How Students Learn-Principle#2 Organize and Contextualize Knowledge

Do you remember from Lionni’s book Fish is Fish the frog describing to the fish what birds look like? The frog continued on to tell about what cows looked like. However, since the fish had no context for his conceptual framework, the facts about horns, a pink bag of milk, hooves and chewing grass didn’t really come across right.

This brings us to Principle #2 of how students learn: (1) factual knowledge (e.g., about characteristics of different species) must be placed in a conceptual framework (about adaptation) to be well understood; and (2) concepts are given meaning by multiple representations that are rich in factual detail.

Knowledge must be meaningful to the student in order for him or her to be able to recall what he or she learned. Detailed facts add rich description to a concept, just like facts with details add rich description to a satisfying story. This is more than reading the textbook chapter, answering the questions at the end, and giving a test on Friday. This mean various multiple exposures to a concept. If students are allowed to explore in detail, do experiments, and create hands-on projects, they will begin to organize and contextualize new knowledge. Once they make connections within a detail-rich environment, they can develop a better idea what a cow looks like.

What kind of context do you think students would need to understand animal adaptations?

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

Creative Commons License

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

no comments yet.