Priority Area: Learning

Written by: Licda Cleopatra Noel Drummond

This reading is about the learning skill and according to what I read, it is important to have motivational strategies in the development of reading that can be positive expectations, feedback, and appearance. it also needs a setting positive expectations include a right climate for learning that takes friendly, attentive, and encouraging communication.

It is necessary in this area of learning to have challenge works not too easy, not too hard. In other words, the easy ones are not challenging enough; hard ones overload working memory so that students give up on making the effort to learn.  It requires also relevant helps as irrelevant hurts this means, that a relevant or familiar context helps, such as relating learning to students' previous experiences or knowledge. Adding unnecessary or relative features of media or content can create too much of a cognitive load and interfere with learning. The personal connections improve learning and it helps students make personal connections to the course content and improve their learning by the following:

• using examples from students life, current events, and popular culture.
• asking students to share personal examples, insights, experience, or interpretations related to what they are studying.
• asking students to answer self-assessment questions, to defend positions or controversial issues; and
• asking students to write personal essays, engage in role plays, analyze case studies, and deal with real-word problems.

Adults need practical applications they learn better when they are told why they need to learn something and experience an application of its value.

The feedback is important for the students because they are motivated by them when it is about correctness and how to improve what they are learning. The appearance the materials should have features that make them appealing. Instructional materials should thoroughly teach a few important ideas.

The process of learning must be focus on the students with powerful ideas which are important because they help students organize what they are learning, students learn more when given big ideas or major themes before they study; or when they area asked to build their own way of representing ideas and relationships, such as their own conceptual maps, outlines, analogies, hierarchies; or when they are asked to brainstorm what they think they know about a topic.

Completeness is necessary for the area of learning because the teaching of the big ideas must be focus on developing  a deeper and more complete understanding of a discipline's major themes.

The learning needs an explicit instruction that depends upon clarity of directions and explanations, and exclusion of ambiguity.

The clarity of directions and explanations includes explicit instructional communication of the skills to be learned, similarly, the development of learning skills requires explicit directions about when and how to do different types of learning activities. Students benefit from knowing and practicing active learning strategies for remembering and using new information, such as:

• explanations and examples of learning processes;
• directions on how to preview, questions, read or listen, reflect, recite, and review;
• directions on use of learning techniques such as note taking, outlining, paraphrasing, and so on,
• encouragement to use persistence and personal control for learning how to learn.

Clarity also is influenced by the progression  of complexity in the materials. Students are more successful when their learning tasks increase in complexity of content and diversity of applications.

Exclusion of ambiguity and guidance and support instructional materials must include guidance and support to help students safety and successfully become more independent learners and thinkers. This guidance and support depends on level and adaptability.

Level of guidance and support most often come from a good teacher, but instructional materials can support or interfere. Some activities can be an organized routines for orderly learning and future searching of information, and they make learning time more productive. This organized routine would be to give the structure for a task followed by practice before moving on to production.

Another activity is better thinking skills that students develop when provided guided instruction in the form of names and definitions of the targeted thinking skills.

The feedback is a key part of guidance is the kind of periodic feedback provided to students. students who receive constructive feedback about the accuracy and adequacy of performance become more interested in the class and learn more.

Other forms of guidance questions provide powerful guidance, and it is particularly effective to vary timing, positioning, or cognitive levels of questions.

Adaptability of guidance and support

1. Lectures help advanced students; average students need scaffolding. Students with less expertise require more structure, active learning, and guidance. Scaffolding needs to fade as students  gain knowledge and skills.
2. Scaffolding supports advanced learning. Asking focused questions, giving prompts or tips, modeling the thinking process and explaining it, and giving informative feedback moves students toward higher levels of learning. Scaffolding includes just enough guidance and support with gradual transfer of responsibility for learning from teacher to student.
3. Too much feedback interferes. Feedback can be overdone. Too much explanation can interfere with learning.
4. Materials should accommodate differences in learning styles with a variety of activities and modalities.
5. Guidance and support in online learning. Student characteristics also can influence how much they benefit from the use of technology in learning.
6. Differences for low-ability and high-ability students online. Animations help both low-and high-ability students. High achievers seek to understand the content rather than memorizes the terms, symbols, and formulas. Low-ability students benefit from illustrations. Low-achieving students benefit from clear instructions, guidelines for self-assessments.
7. Summary of types o guidance and support. Includes the following features: goals at the beginning of an assignment; organized activities and routines; explicit organizational schemes and explanations; examples of finished products, sample problems, and models.

Students responses. Students learn more when they do the following kinds of activities:

• generates their own chats or worksheets for study;
• summarizes and take notes;
• explain concepts and problem-solving steps to each other;
• participate in peer tutoring
• relate, organize, and represent knowledge in a new way;
• generate and test hypothesis; and
• construct their own knowledge.

students learn more when they do the following kinds of assessment activities:

• provide writtr¡en answers to questions
• give explanations
• do case-based self-assessments to improve learning
• take frequent quizzes
• review feedback from test results.