This link has been bookmarked by 4 people . It was first bookmarked on 22 Jul 2008, by Karl Fisch.
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20 Dec 09
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06 Nov 09
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21 Aug 08
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Cognitive science has shown that what ends up in a learner’s memory is not simply the material presented--it is the product of what the learner thought about when he or she encountered the material. This principle illuminates one important origin of shallow knowledge and also suggests how to help students develop deep and interconnected knowledge.
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The notion that education should emphasize meaning is deeply ingrained in our system and has been for a generation or more. There cannot be many teachers who ask their students to learn facts without concern for a larger picture. So how do students end up with shallow knowledge?
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shallow knowledge is simply a step on the way to deep knowledge.
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Clearly the sort of deep knowledge we want our students to have is objectively harder to obtain than shallow knowledge, because knowledge of the facts and knowledge of the conclusion and knowledge of their interrelationships are prerequisite to it. We want students to know how the different levels of hierarchy relate to one another; it’s not enough to have memorized each level in isolation of the others. That connected knowledge will inevitably be the last thing that the student acquires. Thus, some students’ knowledge will be shallow simply because they are not far enough along yet.
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Other students may effectively quit learning before they reach the deep understanding that is our goal for them. A student may learn the facts about Pearl Harbor and think "All right, I’ve learned a lot about this stuff.
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Despite what was offered to students in the teacher’s lesson, the students attended to (thought about) something different--and that’s what they remembered.
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advocates of discovery learning often point out that children learn to use some computer software rapidly and effectively merely by "playing around with it." That may be true, but that learning environment is also quite structured in that profitless actions are immediately discouraged by the system not working. In effect, the system is so structured that profitless discoveries are impossible; but few classroom activities can achieve this kind of structure. How much anatomy will students learn by "playing around" with frog dissection? Can one anticipate the thoughts of students who dissect frogs with little direction? Although discovery learning may be powerful in highly structured contexts that make the correct discovery virtually inevitable, in others it is likely to prove unproductive.
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Lessons should be directed so that students are very likely to think (or can’t help but think) about the goal of the lesson.
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The goal of the Underground Railroad lesson was not really about biscuits--it was to encourage students to consider the experience of escaped slaves. Therefore, a more effective starting point for that lesson would be to ask students leading questions that encourage consideration of what escaped slaves’ experiences would be like, which might include questions of how they would obtain food, and what the constraints were on the food they could get (inexpensive, cooked rapidly, etc.).
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22 Jul 08
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