How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School: Expanded Edition

How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School: Expanded Edition

By: Committee on Developments in the Science of Learning with additional material from the Committee on Learning Research and Educational Practice   National Research Council  

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Average Customer Rating: 4.5 out of 5

Publisher: National Academies Press

Customer Review: 5 out of 5
Great resource for begining teachers! - This book gives you a practical synopsis of the essential information needed for guiding your first year of teaching. There are a lot of great charts, and tables that clearly give you facts. I loved the chapters on the different instructional methods.

Customer Review: 1 out of 5
Those Who Can't Teach - I was disappointed that for all the investment in degrees, education, and decades of research that the "thought leaders" in the field have not evolved beyond this publication.

The human animal is a highly efficient biological learning machine.

Things go well until we are forced to undergo socialization through public education.

Human animals are motivated by survival: we learn in order to improve our search abilities for finding information and controlling resources.

Why is Google such an incredible innovation? Duh...

Education should be designed to help humans develop strategies to better perform both search and control, period.

These two skills can be embodied through learning experiences in all of the thousands of subject domains, extra-curricular activities, and social events in educational settings throughout life.

But, not if educators don't understand at a cognitive level how the brain learns.

Only three points are worth noting in the NRC publications related to learning.

1) The human animal brings with them to the classroom a personal understanding of how the world works. (It may or may not be right)

2) The human animal develops a cognitive strategy for storing information about their understanding of how the world works in long term memory. (It may or may not be an efficient schema or model)

3) The human animal develops a meta-cognitive strategy for monitoring their own learning and detecting change that may indicate when and how they need to update their long term memory. (This self-awareness may or may not even exist in either the instructor or the learner)

The only way I ever survived as a Marine helicopter pilot, grad student, software entrepreneur, management consultant, college professor, and phd candidate was to have all three of these concepts engaged throughout the learning experience.

What I expect every time I walk into a classroom is that the teacher/instructor/professor engage these three concepts before we as a class dive into the domain-specific material we are learning.

It has never happened in thirty years.

Without the students and teacher embracing these concepts there is very little class alignment of understanding individual viewpoints, little in the way of collaboration across social and cultural experiences brought to the classroom, and very little innovative thinking in novel ways about the material presented in the classroom.

Without these three cognitive processes being embraced in the classroom, very little personal transformation takes place.

Could it be that the educator in the classroom cannot explain how the material being covered will contribute to our basic motivator for learning (search and control of resources to improve chances of survival)?

What every human animal really wants out of a learning experience is:

1) to improve their understanding of how the world REALLY works,

2) to improve their ability to efficiently store and retrieve new information that is most important to their strategies for better search and control of resources,

3) to improve their meta-cognitive skills when it comes to monitoring their own learning and updating their mental models to improve search and control strategies

So what did the NRC miss about how we REALLY learn? It is a six step domain-general process.

1) frame
2) cluster
3) connect
4) relate
5) measure
6) compare

You must read across psychology, neuroscience, biological physics, evolutionary developmental education, computer science, biological anthropology, and evolutionary sociology to begin to see how these concepts are integrated into a new theory of semantic intelligence.

Whether you are a student or the educator, try this exercise in class and see what I mean.

Give each participant three sheets of paper and a couple crayons.

I have done this exercise with high school students, MBA students, seasoned executives, and scholars.

The results are always the same.

Ask them to answer each of the following questions using only three shapes: triangles, squares, and circles.

1) How does the world work?
2) How do you store information in memory?
3) How do you monitor your own learning?

Give them ten minutes for each question.

At the completion of the exercise have each person explain their drawings.

You now have a visual repository of the many, multiple, and diverse mental models that exist in each individual across the classroom.

Does your teaching framework, methodology, and activities harmonize these mental models and improve the students search and control skills?

Is there a right answer?

Yes.

It is called semantic intelligence and the leading thinkers in this area include Geary, Hauser, and Barsalou.

We have a long way to go as educators. I would propose the Congress and White House do a little drawing with crayons as well.

Accepting that NRC publications like this are the best we can do does our fellow citizens an incredible disservice.

There is hope and you can replay an excellent example of semantic intelligence in action in your mind.

Remember the US Airways flight over Manhattan that hit a flock of geese?

How did Captain Sullenberger land safely in the Hudson?

He has mastered all three mental models and used this cognitive skill to prevent an incredible disaster.

He was able to do what he did because he developed a cognitive simulation that integrated all three schemas: his understanding of the real world, his long term memory, and his meta-cognition, into a single model.

Remember the Hudson!

1) He re-FRAMEd his environment the second the birds were ingested by the engines
2) He re-CLUSTERed the information sources to only include the few instruments working and required for survival
3) He established new CONNECTions between information, symbols, and motion to narrow his option for a landing strategy
4) He established a new RELATIONship with the copilot, crew, passengers, and air traffic control as the leader in charge
5) He began new MEASUREments of inputs, processes, and outputs to determine speed, glide ratio, and time to impact

(He did all of this within less than 30 seconds after impact with the birds)

6) He established a new scan of information coming in as he set up for landing constantly COMPARING the quality, quantity, configuration, composition, substitution, and subtraction of information from the algorithm in his head and body that worked together to land the plane in the Hudson. (the last two and half minutes of the flight)

All of this happened with multiple sources of information and higher levels of cognitive overload.

Miller (1956) had it all wrong. We can manage many more than 7 plus or minus 2 items in short-term memory.

It was less a miracle and more a heroic display of what we human beings and the field of education should aspire to...and how all human beings will be able to perform in the century ahead if we do our jobs right as educators.

I challenge the NRC to re-engage and innovate...

Customer Review: 4 out of 5
good - the book is used and has highlighter pen and pencil marks but still in ok condition

Customer Review: 4 out of 5
Excellent choice for an education student with classroom experience - After reading numerous books on educational psychology, in an attempt to inform my practice, I encountered this wonderful research text. "How People Learn" is written in a way that allows readers to synthesize the information into their everyday practice. The editors have included multi-disciplinary examples, in order to appeal to educators across the subject area spectrum, and these examples are straight forward and easy to understand. My experience reading psychology texts is that the examples to describe behavior studies are not well-suited for laypeople and impossible to apply to everyday practice, because they are often related to training animals to memorize simple tasks, rather than examples of strategies for classrooms of learners.
The chapter on learning and transfer was useful for me, because my current studies focus on Kolb's Experiential Learning model. While the text did not include a lot of substance when it came to how to motivate students, more of an idea that motivation is key, it did emphasize that learners need to understand how a topic can relate to their life beyond the classroom. This speaks to me, because in my observations of students, I've seen that students are so product-focused, that they can't find value in doing work well, unless there is a grade attached; More often than focusing on developing their skills, students work on efficient models to get a finished product that can earn the best grade with the least work. The research in this book supports that both process and product are key to a learner's development, as well as meaningful assessment--not just handing out grades and moving on.
This book is a valuable addition to the library of any educator who seeks to improve their practice through research. The only downside I can find is that many of the research sources were more than 20 years old, and most grad schools in education emphasize the need for recent (5 years old or less) research. I'm not sure if the age mattered, because the overall message was still useful, but it could indicate that the message was either biased or verging on obsolescence--though I didn't get that impression.

Customer Review: 4 out of 5
How People Learn - The only problem was the delivery was slow. The book was needed well before it was delivered.

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