Listening , you would weigh his personality, you would form some judgment about his truthfulness, his ability. But reading , you drop all judgment, and swallow his words whole — just as if the act of printing the thing made it true!
If you must read in order to acquire knowledge, read critically. To know it — write it! How often you have written something down in order to be sure you would have a record of it, only to find that you never needed the written record because you had learned it by heart!
The men of the best memories are those who make notes, who write things down. And because they DO learn by writing, they seldom need to consult their notes, they have brilliant, amazing memories.
How different from the glib, slipshod individual who is too proud or too lazy to write, who trusts everything to memory, forgets so easily, and possesses so little real knowledge.
Writing, to knowledge, is a certified check. You know what you know once you have written it down! You have a pair of ears — use them!
When the other man talks, give him a chance. Pay attention. If you listen you may hear something useful to you. If you listen you may receive a warning that is worth following. If you listen, you may earn the respect of those whose respect you prize.
Pay attention to the person speaking. Contemplate the meaning of his words, the nature of his thoughts. Grasp and retain the truth. Of all the ways to acquire knowledge, this way requires least effort on your part. You hardly have to do any work. You are bound to pick up information. Keep your eyes open. There are things happening, all around you, all the time.
The scene of events is interesting, illuminating, full of news and meaning. Admission is free — keep your eyes open. There are only two kinds of experience: the experience of ourselves and the experience of others. Our own experience is slow, labored, costly, and often hard to bear. The experience of others is a ready-made set of directions on knowledge and life. Their experience is free; we need suffer none of their hardships; we may collect on all their good deeds.
All we have to do is observe! Especially the good man, the valorous deed. Observe the winner that you yourself may strive to follow that winning example and learn the scores of different means and devices that make success possible.
Observe the loser that you may escape his mistakes, avoid the pitfalls that dragged him down. Observe the listless, indifferent, neutral people who do nothing, know nothing, are nothing. Observe them and then differ from them. And the only good knowledge is orderly knowledge!
You must put your information and your thoughts in order before you can effectively handle your own knowledge. Students who are learning oriented like new challenges; those who are performance oriented are more worried about making errors than about learning. Being learning oriented is similar to the concept of adaptive expertise discussed in Chapter 2.
Social opportunities also affect motivation. Feeling that one is contributing something to others appears to be especially motivating Schwartz et al. For example, young learners are highly motivated to write stories and draw pictures that they can share with others.
Learners of all ages are more motivated when they can see the usefulness of what they are learning and when they can use that information to do something that has an impact on others—especially their local community McCombs, ; Pintrich and Schunk, Sixth graders in an inner-city school were asked to explain the highlights of their previous year in fifth grade to an anonymous interviewer, who asked them to describe anything that made them feel proud, successful, or creative Barron et al.
Students frequently mentioned projects that had strong social consequences, such as tutoring younger children, learning to make presentations to outside audiences, designing blueprints for playhouses that were to be built by professionals and then donated to preschool programs, and learning to work effectively in groups.
Many of the activities mentioned by the students had involved a great deal of hard work on their part: for example, they had had to learn about geometry and architecture in order to get the chance to create blueprints for the playhouses, and they had had to explain their blueprints to a group of outside experts who held them to very high standards. For other examples and discussions of highly motivating activities, see Pintrich and Schunk, Transfer is also affected by the context of original learning; people can learn in one context, yet fail to transfer to other contexts.
For example, a group of Orange County homemakers did very well at making supermarket best-buy calculations despite doing poorly on equivalent school-like paper-and-pencil mathematics problems Lave, Similarly, some Brazilian street children could perform mathematics when making sales in the street but were unable to answer similar problems presented in a school context Carraher, ; Carraher et al, How tightly learning is tied to contexts depends on how the knowledge is acquired Eich, Research has indicated that transfer across contexts is especially difficult when a subject is taught only in a single context rather than in multiple contexts Bjork and Richardson-Klavhen, One frequently used teaching technique is to get learners to elaborate on the examples used during learning in order to facilitate retrieval at a later time.
The practice, however, has the potential of actually making it more difficult to retrieve the lesson material in other contexts, because knowledge tends to be especially context-bound when learners elaborate the new material with details of the context in which the material is learned Eich, When a subject is taught in multiple contexts, however, and includes examples that demonstrate wide application of what is being taught, people are more likely to abstract the relevant features of concepts and to develop a flexible representation of knowledge Gick and Holyoak, The problem of overly contextualized knowledge has been studied in instructional programs that use case-based and problem-based learning.
In these programs, information is presented in a context of attempting to solve complex, realistic problems e.
For example, fifth- and sixth-grade students may learn mathematical concepts of distance-rate-time in the context of solving a complex case involving planning for a boat trip.
The findings indicate that if students learn only in this context, they often fail to transfer flexibly to new situations Cognition and Technology Group at Vanderbilt, The issue is how to promote wide transfer of the learning.
One way to deal with lack of flexibility is to ask learners to solve a specific case and then provide them with an additional, similar case; the goal is to help them abstract general principles that lead to more flexible transfer Gick and Holyoak, ; see Box 3. A third way is to generalize the case so that learners are asked to create a solution that applies not simply to a single problem, but to a whole class of related problems.
For example, instead of planning a single boat trip, students might run a trip planning company that has to advise people on travel times for different regions of the country. Under these conditions, transfer to novel problems is enhanced e. Transfer is also enhanced by instruction that helps students represent problems at higher levels of abstraction.
Helping students represent their solution strategies at a more general level can help them increase the probability of positive transfer and decrease the degree to which a previous solution strategy is used inappropriately negative transfer.
Advantages of abstract problem representations have been studied in the context of algebra word problems involving mixtures. Some students were trained with pictures of the mixtures and other students were trained with abstract tabular representations that highlighted the underlying mathematical relationships Singley and Anderson, Students who were trained on specific task components without being provided with the principles underlying the problems could do the specific tasks well, but they could not apply their learning to new problems.
By contrast, the students who received abstract training showed transfer to new problems that involved analogous mathematical relations. Research has also shown that developing a suite of representations enables learners to think flexibly about complex domains Spiro et al. Transfer is always a function of relationships between what is learned and what is tested.
Many theorists argue that the amount of transfer will be a function of the overlap between the original domain of learning and the novel one. Measuring overlap requires a theory of how knowledge is represented and conceptually mapped across domains.
Examples of research. College students were presented with the following passage about a general and a fortress Gick and Holyoak, A general wishes to capture a fortress located in the center of a country. There are many roads radiating outward from the fortress. All have been mined so that while small groups of men can pass over the roads safely, a large force will detonate the mines. A full-scale direct attack is therefore impossible. Students memorized the information in the passage and were then asked to try another task, which was to solve the following problem Gick and Holyoak, — You are a doctor faced with a patient who has a malignant tumor in his stomach.
It is impossible to operate on the patient, but unless the tumor is destroyed the patient will die. There is a kind of ray that may be used to destroy the tumor. If the rays reach the tumor all at once and with sufficiently high intensity, the tumor will be destroyed, but surrounding tissue may be damaged as well.
At lower intensities the rays are harmless to healthy tissue, but they will not affect the tumor either. What type of procedure might be used to destroy the tumor with the rays, and at the same time avoid destroying the healthy tissue? Few college students were able to solve this problem when left to their own devices.
However, over 90 percent were able to solve the tumor problem when they were explicitly told to use information about the general and the fortress to help them.
These students perceived the analogy between dividing the troops into small units and using a number of small-dose rays that each converge on the same point—the cancerous tissue. Each ray is too weak to harm tissue except at the point of convergence. Despite the relevance of the fortress problem to the tumor problem, the information was not used spontaneously—the connection between the two sets of information had to be explicitly pointed out.
Whether students will transfer across domains—such as distance formulas from physics to formally equivalent biological growth problems, for example—depends on whether they conceive of the growth as occurring continuously successful transfer or in discrete steps unsuccessful transfer Bassok and Olseth, Singley and Anderson argue that transfer between tasks is a function of the degree to which the tasks share cognitive elements.
This hypothesis was also put forth very early in the development of research on transfer of identical elements, mentioned previously Thorndike and Woodworth, ; Woodworth, , but it was hard to test experimentally until there was a way to identify task components.
Singley and Anderson taught students several text editors, one after another, and sought to predict transfer, defined as the savings in time of learning a new editor when it was not taught first. They found that students learned subsequent text editors more rapidly and that the number of procedural elements shared by two text editors predicted the amount of this transfer.
In fact, there was large transfer across editors that were very different in surface structures but that had common abstract structures. Singley and Anderson also found that similar principles govern transfer of mathematical competence across multiple domains when they considered transfer of declarative as well as procedural knowledge. A study by Biederman and Shiffrar is a striking example of the benefits of abstract instruction. They studied a task that is typically difficult to learn in apprentice-like roles: how to examine day-old chicks to determine their sex.
Biederman and Shiffrar found that twenty minutes of instruction on abstract principles helped the novices improve considerably see also Anderson et al. Research studies generally provide strong support for the benefits of helping students represent their experiences at levels of abstraction that transcend the specificity of particular contexts and examples National Research Council, Examples include algebra Singley and Anderson, , computer language tasks Klahr and Carver, , motor skills e.
Studies show that abstracted representations do not remain as isolated instances of events but become components of larger, related events, schemata Holyoak, ; Novick and Holyoak, Knowledge representations are built up through many opportunities for observing similarities and differences across diverse events.
Schemata are posited as particularly im-. Memory retrieval and transfer are promoted by schemata because they derive from a broader scope of related instances than single learning experiences. It is important to view transfer as a dynamic process that requires learners to actively choose and evaluate strategies, consider resources, and receive feedback. Studies of transfer from learning one text editor to another illustrate the importance of viewing transfer from a dynamic rather than a static perspective.
Researchers have found much greater transfer to a second text editor on the second day of transfer than the first Singley and Anderson, : this finding suggests that transfer should be viewed as increased speed in learning a new domain—not simply initial performance.
Similarly, one educational goal for a course in calculus is how it facilitates learning of physics, but not necessarily its benefit on the first day of physics class. Ideally, an individual spontaneously transfers appropriate knowledge without a need for prompting. Sometimes, however, prompting is necessary. With prompting, transfer can improve quite dramatically e.
This method can be used to assess the amount of help needed for transfer by counting the number and types of prompts that are necessary before students are able to transfer. Tests of transfer that use graduated prompting provide more fine-grained analysis of learning and its effects on transfer than simple one-shot assessments of whether or not transfer occurs. Transfer can be improved by helping students become more aware of themselves as learners who actively monitor their learning strategies and resources and assess their readiness for particular tests and performances.
We briefly discussed the concept of metacognition in Chapters 1 and 3 see Brown, ; Flavell, Metacognitive approaches to instruction have been shown to increase the degree to which students will transfer to new situations without the need for explicit prompting.
The following examples illustrate research on teaching metacognitive skills across domains of reading, writing, and mathematics. Reciprocal teaching to increase reading comprehension Palincsar and Brown, is designed to help students acquire specific knowledge and also to learn a set of strategies for explicating, elaborating, and monitoring the understanding necessary for independent learning.
The three major components of reciprocal teaching are instruction and practice with strategies that enable students to monitor their understanding; provision, initially by a teacher, of an expert model of metacognitive processes; and a social setting that enables joint negotiation for understanding. The knowledge-acquisition strategies the students learn in working on a specific text are not acquired as abstract memorized procedures, but as skills instrumental in achieving subject-area knowledge and understanding.
The instructional procedure is reciprocal in the sense that a teacher and a group of students take turns in leading the group to discuss and use strategies for comprehending and remembering text content. A program of procedural facilitation for teaching written composition Scardamalia et al. The method prompts learners to adopt the metacognitive activities embedded in sophisticated writing strategies.
The prompts help learners think about and reflect on the activities by getting them to identify goals, generate new ideas, improve and elaborate existing ideas, and strive for idea cohesion.
Students in the procedural facilitation program take turns presenting their ideas to the group and detailing how they use prompts in planning to write. The teacher also models these procedures. Thus, the program involves modeling, scaffolding, and taking turns which are designed to help students externalize mental events in a collaborative context. Alan Schoenfeld , , teaches heuristic methods for mathematical problem solving to college students.
The methods are derived, to some extent, from the problem-solving heuristics of Polya Gradually, students come to ask self-regulatory questions themselves as the teacher fades out.
At the end of each of the problem-solving sessions, students and teacher alternate in characterizing major themes by analyzing what they did and why. The recapitulations highlight the generalizable features of the critical decisions and actions and focus on strategic levels rather than on the specific solutions see also White and Frederickson, An emphasis on metacognition can enhance many programs that use new technologies to introduce students to the inquiry methods and other tools that are used by professionals in the workplace see Chapter 8.
The value of using video to model important metacognitive learning procedures has also been shown to help learners analyze and reflect on models Bielaczyc et al. All of these strategies engage learners as active participants in their learning by focusing their attention on critical elements, encouraging abstraction of common themes or procedures principles , and evaluating their own progress toward understanding. But even the initial learning phase involves transfer because it is based on the knowledge that people bring to any learning situation; see Box 3.
First, students may have knowledge that is relevant to a learning situation that is not activated. Second, students may misinterpret new information because of previous knowledge they use to construct new understandings.
Third, students may have difficulty with particular school teaching practices that conflict with practices in their community. This section discusses these three implications. The importance of building on previous experiences is relevant for adults as well as children. Math was necessary for my mother in a much more sense than it was for me. Unable to read or write, my mother routinely took rectangles of fabric and, with few measurements and no patterns, cut them and turned them into perfectly fitted clothing for people…I realized that the mathematics she was using was beyond my comprehension.
Moreover, although mathematics was a subject matter that I studied and taught, for her it was basic to the operation of her understanding. What she was doing was math in the sense that it embodied order, pattern, relations, and measurement.
It was math because she was breaking a whole into smaller parts and constructing a new whole out of most of the pieces, a new whole that had its own style, shape, size, and that had to fit a specific person. Mistakes in her math entailed practical consequences, unlike mistakes in my math. The structure of many courses would fail to provide the kinds of support that could help her make contact with her rich set of informal knowledge.
The literature on learning and transfer suggests that this is an important question to pursue. By the time children begin school, most have built a considerable knowledge store relevant to arithmetic.
They have experiences of adding and subtracting numbers of items in their everyday play, although they lack the symbolic representations of addition and subtraction that are taught in school. Without specific guidance from teachers, students may fail to connect everyday knowledge to subjects taught in school. Sometimes new information will seem incomprehensible to students, but this feeling of confusion can at least let them identify the existence of a problem see, e.
A more problematic situation occurs when people construct a coherent for them representation of information while deeply misunderstanding the new information. The Fish Is Fish scenario is relevant to many additional attempts to help students learn new information.
This force is exerted only so long as the ball is in contact with the hand, but is not present when the ball is in flight. Students claim that this force diminishes as the ball ascends and is used up by the time the ball reaches the top of its trajectory. These explanations fail to take account of the fact that the only forces being exerted on the ball while it is traveling through the air are the gravitational force caused by the earth and the drag force due to air resistance.
For similar examples, see Mestre, A study of how plants make food was conducted with students from elementary school through college. It probed understanding of the role of soil and photosynthesis in plant growth and of the primary source of food in green plants Wandersee, Many of the students in this study, especially those in the higher grades, had already studied photosynthesis.
Yet formal instruction had done little to overcome their erroneous prior beliefs. Clearly, presenting a sophisticated explanation in science class, without also probing. Most children bring to their school mathematics lessons the idea that numbers are grounded in the counting principles and related rules of addition and subtraction. This knowledge works well during the early years of schooling. However, once students are introduced to rational numbers, their assumptions about mathematics can hurt their abilities to learn.
Consider learning about fractions. One cannot count things to generate a fraction. Formally, a fraction is defined as the division of one cardinal number by another: this definition solves the problem that there is a lack of closure of the integers under division.
To complicate matters, some number-counting principles do not apply to fractions. Is it idiomatic to say "learn knowledge"? Ask Question. Asked 7 years, 6 months ago. Active 3 years ago. Viewed 22k times. In this book, the author has introduced many good ways to learn knowledge.
Is it good English to say learn knowledge? Is this a common collocation in English? Improve this question. Could have been earn knowledge -- possible typo. Kris - 'To earn knowledge' is an expression with little currency in English.
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