How Students Learn: History, Mathematics, and Science in the Classroom
Committee on How People Learn, A Targeted Report for Teachers, Center for Studies on Behavior and Development, National Research Council, John BransfordBooks.org participates in affiliate programs including Bookshop.org and the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. We may earn a commission from qualifying purchases made through links on this page, at no additional cost to you.
Overview
How do you get a fourth-grader excited about history? How do you even begin to persuade high school students that mathematical functions are relevant to their everyday lives? In this volume, practical questions that confront every classroom teacher are addressed using the latest exciting research on cognition, teaching, and learning.How Students Learn: History, Mathematics, and Science in the Classroom builds on the discoveries detailed in the bestselling How People Learn. Now, these findings are presented in a way that teachers can use immediately, to revitalize their work in the classroom for even greater effectiveness.
Organized for utility, the book explores how the principles of learning can be applied in teaching history, science, and math topics at three levels: elementary, middle, and high school. Leading educators explain in detail how they developed successful curricula and teaching approaches, presenting strategies that serve as models for curriculum development and classroom instruction. Their recounting of personal teaching experiences lends strength and warmth to this volume.
The book explores the importance of balancing students’ knowledge of historical fact against their understanding of concepts, such as change and cause, and their skills in assessing historical accounts. It discusses how to build straightforward science experiments into true understanding of scientific principles. And it shows how to overcome the difficulties in teaching math to generate real insight and reasoning in math students. It also features illustrated suggestions for classroom activities.
How Students Learn offers a highly useful blend of principle and practice. It will be important not only to teachers, administrators, curriculum designers, and teacher educators, but also to parents and the larger community concerned about children’s education.
Synopsis
This text has its roots in the report How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience and School (National Research Council, 1999, National Academy Press), which reviewed research on human learning. Twenty-two academics and researchers from the U.S., Canada, and England explain how the principles and findings on learning can be used to guide the teaching of a set of topics that commonly appear in the K-12 curriculum. The text explores each of three subject areas—history, mathematics, and science—at three levels: elementary, middle, and high school. The authors provide detailed explanations of how they developed successful curricula and teaching approaches, with strategies that serve as models for curriculum development and classroom instruction. For teachers, administrators, curriculum designers, teacher educators, and parents. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR