illustrate the importance of pedagogical content knowledge to guide teachers. Expert teachers have a firm understanding of their respective disciplines, knowledge of the conceptual barriers that students face in learning about the discipline, and knowledge of effective strategies for working with students.

The teachers focus on understanding rather than memorization and routine procedures to follow, and they engage students in activities that help students reflect on their own learning and understanding. The interplay between content knowledge and pedagogical knowledge illustrated in this chapter contradicts a commonly held misconception about teaching—that effective teaching consists of a set of general teaching strategies that apply to all content areas.

This notion is erroneous, just as is the idea that expertise in a discipline is a general set of problem-solving skills that lack a content knowledge base to support them see Chapter 2. The outcomes of new approaches to teaching as reflected in the results of summative assessments are encouraging. How these kinds of teaching strategies reveal themselves on typical standardized tests is another matter.

In some cases there is evidence that teaching for understanding can increase scores on standardized measures e. It is noteworthy that none of the teachers discussed in this chapter felt that he or she was finished learning. Many discussed their work as involving a lifelong and continuing struggle to understand and improve. What opportunities do teachers have to improve their practice? First released in the Spring of , How People Learn has been expanded to show how the theories and insights from the original book can translate into actions and practice, now making a real connection between classroom activities and learning behavior.

This edition includes far-reaching suggestions for research that could increase the impact that classroom teaching has on actual learning. Like the original edition, this book offers exciting new research about the mind and the brain that provides answers to a number of compelling questions.

When do infants begin to learn? How do experts learn and how is this different from non-experts? What can teachers and schools do-with curricula, classroom settings, and teaching methods--to help children learn most effectively? New evidence from many branches of science has significantly added to our understanding of what it means to know, from the neural processes that occur during learning to the influence of culture on what people see and absorb. How People Learn examines these findings and their implications for what we teach, how we teach it, and how we assess what our children learn.

The book uses exemplary teaching to illustrate how approaches based on what we now know result in in-depth learning. This new knowledge calls into question concepts and practices firmly entrenched in our current education system. Based on feedback from you, our users, we've made some improvements that make it easier than ever to read thousands of publications on our website. Jump up to the previous page or down to the next one. Also, you can type in a page number and press Enter to go directly to that page in the book. Switch between the Original Pages , where you can read the report as it appeared in print, and Text Pages for the web version, where you can highlight and search the text.

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Sign up for email notifications and we'll let you know about new publications in your areas of interest when they're released. Brain, Mind, Experience, and School: Expanded Edition Chapter: Examples in History, Mathematics, and Science. Looking for other ways to read this? The National Academies Press. Page Share Cite. Different Views of History by Different Teachers. Studies of Outstanding History Teachers. In the end, remind your reader again about your point of view. Go back and revise and hand this in again! Wilson and Wineburg What benefits do we get out of paying taxes to the crown?

We benefit from the protection. Yes—and all the rights of an Englishman. So should all the colonies be punished for the acts of a few colonies? There were 12 jars, and each had 4 butterflies in it. And if I did this multiplication and found the answer, what would I know about those Jessica: Interactive Instruction in Large Classes.

Science for All Children. Login or Register to save! How learning actually changes the physical structure of the brain. How existing knowledge affects what people notice and how they learn. Many habits must begin early in life: The significance of this view, according to James, is that our emotions are tied in with our bodily expressions. In his survey of a range of cases, James finds that some actions involve an act of resolve or of outgoing nervous energy, but others do not.

If I am on an isolated mountain trail, faced with an icy ledge to cross, and do not know whether I can make it, I may be forced to consider the question whether I can or should believe that I can cross the ledge. In such a case the belief may be justified by the outcome to which having the belief leads. He extends his analysis beyond the religious domain, however, to a wide range of secular human life:.

James defends our right to believe in certain answers to these questions anyway. In the higher animals a theoretical or thinking stage intervenes between sensation and action, and this is where, in human beings, the thought of God arises. The blindness to which James draws attention is that of one human being to another, a blindness he illustrates with a story from his own life. Riding in the mountains of North Carolina he comes upon a devastated landscape, with no trees, scars in the earth, here and there a patch of corn growing in the sunlight.

But after talking to the settlers who had cleared the forest to make room for their farm, James comes to see it their way at least temporarily: This plurality, he writes:. Wordsworth and Shelley, Emerson, and W. But at some five hundred pages it is only half the length of The Principles of Psychology , befitting its more restricted, if still large, scope. For James studies that part of human nature that is, or is related to, religious experience. Healthy-mindedness can be involuntary, just natural to someone, but often comes in more willful forms.

Some sick souls never get well, while others recover or even triumph: The first is ineffability: Thirdly, mystical states are transient; and, fourth, subjects are passive with respect to them: Nevertheless, James articulates his own belief—which he does not claim to prove—that religious experiences connect us with a greater, or further, reality not accessible in our normal cognitive relations to the world: They lead to consistency, stability and flowing human intercourse.

James holds neither that we create our truths out of nothing, nor that truth is entirely independent of humanity. Gustav Fechner and Henri Bergson. James concludes by embracing a position that he had more tentatively set forth in The Varieties of Religious Experience: Certain sequences of pure experiences constitute physical objects, and others constitute persons; but one pure experience say the perception of a chair may be part both of the sequence constituting the chair and of the sequence constituting a person.

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It is never precisely defined in the Essays , and is best explicated by a passage from The Meaning of Truth where James states that radical empiricism consists of a postulate, a statement of fact, and a conclusion. His legacy extends into psychology and the study of religion, and in philosophy not only throughout the pragmatist tradition that he founded along with Charles Peirce , but into phenomenology and analytic philosophy.

James is one of the most attractive and endearing of philosophers: The Nation 3 September The Principles of Psychology 4. Essays in Popular Philosophy 5. The Varieties of Religious Experience 6. Educated by tutors and at private schools in New York. Family moves to Europe. William attends school in Geneva, Paris, and Boulogne-sur-Mer; develops interests in painting and science. Family settles in Geneva, where William studies science at Geneva Academy; then returns to Newport when William decides he wishes to resume his study of painting. William abandons painting and enters Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard.

Enters Harvard School of Medicine.

William James

Returns to medical school. Suffers eye strain, back problems, and suicidal depression in the fall. Travels to Europe for health and education: Severe depression in the fall. Depression and poor health continue. Accepts offer from President Eliot of Harvard to teach undergraduate course in comparative physiology. Accepts an appointment to teach full year of anatomy and physiology, but postpones teaching for a year to travel in Europe. Begins teaching psychology; establishes first American psychology laboratory. Marries Alice Howe Gibbens. Appointed Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Harvard.

Continues to teach psychology. Teaches psychology and philosophy at Harvard: Briefer Course with Henry Holt. Publishes Talks to Teachers on Psychology: Becomes active member of the Anti-Imperialist League, opposing U. All were reprinted in Essays in Radical Empiricism His partially completed manuscript published posthumously as Some Problems of Philosophy. Dies of heart failure at summer home in Chocorua, New Hampshire. The rhythm of a lost word may be there without a sound to clothe it….

However, the objective world originally experienced is not the world of spatial relations that we think: Certainly a child newly born in Boston, who gets a sensation from the candle-flame which lights the bedroom, or from his diaper-pin [who] does not feel either of these objects to be situated in longitude 71 W. The flame fills its own place, the pain fills its own place; but as yet these places are neither identified with, nor discriminated from, any other places.

I sit at table after dinner and find myself from time to time taking nuts or raisins out of the dish and eating them. My dinner properly is over, and in the heat of the conversation I am hardly aware of what I do; but the perception of the fruit, and the fleeting notion that I may eat it, seem fatally to bring the act about. There is certainly no express fiat here;… PP He extends his analysis beyond the religious domain, however, to a wide range of secular human life: A social organism of any sort is what it is because each member proceeds to his own duty with a trust that the other members will simultaneously do theirs….

A government, an army, a commercial system, a ship, a college, an athletic team, all exist on this condition, without which not only is nothing achieved, but nothing is even attempted WB This plurality, he writes: Even prisons and sick-rooms have their special revelations TT Harvard University Press, 17 vol.

Library of America, Contained in Essays in Philosophy , pp.

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