Learning about Learning

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What is the difference between a student learning multiplication tables from a textbook and another student solving similar problems with an interactive computer? Aren't both simply acquiring new information that they can later apply to real-world problems?

Recent research into how children learn has provided surprising new answers to these questions. In the past, the student learning straightforward tasks from a book was the model upon which education was based. According to this view, students first had to master basic skills before they could move on to higher-order skills. School curricula therefore built up knowledge layer by layer, with each layer dependent upon what went before. Multiple choice tests measured whether the basic skills had been learned. Once students had demonstrated their mastery of the material, they could move on to the next level.

Kids have considerable knowledge. They have an intuitive physics. They have invented algorithms and mathematics before they come to school. They have substantial oral literacy. They invent spelling systems. All of these are facts that educators must come to hear, see, and learn to use as resources for new learning. -Roy Pea, Northwestern university

This model of learning has been turned on its head by the past two decades of cognitive research. Scientists have shown that even the youngest students come to school with quite sophisticated theories about the world. Children have an intuitive understanding of language, numbers, and science based on their previous experiences. They have complex thinking processes that they apply to problems, even without a mastery of basic skills. By ignoring this preexisting base of knowledge, schools miss a tremendous opportunity both to place new knowledge in context and to challenge preexisting ideas that are mistaken.

True, students may master the basic skills schools strive to teach, as measured by multiple choice tests. But change the terms of a test slightly, or ask students to apply their knowledge to real-world problems, and they fail. For example, students may learn all about the tilt of the Earth and its orbit around the sun, but they remain unable to tell you why the northern hemisphere is colder in winter and hotter in summer.

Cognitive research is also demonstrating that intelligence is a much more multidimensional attribute than previously supposed. Schools have tended to focus on just a few facets of intelligence-logical analysis and language, in particular. But individuals can also excel in other areas, including the grasp of spatial relationships, the understanding of music and sound, the use of the body to solve problems, or the intuitive understanding of other people and of themselves. These dimensions of intelligence give every individual a particular set of strengths as unique as a fingerprint.

Kids learn well in conditions where they have to actively grapple with stuff, interpret, judge, make sense, in some sense argue about it. They have to have their hands on the materials. -Jan Hawkins, Bank Street College of Education

Individualizing the instructional process is certainly a necessary provision, but it is not sufficient. Students have to have an opportunity to engage in what might be called playful exploration. -Richard Atkinson, University of California at San Diego

The new findings of cognitive research provide a blueprint for the restructuring of education. In classrooms that have sought to apply these findings, students are making their own scientific hypotheses and are testing them with experiments of their own design. Students are working together in groups to solve problems, giving knowledge a much-needed social context. Traditional pencil-and-paper tests are giving way to assessments embedded in learning that are based on student portfolios, notebooks, and projects.

This style of education looks strikingly similar to the learning that is going on in another kind of educational institution: science museums. In science museums throughout the country, students are learning by interacting with displays, manipulating objects, and solving problems posed by an exhibit. The successes and limitations of science museums in education are providing valuable lessons both for schools and for parents.

The recent findings of cognitive research reemphasize the tremendous potential of the new technologies now beginning to appear in schools. Through multimedia or networking technologies, computers are now powerful enough to place new knowledge within a proper context for learning. For example, an analytic thinker might study a play through a careful reading of the text. Another student more attuned to the spoken voice may learn best through an acted-out version of the play. The range of experience made possible by digital technologies allows education to take advantage of each person's individual strengths.

We live in an interesting time where each of us every day lives a little less in the real world and a little more inside of different kinds of synthetic environments. . . . And as we develop technologies that empower even deeper immersion in a wider variety of artificial realities, what are the implications for learning and what

are the implications for redesigning education?

-Chris Dede, George Mason University

Cognitive research of recent decades has shown that earlier theories of learning did not take into account the intuitive capability that young children have to process complex thoughts, even in the absence of basic skills traditionally instilled in the young as "building blocks" of learning. Nor did earlier theories recognize the extent to which complex learning skills begin developing at preschool ages.

The innate learning capabilities of the young are now being joined with interactive learning skills achieved through encounters with game and other information technology. The new challenge for education is twofold: First, what has already been learned about learning must be applied to aid the general teaching and educational reform effort. Second, while systemic reform goes forward, research into the changes in learning posed by interactive technologies must be vigorously supported so tomorrow's schools will profit from improved understandings of learning in the information age.

Traditionally the federal government and a few philanthropic foundations have been the sources of support for cognitive research by scientists and scholars. These institutions must be encouraged to support research that will improve our understanding of how the children of the information age will learn.