CORRECTING FALSE ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT LEARNING

Contextual learning, that have dominated American education for many decades provides a more effective approach to teaching the majority of students because it is specifically geared to the way these students learn. 

Cognitive science and studies of the relationships between structured learning and the work environment have given us a better basis for evaluating the effectiveness of various methods of teaching and learning. Many educators, however, tend to interpret the learning environment according to their own experience as students. It means that they teach the way they have been taught— usually through traditional abstract lecture methods. To increase their effectiveness in the classroom, many educators may need to change some of their basic assumptions about how people learn.

Dr. Sue Berryman of the Institute on Education and the Economy at Columbia University has isolated five common misconceptions (false assumtions) about the ways people learn:

1. People predictably transfer learning from one situation to another.

Berryman questions, for example, whether most people actually use in everyday practice the knowledge, skills, and strategies they acquired during their formal education. For instance, a student training to be a radiology technician may have difficulty relating the theories she learned in physics class to the technical skills she is learning in her electronics courses.

2. Learners are passive receivers of wisdom—empty vessels into which knowledge is poured.

Each student approaches the task of learning equipped with a matrix of acquired skills, knowledge, and experience—and a set of expectations and hopes. The most effective learning happens when the student is invited (and taught) to make connections between past learning and future actions. But teaching techniques that require an essentially passive response from students, such as lecturing, deprive them of this opportunity to actively involve themselves with the material. They may miss the most important means of learning—exploration, discovery, and invention. Passive learners who are dependent upon the teacher for guidance and feedback may also fail to develop confidence in their own intuitive abilities.

3. Learning is the strengthening of bonds between stimuli and correct responses.

This misconception is based on a behaviorist approach to education, which tends to reward response instead ofunderstanding. Education based on behaviorist theory typicallyleads to breaking down complex tasks and ideas into oversimplified components, unrelated subtasks, repetitivetraining, and an inappropriate focus on the “right answer.” Itdoes not help students learn to solve problems on a moresystemic level.

4.What matters is getting the right answer.

 Students who focus primarily on getting the right answer tend to rely on memorized shortcuts instead of acquiring the problem-solving skills they will need in a real-life setting.

5.Skills and knowledge, to be transferable to new situations, should be acquired independent of their contexts of uses.

The process of abstracting knowledge, or taking it away from its specific context, has long been thought to make that knowledge more useful to a number of situations; this philosophy underlies much of our current educational system. However, Berryman points out that such decontextualization
can easily rob students of a sense of motivation and purpose. They may have difficulty understanding why a concept is important and how it relates to reality, and this may make the material more difficult to retain. For example, the definition of a term may be difficult to learn and retain without an understanding of the context of its use.

These are assumptions that may well be blocking many students from an effective learning experience. In each case, the contextual learning approach can help correct the false assumption and the inefficient educational processes that grow out of the assumptions.