Last week, we explained that all learning should have structure and the organisation of information should be as close to the reality of the subject as possible. We then introduced the ways through which learning can be made much more effective and efficient: cognitive strategies.
This week, we will examine some of the initial learning strategies you can easily teach to your children at home to help them learn better and faster.
Attention strategies; How to enable children to pay attention to what they are being taught
Attention has been central to the development of the human species and the rise of sociality. The ability to pay attention to relevant stimuli is very important.
Children do not adequately learn new material if they are not looking at, and listening to, the important aspects of what they are learning. Attention strategies help the child to observe the environment, develop the capability of perception from the sense organs, orient himself towards the material and perceive and select the most important aspects of the learning situation.
1) The first attention strategy is: search or vigilance. This means to make the effort to find one or more items in a perceptual field which may be either rich or poor in stimuli. Much of the learning activity of students requires that they actively search for relevant and useful stimuli.
Example: Puzzles or word grids. The design of the puzzle is the visual element and the words inside are the information.
Puzzles help children pay attention to visual stimuli (letters) and figure out which combinations make words. Parents should help their children do the puzzles until they are good enough to do them on their own. Books with puzzles are easily available and online, several sites also offer them.
2) The second form of attention strategies: management of divided attention (also called distraction), a condition which requires that the student capture stimuli from two or more sources.
Example: When the student is trying to listen to the teacher while also making notes. In terms of attention, this is quite difficult because the child must alternate channels of attention between listening and writing. Think about what happens when you are talking on the phone and another person comes up and begins talking to you. The excess of information makes concentration difficult. Because of the cognitive load, the person tends to pay attention to one source of information at a time and when paying attention to two sources, will alternate quickly back and forth between the sources with a tendency to get easily distracted. More dilligent students can better grasp inputs from two sources with less distraction.
3) The third form of attention (the most important) is sustained attention, which is also called concentration. It is the ability to focus one’s efforts on one situation (event, stimulus, issue) for a relatively long period without being distracted by extraneous stimuli. Concentration is related to metacognition and persistence, as we will see in a future article.
Example: While playing a game or watching a movie.
Elaboration with words: verbal statement or propositions
This is a broad category that includes the major strategies a child uses to learn new things that involve mostly words. This is what the child does to actively work with the material that comes in the form of sentences asking and answer about the material, describing, generating relations with things he already knows, figuring out the implications, and much more. In school learning, words, phrases, associations, sentences and derivation of meaning are a major portion of what must be mastered.
Verbal elaboration can be involved in four basic activities when learning: listening, speaking, reading and writing.
Given the nature of school learning with its emphasis on the accumulation of facts, rules and procedures, much of what your child learns comes from listening and writing. The most frequent activity in the classroom is the teacher talking and the students listening. But it is also important to develop children’s capacities to express themselves and as parents, you play a major role in that development.
Repetition
The first major strategy, one that most likely is inborn, is repetition.
When someone gives you a phone number and you do not have a pencil at hand, what do you do? You repeat the number until it “locks in,” or until you can find a pencil.
This strategy is basic and simple and attempts to record information one is receiving. It is so prevalent that it is called “memorising” which is an incorrect term, because anything a child does to process information would be memorising. This strategy is simply repeating what has been heard or seen in the working memory until at some point, it gets recorded in the long-term memory. It is often referred to as ‘rote learning’ and is the most widely used form of learning in school. It is most often seen in cases where precision is important, such as the multiplication tables, chemical formulas, events and dates in history, names of authors, etc.
As a learning strategy, repetition is NOT effective. Memorised information that should go into the long-term memory often does not, and if it does, about half of it disappears within the first forty-eight hours. Also, if your child has learned a chain of information, for example, a poem or other verbal chain, if one small aspect of it is forgotten, the whole chain tends to get lost or completely confused. The best way to improve the effectiveness of memorisation is to modify the strategy and move toward higher forms of verbal processing, particularly verbal elaboration, visual elaboration, comparison, inferences, etc.
Paraphrasing
This is when one takes an idea and transforms it into her own words: it is called paraphrasing. It is a restatement of a text, passage, group of ideas into another form or other words that clarify the meaning and make it easier for your child to assimilate and accommodate. The restatement of texts into other words is an effective studying or teaching strategy done in order for the learner to transform the vocabulary into words with which he is more comfortable. Your child accommodates the information in words she knows that are more natural, meaningful and comfortable and that relate to her existing schemes and therefore, fit better into existing structures. Further, while paraphrasing, your child is investing more mental effort into the learning situation, thereby increasing probability of successful memorisation.
Paraphrasing is useful in many subjects such as history, social studies and literature to give three examples. It is not appropriate when precise the meaning is required. You cannot, for example, paraphrase the multiplication table, nor would you go to a pharmacist who is paraphrasing chemical formulas.
Parents should stimulate the practice of paraphrasing whenever it is appropriate. For example, when reading stories, ask your child to re-state events in their own words, and you can ascertain if they have comprehended the story.
After having read a story to your child, you can prompt them thus, for example:
“Can you explain that in your own words?
Or, you can model the concept in this way:
Parent: ‘The way I would say that is….’
• ‘Your grandmother used to say…..’
• ‘How would this same idea sound if we used easier words?
As your child paraphrases, you must provide quality control and feedback. It will be easy, particularly at first, for your child to get off track, mix up concepts, etc. You must correct and guide with simple questions that will help her get it right.
Parent: Are you sure you have stuck to the key ideas?
Parent: Did you get off track in your re-statement?
Using questions
“We’re too concentrated on having our children learn the answers.”
“I would teach them how to ask questions - because that’s how you learn.”
-Historian David McCullough
Another learning strategy is the asking of questions. By asking questions, your child’s learning process goes much deeper. The strategy is very powerful if used correctly. Children naturally ask questions, and if their parents learn how to respond well to the questions and learn how to ask questions of their children, many positive things happen.
By learning to answer questions and then learning to ask their own questions, your children are stepping into the world of critical thinking. The initial formulation of questions can start with parents but often starts with children, who are famous for asking many questions as they try to understand the world around them.
From very early parents – both father and mother – should pay close attention to their child’s questions and give answers that will help the child to understand and that also will help – bit by bit – to grasp and absorb the question and answer process.
Since this topic is so important, next week will be devoted entirely to questions and answers – types of questions, how to answer, levels of questions and related issues that are the beginning of critical thinking.
Dr Clifton Chadwick, Center for Research on Teaching Critical Thinking British University in Dubai.
If you want to comment or ask questions, please write to clifton.chadwick@buid.ac.ae
UP AHEAD
Questions and Answers: How to ask questions so your children are encouraged to think before answering.
