How Do Students Think and Learn? How Is Student Progress Assessed?

• In Event: Top 20 Principles From Psychology for Pre-K–12 Teaching and Learning

Abstract

APA’s “Teacher Needs Survey” of over 4,000 k-12 respondents revealed teachers’ greatest needs for professional development to be in instructional skills. Eight of the “Top 20” principles are about how students think and learn. Three will be presented in greater detail.
Principle 1: Student’ beliefs or perceptions about intelligence and ability affect their cognitive functioning and learning.
Explanation: Students can view intelligence as either a “fixed” trait or malleable.
Relevance for Teachers: Teachers can facilitate a “growth mindset” by focusing on student effort (not ability).
Principle 2: What students already know affects their learning.
Explanation: Learning consists of either adding to students’ knowledge or transforming students’ knowledge, which occurs when knowledge is inconsistent or erroneous.
Relevance for Teachers: Teachers can facilitate conceptual growth by engaging students in meaningful interaction with the information to be learned and facilitate conceptual change by strategies that precipitating cognitive conflict/dissonance in students.
Principle 3: Students’ cognitive development and learning are not limited by general stages of development.
Explanation: Students can evidence higher-level thinking and learn more easily when: there is some biological basis for the knowledge to be acquired, they have knowledge in an area, they interact with more capable others or challenging materials, and they participate in familiar sociocultural contexts.
Relevance for Teachers: Teachers can foster student reasoning by linking it to knowledge domains/contexts where students have knowledge, pitching new material at a moderate distance from students’ current level of functioning, placing students into mixed-ability groups, and familiarizing students with schooling and classroom culture.
Principle 4: Learning is based on content, so generalizing learning to new contexts is not spontaneous but instead needs to be facilitated.
Principle 5: Acquiring long-term knowledge and skill is largely dependent on practice.
Principle 6: Clear, explanatory, and timely feedback to students is important for learning.
Principle 7: Students’ self-regulation assists learning and self-regulatory skills can be taught.
Principle 8: Student creativity can be fostered.

Psychological science contributes to how assessment can be used to facilitate student learning. One of the three principles on assessment will be featured in the session.
Principle 18. Formative and summative assessments are both important and useful, but require different approaches and interpretations.
Explanation. Formative assessments aim to guide classroom instruction. Summative describes assessments that aim to evaluate progress against a benchmark and are used to for overall judgments about student learning or program effectiveness.
Relevance for Teachers. Teachers can use formative assessments to increase student learning and can enhance their effectiveness.
19. Students’ skill and knowledge is best measured with assessment processes that are grounded in psychological science with well-defined standards for quality and fairness.
20. Making sense of assessment data depends on clear, appropriate, and fair interpretation.
References
Mayer, R.E. (2011). Applying the science of learning. Boston, MA Pearson.
Bjorklund, D. F. (2012). Children’s thinking: Cognitive development and individual differences (5th Ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.
Wylie, C., & Lyon, C. (2012, June). Formative assessment – Supporting students’ learning. R & D Connections (No. 19). Retrieved from the Educational Testing Service website.

Author

• Joan Lucariello, CUNY Graduate Ctr