Executive Summary - How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School

This is the top page of a set of book pages that summarize the work of the National Research Council in it's important book, "How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School"

This book presents a collection of results from the field of cognitive science and assesses their implications for teaching and learning in K-12 and higher education with the aim of helping all individuals reach their highest potential.

Cognitive science is an interdisciplinary science that emerged in the late 1950s with the goal of better understanding human learning. Encompassing anthropology, linguistics, philosophy, developmental psychology, computer science, neuroscience, and several branches of psychology, its "new experimental tools, methodologies, and ways of postulating theories [have] made it possible for scientists to begin serious study of mental functioning: to test their theories rather than simply speculate abouting thinking and learning, and in recent years, to develop insights into the importance of social and cultural contexts of learning." (p.8)

Key findings from cognitive science:

1. Students bring strong, pre-existing conceptual schemas into the classroom. Engaging student preconceptions about how the world works is critical to creating enduring understanding that transfers into new contexts. (p. 14)
2. Development of student competency requires that the student:
1. have a strong foundation of factual knowledge
2. understand facts and ideas inside the context of a conceptual framework
3. coherently organize knowledge to enable retrieval and application
3. Defining learning goals and explicitly teaching students to monitor their own comprehension enables students to take control of their own learning.
   

Implications for teaching:

1. Teachers must activate and engage students' pre-existing conceptions of how the world works. This means that:
1. The "empty vessel" model is broken. "Teachers must inquire into students' thinking, creating classroom tasks and conditions under which student thinking can be revealed." (p. 19)
2. Assessment must be expanded to better serve as a feedback mechanism to guide the evolution of student thinking: a means to reveal student thinking to themselves, their peers, and the teacher.
3. Assessment "must tap understanding, rather than merely the ability to repeat facts or perform isolated skills." (p. 19)
4. Teacher training must enable teachers to:
1. Recognize predictable preconceptions that may interfere with mastery of a particular subject.
2. Evoke student thinking to probe preconceptions that may not be predictable.
3. Engage preconceptions in ways that enable students "to build on them, challenge them and, when appropriate, replace them." (p. 20)
2. "Teachers must teach some subject matter in depth, providing many examples in which the same concept is at work and providing a firm foundation of factual knowledge." This means that:
1. to be continued....
3. The teaching of metacognitive skills should be explicit and integrated into the curriculum in a variety of subject areas. This means that:
1. to be continued....