Sense and Sensation

Which is best:  Inquiry-based learning?  Technology-driven classes?  Socratic discussion?  Others?  These pedagogical approaches seem to have their own disciples, each claiming the One Pedagogy To Rule Them All.  How is a teacher to know?  How understand which to use when?  And why? I used to have a "grass is always greener" feeling about this.  I wondered: could everything my colleagues are doing be better than what I'm doing?  I always admired (and still do) the fervent proselytizing different schools of thought attract.  But clarity came for me when I made the realization in the previous blog post: that our habits and dispositions directly engage different stages of the cognitive process .  When I understood that the cognitive model of attention, encoding, storage, and retrieval explains how “non-cognitive skills” influence learning in different ways, then I began to consider how it might similarly cast our differe...

On its own, cognitive science is helpful for understanding how the mind works; it's only useful, though, if we can apply this understanding to facilitate better learning. So how is the cognitive model for learning useful for educators?  Let’s review: learning happens in four cognitive stages: Attention , Encoding , Storage ( I and II ), and Retrieval .  And from the perspective of students , we can think of these stages working like this: Attention is the filtering out of the many stimuli of the world and the focusing on the information at hand. Encoding is the brain registering this information, processing sensory experience and attaching new information to old information. Storage is the consolidation of information and its movement from working memory to long term memory. Retrieval is the act of bringing long-term memory back into mind, back in to working memory and out into our experiences, silently to ourselves or publicly to others. As educators , ...

Before we dig further into memory, we need a brief interlude.  Let's take a step back and consider the whole system of thinking and memory for a moment.  Here's something to begin: Stored in the corners of our minds is the image of a ball soaring through the air.  Let it be a baseball, basketball, football, or ball of your choice.  It makes a great arc in the air, and we can picture it rising and falling.  Until I mentioned it, we weren’t consciously thinking of it, but the image was there, planted from previous experiences in our lives, tucked away in what we call Long Term Memory. When, in a conversation, someone starts talking about parabolas, we might initially hesitate, unsure of what a parabola is, but when she says that a parabola is an arc made by an object thrown in the air, we suddenly recall the image of the soaring ball.  We dig it out of Long Term Memory, and we bring it to mind, to a place we call Working Memory, the place where...

Encoding is what happens when information meets the brain. During exposure to new information, the brain does two things: first, it processes sensory and emotional information, and then second, it tries to attach this new information to old information, to prior knowledge.  And the richer the sensori-emotional experience and the deeper the well of prior knowledge, the more strongly the new information is encoded into memory. And so, strong learning grows out of two things: full, multi-sensory experiences and/or richly contextualized information. Let's look a little closer... Multi-Sensory Experience Several years ago, the science department where I teach switched to a Physics First curriculum.  Like most schools, we had previously taught biology in the freshman year.  But, one teacher told me, at a department meeting one day, the science teachers asked themselves: “What is it that led us to become science teachers?  What turned us on to science t...