The Art of Learning

In Seymour Papert’s “The Children’s Machine”, (1993) he brought up the question of whether students should be learning specific material or learning to learn. I have been thinking about this lately myself and it does seem that schools don’t spend enough time teaching students to be able to recognize how they each learn best. Upon reflection, I know that I am a very visual learner and need to see and do things to understand them better. This would have been very helpful to realize in my calculus class in high school where the teacher rarely used the chalkboard to teach. I knew that I was having more trouble than other years in math but I figured it was because it was my senior year so I was not trying as hard and calculus is just harder. However, I do know that when my teacher would actually show me how to work a problem on paper, I would understand it very quickly. I think that it definitely could have made a difference in my success in calculus if I understood how important it was for me to see the problems worked out, rather than just talk about them. Teachers are being taught to recognize different learning styles in their students, but why should not they teach the students directly? This may not apply as well to younger learners, but it could make a big difference once the student is given more responsibility for their own learning.

It was interesting that Papert went into such detail about how he learned the names of the flowers because what seemed to be the driving force was his desire to figure out how to unlock this part of his brain. Providing context as he suggests can certainly make a big difference, but if a student is not interested in a particular subject, giving them a greater context will not be the only solution. In a study testing whether an interactive lesson in a computer-based learning environment enhances learning, Evans and Gibbons (in press) found that while there was not a significant difference in the overall retention rate, there was a significant difference in the performance on the transfer questions. For example, this lesson was on how a pump works so a transfer question was “What could be done to make the pump more reliable, that is, to make sure that it won’t fail?” (Evans & Gibbons, in press). They also found that the students who used the interactive lesson completed all of the questions on the test faster than they completed those who used the non-interactive model. From this study, using interactive material seems to let the student work through the lesson at their own rate. This coupled with the fact that the cognitive load for each student is self-regulated can help the students gain a greater understanding of certain components of a lesson.

Clearly, I agree with Papert’s ideas about the importance of the art of learning. If students gain more insight into how they learn, their school career could be much more successful. If this strategy is combined with what teachers already know about making learning more meaningful, then the students’ should be leaving school with the universal skill of learning that can be applied to whatever environment they choose to enter.


References

Evans, C. & Gibbons, N. (in press). The interactivity effect in multimedia learning. Computers & Education.

Papert, S. (1993). The children's machine: rethinking school in the age of the computer. New York: BasicBooks.