6 How Do Students Learn?

For the first time in her still-new teaching career, Willa had begun to observe students closely. For her first couple of years of teaching, Willa had focused on getting her feet on the ground. As a new teacher, Willa really had no choice but to focus on herself and her teaching practices. She was still learning the ropes, figuring out how to hold everything together. But with a couple of years of tenuous teaching experience under her belt, Willa was now able to take a deep breath and look around her at the students she was engaging. And what she noticed shocked her. Willa could see that the motions she had been going through were in many instances grossly missing the mark. Until now, Willa had barely noticed the up-and-down, on-again off-again impact of her inexperienced instruction. Willa thus resolved to pay much closer attention to students, from now on. 

Learning

The prior chapter on teaching theories had a lot to do with how students learn. Yet the prior chapter focused more on instructional methods than on what the student expects and experiences while learning. In this chapter, view your teaching from the student’s perspective as to how they see and experience learning. In other words, set aside teaching theories and practices, to consider how students encounter the classroom, its instruction, and the curriculum, and what they see as learning. Isn’t that the teacher’s challenge, to place yourself in the student’s place, to see how instructional activities influence student behavior? This chapter explores each main feature of the student experience of teaching practices. Take this chapter as an introduction to those primary instructional practices. Later chapters address several of the following topics in significantly greater detail, including how to plan and improve these practices. 

Presentation

As they begin the process of learning, students first encounter some form of stimulus, or multiple stimuli, that the teacher has chosen. Teachers may begin by assigning a reading, or they may lecture with or without a slide show, demonstration, worked problems, video, audio, or other stimuli. You could alternatively begin with a pre-test or worksheet to help you gauge student knowledge and skill, so as not to teach what students already know. Pre-tests can also show students their limitations. Or you might begin with paired work around a worksheet or group work around a project, with an instructional resource to which students may refer. But generally, students expect and need some form of presenting stimuli. You know your instructional objective, aligned to the course, curriculum, and standards. You have a sense of students’ current knowledge and skill, so that you know that on which you must build. Your challenge and opportunity is to select the best combination of stimuli at the right comprehension level, in the right quantity, and in the best order. Too much reading, then students won’t do it. Too much lecture, then you will stultify students. A poorly designed slide show, then you will confuse students. Lecture when you should instead demonstrate, then students won’t comprehend. Your choice of clear and well designed stimuli is critical to student learning. Focus on choosing, designing, and implementing the right stimuli. 

Comprehension

As they continue the process of learning, students need to reach a reasonable level of comprehension. They must not only hear or see the stimuli, but they must also process the stimuli internally. Comprehension first requires attention. Students must be physically, mentally, and emotionally ready to attend, and then find the stimulus sufficiently clear and engaging to pay attention. Students must then identify the priority information that they hope to retain, or in other words must concentrate, so that they can mentally mull, elaborate, or process that information. Allowing students intervals to process during presentations can be critical to their comprehension. They should pause frequently during readings to reflect over the information, just as you should pause frequently during lectures and slide shows, allowing students to understand what they have just heard and seen. 

Recording

As they continue their learning, students may need or wish to record what they have comprehended from your assigned reading or from your lecture, slide show, or other demonstration or presentation. Recording serves the dual purpose of helping students process the presented information and creating a crystallized record to which they may refer later to rehearse and refresh the information, even if the reading, lecture, slide show, or other presentation remains available to them. Taking notes is the common way that students record presented information, although they may alternatively draw diagrams, mind maps, or other graphic organizers, or annotate materials, worksheets, or outlines already supplied. The physical activity involved in handwritten note taking can aid the mental process of identifying, prioritizing, and summarizing the presented information. Encourage students to take notes, but help them do so in the most useful manner. Discourage efforts to transcribe everything presented. Transcription fails to help students identify critical information, prioritize that information, paraphrase information accurately as a way of demonstrating comprehension, and organize information, showing relationships among constructs. Teach students those better note-taking skills. 

Processing

As students proceed with their learning, beyond encountering and comprehending the new information you present, students need in some manner to process that information. To process information generally means to turn it over in one’s mind, which might include to recall it accurately, rehearse or paraphrase it, further define or extend it, and reflect on its import, use, value, and relationship to other constructs. The more processing, the better. Importantly, processing allows students to connect the new information with their prior knowledge, reordering their frameworks or schema. Processing can thus include storing new information in a mental location, connected with other related information, from which the student can readily retrieve it. Indeed, the more connections the student makes for the new information, the more readily the student will be able to recall the information. The relative degrees of processing that students do with the new information that you present may be what most separates effective from ineffective learners.

Remembering

To learn, though, students must do more than simply encounter and comprehend your presentations, and process the new information usefully to ensure that they understand its use, value, and relationships. Students must also remember the new information. Recall our definition for learning that it involves a persistent change in behavior. Students comprehend lots of new information. They also quickly forget lots of new information. You’ll see students nodding appreciatively in class as you lecture, and they’ll respond correctly to your prompts. The next day, though, they’ve forgotten much of what you just thought you taught. To remember, students must not only comprehend the new information and store it accurately within their mental frameworks, where they can readily retrieve it. They must also rehearse it at increasingly spaced intervals, an hour later, four hours later, a day later, several days later, and yet again weeks later. As a later chapter addresses in greater detail, that’s how memory works. Design your instruction not just for comprehension and processing but also for remembering, with frequent, spaced rehearsing and retrieval. 

Engaging

As students continue in their process of learning, they benefit from further engaging the new information in ways that help them incorporate, enliven, and embody it, rather than simply hold it faintly in mind as an abstract concept. The mind/body duality that we generally picture misses how learning works. Learning involves behavior, not just mentation. Even in a strictly academic setting, students must generally use not just their minds but also their eyes, ears, mouths, hands, and bodies to reflect their knowledge. They must do research, write reports, create slide shows, make oral presentations, and solve problems on screen or paper by physically manipulating symbols. Students may also have to move, communicate, and interact socially in groups to complete projects. They may even have to build models and perform dissections and experiments. Actively engaging subjects in meaningful ways, rather than passively receiving them, increases student attention, interest, motivation, processing, and retention. Design your instruction to increase student engagement of your subject.

Reasoning

As students continue in their learning process, your deeper goal for them should be to help them do more than just store, remember, and retrieve new information but also to reason using that new information. Students grow intellectually when they evaluate new information, extend it into new contexts and forms, deploy it in justification of proposed actions, and engage in other forms of critical thinking. Well-designed instruction gives students those opportunities. Story problems, hypotheticals, and debates are examples of instructional activities that tend to deepen, test, and extend the new information. Even simple exercises like encouraging students to generate examples and non-examples of the new information, and then arrange those examples and non-examples along a spectrum from nearest to farthest, can generate deeper reasoning around the new information’s core aspects. Design your instruction to help students engage in deeper processing of the new information you present. 

Demonstrating

A capstone in the learning process is when students can make their own presentation, demonstration, or recitation of the new information. Confident recitation before other students shows that the student has comprehended, incorporated, and embodied the new information in a way that the student can recall and use it to communicate competently and usefully. Teachers commonly call on students to give mini-recitations in response to the teacher’s questions or prompts. Questions asking for factual information can help students identify, prioritize, rehearse, and recall that information. Yet questions that ask students to reason, apply, and evaluate can move simple recitation into deeper student demonstration of the new information. Arranging for students to make formal presentations of their own, individually and in pairs or groups, can extend those opportunities into rich contexts for thorough exploration and demonstration. Student demonstrations in effect reverse the teacher/student roles, placing the student in the role of teacher and demonstrating full competence. 

Reviewing

To ensure that they retain their learning, students generally engage in periodic review of new information, spurred by the teacher’s quizzes, tests, and final exam. Review prompts retrieval and rehearsal, helping students to move new information from short-term memory to long-term memory. Students may conduct their review from class notes that they produced or from materials that the teacher supplied. Students can benefit from compiling their own outline of their learning across days and weeks of instruction, up to a full-course term. Outlining is a common practice among students, most beneficial when the student writes and organizes the student’s own outline rather than borrowing another’s outline, for the additional processing that doing so requires. But staring at an outline isn’t necessarily an effective review, as a later chapter addresses. Study groups, flashcards, practice problems and essays, and other means of review may enhance retrieval and memory. Promote review, and guide students in the better review practices, as part of your instruction. 

Assessing

For students, instruction generally concludes with assessment, or in student terms, with a quiz, test, or exam. Schools generally require assessments to prove their instruction’s effectiveness against benchmarks and standards. Assessments also rank students competitively and certify to students, parents, accreditors, licensing bodies, employers, or others that students have learned what they should. Yet teachers also use tests, quizzes, and exams to teach, not just to credential. The so-called testing effect, referring to the effect on student learning of students taking frequent tests, whether or not prepared to do well on them, can be a powerful tool for instruction. Students can appreciate and benefit from practice tests as a means of guiding them to priority information and helping them habituate to test format and conditions. Align your assessment to your instruction and to benchmarks and standards. And consider making practice tests a significant part of your instruction. See further details on assessment in a later chapter. 

Reflection

How keen is your ability to discern what students are thinking and experiencing, in the course of your instruction? Do you have colleagues who have better insight into student thinking and behavior than you do? What practice could you adopt to gain a better understanding of what students are going through during the course of your instruction? Are you satisfied with the quality of the readings you assign? How clear are your presentations? Do you pause during your presentations to let students process? Do students take notes during your presentations? What is the quality of their note-taking practices? Does your instruction encourage students to periodically recall and rehearse new information, so that they remember it? How actively do you engage students in their instruction? What engagement exercises, if any, do you include in your instruction? Do you encourage or require students to think critically about your subject? Do students create outlines in your courses? If so, what is the quality of their outlining? Do you teach or confirm outlining or note-taking skills? Do you offer practice tests? If so, are they similar in content, format, and conditions to your final tests or exams?

Key Points

• Students experience instruction as an iterative learning process.

• Students first encounter presentations or stimuli the teacher arranges.

• Students must comprehend the new information in presentations.

• Students often record new information in notes or other organizers.

• Students must process new information to store, retain, and retrieve it.

• Students remember new information by periodically rehearsing it.

• Students benefit in their retention by actively engaging the subject.

• Help students deepen their learning by requiring that they reason.

• Encourage students to demonstrate and recite their new learning. 

• Students typically review new information to retain it for examination.

• Add formative assessments to the examinations your school requires.

Read Chapter 7.