6. Learning With Understanding: Seven Principles | Learning and Understanding: Improving Advanced Study of Mathematics and Science in U.S. High Schools |The National Academies Press

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Learning with Understanding: Seven Principles

During the last four decades, scientists have engaged in research that has increased our understanding of human cognition, providing greater insight into how knowledge is organized, how experience shapes understanding, how people monitor their own understanding, how learners differ from one another, and how people acquire expertise. From this emerging body of research, scientists and others have been able to synthesize a number of underlying principles of human learning. This growing understanding of how people learn has the potential to influence significantly the nature of education and its outcomes.

The committee’s appraisal of advanced study is organized around this research on how people learn (see, for example, Greeno, Collins, and Resnick, 1996; National Research Council [NRC], 2000b; 2001a; Shepard, 2000). Our appraisal also takes into account a growing understanding of how people develop expertise in a subject area (see, for example, Chi, Feltovich, and Glaser, 1981; NRC, 2000b). Understanding the nature of expertise can shed light on what successful learning might look like and help guide the development of curricula, pedagogy, and assessments that can move students toward more expert-like practices and understandings in a subject area. To make real differences in students’ skill, it is necessary both to understand the nature of expert practice and to devise methods that are appropriate to learning that practice.

The design of educational programs is always guided by beliefs about how students learn in an academic discipline. Whether explicit or implicit, these ideas affect what students in a program will be taught, how they will be taught, and how their learning will be assessed. Thus, educational program designers who believe students learn best through memorization and repeated practice will design their programs differently from those who hold that students learn best through active inquiry and investigation.

The model for advanced study proposed by the committee is supported by research on human learning and is organized around the goal of fostering