How Students Learn-Principle#1 Background and Preconceptions

I attended to workshop yesterday called How Students Learn by M. Suzanne Donovan and John D. Bransford. I only got a couple things out of the all-day workshop, and I’ll share the other one with in another blog post. The biggest thing I took way for the workshop was the 3 principles that research concludes about how students learn. Rather than address all three in one long post, I’ll address each principle in separate posts.

1. Students come to the classroom with preconceptions about how the world works. If their initial understanding is not engaged, they may fail to grasp the new concepts and information, or they may learn them for purposes of a test but revert to their preconceptions outside the classroom.

Here is the example from the children’s book Fish is Fish.

In the story, a young fish is very curious about the world outside the water. His good friend the frog, on returning from the land, tells the fish about it excitedly:

“I have been about the world—hopping here and there,” said the frog, “and I have seen extraordinary things.”

“Like what?” asked the fish.

“Birds,” said the frog mysteriously. “Birds!” And he told the fish about the birds, who had wings, and two legs, and many, many colors. As the frog talked, his friend saw the birds fly through his mind like large feathered fish.

New learning is built by connecting it to the foundation of the student’s prior knowledge. If the students don’t have any previous knowledge to connect to the new knowledge, they may get the wrong idea. Misconceptions need to be identified and addressed or else they may continue to envision flying fish instead of birds.

Next time, we’ll discuss Principle #2 Organize and Contextualize Knowledge.

What does this have to do with school in 21st century? Well, if your senator or representavie asked your advice about how students should be taught, what would be your answer? Mine would probably include these 3 principles from Donovan and Bradford’s book.

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Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

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