Monday, 29 October 2012
Teaching for understanding:mind mapping for the teacher
Constructivism mind mapping
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Saturday, 27 October 2012
Advanced Organizer (David Ausubel ,1963)
Ausubel's theory is
concerned with how individuals learn large amounts of meaningful material from
verbal/textual presentations in a school setting (in contrast to theories
developed in the context of laboratory experiments). According to Ausubel,
learning is based upon the kinds of superordinate, representational, and
combinatorial processes that occur during the reception of information. A
primary process in learning is subsumption in which new material is related to
relevant ideas in the existing cognitive structure on a substantive,
non-verbatim basis. Cognitive structures represent the residue of all learning
experiences; forgetting occurs because certain details get integrated and lose
their individual identity.
A major instructional mechanism proposed by Ausubel is the use of advance organizers:
"These organizers are introduced in advance of learning itself, and are also presented at a higher level of abstraction, generality, and inclusiveness; and since the substantive content of a given organizer or series of organizers is selected on the basis of its suitability for explaining, integrating, and interrelating the material they precede, this strategy simultaneously satisfies the substantive as well as the programming criteria for enhancing the organization strength of cognitive structure."
Ausubel emphasizes that advance organizers are different from overviews and summaries which simply emphasize key ideas and are presented at the same level of abstraction and generality as the rest of the material. Organizers act as a subsuming bridge between new learning material and existing related ideas.
Ausubel's theory has commonalities with Gestalt theories and those that involve schema (e.g., Bartlett< ) as a central principle. There are also similarities with Bruner's "spiral learning" model , although Ausubel emphasizes that subsumption involves reorganization of existing cognitive structures not the development of new structures as constructivist theories suggest. Ausubel was apparently influenced by the work of Piaget on cognitive development.
This article is
taken from http://www.instructionaldesign.org/theories/subsumption-theory.html,
Construktivism
Constructivism
is basically a theory -- based on observation and scientific study -- about how
people learn. It says that people construct their own understanding and
knowledge of the world, through experiencing things and reflecting on those
experiences. When we encounter something new, we have to reconcile it with our
previous ideas and experience, maybe changing what we believe, or maybe
discarding the new information as irrelevant. In any case, we are active
creators of our own knowledge. To do this, we must ask questions, explore, and
assess what we know. In the classroom, the constructivist view of learning
can point towards a number of different teaching practices. In the most general
sense, it usually means encouraging students to use active techniques
(experiments, real-world problem solving) to create more knowledge and then to
reflect on and talk about what they are doing and how their understanding is
changing. The teacher makes sure she understands the students' preexisting
conceptions, and guides the activity to address them and then build on
them. Constructivist teachers encourage students to constantly assess how
the activity is helping them gain understanding. By questioning themselves and
their strategies, students in the constructivist classroom ideally become
"expert learners."
This
gives them ever-broadening tools to keep learning. For example: Groups of
students in a science class are discussing a problem in physics. Though the
teacher knows the "answer" to the problem, she focuses on helping
students restate their questions in useful ways. She prompts each student to
reflect on and examine his or her current knowledge. When one of the students
comes up with the relevant concept, the teacher seizes upon it, and indicates
to the group that this might be a fruitful avenue for them to explore. They
design and perform relevant experiments. Afterward, the students and teacher
talk about what they have learned, and how their observations and experiments
helped (or did not help) them to better understand the concept.Contrary to criticisms
by some (conservative/traditional) educators, constructivism does not dismiss
the active role of the teacher or the value of expert knowledge. Constructivism
modifies that role, so that teachers help students to construct knowledge
rather than to reproduce a series of facts. The constructivist teacher provides
tools such as problem-solving and inquiry-based learning activities with which
students formulate and test their ideas, draw conclusions and inferences, and
pool and convey their knowledge in a collaborative learning environment.
Constructivism transforms the student from a passive recipient of information
to an active participant in the learning process. Always guided by the teacher,
students construct their knowledge actively rather than just mechanically
ingesting knowledge from the teacher or the textbook.Constructivism is also
often misconstrued as a learning theory that compels students to "reinvent
the wheel." In fact, constructivism taps into and triggers the student's
innate curiosity about the world and how things work. Students do not reinvent
the wheel but, rather, attempt to understand how it turns, how it functions.
They become engaged by applying their existing knowledge and real-world
experience, learning to hypothesize, testing their theories, and ultimately
drawing conclusions from their findings. This article taken from http://www.thirteen.org/edonline/concept2class/constructivism/ contructivism
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