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July 6, 2009
Findings from Columbia
By Bob Connor, The Teagle Foundation
A group of faculty, post-doctoral fellows, and doctoral students from Columbia University’s Morningside Campus, the Medical Center and Teachers College have been working as a Teagle Collegium over the past year, focusing their formidable energies on two crucial questions: What has recent psychological research taught us about learning and how can we best apply these findings to improve teaching and enhance student learning?
Here are some of their findings, as reported by the leader of the Collegium, Steven Mintz:
Engagement
What are the factors that enhance or inhibit involvement in learning? Engagement tends to decline if an activity is motivated by the promise of a reward (as opposed to an intrinsic motivation, such as a desire to increase one’s competence). Motivation is also reduced if individuals engage in more than one activity at a time, or if they attribute their failure to a lack of ability (rather than a lack of effort).
Emotional Factors Affecting Cognition
Learners have distinct styles that influence learning. Especially important is whether a student has a prevention and promotion focus. A student with a prevention focus is especially sensitive to negative outcomes, seeks to avoid errors, and is driven by security concerns, while a student with a promotion focus is more sensitive to positive outcomes. Learning is enhanced when there is regulatory fit, when fit when the manner of in which a student engages in an activity sustains their goal orientation or interests regarding that activity.
Grounded Cognition
Learning, memory, and reasoning are enhanced when students have the opportunity to perceive and interact with real-world examples. Thus, simulations and problem solving activities can play a valuable role in promoting understanding and recall.
Mental Modeling
A mental model is a representation or a conceptualization of a larger reality which allows an individual to readily acquire, code, store, recall, and decode information. By allowing an individual to structure knowledge, mental models play a crucial role in cognition, recall, learning, and decision making.
The Zone of Proximal Development
The early 20th century developmental psychologist Lev Vygotsky wrote about “the zone of proximal development,” a phrase that refers to the level of understanding that a student can reach with a teacher’s help. Thus, an instructor seeks to stretch and broaden a students understanding (i.e. scaffold) by identifying those areas that are within a student’s grasp: not too easy, but also not too difficult.
Repeated Testing
Testing can be a valuable learning tool. It can focus on evaluation, or it can be used in other ways: to motivate study, consolidate learning, combat overconfidence, and assist students in monitoring their own understanding. Testing enhances long-term memory and helps students retrieve and apply knowledge.
Spacing
Recent research has demonstrated that a student’s ability to remember, retrieve, and utilize information is greater when an instructor’s presentations of difficult material are spread out over time rather than concentrated intensively.
Generation Effect
Studies have shown that when students generate their own answers to a problem, their mastery of a topic is greater than when an instructor shows them how to solve a problem.
Metacognition
Metacognition refers to one’s self-awareness of one’s own thought processes. It also involves the ability to monitor comprehension and accurately evaluate one’s learning. Metacognition helps students avoid distractions, sustain effort, and modify their learning strategies based on their awareness of the strategies’ effectiveness. Strategies for encouraging metacognition include having students:
• Ask reflective questions;
• Recount their thought processes as they attempt to solve a problem; and
• Make graphic representations of their thoughts and knowledge (e.g. concept maps, flow charts, semantic webs).
Not a bad start for the Collegium, and a stimulus to all of us to think how we can put these findings to work for the improvement of student learning.
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