Hello! My name is Amanda and I am a graduate student at Michigan State University. I am currently working towards getting my master’s in Special Education- Learning Disabilities. This blog will be used to document my learning and understanding in courses. I hope you enjoy and learn something new!
This week began the first week of my class CEP 810, Teaching for Understanding with Technology. As part of the course assignments this week I was asked to read the first three chapters of How People Learn by Bransford, Brown, and Cocking. These chapters really dove into the difference between learning and understanding. Learning can be rote fact memorization. Students are learning a fact, using it for a test, and then, probably, never accessing that information again. When students learn for understanding they are able to take what they have learned and apply it into different situation to critically think and problem solve. The authors also talked about the difference between novice learners and expert learners. Novice learners are not able to apply previous knowledge, whereas expert learners are. If you’d like to learn more about it please click here to read my take on this subject!
Teach & Tech 
Amanda,
You are so right about students having misconceptions about information and how we have to un-teach that incorrect prior knowledge! I think as learners when we do not understand a process we fill in the gaps with our own understanding. Although our information may not always be accurate, I think by trying to fill in those gaps in our own way is moving us in the direction of becoming an expert learner. As you mentioned it is our job as teachers to fill in all of the missing information for students so they do have those misconceptions. I have noticed this is an issue for a lot of students, and when they do not know something instead of filling in the gaps on their own they shut down, and want the information and all the answers just given to them. Now with technology students can have access to all missing information they need, but it is always a challenge to help students fit those missing pieces together. Which relates to the idea of teaching students to be inquiry based learners. I agree with you about how science provides a way for students to want to find the answers to their own questions, but more and more students are having a hard time creating questions they want the answers to. I love the idea of designing experiments, as I am a science teacher, but I struggle with the scripted curriculum and how structured it is that we are not longer giving students the opportunities to be inquiry based learners. I also believe that idea of allowing students to becoming inquiry based learners takes them from being novice learners to experts. Thanks for the great read and it allowed me to see a different perspective on how students think through a process when they don’t quite have all the information.
Paige
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Amanda, it was a pleasure to read your essay! I really connected with your real world examples on memorization, it really takes me back to when we were in school! You mentioned inquiry-based teaching; which really connected to what learning and understanding is. Allowing kids to explore a concept with the facts that they learned definitely allows the students to transfer their information to that concept and beyond. Teachers need survey students prior knowledge to and guide them to understanding to get their students from novices to experts! With our help our students will become masters of retrieving information, organizing it, and seeing patterns that will help them succeed with their learning. Keep up the great work!
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You bring up a good point in saying that all children come to school with various kinds of knowledge. While I think that we do need to help clarify misconceptions that students may have, I think that we also need to be care that we validate students, even when there are gaps or inaccurate reasoning in their knowledge bases. Much of the knowledge and skills that students display when they come to school has been shaped by the culture and traditions of their families and ethnic backgrounds. Rather and trying to immediately dispel that the knowledge that may not totally line up with reality, I think it would be helpful to both the student and the teacher to try to understand where that reasoning or the holes formed in the first place and to figure out whether or not that thinking permeates any other perspectives the student has formed about the world around them. I also think that instead of telling kids that they are wrong or that they misunderstood something, we can provide them with further information to help them reflect on what they already know and determine whether or not their previous perceptions hold up to the new knowledge or not.
Like you said, we need to help students to learn how to analyze and think critically, not just memorize facts, so the more opportunities we can provide them to reflect on their own, the better!
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