A Learners’ View (ALV) Is Of Choices On The Shortest And Fastest Path to Learning, The Oxygen Of Social Life.
[edit] Why People Learn
NO ONE KNOWS WHY PEOPLE LEARN. Answers to Why remain matters of speculation, theories, and beliefs.
Scientists try to answer the question “How?” From a learners’ view (ALV), people learn while solving a problem, that is, while connecting two or more dots with a line. Problems have many names, such as puzzles, curiosity, obstacles, and negotiations.
According to novelists and conventional wisdom, people learn in order to survive. What behavior patterns would you use to survive, if a panther jumped from a tree onto your back, as L’Amour describes in Bendego Shafter?
Some argue that survival appears consistent with Darwin’s theory of evolution and variations of that theory, such as demonstrations of stimulus-response (S-R) patterns of behavior demonstrated by B.F. Skinner and practitioners of S-R.
Behavioral scientists have not reported experimental empirical research evidence that disputes this wisdom or the S-R demonstrations. But, they have refined their research results to demonstrate a learners’ view that includes choices learners make while learning.
Here’s a sample puzzle from the 1960s that uses ALV (without that name), so people with tested IQ scores from 32 to 60s living in a total care institution could learn to solve it: Assemble a bicycle coaster brake that has 15 parts. That was considered a complex industrial task.
Marc Gold, an educator, applied experimental behavioral science data to demonstrate through an experimental study that these people could learn to solve the problem. He analyzed the assembly task by taking the brake apart, laying the parts in a row from left to right, and painting the top side of each part red.
This arrangement requires at least 24 manipulations of these parts to assemble a working unit.
He showed each learner how to assemble the brake, then gestured to the learner to pick up the first part. After the learner touched the first part, he used hand gestures to guide sight to the next part. He also only used the age old term “try another way” to prompt manipulation of these parts.
All of the learners in the experiment assembled the brakes correctly, some taking longer than others to do so.
A year later with no intervening activities similar to this assembly the same people again assembled these brakes without error except for one person who required a prompt from the researcher.
Researchers, educators, and practitioners have repeatedly demonstrated the power of using the precision of task analysis for showing people ways to solve simple to complex tangible and nontangible puzzles.
[edit] Related Reading
- Gold, M. (1980). “Did I Say That?”: Articles and Commentary on the Try Another Way System. Urbana, IL: Research Press.
- L’Amour, L. (1983). Bendigo Shafter. NY: Bantam.
[edit] Related Resources
Video of Marc Gold demonstrating his Try Another Way system.