HOW LEARNING TAKES PLACE IN CLASSROOM

How learning takes place in Classroom

How learning takes place in Classroom

Introduction

Cognitive research is revealing that even with what is taken to be good instruction, many students, including academically talented ones, understand less than we think they do. With determination, 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.

This finding suggests that parsimony is essential in setting out educational goals: Schools should pick the most important concepts and skills to emphasize so that they can concentrate on the quality of understanding rather than on the quantity of information presented. The psychology of teaching and learning model of education focuses on multiple considerations of the various characteristics of instruction. Teachers wanting students to learn seek to understand the psychology of proper instruction, and common researched models include a process that considers many factors. (Petty 2007)

Student Learning

People 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. Concepts—the essential units of human thought—that do not have multiple links with how a student thinks about the world are not likely to be remembered or useful. Or, if they do remain in memory, they will be tucked away in a drawer labeled, say, "biology course, 1995," and will not be available to affect thoughts about any other aspect of the world.

Concepts are learned best when they are encountered in a variety of contexts and expressed in a variety of ways, for that ensures that there are more opportunities for them to become imbedded in a student's knowledge system(Piaget 1985) 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. The alternatives to the necessary restructuring are to distort the new information to fit their old ideas or to reject the new information entirely.

Students come to school with their own ideas, some correct and some not, about almost every topic they are likely to encounter(Petty 2004). If their intuition and misconceptions are ignored or dismissed out of hand, their original beliefs are likely to win out in the long run, even though they may give the test answers their teachers want. Mere contradiction is not sufficient; students must be encouraged to develop new views by seeing how such views help them make better sense of the world. The distinct atmosphere created by each new set of students, the school environment and the teacher contribute to the situational component of the psychology of teaching and ...