Effective learning: Why? What for?Students taking an examination are commonly able to identify what they have been told or what they have read; careful probing, however, often shows that their understanding is limited or distorted, if not altogether wrong.
Schools (me as an instructor) should pick the most important concepts and skills to emphasize (through needs analysis) so that, we, as a class, can concentrate on the quality of understanding rather than on the quantity of information presented.
Students (and teachers) have to construct their own meaning regardless of how clearly teachers or books tell them things. Mostly, a person does this by connecting new information and concepts to what he or she already believes.
But effective learning often requires more than just making multiple connections of new ideas to old ones; it sometimes requires that people restructure their thinking radically. That is, to incorporate some new idea, learners must change the connections among the things they already know, or even discard some long-held beliefs about the world.
Interesting, isn't it? For more information, you can visit:
http://www.project2061.org/publications/sfaa/online/chap13.htm
Universal Design for Learning (UDL)
http://www.montgomeryschoolsmd.org/departments/hiat/udl/UDL_intro.pdf
Emotional Intelligence
http://www.is-toolkit.com/knowledge_library/kl_files/Emotional%20Literacy-BrackettKatulak-2006.pdf
Strategies
In class work: pair work, individual work and group work; peer and teacher correction; peer and teacher collaboration, cooperation and sharing.