Week 3 Blog

Chapter 5 Takeaways

In chapter 5 of How People Learn II: Learners, Contexts, and Cultures (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2018) the focus is on knowledge and reasoning by explaining how people use past experiences and connect them to create a deeper understanding of their knowledge or the world around them. The chapter also ends by providing learning strategies that can support a deeper learning and help students retain information they are learning. The three things that I felt were most important from this chapter are expertise, integration, and the learning strategies. 

Expertise is related to knowledge, the chapter focuses more on the benefits of expertise. Before we know what the benefits are, I want to clarify what expertise is. According to the language data provided by Oxford Languages, part of Oxford University Press, expertise is defined as "expert skill or knowledge in a particular field" (Oxford languages and google - english). Expertise is knowledge that people acquire, and as people acquire knowledge about something specific they build an increase in speed and accuracy with tasks and problem solving. It takes less of a cognitive load for you to solve a problem or a task of something you have more expertise on than it would something you do not have any expertise or knowledge about.

Integration is the next key point that stood out to me. When learners are able to put together different types of information and experiences, and connecting them in various ways they are able to integrate knowledge into different experiences (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2018). I am a kindergarten teacher so many of my students are experiencing things for the first time in my classroom, however it is also interesting to see the different connections they are able to make on their own and with their peers throughout different lessons. When talking about morning, afternoon, and night my students are asked to share what they might do during night time, and while they are sharing the different things that they do they are integrating all the different experiences they are integrating different experiences and things that may happen at that time of day. 

The last topic discussed in chapter 5 was the different learning strategies to support learning. This reading discussed five different strategies that had been been researched. These strategies are; retrieval practice, spaced practice, interleaved and varied practice, summarizing and drawing, and explanations. In my classroom I believe my most practiced learning strategy would be retrieval. When we are learning a new concept or reading a story I am always asking questions about what we just discussed, trying to get students to retrieve the information that we just learned and create a response using the information they retrieved. It was proven in a study that  "students who practiced retrieval one time recalled more of the material than students who only read the texts, and the students who repeatedly retrieved the material performed the best" (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2018, p. 98).

Gura and Rivero Connection

Gura's article Fostering Student Creativity highlighted the importance of allowing students the opportunity to be creative and teaching them how to be creative. Gura compared creativity to innovation, and that can be related to knowledge and how children and people problem solve. When people are able to be innovative or creative they are able to think and create different ways to solve a problem. Based on Gura's belief of how important creativity is, is we teach students how to be creative they will be able to work in multiple ways to create new solutions to problems, not just memorization of how to solve a problem using rote tasks Gura, M. (2020).

ISTE Standards for Students

ISTE standard 1.3 is Knowledge Constructor, Students critically curate a variety of resources using digital tools to construct knowledge, produce creative artifacts and make meaningful learning experiences for themselves and others (ISTE Standards for Educators, 2017). All the standards within standard 1.3 discuss students taking previous knowledge and using it in various ways such as evaluating, curating, and employing effective research strategies. Chapter 5 was all about how students use knowledge to build upon their learning and integrate and respond using knowledge that they already have. This standard goes right along with that same theme. 

Below is an infographic supporting and identifying my learning from this week visually:

References

Gura, M. (2020). Fostering Student Creativity. EdTech Digest the State of the Arts, Creativity, and Technology 2020: A Guide for Educators and Parents. p. 7. 

ISTE Standards for Educators (2017). Retrieved from: https://www.iste.org/standards/for-educators

National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2018. How People Learn II: Learners, Contexts, and Cultures. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/24783.

Oxford languages and google - english. Oxford Languages. (n.d.). https://languages.oup.com/google-dictionary-en/