NEA: Improving History, Math, & Science Teaching

Improving History, Math, & Science Teaching

A Review of ‘How Students Learn’

By Elizabeth Demarest, NEA

How Students Learn: History, Mathematics, and Science in the Classroom. M.S. Donovan & J.D. Bransford, eds. Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press. 2005.
Read the book online free.

Are you looking for good ideas that can significantly improve instruction? NCLB often pushes prescriptive, prepackaged models or "teaching to the test," but research offers better alternatives. This research synthesis focuses on three principles of learning and explains how they can be applied to improve teaching in history, mathematics, and science.

Principles of Learning
This report focuses on a subset of learning principles from a more comprehensive earlier report, How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School by the National Research Council, that was widely recognized as an authoritative synthesis of decades of research in the cognitive and developmental learning sciences. This follow-on report provides a concise explanation of the following three learning principles and significantly extends our understanding of their practical implications for teaching.

Connect school knowledge with students' background knowledge.
New knowledge always builds upon a foundation of prior knowledge and experience. Students' preconceptions shape how they make sense of the school subjects they are taught. Sometimes everyday ideas are consistent with formal disciplinary knowledge and can serve as building blocks. At other times, students bring misconceptions into the classroom that serve as barriers to learning and are very difficult to change. In any case, learning is facilitated when teachers understand and address students' preconceptions.

Emphasize both concepts and facts.
Facts must fit within a conceptual framework to be understood and remembered. Concepts take on meaning when they are rich in factual detail. Thus, knowledge of facts and of important organizing ideas are mutually supportive. When teachers "teach for understanding," they use the core concepts that organize the knowledge of experts to organize instruction. This helps students to organize their own knowledge in more productive ways.

Enable students to take control of their own learning.
Effective learners have developed their metacognitive abilities. They know how to monitor their own learning processes and how to initiate corrective strategies, such as rereading or asking questions, when their learning falters. Teachers can improve student achievement by helping students to become aware of the importance of metacognition and to develop the necessary skills.

Implications for Teaching
After the introductory discussion of principles, the book is divided into three main parts that illustrate how the principles can be used in the teaching of history, mathematics, and science. Each part begins with a more specific discussion of how the principles apply in the context of that discipline generally and then describes how they can be used in teaching particular topics usually covered at the elementary, middle, and high school levels.

History. This section explains key disciplinary concepts that characterize all historical understanding—including time, change, empathy, cause, and evidence—and discusses common misunderstandings of these concepts and how to address them. It then deals with one substantive topic, exploration and discovery, and illustrates how it may be taught with increasing sophistication at the elementary, middle, and high school levels.

Mathematics. In addition to the procedural fluency usually sought in teaching mathematics, competence in this discipline is defined to include conceptual understanding, strategic competence, adaptive reasoning, and a productive disposition. Three important mathematical topics are covered at three different grade levels: whole numbers in elementary school, rational numbers in middle school, and functions in high school.

Science. The introduction to this section encourages teachers to move away from teaching the "scientific method" in a lock-step manner to an approach that enables students to understand what it means to generate and justify scientific knowledge and to participate in a scientific community. Three science topics are covered: light and shadow at the elementary school level, gravity at the middle school level, and genetics and evolution at the high school level.

This book provides practical ideas for implementing advances in knowledge about learning and teaching. Rich in content for teacher professional development, it can be used either by those planning professional development for teachers or directly by school-level teacher professional communities to support instructional improvement.