Learning to Learn

How Memory, Focus and Good Teaching Can Work Together to Help Kids Learn by Katrina Schwartz (Mind/Shift, April 2015), shares these points about learning made by William Klemm, senior professor of neuroscience at Texas A&M University, speaking at the Learning and the Brain conference "Making Lasting Memories"...

“'The more you teach students how to learn, the less time you have to spend teaching curriculum because they can [understand] it on their own....  I think the real problem is that students have not learned how to be competent learners.  They haven’t learned this because we haven’t taught them....'”

"Klemm believes the Internet makes students lazy.  'When students rely on the Internet for knowledge, they are programming themselves to look for information on the Internet and not in their heads,' he said.  When asked to recall the information they just looked up, they don’t remember it as well.  Instead, they remember how to find the same information again on the Internet..."

"When a student has an experience of learning, he holds that new information in his short-term memory while the brain consolidates it and prepares it for long-term storage.  The problem is, short-term or working memory can’t hold very much information.  Often students become distracted immediately after learning something, and that new sensory input crowds out the lesson before it can be used for thinking and building new knowledge."

Contributed by Kirsten Haugen

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