A Learners’ View (ALV) Is Of Choices On The Shortest And Fastest Path To Learning, The Oxygen Of Social Life.

Common Experimental Behavioral and Social Science Descriptions of Teaching and Learning

Main Article: Foreword

Classic Education: A Learners’ View (ALV) of Choices during Teaching and Learning features descriptions of choices people make to learn, so that observers and managers of learning, especially parents and educators, may monitor and increase learning promptly and dramatically. Experimental behavioral and social scientists have described how use of these principles in lessons can promptly and dramatically increase people’s rate of learning.

WE INVITE YOU to watch development of this site as it moves, sometimes like a glacier, from random notes about learning to a more coherent and concise description of choices as social processes people use to affect the teaching-learning process. These descriptions feature choices that experimental behavioral and social scientists report accelerate, increase, and deepen (AID) learning. Few activities impose such rigorous demands on educators as planning, instructing, and assessing teaching-learning with these choices.

1. Ongoing Development

Parts of a description on this site can change multiple times in one day. At other times, all entries appear unchanged from orignial drafts.

This variation leaves descriptions of social patterns people use to learn open to misinterpretation. Future posts and editing will close those openings.

Some entries meet the standard of peer reviewed professional writing. Others consist of place holders, unedited notes, and drafts for further development.

As time permits, an increasing number of entries will include links to research reports, videos, webinars, and interactive media that further illustrate the use of social science descriptions of what people do to learn. More plans exist for the future of this site.

2. Paradox of Principles of Learning: Vocabulary and Logic of Social Science Processes

Second, this site uses the vocabulary, logic, and arrangement of descriptions by experimental behavioral and social scientists. We call this A Learners’ View (ALV) of learning.

Most of the site consist of describing vocabulary and how experimental behavioral scientists use it to show what people do to learn. They have contributed the bulk of experimental research results.

The arrangement of their vocabulary identifies the sequence of social patterns people use that most likely results in learning.

This view encourages some people. Using these descriptions to increase learning in and out of schools offends others. Using these descriptions as principles to form lesson plans, instruction, and assessments, to automate instruction and assessments, or to analyze and forecast learning offends still more people.

Yet, all of these people implicitely use these same principles to learn to be offended.

That’s a paradox of principles of learning. They can be used to argue for or against a point, including against paradoxes of how people learn.

3. Prepositions Matter: Converting Folklore about Education into Descriptions of Choices during Teaching-Learning

Third, arguments against converting folklore about education into social science principles of learning result from misreading five points. Misreadings appear in part as consistent with not distinguishing between the prepositions about and of.

Point One argues that principles of learning described by experimental behavioral scientists appear incomplete. In turn, these scientists account for incompleteness by describing probabilities, not absolutes, of learning occuring under certain conditions.

Point Two argues that descriptions of principles of learning give the appearance of downgrading the ability and creativity of an individual to learn independently beyond the superficial. In practice, behavioral scientists try to describe how people learn in ways that practitioners and others can use, test and refine objectively and systematically to account for whatever they plan for someone to learn.

Point Three, from some views, can appear as though principles of learning are rules to follow as a matter of faith. As a discipline, scientists describe what they do and what results they obtain from their actions. They do not discuss or use faith in their studies unless they test some aspect of faith with scientific method. They do offer their findings, so that others may refine and use them to increase learning.

Point Four, it seems a stretch, but some may argue that offering is a matter of faith, intended or not. Some experimental scientists calculate the likelihood of practitioners using their findings in order to avoid the issue of faith entering their discussions.

Point Five seems plausable, but inaccurate, that it’s an issue of scale: instructors cannot pay attention to how people learn when instructing. From an experimental science view, people learn in observable, manageable ways. So, it’s an issue of whether to leave learning to chance or to intent. Variations in distributions of learning occur to the extent that instruction uses experimental behavioral and social science principles of what people do to learn.

This site includes only a few discussions about uses of social processes of how people learn and comparisons with other views.

Watch Our Progress

References

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