 | "Learning first takes place through osmosis,"
Reinsmith claims, making an analogy between the initial learning of
babies who live immersed in an environment and any learner, who
perhaps should be immersed in an active learning atmosphere. |
| "Authentic learning comes through trial and error."
That is, learning occurs when people try out ideas and see if their
guesswork applications work or not. |
| "One of the tragic defects of mass education" is the
"waste" of not following or building students' interests. |
| Besides determining readiness and interest for course topics
and tasks, teachers have to get students to affirm that they can
learn. |
| Learning occurs in a context. [Another writer stresses
the importance of previewing and reviewing during each class, but
that's course continuity. Diversity implies that students
bring various contexts to each course.] |
| Use it or lose it. Why can't students who passed a class
use all the information and skills from it? They have to try
out ideas in various situations and keep using them; of course, it's
impossible to use all of the information from a course, so students'
experiences vet the information and skills to preserve only the most
useful. |
| "A learner moves from imitation to intrinsic ownership, from external modeling to internalization and
competence." How? Teachers can be catalysts in this process
[perhaps by including modeling and by designing tasks that help
students make a progressive series of discoveries toward course
concepts]. |
| Learning can be joyful, fun. |
| Real learning often follows tangents. |
| "Tests are a very poor indicator of whether an individual has really learned something."
Nevertheless, tests could be used to diagnose how students think if
teachers can uncover why students answer in a particular way. |
1999