How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School: Expanded Edition [Paperback]

Committee on Developments in the Science of Learning with additional material from the Committee on Learning Research and Educational Practice (Author), National Research Council (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0309070368 | ISBN-13: 978-0309070362 | Publication Date: September 15, 2000 | Edition: 2

This popular trade book, originally released in hardcover in the Spring of 1999, has been newly expanded to show how the theories and insights from the original book can translate into actions and practice, now making a real connection between classroom activities and learning behavior. This paperback edition includes far-reaching suggestions for research that could increase the impact that classroom teaching has on actual learning. Like the original hardcover edition, this book offers exciting new research about the mind and the brain that provides answers to a number of compelling questions. When do infants begin to learn? How do experts learn and how is this different from non-experts? What can teachers and schools do-with curricula, classroom settings, and teaching methods - to help children learn most effectively? New evidence from many branches of science has significantly added to our understanding of what it means to know, from the neural processes that occur during learning to the influence of culture on what people see and absorb. "How People Learn" examines these findings and their implications for what we teach, how we teach it, and how we assess what our children learn. The book uses exemplary teaching to illustrate how approaches based on what we now know result in in-depth learning. This new knowledge calls into question concepts and practices firmly entrenched in our current education system. The topics include: how learning actually changes the physical structure of the brain; how existing knowledge affects what people notice and how they learn; what the thought processes of experts tell us about how to teach; the amazing learning potential of infants; the relationship of classroom learning and everyday settings of community and workplace; learning needs and opportunities for teachers; and a realistic look at the role of technology in education.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"...this book provides all educators with an excellent framework for understanding conceptual changes in the science of learning..." -- Teaching and Learning in Medicine, Summer 2001

"How People Learn is an important book, which may, in time, become a classic.” -- Education, Communication and Information, Spring 2001

"The findings [in this book] are significant and should be discussed at the highest levels in educational practice." -- Network, April 2001

...exciting new research about the mind and the brain... -- Curriculum Administrator

Book Description

This popular trade book, originally released in hardcover in the Spring of 1999, has been newly expanded to show how the theories and insights from the original book can translate into actions and practice, now making a real connection between classroom activities and learning behavior. This paperback edition includes far-reaching suggestions for research that could increase the impact that classroom teaching has on actual learning.

Like the original hardcover edition, this book offers exciting new research about the mind and the brain that provides answers to a number of compelling questions. When do infants begin to learn? How do experts learn and how is this different from non-experts? What can teachers and schools do-with curricula, classroom settings, and teaching methods--to help children learn most effectively? New evidence from many branches of science has significantly added to our understanding of what it means to know, from the neural processes that occur during learning to the influence of culture on what people see and absorb.

How People Learn examines these findings and their implications for what we teach, how we teach it, and how we assess what our children learn. The book uses exemplary teaching to illustrate how approaches based on what we now know result in in-depth learning. This new knowledge calls into question concepts and practices firmly entrenched in our current education system.

Topics include:

• How learning actually changes the physical structure of the brain.
• How existing knowledge affects what people notice and how they learn.
• What the thought processes of experts tell us about how to teach.
• The amazing learning potential of infants.
• The relationship of classroom learning and everyday settings of community and workplace.
• Learning needs and opportunities for teachers.
• A realistic look at the role of technology in education.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 385 pages
• Publisher: National Academies Press; 2 edition (September 15, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0309070368
• ISBN-13: 978-0309070362
• Product Dimensions: 9.8 x 7 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (28 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #9,960 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #67 in Books > Professional & Technical > Professional Science > Behavioral Sciences > Cognitive Psychology

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

45 of 49 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Perhaps the best summary of pratical educational research, August 12, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School (Hardcover)

This summary of research in human learning and what this body of knowledge suggests should be the direction of education in the next 10 years makes this work a must read for any educational professional. We owe a debt of gratitude to the National Research Council for the depth and quality of this work. It is already being used by many educators in the Bay Area to guide teachers and school administrators in their efforts to provide an education that prepares our young people for the next century! This would make an outstanding resource for both working teachers and those studyiong education at the graduate level.

106 of 122 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent book on cognitive learning, November 23, 1999

By 

K. L Sadler "Dr. Karen L. Sadler" (Freedom, Pa. USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School (Hardcover)

As a Deaf person and an educator, as well as having two degrees in Neuroscience, I found this book extremely helpful in elucidating what has been done in understanding how we learn. Perhaps even more important is the questions that the authors, contributors and editors raise concerning what more needs to be done, to adequately help all students reach their highest potential. The book is concise and knowledgeable without being needlessly wordy. It is written so that everybody can understand and make use of it to help educators and researchers to further their goals and those of their students. I've had this book less than six months and yet I've quoted it several times in papers, and refer to it constantly. Thanks to the editors for doing such a great job. Karen L. Sadler Science Education University of Pittsburgh

238 of 311 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Less than meets the eye, July 31, 2003

By 

Michael J Edelman (Huntington Woods, MI USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School: Expanded Edition (Paperback)

"How People Learn" is both a simple summary of some recent research in the cognitive sciences and an argument for how teaching should be done. This is currently a very popular topic in the educational industry, as educators look for justification in the cognitive literature for the rather ad-hoc educational theories of the past 40 or 50 years. Most of this volume is devoted to a fairly low-level- let's say High School level- review of selected literature form the cognitive and neuropsychological literature of the last few decades, and as far as it goes, it's not bad. It's spotty, certainly, and musch of it is very old, but the lay reader will still find much of it interesting and informative.

But the final chapter- Conclusions- is a tremendous disappointment, at least for this reader. Half the conclusions offered are so simple, and so obvious, as to be laughable. The other half are either contradictory or simply unjustified.

Consider this gem: "Transfer and wide application of learning are most likely to occur when learners acheive an organized and coherent understanding of the material; when the situations for transfer share the structure of the original learning; when subject matter has been mastered and practiced; when subject domains overlap and share cognitive elements; when instruction includes specific attention to underlying principles; and when instruction specifically emphasizes transfer."

Translated, that means that people can best use things they learn when they've learned them very well, that practice helps, and that it helps to learn something in a way similar to how you're going to use it.

Or this: "The predominant indicator of expert status is the amount of time spent working and learning in a subject area to gain mastery of the content" That's Edu-Speak for "the best way to learn material is to practice it"

The author then concludes with an attempt to justify the "new approaches to teaching" that had their genesis in the ed school of the 60s and 70s in a way that in no way follows what was found in the last 230 pages:

"Traditional education has tended to emphasize memorization and mastery of text. Research on the development of expertise, however, has shown that more than a set of general general problem solving skills or memory for an array of facts is necessary to acheive deep understanding..."

Wait a minute. Didn't we just learn that people who learn things best are those who practice them?

The biggest problem with this book is that it, like so many education books, is written by people with a lot of time in schools of education, but little or no time in a classroom or a basic psychology lab. The authors misinteprret the findings of others, they ignire a few centuries of existing knowledge, and they tend to use an overly complex terminology that parodies the language of psychology. And they confuse the principles of basic learning with the techniques and strategies of more skilled practitioners. Sometimes the results are merely amusing, but often they have tragic consequences.

A perfect example is to be found in the great whole word vs. phonetics debate of the past twenty years. Some education researcher came across the interesting tidbit that skilled readers don't sound out words; they recognize whole words at a glance. This was seized on by the education community, and within a short time phonics were out, whole word was in, and reading acquisition skills plummeted. The educators, amazingly enough, missed the obvious: That the skills required for initial acquisition are very different from the strategies used later on. Even the best readers rely on phonological skills when they encounter new words. If all you learn is whole word, there's no way for you to learn on your own or to sound out new words. Despite the overwheling data in favor of phonetics, Ed schools still push the supposedly superior whole-word teaching method. (The tremendous commercial success of the "Hooked on Phonics" program should be evidence enough regarding which method works better.)

As anyone who has actually read the cognitive memory and learning literature of the past few decades will tell you, there are a number of facts regarding learning that are pretty much undisputable. One is that all learning is essentially unconcious. The brain tries to make patterns from repeated stimuli, and to associate these patterns with other patterns. Another is that repeated presentation strengthens these associations. This is something that's been demonstrated down to the cellular level back in the 1960s (Hebb, et al)

What this means is that initial learning is all about repetition, and lots of it. The best way to learn to play clainet is to practice clarinet, and the best way to learn to perform multiplication is to practice the heck out of your multiplication tables. You can use all the audio-visual aids, enrichment activies and voyages of self-discovery you want, but the only way to acquire inital skills is through repetition. Somehow, this message still hasn't gotten through to the education schools.