How Students Learn

Learning, in broad terms, involves (summarized in more detail below):

    • Building on pre-existing knowledge or schemas that creates initial understanding. Schemas must be engaged to advance learning.
    • Developing competence in an area of inquiry, which requires:
      • A deep foundation of factual knowledge
      • Understanding of facts and ideas in the context of a conceptual framework
      • The ability to organize knowledge in ways that facilitate retrieval and application
  • Meta-cognition can help students learn to take control of their own learning by defining goals and monitoring their progress in achieving them

One practical way for teachers to think about differences in how student learn is to think about students cognitive strengths. The concept of multiple intelligences is a useful, albeit simplistic, way of considering how varied teaching can respond to student learning differences.

While the key findings of the National Research Council (2000) can be found here: How People Learn Key Findings, the following provides a brief summary (Donovan & Bransford, 2005; Barron & Darling-Hammond, 2008):

    1. Students come to the classroom with prior knowledge that must be addressed if teaching is to be effective. If what they know and believe is not engaged, learners may fail to grasp the new concepts and information that are taught, or they may learn them for purposes of a test but not be able to apply them elsewhere, reverting to their preconceptions outside the classroom. This means that teachers must understand what students are thinking and how to connect with their prior knowledge if they are to ensure real learning. When students from a variety of cultural contexts and language backgrounds come to school with their own experiences, they present distinct preconceptions and knowledge bases that teachers must learn about and take into account in designing instruction. Teachers who are successful with all learners must be able to address their many ways of learning, prior experiences and knowledge, and cultural and linguistic capital.
    2. Students need to organize and use knowledge conceptually if they are to apply it beyond the classroom. To develop competence in an area of inquiry, students must not only acquire a deep foundation of factual knowledge but also understand facts and ideas in the context of a conceptual framework, and organize knowledge in ways that facilitate retrieval and application. This means teachers must be able to structure the material to be learned so as to help students fit it into a conceptual map and teach it in ways that allow application and transfer to new situations. The teaching strategies that allow students to do this integrate carefully designed direct instruction with hands-on inquiries that engage students actively in using the material, incorporate applications and problem solving of increasing complexity, and require ongoing assessment of students’ understanding for the purpose of guiding instruction and student revisions of their work.
    3. Students learn more effectively if they understand how they learn and how to manage their own learning. A “metacognitive” approach to instruction can help students learn to take control of their own learning by having a set of learning strategies, defining their own learning goals, and monitoring their progress in achieving them. Teachers need to know how to help students self-assess their understanding and how they best approach learning. Through modeling and coaching, teachers can teach students how to use a range of learning strategies, including the ability to predict outcomes, create explanations in order to improve understanding, note confusion or failures to comprehend, activate background knowledge, plan ahead, and apportion time and memory. Successful teachers provide carefully designed “scaffolds” to help students take each step in the learning journey with appropriate assistance, steps that vary for different students depending on their learning needs, approaches, and prior knowledge.

These conclusions were affirmed and expanded on by the National Academies of Sciences Engineering and Medicine (2018) to incorporate emerging research including:

    1. "The complex influence of culture: While humans share basic brain structures and processes, as well as fundamental experiences such as relationships with family, age-related stages, and many more, each of these phenomena are shaped by an individual’s precise experiences. Learning does not happen in the same way for all people because cultural influences are influential from the beginning of life. These ideas about the intertwining of learning and culture have been reinforced by research on many facets of learning and development." (Pg. 2)
    2. "Types of learning processes: Even at the most basic individual level, brain development and cognition (and the connectivity between cortical areas) are influenced and organized by cultural, social, emotional, and physiological experiences that contribute to both age-related and individual variability in learning. Different situations, contexts, and pedagogical strategies promote different types of learning." (Pg. 3)
    3. "Knowledge and reasoning: Learners identify and establish relationships among pieces of information and develop increasingly complex structures for using and categorizing what they have learned. Accumulating bodies of knowledge and the capacity to reason about them are key cognitive assets throughout the life span. The strategies that have shown promise for promoting learning help learners to develop the mental models they need to retain knowledge so they can use it adaptively and flexibly in making inferences and solving new problems." (Pg. 4)
    4. "Motivation: Conscious learning requires sustained effort. To learn intentionally, people must want to learn and must see the value in accomplishing what is being asked of them. Numerous factors and circumstances influence an individual’s desire to learn and the decision to expend effort on learning. Engagement and intrinsic motivation develop and change over time; they are not properties of the individual or the environment alone, and they are strongly influenced by cultural and developmental processes." (Pg. 5)
    5. "Implications for learning in school: First, understanding of the cultural nature of learning and development means that what takes place in every classroom—the learning environment, the influence of educators, and all students’ experience of school—cannot be fully understood without attention to cultural influences. Second, there is a growing body of research that examines learning in academic content areas that can provide guidance to educators. Third, a part of what is accomplished when educators attend to the influences of culture on the classroom environment and the perspectives students bring to their learning is that learners are better supported in taking charge of their own learning. Many strategies for fostering specific types and functions of learning are primarily ways of supporting the learner in actively making progress and improvements for himself. Finally, assessing learning is a central part of education in school; effective assessment depends on understanding of how learning occurs." (Pg, 6)

Sources:

National Research Council (2000). How people learn: Brain, mind, experience, and school. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press

National Academies of Sciences Engineering and Medicine. (2018). How people learn II: Learners, contexts, and cultures. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.