Learning Technologies Week 3 - Learning Science Research

 This week I took time to read chapters 4, 5 and 6 from the book "How People Learn II: Learners, Contexts and Cultures" (2018). Chapter 5 focuses on knowledge and reasoning. How do we categorize and later utilize the new information we come across every day? Chapter 5 offers four steps:

- Building a Knowledge Base - connecting unrelated information - learners put together experiences and information, relate them, and create and expand mental frameworks to organize their knowledge 

- Knowledge and Expertise - expert knowledge is built through repeated experiences within a mental framework. Bias naturally develops, but is not necessarily harmful.

- Knowledge Integration and Reasoning - includes inferential reasoning, accumulating knowledge over many years, and the effects of culture

-  Strategies to Support Learning - five strategies are identified. The first three support knowledge retention, and the last two support understanding and integration. They are:

    * Knowledge retention: retrieval practice, spaced practice, and interleaved and variable practice

    * Understanding and integration: summarizing and drawing and developing explanations

Mark Gura, in his article "Fostering Student Creativity" (2020), describes creativity as "... a way of responding to the world" (p. 7). In a rapidly changing world, creativity becomes a necessity to address our rapidly changing society and the problems we face both individually and cooperatively. How does this relate to knowledge and reasoning? Teachers need creativity to provide new opportunities for students to practice the five strategies of knowledge retention and understanding and integration. Creative learning opportunities will enable greater mastery and recall abilities - much more so than traditional rote memorization.

Victor Rivero, in his article "A Whole New Class of Art" (2020), urges parents and educators to consider the goals and objectives of a child's screen time and technology usage. He identifies several tools and applications that students (or anyone) can use to create meaningful content. One of the applications, Fender Play, would be perfect for the elementary music room. My third, fourth and fifth graders already learn and practice the ukulele, one of the instruments that Fender Play supports. Use of the program would honor and incorporate their prior knowledge while helping them practice in short, rewarding increments. This spaced practice (see infographic above) promotes better learning and retention!

ISTE (International Society for Technology in Education) Standards for Students: Standard 1.3.d states "students build knowledge by exploring real-world issues and gain experience in applying their learning in authentic settings" (2017). This directly relates to chapter 5 of "How People Learn." We learned more about how students build knowledge, and that meaningful, creative use of technology in authentic settings promotes learning and recall later on.

References

Gura, M. (2020). Fostering Student Creativity. EdTech Digest the State of the Arts, Creativity, and Technology 2020: A Guide for Educators and Parents. p. 7.

Rivero, V. (2020). A Whole New Class of Art. EdTech Digest the State of the Arts, Creativity and Technology 2020: A Guide for Educators and Parents. p. 12-20

National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. (2018). How people learn II: Learners, contexts, and cultures. Washington, D.C.: The National Academies Press. http://doi.org/10.17226/24783.

Links to an external site.

ISTE Standards for Students (2017). Retrieved from: https://iste.org/standards/students July 17, 2025.