Danielle Grignon

As I read How People Learn by Bransford, Brown, and Cocking, I cannot help but think back on my own educational background and the education of others with whom I have been involved. Explanations are suddenly available for why teachers sometimes cannot explain things in the most understandable way, for why people will continue to persevere and work for knowledge even when there is no external prize in the end, and for why prior knowledge from home can build barriers between a teacher and a student. These are only some of the thousands of discoveries that psychological research has added to our knowledge of the human mind in the past decades. They are relevant to everyone because learning is a lifelong process that never ceases to be carried out. However, the most obvious and applicable area for this research to be applied is in the school systems around the world. Here, teachers can be taught about how to better reach their own students and help them to reach their full learning potential.

One prominent problem in education is that an expert is teaching a novice, a situation that without assistance could be quite challenging. Experts are people who have spent much time studying in a certain area and have developed a comprehensive knowledge of the subject. They are able to easily retrieve information about the subject and apply it to a wide variety of situations. However, there are certain drawbacks to being an expert. "Experts notice features and meaningful patters of information that are not noticed by novices" (31). In addition, "though experts know their disciplines thoroughly, this does not guarantee that they are able to teach others" (31). Clearly, this can be troubling in a schooling situation. Experts can find it difficult to convey their ideas to someone who does not have the same background knowledge as them. Therefore, students are left not understanding the connections between ideas and wondering what the teacher is trying to say. In a class such as math, many times a student will not understand how to approach certain problems, but the teacher will not understand why. I have been involved with this situation, though it was not myself that was having the trouble. In my math class during my junior year, I had a wonderful math teacher, but sometimes she simply could not get across to the students what she was trying to say. Since I had a good grasp of the subject matter most of the time, she would have be stand up and teach the class. I was able to see where other novices, such as myself, would get confused, and therefore, I was able to identify their weaknesses and help them to correct them. This was simply a problem of an expert being unable to imagine not seeing the patterns that novices were incapable of yet noticing. This can be compared to the quote that Bransford, et al. borrowed from deGroot (1965: 33-34). "‘We know that increasing experience and knowledge in a specific field (chess, for instance) has the effect that things (properties, etc.) which, at earlier stages, had to be abstracted, or even inferred are apt to be immediately perceived at later stages’" (32). I believe that my math teacher handled the situation appropriately by acknowledging that it was in fact her inability to gain a novice’s perception that was hindering her teaching abilities rather than the students’ problem. She did not let pride get in the way, and instead, let a novice take over and assist those having trouble. If all teachers could identify when they are having problems reaching students, we could begin to eliminate this all too pervasive situation.

An important function of a teacher is to monitor the progress of the student and provide feedback. "Feedback has long been identified as important for successful learning, but it should not be regarded as a unidimentional concept" (59). Research has shown that students need feedback about whether or not they have conditionalized their knowledge. It is very easy for students to contextualize their knowledge, and only be able to answer certain questions when they know, for example, that the information comes from Chapter 3. When given a more comprehensive test, where information is pooled from many chapters, students are given true feedback about whether or not they have learned the material. During my junior year of high school, I conducted a study on feedback. I was wondering whether positive and negative feedback would have differing effects on subjects’ performance. Subjects took the Stroop Test, a psychological test with which no one would have had prior experience. Subjects were under the impression that the results of the test were what were being studied. After completing the test once, subjects were given either positive, negative, or no feedback (regardless of their actual performance) and asked to repeat the test. After statistically analyzing the data, I found that subjects that had received some form of feedback, regardless of whether it was positive or negative, experienced a significant increase in scores during the second testing. Subjects who had received no feedback, on the other hand, showed no significant change in scores. This finding is consistent with the fact that "feedback has long been identified as important for successful learning" (59). People like to know where they stand, and what sort of changes, if any, need to be made in their learning strategies.

Motivation for learning has always been a fascinating subject. People have an innate desire to learn, and that very desire drove them to find out why it was that they wanted to learn. Therefore, research led to the discovery that people have what can be called, as it was by White (1959), "competence motivation" (60). Motivation is what drives people to spend hours researching the answer to an obscure question that has been plaguing their minds or to take on their own small experiment. Extrinsic rewards, such as good grades or money, are often a reason for students to work hard and pursue knowledge in schools. However, intrinsic rewards, such as the gratification in knowing that you figured out a difficult problem or finished a long research paper, are also important and much more satisfying for the individual. Most times, it is the happiness and self-worth that someone feels after achieving their goal that he/she will remember, rather than the five-dollar reward from his/her parents. This can most often be seen in small children. For example, small children will incessantly ask "Why?" to anything their parents say. More than this being a simply annoyance, I would venture to guess that this is children’s competence motivation striving to learn as much as possible to enrich their little-experienced lives. In addition, children begin carrying out their own experiments a few years later. Little boys might take a magnifying glass to see what happens if they shine direct, intense sunlight on crayons. Little girls might mix all sorts of ingredients together to find out what kind of food (if any!) their concoction creates. All of this is in an attempt to satisfy the natural urge to acquire knowledge.

One problem that I have noticed recently in education is the role that prior knowledge plays in acquiring new knowledge, especially prior knowledge from race, and culture. Prior knowledge is very important in learning. All new knowledge is built upon prior knowledge. As studies have shown, "prior knowledge also includes the kind of knowledge that learners acquire because of their social roles, such as those connected with race, class, gender, and their cultural and ethnic affiliations" (72). Children come to school with years of cultural learning about how to interact with others, how to approach school, and what is appropriate in certain situations. Unfortunately, these cultural ideas may not be the same as the teacher’s. Many times this causes unnecessary friction and misunderstanding in the learning environment. Teachers may find it hard to understand why their students are unwilling to answer their questions or tell stories in a different manner than they would desire. This is all a result of different cultural backgrounds. I see this firsthand at McKissack Elementary School in Nashville, where I am a teacher’s aide in a fifth-grade math class. The students are all from very low-income families in the inner city. The large majority of the students are African American. Few of them know their fathers or have any sort of relationship to speak of with them. The teacher, on the other hand, is a middle class, white woman with little experience with the population that she is trying to teach. She finds it very hard to relate to these children who come to school hungry and tired because they did not eat or sleep the previous night. She becomes frustrated when they will not concentrate on math. She will often make comments about calling their fathers or asking them to have their fathers help them with their homework, but the children can do nothing but look at her with a blank face. Overwhelmed by the cultural differences, she has asked for a transfer to a suburban school where she can better relate to the students. Cultural differences are a large issue, mainly in inner city schools. Teachers are not part of the welfare community and, therefore, sometimes have trouble relating. If schools had available funds, it would be helpful if teachers could undergo some form of training to help them to become aware of and sensitive to the differences that they will be encountering.

Psychological knowledge in the past decade has grown immensely. We have been able to reverse beliefs held for over a hundred years with more accurate descriptions of how the human mind works. Research has enabled us to delve deep into the mysteries of that mass of tissue that holds such amazing powers. Because people are driven to learn by a competence motivation, we wonder about things, including ourselves, and go after the answers. We search for knowledge that interests us until we become an expert in the area, and even then, we continue to look for more and more answers. We search for feedback from others to let us know how we are progressing. Anything we learn, however, must fit into our scheme that has been created in our home lives through our cultural experiences. The human mind is an incredibly interesting thing, and with the human drive to acquire knowledge, I am sure that we are nowhere near the end of our mission to finding new discoveries about how it shapes who we are.

Bransford, John D., Ann L. Brown, and Rodney R. Cocking, ed. How People Learn:

Brain, Mind, Experience, and School. Washington, D.C.; National Academy

Press, 2000.