How learning works

7 Principles#

7 principles from a book of the same name

Students' prior knowledge can help or hinder learning.
How students organize knowledge influences how they learn and apply what they know.
Student's motivation determines, directs, and sustains what they do to learn.
To develop mastery, students must acquire component skills, practice integrating them, and know when to apply what they have learned.
Goal-directed practice coupled with targeted feedback enhances the quality of students' learning.
Students' current level of development iteracts with the social, emotional, and intellectual climate of the course to impact learning.
To become self-directed learners, students must learn to monitor and adjust their approaches to learning.

Efficacious learning (and schools)#

Lankshear and Bigum (1999) offer this from Gee

If learning is to be efficacious, what a person does now as a learner “must be connected in meaningful and motivating ways with ‘mature’ (insider) versions of related social practices, and with what they will be doing at later points in their life trajectories” (Gee et al, 1996, p. 4).

And follows up with observations that much of what is seen in schools does what Gee (et al, p. 15) suggests is to render "entirely mysterious" what mature versions of social practice look like. Suggesting teachers "lack knowledge of authentic 'embeddings' of the tools in 'mature' versions of social practice" (Lankshear & Bigum, 1999, p. 455)

References#

Ambrose, S. A., Bridges, M. W., DiPietro, M., Lovett, M. C., & Norman, M. K. (2010). How Learning Works: Seven Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching. John Wiley & Sons.

Lankshear, C., & Bigum, C. (1999). Literacies and new technologies in school settings. Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 7(3), 445--465. https://doi.org/10.1080/14681369900200068