How People Learn: Engaging Learners' Minds

I have been attending the Teacher Development Series here at Lehigh, which aims to take those in teaching assistant positions or students who are about to become young faculty, and helps build their educational toolbox.  From physics to mechanical engineering to theater, students come from a variety of backgrounds, but all have similar concerns about how to best reach their students.  A large focus has been put on engaging the student and how relevance of material - or the understanding of how it will be relevant later - is key to getting those students engaged and absorbing the material.  Because this has been at the forefront of my mind, I see the lessons that resonate from Snowman, et. al. (2009), and the Bransford, et. al. (1999) as being those of student engagement.

Snowman, McCown, and Biehler (2009) talk about "meaningful" learning and the characteristics of that exercise.  Meaningful learning, they contend, happens when a learner encounters a lesson that is logical, well-organized that is relatable to prior knowledge and experiences.  When meaningful learning occurs, the learner is more apt to remember and retain that lesson.  At the same time, information taught that is meaningful, but not approached in a way that students can grasp as meaningful, is often not comprehended or retained as well.  Sometimes as students, we put up barriers to learning because we fear the material is either too hard or seemingly irrelevant.  In the transfer process, teachers and students must be aware that when new knowledge gets fit into the puzzle that is already comprised in your brain, it must make a logical fit that can be called up later.  By relating it to real life circumstances, or potential future goals, students would be more apt to want to learn the material and retain it more readily.

From Bransford, et. al. (1999), the example of homemakers who could calculate the best buy in the grocery stores but struggled with math is one example of the need to bridge the theoretical with the concrete.  This speaks to an issue of applicability and should be taken into consideration when crafting exercises and lesson plans for students.  If students can find the relevance to their own lives - even if that simply means sparking interest, rather than a real applicable skill - they are much more likely to retain and use the information than if only relayed the bare facts.

Another important perspective is that of variety in the classroom. "Knowledge that is taught in only a single context is less likely to support flexible transfer than knowledge that is taught in multiple contexts (NAP 2000: 78)."  Every student learns in a different way, and it is impossible to tailor lessons specifically to the strengths of each person in a classroom.  Through a variety of methods and tactics, students retain information at a different rate and in a different way.  The exercise done at the last part of class on Tuesday (I am sure by design) highlighted these differences.  We are all students in a graduate program, of varied backgrounds but of same educational level for the most part, but through a simple memorization exercise, we could see just how differently our brains work to memorize.  Some employed photographic memory to recall the list of words, others tried repetition. Stories were created.  Pneumonic devices were employed.  But the way in which every person in that room absorbed that information was in a different fashion.  Even similar methods might have slightly different characteristics from person-to-person.

Technology, which has the inherent ability to flex, shape, and deliver information in different contexts, can be seen as the ultimate bridge between different learner personalities and we as educators.  As we move further into the Clark/Kozma debate, we must keep in mind the lessons of meaningful learning and contextual varieties.  While technology cannot be the silver bullet to solving our hardest learning challenges, it is unquestionably a key element to offering the variety and interactivity students need for meaningful learning.

REFERENCES
Snowman, J., McCown, R., and Biehler, R. (2009). Psychology Applied to Teaching. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Bransford, J.D., Brown, A.L., and Cocking, R.R. (Eds.). (1999). How people learn: Brain, mind, experience, and school. Available: http://www.nap.edu/html/howpeople1.