A Learners’ View (ALV) Is The Straightest And Fastest Path To Learning, The Oxygen Of Social Life.
CLASSIC EDUCATION: A Learners’ View (ALV) of Choices… CONSISTS of disassembled and reassembled elements of learning that are descriptions of patterns experimental behavioral and social scientists reported they observed as people learn. They move descriptions and discussions of learning from folklore to fact. These scientists did not address, so leave unresolved, symantic and definitional issues, such as similarities and differences among the words learning, discovery, and invention.
Context for Disassembling Learning
Disassembling learning requires at least one set of practices called learning to take apart. That in turn requires identifying where to find those practices and then validating their appropriateness for disassembly. One step in validation requires an assessment of their origin and history of derivations in order to avoid assessing nominalisms.
Three kinds of references to the origin and history of learning exist: (1) etymologies: descriptions of origins of words derived from other languages; (2) histories of societies or civilizations in which writers and speakers presume that learning has occurred; and (3) practices intended to result in learning, such as through instruction.
A sample etymology of the word learning identifies multiple derivations from words in several languages over at least eight centuries. The meaning from these derivations range from “to follow or find the track” to “to teach” and “to make known.” These meanings leave an unclear picture of what constitutes learning other than that is what someone(s) has named an imprecise set of observations and conclusions about an imprecise phenomenon.
A fourth reference remains unwritten: a description of the origin and history of learning that results from scouring ancient to more contemporary documents and artifacts for evidence of learning and its place in the world.
To complicate the matter further, historians appear to assume the existence of learn and learning when they select, categorize, analyze, and compare artifacts and events into time sequences that preceed life today. These catergories appear to follow a pattern of advancement without identifying learning as a driver of that movement.
Historians have traced origins and histories of the social institution of education and its formal expression as schooling. These descriptions rest on the assumption that learning occurs and that people may manage it without accounting for its origin. These traces leave out descriptioins of necessary conditions over time for learning to occur.
In 1904, the French parliment asked Alfred Binet, a French psychologist, to identify which school children in France would likely learn to read. People still argue about the relevence of such forecasts and about ways to alter their results.
The request by the parliment gave impatus to an unprecedented international stream of systematic measurement and analysis of human behavior by a growing number of behavioral scientists. Besides Binet, this stream included the work of J. B. Watson who argued for behaviorism as a preferred way to identify learning without relying on anything not sensed.
A new language with a rich vocabulary that describes ways to observe behavior patterns contributed to that stream. It also gave birth to a learners’ view of learning, but without that name.
The language consists of scientific descriptors that identify the place and use of specific behavior patterns in the process of learning. Learners and observers can identify and adjust these patterns while people learn. The language permits using the assumption that learning exists as voluntary social action.
These patterns appear consistent with social theories of Homans, Parsons, and other sociologists that account for changing human behavior without referring to other theories of personality, emotionality, etc. that observers cannot see, hear, etc. without making more assumptions and speculations.
The Binet, Watson, and other behaviorists’ descriptions of learning emphasize classic sensibilities, such as formal elegance, simplicity, dignity, lucid conception, and order. These descriptions establish the highest standard for guiding and assessing the value of practices and policies intended to increase learning.
These scientists disassembled learning in ways that others can repeat, test, and refine. Within two decades after the French parliment’s request of Binet, behavioral scientists identified and codified patterns of behavior that they related to human intelligence. Other scientists codified generic sequences of behavior patterns that people use to learn, or as some say, to change behavior patterns so they result in different observable actions.
As research findings accumulated, scientists refined these codes. Other behavioral scientists established and applied codes to assess whether learning increased in and out of schools.
By the end of the 20th century, behavioral scientists established an uncounted inventory of objective, measurable third-party views of learners and learning related to these codes. They also offered systematic applications and measurements of the effectiveness of these views for increasing learning through lessons in schools. [Read More]
[edit] Related Reading
- Graham, George, “Behaviorism”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2010 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.).
- Depictions of Learning in Arts and Literature
- Folklore about Education
- Folklore about Learning
- [Q & A
- [Tip]
[edit] Related Resources
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Article Last Update: 11/13/2013