Summary, notes, and critique of the science of learning

… written by “Deans for impact”, see https://carpentries.github.io/instructor-training/papers/science-of-learning-2015.pdf

Summary

This document is essentially a table that answers six questions related to human learning, regardless of whether they are in primary school, high school, universities, or professional learning set ups. These questions are as follows:

1. How do students understand new ideas?
2. How do students learn and process new information?
3. HOw do students solve problems
4. How does leearning transfers to new situations inside and outside classrooms?
5. What motivates students to learn?
6. What are the common misconceptions about how students learn?

So let’s take the answers one by one:

How do students understand new ideas?

There are three things here:

• We learn new things by relating to what we already know and remember
• If we are faced with too much information, this hinders our learning
• Our mastery of new concepts proceed through stages, there is nothing about age or automatic or magical about that

The most important takeaway point here is that, we learn and understand new ideas by relating to what we already know. So, essentially our knowldege is…