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Sunday, 7 September 2014

CfE: Learning how to learn - or why bother?




Curriculum for Edcellence practitioners are asked to reflect on their practice in the early years:
How do you actively involve children in planning their own learning?
How do you ensure that learning extends children’s learning styles?
In what ways do you support children to reflect on their own learning?

As if `learning how to learn`  - without reference to what is to be learned - was not vacuous enough, this process is expected to continue for non-academic learners, throughout their lives.
To deliver increased opportunities and achieve parity of esteem with academic learning and certification we must ensure that vocational and employability skills, learning about the world of work and learning about the skills needed in the world of work, are an integral part of the curriculum and not a separate experience.
Most importantly we should encourage young people to retain an enthusiasm for learning and support them in 'learning how to learn', identify gaps in their knowledge through reflection and self awareness and to learn new skills effectively throughout their life.
There is little evidence to support any of it.
The learning-styles view has acquired great influence within the education field, and is frequently encountered at levels ranging from kindergarten to graduate school. There is a thriving industry devoted to publishing learning-styles tests and guidebooks for teachers, and many organisations offer professional development workshops for teachers and educators built around the concept of learning styles.
Although the literature on learning styles is enormous, very few studies have even used an experimental methodology capable of testing the validity of learning styles applied to education. Moreover, of those that did use an appropriate method, several found results that flatly contradict the popular meshing hypothesis.                 
We conclude therefore, that at present, there is no adequate evidence base to justify incorporating learning-styles assessments into general educational practice. 
See Learning how to learn: a critique. "If we can learn - which we all can do - then we do not need to `learn how to learn`."http://www.philosophy-of-education.org/conferences/pdfs/Chris_Winch.pdf

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