Blog One EDRG 3344

How do students learn?

According to Jean Piaget learning is the modification of students’ cognitive structures as they interact with and adapt to their environment. Piaget believed that children construct their own knowledge from their experiences. From this point of view it seems that children learn in a social environment. According to the text students gain their knowledge when they are actively involved allowing them to take from previous experiences and cultural backgrounds. Giving them many opportunities to model and discuss their learning. These ideas are based on Vygotsky, Bandura, Piage , and Bruner. The knowledge stored in the students’ brain is not a collection of isolated bits of information; it is instead organized and becomes integrated and interrelated as their knowledge grows. The organization is a cognitive structure and the knowledge is arranged in systems called schemata. Students learn when the existing schemata are enlarged because of assimilated information and when their schemata are restructured to account for new experiences being acted on and accommodated. Also according to the Information Processing Theory children use five general strategies to process information. These are: rehearsal in which they repeat information over and over, predicting where they anticipate what will happen, organizing where they group information, elaborating where they expand on the information presented, and monitoring where they regulate or keep track of progress. As the strategies develop they develop metacognition where one begins to think about their thinking. Students also learn through active involvement in the six components language arts.

What are the six components of Language Arts? How does teaching LA connect to how children learn?

The six components of language arts are listening, talking, reading, writing, viewing, and visually representing. Teaching Language Arts connects to how children learn by incorporating all six of the Language Arts components. For example literature focus units, literature circles, reading and writing workshop and across-the curriculum theme cycles include all six language arts as they read and respond to literature in focus units. As stated before students learn through active involvement and in order to teach the language arts components the students must be actively involved, which is helping them learn. Students can then take what they learned from the components and use them in other theme cycles in subjects like social studies and math.