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

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THIS SITE describes choices while teaching that increase the chances of learning occurring during lessons. In particular, it presents what is common across descriptions of learning by experimental behavioral and social scientists in their reports since the late 19th century. It converts folklore and discussions about education into social science principles of learning. By design, these scientists use a vocabulary that adds accuracy and precision to their descriptions beyond that commonly used by educators. Other scientists working with educators, applied these descriptions to lessons in ways that accelerated, increased, and deepened learning (AIDed) learning promptly.

This site presents these descriptions in ways familiar to teachers, and with the rigor familiar to scientists. The detail of some of these descriptions may give the impression of unnecessarily going overboard. However, as in making a soup or soufflé, the difference between success and getting-by is in the details. Only by trying to accomplish the unusually high levels of academic performance that scientists obtained will teachers begin to understand the importance of tradeoffs in planning and instructing lessons.

Arguments against converting folklore about education into social science principles of learning result from misreading five points. Misreading appears in part as consistent with not distinguishing between the prepositions about and of.

Point One argues that principles of learning described by behavioral scientists appear incomplete. Behavioral and social scientists account for incompleteness by describing probabilities of learning occurring under certain conditions, not absolutes.

Point Two argues that descriptions of behavioral and social principles of learning give the appearance of downgrading the ability and creativity of an individual to learn independently beyond the superficial. In practice, behavioral and social 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 behavioral and social 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 scientists calculate the likelihood of practitioners using their findings in order to avoid the issue of faith entering their discussions.

Point Five seems plausible, but inaccurate, that it’s an issue of scale: Instructors cannot pay attention to how people learn when instructing. From a social 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 social principles of what people do to learn.
Classic Education features descriptions of what people do to learn, so that observers and managers of learning, especially parents and educators, may monitor and increase learning promptly and dramatically. Scientists have described how use of these principles in lessons can promptly and dramatically increase people’s rate of learning.

Classic Education includes only a few discussions about uses of social science descriptions of how people learn and comparisons with other views.

We’ll try to get you up and running quickly. When you have meet these new standards, you’ll wonder why you did not do so earlier.

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