A Learners’ View (ALV) Is Of Choices On The Shortest And Fastest Path To Learning, The Oxygen Of Social Life.
PEOPLE LEARN. Behavioral and social scientists have described increasing refinements of learning for more than a century. They have established a science of learning based on what people see, hear, and in other ways sense while learning. This science is independent from the instruction and content of lessons. It adds accuracy and precision to definitions of learning and their uses. In the end, observers rely on senses to monitor learning, whether through casual watching and listening, various kinds of assessments, or electronic tools such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) or electroencephalogram (EEG).
People have vilified sensory based learning with various names during romantic times and lionized it during entrepreneurial ones. Both the admiration of the power of using sense data for teaching and some of the qualms of relying on it have merit.
By ignoring these judgments and peeling back a layer of research jargon, a point of view of learning common among learners emerges. We call it a learners’ view (ALV) to distinguish it from other views of learning, such as cognition. Views other than ALV are not necessary to describe and manage learning.
The name a learners’ view and its acronym ALV refers to common elements of physical sensations that researchers have reported observing learners using while learning. In this way, ALV represents a view of learning that relies on descriptions reported from experimental empirical research rather than on other sources, such as theories of learning which add speculation to sense based data to formulate generalizations.
By peeling back another layer and sorting these same research descriptions into common categories of the use of physical sensations reveals an array of five choice points learners encounter while learning. To learn something, learners select from among at least 15 options across these points.
Teachers who apply ALV in lessons increase learning by up to nine or more out of ten learners per lesson. ALV demands a refined style of teaching that may seem awkward, intriguing, and overwhelming at first. Experienced teachers seem to have the most trouble letting go of their preferred practices even though those activities result in less learning than with ALV. When taken in steps, ALV is manageable for experienced and beginning teachers. It also offers adjustments to administration, research, and public policy of education, including to school reform.
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Last Edited: 01-20-15