Learning and Teaching Theories

Developmental trends

Information – Processing

Strategy Instruction

Warm-up:– What are learning strategies and how are they

helpful to students with disabilities? – What are the developmental issues

concerning students with learning disabilities?– Any extras about CBM from chapter 8?

Constructivism

• Students construct their own solutions and processes to problem solving based on interactions with the problem. Thus, a child builds on previous learning (scaffolding) through exploration.

• Teacher designs instruction that allows students to explore learning and learn by what they did and what they found. Learning is implicit in the discovery.

• Assessment through interviews and observations of the process of learning.

Behaviorists/Reductionists

• Tasks need to be broken down to small components and taught sequentially (task analysis)

• Student learning should be closely monitored and recorded

• CBM – incremental growth monitored across several days.

• Direct Instruction – a method of teaching skills through teacher directed (explicit), structured, and sequential lessons.

Paradigm wars

• Why must there be a balance between reductionism and constructivism?

• Gallagher (1989)

Teacher involvement

Student involvement

Information-processing• Based on learning strategies and computer

model• An interaction between short and long term

memory.• Short-term memory

– Restricted to about 7 items

• Long-term memory– Encoding takes up to 20 mintues (STMtoLTM)– Knowledges: Declarative (facts); Procedural

(fluent steps); Conditional (metacognitive, the when and why)

Strategy Instruction

• Metacognitive purposes• Teaching how to learn rather than only what• Students who are passive might revert to

learned helplessness when encountered with a unique or difficult challenge

• Learning strategies are on the website http://coe.jmu.edu/learningtoolbox

• Strands (acquisition, storage, academic competence)

Fluency• Students need opportunities to work in timed situations:

to retrieve facts and follow known procedures with prosody (accuracy and without hesitation)

• How to graph (example)– pinpoint the behavior and appropriateness of skills– design the probe– baseline– select a goal– identify the objective and intervene appropriately– teach, test and score– monitor– evaluate with observation

• What kinds of learning could be followed with instruction in fluency?

Details of learning

• Learning modalities and Multi Int (Gardner, 1983)

– Verbal/linguistic; logic/math; visual; musical; kinesthetic; interpersonal; intrapersonal

– How do you teach to them all??????

• Stages of learning1. Exposure – student knows about some information2. Grasping – can explain general ideas of the

information to another3. Independence – completes tasks using the info4. Application – applies the knowledge in general or

outside forms

Application of Assessment

• Should instruction be based on assessment items -or- should assessment be based on instruction? (An argument over packaged curriculum)

• Assess frequently• Go beyond scores and into the why

– Error pattern analysis

Summation

• How can you apply CBM to your classroom instruction?

• What are the benefits to students graphing their progress?

• Name factors that affect long-term memory.• When is it appropriate to use Reductionist or

Constructivist techniques?• How can you incorporate strategy instruction in

your class?