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 , ...

What saves our sanity, every day, is that we can forget.  It’s good that we forget things--even though sometimes we forget more than we want to--for if we never forgot anything we ever thought or saw, we’d drown in the information overload. For teachers, all this forgetting means that even if we sustain our students’ attention, even if we help our students encode information richly, and even if we create opportunities for students to consolidate that information in their minds--they will still naturally forget things.  Like patterns in sand on the beach that wash away, so will memories. And it turns out that the rate at which we forget things has been studied. Forgetting and Remembering In the late 1800s, a psychologist named Hermann Ebbinghaus tested peoples’ memories for both meaningless and meaningful information over time, and he developed curves that showed our rate of forgetting information.  (Ebbinghaus is that guy pictured above...) We lose inf...