How Students Learn: History, Mathematics, and Science in the Classroom
The National Academies Press, (2005)Abstract
More than any other species, people are designed to be flexible learners and, from infancy, are active agents in acquiring knowledge and skills. People can invent, record, accumulate, and pass on organized bodies of knowledge that help them understand, shape, exploit, and ornament their environment. Much that each human being knows about the world is acquired informally, but mastery of the accumulated knowledge of generations requires intentional learning, often accomplished in a formal educational setting.
Decades of work in the cognitive and developmental sciences has provided the foundation for an emerging science of learning. This foundation offers conceptions of learning processes and the development of competent performance that can help teachers support their students in the acquisition of knowledge that is the province of formal education. The research literature was synthesized in the National Research Council report How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School.1 In this volume, we focus on three fundamental and well-established principles of learning that are highlighted in How People Learn and are particularly important for teachers to understand and be able to incorporate in their teaching: