What makes a good learner

One of the first classes got me very interested in learning styles, and I have decide to do my action research on helping my 8th grade students become better learners by helping them understand their learning strengths and weaknesses.

This is what brought me to your page. Presently, I am creating a survey for my action reasearch class to adminster to my students. I what to design it in order to obtain the students' perceptions of themselves as learners. I want to thank you for you ideas as they have help me formulate questions to measure the traits students have in goal setting, self-efficacy, self-regulation, motivation,.

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Student Self Directed Learning This blog is about my developments in understanding student learning. Friday, March 11, What makes a good learner? I'm interested in finding out what makes a good learner - focusing on the year group.

I know there is a billion pages of research written on this topic but I want to start with this article which recently caught my attention. Brave kids are going to be the ones who take risks and amass experiences. They can use those experiences powerfully in their learning and growing. They quickly establish what they love and loathe and then they are more likely to create a life they love. They are also going to be the students who take learning risks that lead to lateral, out of the box thinking.

The world needs that kind of thinker. Bravery is about taking on daunting challenges; feeling the fear and doing it anyway. Bravery is not the absence of fear. This implies that fear is something to be ashamed of. Fear is human and to be expected, but it also needs to be overcome.

It comes with modelling, teaching and explaining. A high school student can study as many as nine different subjects with nine different teachers and nine different sets of expectations. It is impossible to thrive under those circumstances unless a child is highly organised.

Fortunately, organisation is something we can teach. We can also employ aids like diaries, planners and study schedules. Learning happens slowly and consistently. Take for example the process we went through when we learned to read.

There were steps, from holding a book the right way up, to recognising letters to phonetics, years of practising and finally fluency. It is the willingness to practise that contributes to success as a student. Consistency is becoming less common in adolescents. In each of these areas, there needs to be a mastery of some basic skills that only comes with practise. Failure is one of the greatest tools in the learning process.

Unfortunately, too many people are simply overwhelmed by the feeling of failure rather than being able to stand back and look at the lessons it can teach us. It is amazing that all of the over five billion humans on earth are each different, though we may share many characteristics with others with similar temperaments and cultures and life experiences.

Understanding more about ourselves, though, can help us make better decisions about what kinds of circumstances and activities in which we are more likely to be satisfied and successful in life. The ultimate ability in learning is knowing what we do not know. If we think we already know something, then we are closed to understanding more completely.

But once we are aware that we do not fully understand something, we are then open to learning more. In over thirty years of university teaching, I have tried to understand the learning process better in order to help students succeed in their college experience. As I have told all my classes, I was trained to be an Anthropologist, not a teacher. Much of what I have learned about teaching has come from students themselves, who have helped me develop my own teaching skills. I also received a fellowship to study educational pedagogy, so I could make my teaching more effective with a wider range of students.

I hope the following materials help you as you seek to learn more effectively. Critical thinking and problem solving skills are major emphases in learning. One of the most common schemes to assess the degree of development in a person's thinking process is Bloom's Taxonomy. We can this model to assess what levels of thinking we are currently using to understand information and events in life, and to develop more in-depth understanding to help resolve the issues that we face individually and as a society.

Initial levels of thinking : Remember [basic knowledge]. Remebering reflects awareness that certain things exist, and being able to recognize, recall, list, and define basic information.

This is the most "traditional" goal in education, and what is foremost in many people's minds when they think of "learning". However, just knowing that something exists is only the first step in the larger context of learning. We all know of cases where someone may be brilliant in remembering facts, but can't really "do" simple things in life. Furthermore, what is considered a "fact" is often really just an opinion, what someone believes to be the "truth" but is actually a personal or cultural perception.

More important, factual knowledge changes rapidly, and so what information is acquired today is soon outdated. Valid factual knowledge is only the foundation upon which larger understandings are based.

We can all stop and realize that if all we know were a long list of facts we would not be able to respond to complex life events successfully. For example, does knowing that there is such things as a gas pedal, brake, and steering wheel enable us to drive a car? We have to understand how they work together in the context of roads, traffic, weather, and many other variables if we are to be safe and effective drivers.

Comprehend ideas and information. Comprehension reflects a deeper understanding of what ideas and information mean. How well can we explain, classify, and give examples that illustrate an idea? It is not enough just to know something exists. It is far richer to understand what ideas and information involve. For example, we may know that there is such a thing as "prejudice," but what does this involve? Apply understanding. Application involves an ability to take basic ideas and information and use them to understand new situations.

This enables us to extend our understandings to include wider contexts and circumstances. For example, we may develop an understanding of the reasons we believe kindness to others is important in life, but can we then extend this to better understand the reasons another group has for "sharing" so that everyone has a similar economic standard Advanced levels of thinking emphasized in "critical thinking" : Analyze ideas and information.

Analysis involves an ability to break ideas and information into their component parts, and to examine how these parts are organized and interact together. As we compare and contrast different ideas, we can better determine where they are relevant and not.

We thus better realize the context of our understanding and how different parts of the system influence each other and the functioning of the whole. For example, how do the values and views of a particular political ideology influence the cohesion and functioning of the society? Evaluate ideas and information. Evaluation involves judging the value of information and ideas based on set criteria, realizing that solutions are not necessarily a matter of absolute right or wrong answers but more functional products and processes given particular contexts.

A belief that provides personal meanings in life may or may not be relevant for dealing with particular situations. We have to ask whether our "understanding" enables us to realistically predict outcomes. For example, how well do "traditional" gender roles which persist from an agricultural subsistence help us function in an industrialized and service economy?

Create new understandings and solutions. Creativity involves taking understandings about how systems function to develop new alternatives in resolving life challenges, including new ideas which help us better explain phenomena and processes.

Innovation is the process where we preorganize our existing understandings of relationships, functions, and principles into new levels of understanding. This is something we all do every day, but usually do not recognize we are doing it. As with evaluation, a major challenge is to be able to validly predict the consequences of our new products and plans in the context of real life. If we understand that components of a system mutually influence each other, we can see processes that may not have been obvious before.

This is the essence of "problem solving", a major goal in all learning in life which is based on our levels of knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, and evaluation in our thinking.

For example, how well are we able to predict the consequences of particular domestic and international policies for the long-term well-being of all segments of our society? What are the lessons of history when we do not consider all the factors in how a social system functions? Note that "science" includes all steps in learning. Whenever any of these processes are missing or ignored, we are left with "opinion" rather than grounded understandings that help us deal effectively with life situations, individually, as a society, and as the human race who share this little spot in the universe.

Where do you stand on each of these levels of learning? Which levels have you developed well? Which levels do you need to develop more in order to be a more effective learner? Although there is some progression in learning abilities across these levels, they are certainly not mutually exclusive or absolutely ordered. For example, we all know of cases where someone may do an excellent job of analysis, but in the absence of grounded knowledge!

People are not totally one level or another, of course. We all reflect all of these levels in different life circumstances. But how much have we developed our learning abilities is critical not only in our education but all of our life situations. The value of a college education is not knowledge in itself, but rather developing your abilities on how to learn a wide variety of things. In anthropology, math, history, biology, and other subjects, you are asked to broaden all of your learning abilities.

In the larger context, we are seeking to develop our abilities to learn, for then we can learn anything we wish or need to understand.