Lecture 1- How do we learn things.doc

此文档收集于网络，如有侵权，请联系网站删除Before we start our discussion on how humans learn things, we need firstly look at the physical conditions that are basically required for the action of learning.Physical GrowthThe Growing BodyTwo years after birth, the average child in the US weights in at around 25 to 30 pounds and is close to 36 inches tall- around half the height of the average adult. Children grow steadily during the preschool period, and by the time they are 6 years old, they weigh, on average, about 46 pounds and stand 46 inches tall.The Growing BrainThe brain grows at a faster rate than any other part of the body. Two-year-olds have brains that are about three-quarters the size and weight of an adult brain. By age 5, childrens brains weigh 90 percent of average adult brain weight. In comparison, the average 5-year-olds total body weight is just 30 percent of average adult body weight.Why does the brain grow so rapidly? One reason is an increase in the number of interconnections among cells. These interconnections allow for more complex communication between neurons, and they permit the rapid growth of cognitive skills. In addition, the amount of myelin-protective insulation that surrounds parts of neurons-increases, which speeds the transmission of electrical impulses along brain cells but also adds to brain weight.By the end of the preschool period, some parts of the brain have undergone particularly significant growth. For example, the corpus callosum, a bundle of nerve fibers that connect the two hemispheres of the brain, becomes considerably thicker, developing as many as 800 million individual fibers that help coordinate brain functioning between the two hemispheres.Brain LateralizationThe two halves of the brain also begin to become increasingly differentiated and specialized. Lateralization, the process in which certain functions are located more in one hemisphere than the other, becomes more pronounced during the preschool years.For most people, the left hemisphere concentrates on tasks that necessitate verbal competence, such as speaking, reading, thinking, and reasoning. The right hemisphere develops its own strengths, especially in nonverbal areas such as comprehension of spatial relationships, recognition of patterns and drawings, music and emotional expression. Each of the two hemispheres also begins to process information in a slightly different manner. Whereas the left hemisphere considers information sequentially, one piece of data at a time, the right hemisphere processes information in a more global manner, reflecting on it as a whole.Despite the specialization of the hemispheres, we need to keep in mind that in most respects the two hemispheres act in tandem. They are interdependent, and the differences between the two are minor. Furthermore, the fact that each hemisphere specializes in certain tasks does not mean that it alone functions in any particular area. In fact, each hemisphere can perform most of the tasks of the other. For example, the right hemisphere does some language processing and plays an important role in language comprehension.Intellectual DevelopmentPiagets Approach to Cognitive DevelopmentOlivias dad is wiping up the mess around the base of her high chair- for the third time today! Lately, the 14-month-old Olivia seems to take great delight in dropping food from the high char. She also drops toys, spoons, anything it seems, just to watch how it hits the floor. She almost appears to be experimenting to see what kind of noise or what size of splatter is created by each different thing she drops.Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget (1896-1980) probably would have said that Olivias dad is right in theorizing that Olivia is conducting her own series of experiments to learn more about the workings of the world. Piagets views of the ways infants learn could be summed in a simple equation: Action = Knowledge.He argued that infants do not acquire knowledge from facts communicated by others, nor through sensation and perception. Instead, Piaget suggested that knowledge is the product of direct motor behavior. Although many of his basic explanations and propositions have been challenged by subsequent research, as we will discuss later, the view that in significant ways infants learn by doing remains unquestioned.Key Elements of Piagets TheoryPiagets theory is based on a stage approach to development. He assumed that all children pass through a series of four universal stages in a fixed order from birth through adolescence: sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational and formal operational. He also suggested that movement from one stage to the next occurred when a child reaches an appropriate level of physical maturation and is exposed to relevant types of experience. Without such experience, children are assumed to be incapable of reaching their cognitive potential. Furthermore, in contrast to approaches to cognition that focus on changes in the content of childrens knowledge about the world, Piaget argued that it was critical to also consider the changes in the quality of childrens knowledge and understanding as they move from one stage to another.Piaget believed that the basic building blocks of the way we understand the world are mental structures called schemes, organized patterns of functioning, that adapt and change with mental development. Although at first schemes are related to physical, or sensorimotor, activity, as children develop their schemes move to a mental level, reflecting thought. Schemes are similar to computer software: They direct and determine how data from the world, such as new events or objects, are considered and dealt with.Piaget suggested that two principles underlie the growth in childrens schemes: assimilation and accommodation. Assimilation is the process in which people understand an experience in terms of their current stage of cognitive development and way of thinking. Assimilation occurs, then, when a stimulus or event is acted upon, perceived, and understood in accordance with existing patterns of thought. For example, an infant who tries to suck on any toy in the same way is assimilating the objects to her existing sucking scheme. Similarly, a child who encounters a flying squirrel at a zoo and calls it a “bird” is assimilating the squirrel to his existing scheme of bird.In contrast, when we make changes in our existing ways of thinking, understanding, or behaving in response to encounters with new stimuli or events, accommodation takes place. For instance, when a child modifies the way she sucks on a toy according to the particular shape of the toy, she is accommodating her sucking scheme to the special characteristics of the toy. In the same way, a child who sees a flying squirrel and calls it “a bird with a tail” is beginning to accommodate to new knowledge, modifying his scheme of bird.According to Piaget, cognition develops through four stages:1. sensorimotor (birth-2 years) using reflexes, object permanence2. preoperational (2-7 years) learning to represent things in the mind; conservation, centration and reversibility and egocentrism3. concrete operational (7-11 years) inferred reality: the meaning of stimuli in the context of relevant information4. formal operational (11- adulthood) thinking abstractly, dealing with hypothetical situations.The Sensorimotor PeriodPiaget suggests that the sensorimotor stage, the initial major stage of cognitive development, can be broken down into six substages. These are summarized in the following table.SubstageAgeDescriptionE.G.Simple reflexesFirst month of lifeDuring this period, the various reflexes that determine the infants interactions with the world are at the center of its cognitive life.The sucking reflex causes the infant to suck at anything placed in its lips.First habits and primary circular reactions1-4monthsAt this age infants begin to coordinate what were separate actions into single, integrated activities.An infant might combine grasping an object with sucking on it, or staring at something with touching it.Secondary circular reactions4-8monthsDuring this period, infants take major strides in shifting their cognitive horizons beyond themselves and begin to act on the outside world.A child who repeatedly picks up a rattle in her crib and shakes it in different ways to see how the sound changes is demonstrating her ability to modify her cognitive scheme about shaking rattles.Coordination of secondary circular reactions8-12 monthsIn this stage infants begin to use more calculated approaches to producing events, coordinating several schemes to generate a single act. They achieve object permanence during this stage.An infant will push one toy out of the way to reach another toy that is lying, partially exposed, under it.Tertiary circular reactions12-18 monthsAt this age infants develop what Piaget regards as the deliberate variation of actions that bring desirable consequences. Rather than just repeating enjoyable activities as in substage 4, infants appear to carry out miniature experiments to observe the consequencesA child will drop a toy repeatedly, varying the position from which he drops it, carefully observing each time to see where it falls.Beginnings of thought18-48 monthsThe major achievement of this stage is the capacity for mental representation or symbolic thought. Piaget argued that only at this stage can infants imagine where objects that they cannot see might be.Children can even plot in their heads unseen trajectories of objects, so that if a ball rolls under a piece of furniture, they can figure out where it is likely to emerge on the other side.NB: we will be looking at other stages in detail when we move on to talk about intellectual development.Information-Processing Approaches to Cognitive DevelopmentAt the age of 3 months, Amber Nordstrom breaks into a smile as her brother Marcus stands over her crib, picks up a doll, and makes a whistling noise through his teeth. In fact, Amber never seems to tire of Marcuss efforts at making her smile, and soon whenever Marcus appears and simply picks up the doll, her lips begin to curl into a smile.Clearly, Amber remembers Marcus and his humorous ways. But how does she remember him? And how much else can Amber remember?To answer questions like these, we need to diverge from the road that Piaget laid out for us. Rather than seeking to identify the universal, broad milestones in cognitive development through which all infants pass, as Piaget tried to do, we must consider the specific processes by which individual babies acquire and use the information to which they are exposed. We need, to focus less on the qualitative changes in infants mental lives and consider more closely their quantitative capabilities.Information-processing approaches to cognitive development seek to identify the way that individual take in, use and store information. According to this approach, the quantitative changes in infants abilities to organize and manipulate information represent the hallmarks of cognitive development. Taking this perspective, cognitive growth is characterized by increasing sophistication, speed and capacity in information processing. Encoding, Storage, and Retrieval: The Foundations of Information ProcessingInformation processing has three basic aspects: encoding, storage, and retrieval. Encoding is the process by which information is initially recorded in a form usable to memory. Infants and children-indeed, all people- are exposed to a massive amount of information; if they tried to process it all, they would be overwhelmed. Consequently, they encode selectively, picking and choosing the information to which they will pay attention.Even if someone has been exposed to the information initially and has encoded it in an appropriate way, there is still no guarantee that he or she will be able to use it in the future. Information must also have been stored in memory adequately. Storage refers to the maintenance of material saved in memory. Finally, success in using the material in the future depends on retrieval processes. Retrieval is the process by which material in memory storage is located, brought into awareness, and used.Automatization. In some cases, encoding, storage, and retrieval are relatively automatic, while in other cases they are deliberate. Automatization is the degree to which an activity requires attention. Processes that require relatively little attention are automatic; processes that require relatively large amounts of attention are controlled. For example, some activities that may be automatic for you, but that required your full attention at first, might include walking, eating with a fork, or reading. Automatic mental processes help children in their initial encounters with the world by enabling them to easily and “automatically” process information in particular ways. For instance, by the age