Jesse is a world leader in the integration of the science of learning into formal teaching settings. He is an Adjunct Associate Professor at the University of Lethbridge and Director at The Academy for the Scholarship of Learning. Huge advocate of the science of learning, he provides people with ideas about how they can use it in their classrooms. Jesse holds a PhD in Psychology from the University of Wales, Bangor.
As an expert in the area of The Science of Learning, I have ignored business training needs because of a couple of comments on previous articles about how businesses don’t want their workers trained to think because that might cause unrest in a business.
The transfer of knowledge or learning from one situation or environment to another is one of the central long-term goals of any educational endeavor. As Bjork said in his 1994 work on training, “… long-term goal of training is to produce a mental representation of the knowledge or skill in question that allows for flexible access to that knowledge or skill. We would like the learner to be able to generalize appropriately, that is, to be able to draw on what was learned during training in order to perform adequately in real-world conditions that differ from the conditions of training.”
I have written a couple of times about the link between higher order thinking skills and moral development but a recent comment on another article has prompted me to visit the subject again. The comment was that empathy is needed alongside higher order thinking skills in order for us to make the world a better place. Empathy is needed and although basic empathy begins to be developed in very young children, the full expression of empathy requires very abstract thinking and is included in one of the higher order thinking skills: metacognition.
The Science of Learning is a compilation of the principles that underlie exactly what we know about how people learn. This includes the application of that knowledge to formal learning experiences – classrooms and such. Although important for general learning, the real need that I have tended to focus on for the past year is learning higher-order thinking skills.
As methods of teaching go, lectures are the most widely used (80 - 90%) method of teaching in higher education today with about the least amount of effectiveness of any form of teaching.
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