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When preparing a lesson plan, determining what a student should be able to do is far more effective than determining what that student should know. It then turns out that the knowing part comes along for the ride.
What should a person be able to do?
Generally speaking, in almost any area of education the most useful learning objectives will be those that help students develop effective mental representations.
How to develp effective mental representations
students are far behind the experts in their ability to solve qualitative problems, or problems that involve concepts but no numbers, something like, Why is it hot in summer and cold in the winter? Answering a question like that requires less a command of numbers than it does a clear understanding of the concepts that underlie particular events or processes — that is, good mental representations.
Skill of conceptual understanding
questions and solve the tasks. The questions and tasks were also designed to push the students outside their comfort zones — to ask them questions whose answers they’d have to struggle for — but not so far outside their comfort zones that they wouldn’t know how to start answering them. Wieman and his colleagues pretested the clicker questions and learning tasks on a couple of student volunteers who were enrolled in the course.10 They gave these students the questions and the learning tasks and then had them think aloud as they reasoned their way toward the answers.
How to teach skills in english
The redesigned physics class at the University of British Columbia offers a road map for redesigning instruction according to deliberate-practice principles: Begin by identifying what students should learn how to do. The objectives should be skills, not knowledge. In figuring out the particular way students should learn a skill, examine how the experts do it. In particular, understand as much as possible about the mental representations that experts use, and teach the skill so as to help students develop similar mental representations. This will involve teaching the skill step by step, with
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Teaching using deliberate practice
Having students create mental representations in one area helps them understand exactly what it takes to be successful not only in that area but in others as well.
Best way to learn is to learn one subject really really well
And I would argue that we humans are most human when we’re improving ourselves. We, unlike any other animal, can consciously change ourselves, to improve ourselves in ways we choose. This distinguishes us from every other species alive today and, as far as we know, from every other species that has ever lived.
What makes us human
will have no choice but to continuously learn new skills, so it will be essential to train students and adults about how to learn efficiently.
How to learn efficiently
