Notes from How Students Learn

Notes from “How students learn”

Presented by Dr. Claire Rubman, Professor of Psychology, Suffolk County Community College.

Reported by: Sean Tvelia

This presentation began with a brief survey regarding learning myths, each of which was discussed/debunked during the presentation.

For example— Can students/anyone really pay attention to class while texting or doing other things? No, the brain can only focus on one thing at a time. From day one faculty need to set the tone of the classroom that best sets suits the learning environment. No sleeping, no texting…etc

Parallel distributed processing (PDP) describes how we process stored information through accessing the neural connections formed between discrete pieces of stored information. The more we access those pathways the stronger those connections become.

The spreading activation model describes working memory and explains how the brain processes related material. Spreading Activation states that semantic concepts can be thought of occupying “nodes” within the neural network and that each time a person is presented with a concept all related nodes are activated. For example when presented with the concept of a dog, nodes for bark, bite, or even pet may be activated. This activation then “primes” the brain for the next task relevant to the presented concept. The more often a person is presented with material that strengthens connections between nodes the easier it becomes to recall that information.

When teaching we should attempt to build on our students existing schema (schema refers to our mental model of the world).

If you want to teach you need to add to knowledge that is already available. When connections are not made to existing knowledge we simply create superficial knowledge which is not readily available for critical thinking.

We can further strengthen student understanding through applied use of the generation effect. The generation effect is the term given to the fact that we tend to remember things better when we generate the examples ourselves. By getting students to create there own examples based on their own life experiences we add to connections already made based on life experience and create working knowledge. We’re student’s lack these experiences it is important for us to find ways to provide them so that the information is put into the correct context given the students existing schema. For example students often say that they read the text but they don’t understand it. Without the previous knowledge they may not understand the text and without the proper context any information may be misunderstood or unintelligible.