How Humans Learn: The Science and Stories Behind Effective College Teaching (Teaching and Learning in Higher Education) - Hardcover

Eyler, Joshua R.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1946684651 ISBN 13: 9781946684653

Verlag: WEST VIRGINIA UNIV PR, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

Even on good days, teaching is a challenging profession. One way to make the job of college instructors easier, however, is to know more about the ways students learn. How Humans Learn aims to do just that by peering behind the curtain and surveying research in fields as diverse as developmental psychology, anthropology, and cognitive neuroscience for insight into the science behind learning.

The result is a story that ranges from investigations of the evolutionary record to studies of infants discovering the world for the first time, and from a look into how our brains respond to fear to a reckoning with the importance of gestures and language. Joshua R. Eyler identifies five broad themes running through recent scientific inquiry—curiosity, sociality, emotion, authenticity, and failure—devoting a chapter to each and providing practical takeaways for busy teachers. He also interviews and observes college instructors across the country, placing theoretical insight in dialogue with classroom experience.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Joshua Eyler is the director of the Center for Teaching Excellence and adjunct associate professor of humanities at Rice University. He has a PhD in medieval studies from the University of Connecticut and has published on a range of topics, including evidence-based pedagogy, technology in the classroom, and disability studies.

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Even on good days, teaching is a challenging profession. One way to make the job of college instructors easier, however, is to know more about the ways students learn. How Humans Learn aims to do just that by peering behind the curtain and surveying research in fields as diverse as developmental psychology, anthropology, and cognitive neuroscience for insight into the science behind learning.

The result is a story that ranges from investigations of the evolutionary record to studies of infants discovering the world for the first time, and from a look into how our brains respond to fear to a reckoning with the importance of gestures and language. Joshua R. Eyler identifies five broad themes running through recent scientific inquiry—curiosity, sociality, emotion, authenticity, and failure—devoting a chapter to each and providing practical takeaways for busy teachers. He also interviews and observes college instructors across the country, placing theoretical insight in dialogue with classroom experience.

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How Humans Learn

The Science And Stories Behind Effective College Teaching

By Joshua R. Eyler

West Virginia University Press

Copyright © 2018 West Virginia University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-946684-65-3

Contents

Acknowledgments, 
Introduction, 
1. Curiosity, 
2. Sociality, 
3. Emotion, 
4. Authenticity, 
5. Failure, 
Epilogue, 
Notes, 
Bibliography, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Curiosity

We ascended as a species through incandescent curiosity — that hallmark of scientists in every century — at play in the world.

— Barbara Kiser, "Learning Through Doing," Nature

Curiosity is nearly universal in babies, and, in our culture at least, continues to propel children, intellectually, through early childhood. Beyond early childhood, however, its fate rests in great part on the people and experiences that surround and shape a child's daily life. While there are some situations where it would not be good to ask too many questions, or to investigate too persistently, there is a clear empirical link between the hungry mind and the educated mind.

— Susan Engel, The Hungry Mind

I only began drinking coffee shortly after my daughter Lucy was born. That may be hard for some to believe, but it is true. Oh, I was no caffeine-saint, but diet soda had always been my poison. When the sleep deprivation that accompanies parenthood set in, I realized I needed something that had a little bit more octane in it, and I finally switched to coffee, much to my wife's delight. Why am I telling you, dear readers, about coffee? Because of our red coffee cups, that's why. We had, at that time, two red coffee cups that were bigger than all the others. Given the amount of sleep that had abandoned me, I often used these cups in the vain hopes that some amount of coffee might restore me to my previous levels of wakefulness. Sadly, this experiment failed, but another one quickly began.

At about six months of age, I noticed that Lucy became deeply curious about these red cups. She would stare at them, reach her hand out to touch them, rub them (when they were not hot), and try to grab them. She did this with many things around the house, frequently attempting to put them in her mouth as well. For her, learning was about necessity: "That's an interesting looking cup. I need to touch it RIGHT NOW." It was about relevance: "I wonder if that funny red cup is important for my daily needs." It was about trial and error: "I have judged this cup and determined that it is not of immediate significance." I could see all of this being played out concretely each time I drank from one of the cups.

What was revelatory for me, however, was the completely unbridled curiosity I witnessed from her in those moments. I began to wonder how, as a teacher, I could spark the same kind of intellectual curiosity in my students — about the Middle Ages as opposed to, say, red cups. We were all children once, so what happens to this curiosity that was once the driving force of our daily lives? This key question sent me on the quest for information that I document in this chapter. The more I looked, the more I noticed that many of the arrows began to point in one direction: curiosity is an essential part of the way human beings learn, and it always has been. In order to learn something, we must first wonder about it. This was true of our distant ancestors, and it is true of all of us. Somewhere between the time when children are very young and when they make their way to our college classrooms, however, some of this curiosity gets lost.

Let's go find it.

What Is Curiosity?

Any discussion of curiosity must first begin with the thorny question of definitions. Nearly every article I read about curiosity while conducting research for this project contained some version of the question, "How can we possibly talk about curiosity if we cannot specifically define it?" In fact, perhaps the best place to start my discussion is with the recent declaration by Min Jeong Kang and her coauthors that "despite the importance of curiosity, its psychological and neural underpinnings remain poorly understood." As a biological response, or even as an intellectual construct, curiosity is so complex and nuanced that the only thing scholars can really agree on is its importance. George Loewenstein, one of the foremost researchers on curiosity, has summarized this point of consensus nicely: "Curiosity has been consistently recognized as a critical motive that influences human behavior in both positive and negative ways at all stages of the life cycle. It has been identified as a driving force in child development ... and as one of the most important spurs to educational attainment." Loewenstein's depiction of the trait's significance cuts across many spheres here, demonstrating both the breadth of the field with respect to the study of curiosity, as well as the reasons for the disparate approaches to the subject. Researchers are bringing to the table a host of methodologies from a variety of disciplines. This is never a bad thing, of course, and the outcome has been important discoveries and multiple lenses through which to view curiosity.

Once we move past the recognized importance of curiosity, though, the multidisciplinary nature of the subject makes things a bit muddy. I'm okay with muddiness as long as we are eventually able to see through to the object itself, and this is the case with curiosity, though its shape and size may look different from what we would expect. Curiosity has been sliced and diced, categorized and recategorized, divided and subdivided, all in an attempt to figure out what it is and whether distinct types of it are at play at various times. Some studies tackle the nature of curiosity head on, while others try to avoid this quagmire by reframing the concept into something else closely related. Interest, novelty, and wonder are all analogous ideas that have been studied in order to isolate a particular aspect of curiosity that could yield verifiable insights. For similar reasons, some have posited that curiosity is a kind of exploration or have linked it to creativity.

Those who study curiosity on its own terms, though, have taken a number of approaches to defining it. In the landmark article from which his earlier comments were taken, Loewenstein sought to cull through the many descriptions and explanations of curiosity in order to derive a definition that could readily be tested. To do so, he first analyzed the dominant theories that governed our understanding of curiosity for much of the twentieth century. Two approaches emerged as being foundational to our early conceptualization of curiosity, both of which fit under the umbrella of behaviorism — a school of thought that was very much in vogue in the early part of the twentieth century. One of these approaches saw curiosity as being a series of behavioral responses to stimuli. The other largely stemmed from the work of Daniel Berlyne, who diverged from this earlier view and began to suggest in the 1950s and 60s that curiosity was a biological drive stemming from an arousal brought on by novelty. In Berlyne's view, it is this drive-arousal pairing that steers our behavior.

What bothered Loewenstein about these definitions was the inability to test any of them. Above all else, he felt that the study of curiosity was in desperate need of this kind of operational definition. As a result, Loewenstein proposed that curiosity is an "information gap," which he explains...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: WEST VIRGINIA UNIV PR
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2018
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1946684651
• ISBN 13: 9781946684653
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 312
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar