a response to the chapters in Kirschner, P. A., & Hendrick, C. (2020). How Learning Happens: Seminal Works in Educational Psychology and What They Mean in Practice. Routledge
Chapter 15 Activities that give birth to learning
The chapters up to now have either been about something I have heard of or a writer whose name I know even if only very vaguely. This chapter doesn’t work for me at all. It focuses on Ernst Rothkopf and his 1970 article on mathemagenic activities. Mathemagenic seems to be an overly long and obscure name for activities that promote learning.
The only thing they point out that seems useful is that this was the first time someone acknowledged that the learner had a part to play in what they learnt (as opposed to it being entirely determined by teacher or syllabus. I looked at the article itself and was none the wiser and then searched for mathemagenic activities online, but there is very little to be found and what I did find wasn’t enlightening.
Rothkopf talk about three categories of mathemagenic activity
(1) Orientation: Moving students towards what they have to learn. (2) Object acquisition: Focusing the attention and studying of the student on certain things and in a certain way (3) Translation and processing.
Perhaps I am missing something but that seems to amount to
- Get their attention
- Help them see what is important
- Give them things to do that ensure they manipulate / process the material
And if you are not doing that in a classroom you are not helping students learn. I can’t see it needs an oddly spelt word to describe it.
They say that the first two parts of this are more observable, but that the third is now partly observable using technology like eye tracking so you can see how a person is solving things.
They also say that activities can promote learning, be neutral to it or hamper it, but nothing about specific characteristics which would make something any particular one.
Chapter 16 Zooming out to zoom in
This is the first in their section called the teacher. But this is almost as uninformative as the previous chapter. This time is based on a chapter in a book. REIGELUTH, C., & STEIN, F. (1983). THE ELABORATION THEORY OF INSTRUCTION. But again it seems to be stating the blindingly obvious and taking an awful lot of words and not enough concrete examples to do so. Perhaps this is my lack of knowledge of educational history. Maybe before this chapter there was another way of looking at these things, but I am baffled as to what it might have been. The original is hard going and searching for this term just brings up such a wide range of ideas as to be useless.
The core of it seems to be …
- To be able to grasp something you should be toggling from whole to parts and back again.
- Move from the easier to the more complex
- Have a solid core example to build from.
- Relate things to what they already know
- Have summaries and self tests
- And to be able to do all this you have to be very aware of what you are trying to teach at a variety of levels.
See what I mean ? Who is planning courses which don’t have that built in ?
After two ‘dud’ chapters in a row, I’d be tempted to give up, but some of the chapter names coming up sound good so I’ll hang in there a bit longer.
sallyhirst 