How students learn

Editor's Notes

• #2: Meet Ruba, an elementary science teacher. Ruba is a diligent teacher who takes pride in helping her kids understand the science subject while enjoying it.
• #3: She figured out that she needs to use PowerPoint to engage her students with the material. She did her lesson plan and decided to use PowerPoint in her classroom as a presentation tool, to present her material to her students.
• #4: So she set to work, filing the slides with all the materials she wants her students to know, adjusting and aligning text to make them visible. She added some graphics for illustrations and sprinkled some clip arts around because she knew that as her students are young learners they are attracted by colors and graphics.
• #5: Once she clicked save to the PowerPoint she created the night before the day of the lesson she felt proud that now her students will understand the concept and that her three hour work on the PowerPoint will pay off. Her students will learn !!!
• #6: The next day, she proudly hit the slide show button before her kids. She started explaining the concepts and facts, slide after another, posing for kids to grasp the material. Slides with texts, visuals, clip arts and even sounds. After 20 min. of presenting she was done and still satisfied with her work 
• #7: but there was something not right. Her kids’ faces did not express that they understood the lesson. Yes, they were delighted when she put the Spider clip art next to the text, and they even jumped at seeing a star animating below the photo, but still something told her that they did not really understand the lesson. And so the next day she distributed a worksheet on the lesson to test how much they grasped on the day before.
• #8: The results were disturbing. Most of her kids understood only a fraction of what she set to explain, some not at all. What was wrong? After all this hard work and time spending on preparing her presentation, why did this happen? Of course it’s the kids’ fault, they weren’t paying attention, she would say. But what if it was my fault? What if I did not pay attention to how children learn through Multimedia?
• #9: This course is about how students learn. How students’ cognition process information and how we can help them retain and structure information through the purposeful use of multimedia. All the principles you will be working on during the course are based on a bulk amount of research in the educational psychology on how students (people in general) learn , especially through the use of verbal and visuals.
• #10: But first let’s do some polling. In Moodle please answer the poll learning with technology Give teachers some time to poll, then look at the results and then discuss with them the implications. Those who have chosent he first three choices, are technology-centered and not learner-centered. This course is about learners , is learner centered. Give them some time to do the second poll metaphors for learning, then discuss, our aim is cognitive processing and how we can help students structure information in their brains and not transfer of knowledge.
• #11: Whether or not you think about it consciously, you probably accept fundamentalassumptions about communication that literally shape your thinking in ways large andsmall. If you commonly talk about communication in terms of a “sender” who transmitsa “message” to a “receiver,” you might assume that you can “send” information throughan unobstructed channel, like a pipeline, and the students will “get it,” fully intact, at theother end of the pipeline
• #12: With the pipeline in mind, you assume that you can produce a PowerPoint presentationin whatever way you like. After you send thisPowerPoint presentation through the pipeline, you assume that its receivers will “get it”on the other side, as shown on the right. Your work is then done. The only criterion forsuccess is that you “delivered” the PowerPoint presentation through the pipeline. If forsome reason your students didn’t get what you delivered, of course, it’s not your fault as aTeacher-presenter—after all, you delivered the PowerPoint presentation, and what they did withit is their problem, not yours.The pipeline assumption is at work when teachers make statements like, “We showed themthe facts, but they just didn’t get it,” or, “The presentation went right over their heads.”It is hard to separate the pipeline metaphor from our thinking because it is woven intothe words and expressions we use commonly every day.
• #16: According to educational psychology research there are three possible outcomes on how your students learn.
• #20: During a PowerPoint presentation, the memory of an audience member is the criticalhuman element that determines how well new information is received, processed,and stored in the student’s mind. Researchers who study the mind generally accept thatthere are three types of human memory. The first type is sensorymemory. Sensory memory is the part of the mind where your audience members brieflystore the initial impressions of sights and sounds as they look at and listen to the environmentaround them. Sensory memory is potentially unlimited in capacity, althoughsights and sounds might persist in sensory memory for less than a second
• #21: The second type is long-term memory—the part of the mind where your students store information over an extended period of time, from as little as 30 secondsto as long as a lifetime. In a presentation context, this is where you would like youraudience to store the new information you intend to communicate to them. Beyond justremembering the new information, you also would like them to be able to access andapply the information from long-term memory when needed. Like sensory memory,long-term memory is also potentially unlimited in its capacity.
• #22: The third type is working memory (used to be called short-term memory)—the part ofthe mind where your students hold their attention. The theories underlyingworking memory are complex, but essentially, working memory is a temporary holdingarea for information. As sensory memory briefly holds sights or sounds, working memorythen pays attention to some of them and holds them for a matter of seconds while itworks to integrate them into long-term memory.While sensory memory and long-term memory each have unlimited capacity, workingmemory is severely limited in its capacity to process new information. Thought to hold seven (+ or – 2) chunks of information (The magic number seven) but new research say that it holds three or four chunks of information.
• #24: Although the limits of working memory have been acknowledged for 50 years, theconcept has never been fully absorbed or integrated into our day-to-day practice andunderstanding of human communication. The pipeline metaphor has such a strong gripon our collective consciousness that we have effectively resisted the adoption of theresearch that contradicts it. Yet as much as you might want to believe that there is anunobstructed pipeline between sender and receiver, the reality is that the limits of workingmemory put a major crimp in that metaphor. In order to align your own assumptionsabout communication with what researchers accept about the way human memoryworks, you’ll need to drop the old pipeline metaphor and pick up a new metaphor
• #25: Keeping this new metaphor in mind when you create presentations, you know that youhave a potentially unlimited amount of new information that you could show someone’ssensory memory (left). You want the new information to be retained in long-termmemory (right). But working memory is so constrained in its capacity to process newinformation that it creates a narrow passage, much like the eye of a needle (center). Thisextremely small space of the “eye” of working memory constitutes the most formidablechallenge you face as a teacher.
• #26: Keeping this new metaphor in mind when you create presentations, you know that youhave a potentially unlimited amount of new information that you could show someone’ssensory memory (left). You want the new information to be retained in long-termmemory (right). But working memory is so constrained in its capacity to process newinformation that it creates a narrow passage, much like the eye of a needle (center). Thisextremely small space of the “eye” of working memory constitutes the most formidablechallenge you face as a teacher.The impact of reducing excess load on working memory has been documented byresearchers including Mayer, who conducted a study using two multimedia presentations.The fi rst presentation featured interesting but irrelevant graphics, and the secondpresentation provided the same information, but without the interesting but irrelevantgraphics. Mayer measured the impact of the two approaches on audiences in terms oftwo criteria: retention, the ability of the audience to simply recall the information, andtransfer, the ability to creatively apply the new information. Audiences who experiencedthe second presentation retained 69 percent more information and were able to apply105 percent more creative solutions using the information than those who experiencedthe fi rst presentation. This study offers research-based evidence to support the saying“Less is more”—the less you overload working memory with extraneous information, themore learning improves.
• #27: an important quality of working memory is that it is a two-way street. Although working memory has only limited capacity to handle new information as that informationarrives, as shown on the left, it also has unlimited capacity to pull in existinginformation from long-term memory, as shown on the right.
• #28: This plays out in the classic test of working memory, when a researcher presentssomeone with new information in the form of a series of unrelated numbers The number of these individual chunks of information that someonecan recall is considered the capacity of that person’s working memory. However,people can remember more of the same set of numbers when working memory pullsfrom long-term memory a structure they already know.
• #29: This organizes the new informationinto meaningful chunks that hold the same information in a more memorable way,such as 2—the familiar structure of a local mobile phone no. Thus a “chunk”is defined by the students as they apply a meaningful structure from their long-termmemory to new information. You help your students accelerate understanding of newinformation by introducing a familiar “chunking” structure to new informationyou present.
• #31: The next research reality, the concept of dual channels, states that people receive andprocess new visual and verbal information in not one, but two separate but related channels.
• #32: In the dual-channels model, the images someone sees are processed througha visual channel, the domain of images including photographs, illustrations, charts, andgraphs,
• #33: Although text on a screen is a visual element, working memory quickly verbalizes thewords and sends them through the verbal channel. Research over the years has foundthat the way information is presented to these two channels has a big impact on theeffectiveness of working memory.