How Does the Way Students Organize Knowledge Affect Their Learning?
As individuals we all organize our knowledge and learning in various ways, but being able to file the information in our mind to help build retention in the future is the best learning. For example: when a freshman history teacher discusses a specific chapter about the revolutionary war ,but is unable to connect the dates in order with other events, students are unable to retain the information past the test. Educators need to be able to take pieces of information and make meaningful to the class or student. The student may not have all of the dates right, but if they are able to piece together various events that have happened around the revolutionary war they are able to use their retained knowledge to create a educated response. As a educator it is our job to help organize the information to help students file it away for the next day and beyond.
The research based upon the learning principles believes that students across all cultures organize information based on experiences that are meaningful to them. As educators we can't expect all students to be thrilled to learn about the revolutionary war, but if we identify their prior knowledge this will help us locate the information they do or do not understand. When educators locate the prior knowledge of each student they are able to create tasks or activities that will engage student learning. Once students are engaged in the learning activities they are able to retain the information or organize pieces of it to recall from as the instructor moves through the next chapter. As a instructor the curriculum needs to be based upon student experience, knowledge, and engagement to help organize/retain information for a long period of time.
The research based upon the learning principles believes that students across all cultures organize information based on experiences that are meaningful to them. As educators we can't expect all students to be thrilled to learn about the revolutionary war, but if we identify their prior knowledge this will help us locate the information they do or do not understand. When educators locate the prior knowledge of each student they are able to create tasks or activities that will engage student learning. Once students are engaged in the learning activities they are able to retain the information or organize pieces of it to recall from as the instructor moves through the next chapter. As a instructor the curriculum needs to be based upon student experience, knowledge, and engagement to help organize/retain information for a long period of time.
The strategies instructors can use to help build student organization and knowledge are:
- Create a concept map to analyze your own knowledge organization
- Analyze tasks to identify the most appropriate knowledge organization
- Provide students with the organizational structure of the course
- Explicitly share the organization of each lecture, lab, or discussion
- Use contrasting and boundary cases to highlight organizing features
- Explicitly highlight deep feature
- Make connections among concepts explicit
- Encourage students to work with multiple organizing structures
- Ask students to draw a concept map to expose their knowledge organizations
- Use a sorting task to expose students' knowledge organizations
- Monitor Students' work for problems in their knowledge organization
I find it amazing everyday when a student will recall information from a topic they learned in other classes. For example: I was teaching students in math class about simple and compound interest. One student raised their hand and said "I remember learning about interest from business class last year." I had another student that mentioned she was in the class now and that they would be learning about it in a few weeks. I opened the discussion up further by asking students various questions about what they learned in business class and if this will help them in math class or in the future. I found it interesting that I had a mix of students who have had experience with the topic to none at all, but the students who had experience with the topic were able to organize the information in their mind which helped them to recall this topic in math class. In my mind I always get pretty excited when I see a student recall information that they have learned in other courses and try to connect it with the topic they are currently learning.
Ambrose, S., Bridges M., DiPietro, M., Lovett, M., Norman, M. (2010). How Learning Works: 7 Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass