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| A Learners’ View: a. Descriptions of behavior patterns people use to learn as reported by empirical experimental behavioral scientists. b. Questions a learner attempts to answer through trial-and-error when facing an unfamiliar situation, such as an academic problem; answering two primary questions in order to resolve a problem: What do I have to do? and What will it cost me? c. Resolving questions (problems) with the least personal cost and the greatest personal gain. d. To adapt, adopt, and manage behavior patterns to survive the moment.
EduClassics.com of Classic Education describes how learners adopt, adapt, and manage behavior patterns they use to learn, including a classic education in the 21st century.This page of EduClassics.com uses descriptions of learning by experimental empirical behavioral scientists to introduce A Learners’ View of learning. |
A learners’ view consists of behavior patterns people use to adapt to and survive in unfamiliar situations, such as a problem in mathematics. Empirical experimental behavioral scientists have observed, described, and assessed these patterns for over a century.
The term a learners’ view represents generic elements of these behavior patterns. Observers may identify and count these patterns as people adapt. Learning (adapting), however defined, does not occur when observers do not identify these patterns.
These patterns include answering two primary generic questions: What do I have to do? and What will it cost me to do it? Four other questions follow these two.
Classic education relies on the assumption that a learners’ view of learning is to adopt, adapt, and use behavior patterns that resolve problems as others resolve them. These patterns provide a base from which learners may resolve problems others have not resolved.
People commonly connect classic education with disciplined, sometimes hurtful, schooling. However, a person can earn a classic education through extensive self initiated reading and trials-and-errors.
In either case, from a learners’ view, learners must resolve problems in ways teachers accept. Teachers of classic education commonly expect superior academic performance for themselves and their students by using enduring resolutions. That performance includes following commonly accepted, although seldom discussed, rules of learning.
To meet expectations, classic education learners use a cascade of questions to “figure out” through trial-and-error how to learn what the faculty member writes, says, and in others ways demonstrates. In classic academic courses, each learner uses these demonstrations to critique and elaborate those performances.
Faculty know this process from personal experience. They used classic learning to earn a classic education.
They build their classes, seminars, and scholarly and scientific work on the assumption that classic education students will use the same process.
Learners and faculty accept that anything less than superior learning they attribute to less than a classic education.
A Learners’ View of Learning
It seems reasonable to assume that learners implicitly ask a series of questions when faced with a new task to perform. It’s unclear when using more of these questions leads to more learning.
Most people who have encountered any instruction will recognize a cascade of questions as including those each of us has considered at least once. Each question has a corresponding set of behavioral research findings that instructors may answer in order to increase learning efficiency.
Learners’ Questions
When faced with an unknown, learners implicitly ask two questions:
“What do I do?” and
“What will it cost me (in time, effort, other tangibles and intangibles) to do it?”
Sometimes these questions occur as statements, “Show me. Let me try.”
A Cascade of Questions
Learners then ask a cascade of six primary generic questions (PGQ) to search for answers to the what-to-do and the personal-cost questions.
Each question probes for common relationships across what the learner knowns. Once that’s identified, learners must identify what to do to solve a problem, such as How do I do it? in order to meet a teacher’s learning criterion.
These six primary generic questions seem a reasonable starting point for understanding a learners’ view of learning until empirical data indicate an alternative starting point.
Related Resources
- A Learners’ View
- A Learners’ View of Learning: Answer My Cascade of Questions – Lecture Notes
- Persuasive Point
- Textbook Reading Guides
- Worksheets
- Implication for Teaching
Related Reading
Heiny, R. (August 20, 2008). Tablet PC Learning Research Agenda 4 – Learner Views. Captured December 8, 2008.
Heiny, R. (October 16, 2008). Learning with Tablet PCs Research Agenda: From Facts to Pragmatics. Paper presented at WIPTE 2008 panel Wednesday, October 16, 2008, Purdue University. Captured December 6, 2008.
Terman, L. & Merrill, M. (1960). Standford-Binet Intelligence Scale: Manual for the Third Revision Form L-M. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.