The Science of Learning (and Teaching)

One would think the world of education -- including educators, decision makers and government education policy generators -- would base decisions on grounded research. After all, these are folks who have managed to make their way to a higher order of thinking and graduated with a degree from our educational institutions. Why then is there such a gap between what we know (through research) and what we do (practice/make decisions)?

With apologies to Stevens, I’d like to present eight ways of looking at intelligence—eight perspectives provided by the science of learning. A few words, first, about that term: The science of learning is a relatively new discipline born of an agglomeration of fields: cognitive science, psychology, philosophy, neuroscience. Its project is to apply the methods of science to human endeavors—teaching and learning—that have for centuries been mostly treated as an art.

In lieu of the academic standards, self-Knowledge–and perhaps the thinking habits learners possess–are the ultimate goal of all learning.

It may surprise us to think of it like this, but today’s students grew up in a culture of routine assessment and feedback. Yet when they click (or walk) into our courses, the experience is often quite different: there are few high-stakes grades, big exams, or one-shot term papers. Despite critiques of high-stakes testing – Wideen et al. (1997) said such “examinations discouraged teachers from using strategies which promoted enquiry and active student learning […] this impoverishment affected the language of classroom discourse”—teachers often still see “assessment as an index of school success rather than as the cause of that success” (Chappuis and Stiggins, 2002).

There are two gatekeepers in our brain that look after all information flow. Everything that comes your way is information -- information that entices you and information that terrifies you. And the brain takes them to the appropriate channels.

The idea that students have particular “learning styles”—visual, auditory, kinesthetic, etc.—is a popular and persistent one despite the lack of scientific evidence to support it.

Three generations of distance education pedagogy

I checked out Picard’s study myself, and the graph to which Mazur refers is indeed striking. Many daily activities—including socializing and even sleeping—generate strong physiological arousal, as shown by a sharply jagged line. The line on the graph that covers the period during class, however, looks like the EKG of a patient who’s just died: perfectly flat.

Many daily activities—including socializing and even sleeping—generate strong physiological arousal, as shown by a sharply jagged line. The line on the graph that covers the period during class, however, looks like the EKG of a patient who’s just died: perfectly flat.

Flirck:WoodleyWonderworks Every educator wants to create an environment that will foster students' love of learning. Because the criteria are intangible,

The science of learning can offer some surprising and useful perspectives on how we guide and educate young people.

Fluent instruction no more effective than poor delivery in teaching terms

You've heard the expression “practice makes perfect” a million times, and you've probably read Malcolm Gladwell's popular “10,000 hours” theory. But how does practice actually affect the brain?

Using tech tools that students are familiar with and already enjoy using is attractive to educators, but getting students focused on the project at hand might

You learn something. You stop. You go on to something else. But your brain is still actively processing the learning experience, for four to six hours afterward—and the brain calls it up for processing again when you go to sleep that night. All of this “off-line” activity is best understood as a continuing part of the learning experience, and one reason that sleep is so crucial to the acquisition of new knowledge and skills.

This paper defines and examines three generations of distance education pedagogy. Unlike earlier classifications of distance education based on the technology used, this analysis focuses on the pedagogy that defines the learning experiences encapsulated in the learning design.

Before becoming a writer, I spent a year-and-a-half training as a science teacher and then working at a secondary school in Croydon. During my short stint in education, the biggest buzzword was “differentiation.” We were told that any given class contains pupils with a range of abilities, and that different children have different learning styles.

let’s see the differences between Constructivism and Instructivism. Second, the differences between Constructivism and Connectivism.

Popular interest in the brain means that we increasingly have a ‘folk neuroscience’ that is strongly linked to personal identity and subjective experience. Like folk psychology it is not necessarily very precise, and sometimes wildly inaccurate, but it allows us to use neuroscience in everyday language in a way that wasn’t previously credible for non-specialists.

Our intuitions about what works in learning are often wrong. That’s why we need science.