A Learners’ View (ALV) Is Of Choices On The Shortest And Fastest Path to learning, The Oxygen Of Social Life.
Main Page: NARRATIVES
Theme: Grand Views of Learning
A LEARNERS’ WORLD exists as descriptions of learning reported by experimental researchers. This view distinguishes how people learn by making choices from what they learn. It complements the two grand views that permeate the pubic and professional understanding of learning, and exists separate from the content (subject matter) people learn.
The two grand views of learning exist in both standard and specialized dictionaries and textbooks of education and psychology. One view attributes learning to one or more cognitive process(es). The other grand view avoids cognition and other theories with descriptions of observable patterns of behavior people use to change their behavior patterns.
A learners’ view offers a third grand view as descriptions of social processes learners use to show observers how they learn. It crosses boundaries of the other grand views and avoids theories of both of them at the same time.
Each of these views offers a variation of learning and a learners’ world.
Learning as Cognition
Accordingly, in the first (dominant) grand view, learning occurs as cognitive processes in the brain. Somehow, yet undescribed, the sensations people see, hear, smell, etc. transform into electrical-chemical processes that change choices people make to adapt their patterns of behavior in and out of classrooms.
In effect, this view of learning represents part of unseen sequences of brain activity. Its fundamental translations and transliterations from sensations to cognition are unknown in or out of classrooms and laboratories.
Educators and others who try to manage someone else’s learning, in order to stay-up-to-date with scientific discoveries of learning, must translate incomplete descriptions of neural activity into lessons that accelerate and increase the learning by others of specific information. For decades, results of these attempts appear consistent with a distribution on Gaussian (bell) Curves.
Learning as Observable Behavior
A second view of learning consists of descriptions of the processes to change behavior patterns of a person or group of people. This view rests on the assumption that if it exists, then it is measurable. If it cannot be measured, it doesn’t exist, at least not as described. A second premise is that learning is ultimately described as behavior patterns, so why not eliminate other discussions and start and end with descriptions of observable, measurable behavior patterns.
Learning from a Learners’ View
A learners’ view (ALV) of learning consists of descriptions of choices people make while learning. It is grounded in what is common in experimental behavioral and social science research reports of learning over more than a century.
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