Strategies For Learning

Learning Strategies

Learning Strategies

Learning Strategies describes a program of research in learning strategies initiated by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in 1976. The goal of the program is to improve learning, decrease training time, and reduce training costs by developing and evaluating instructional materials designed to teach basic intellectual and affective skills. This book records the program's progress and suggests further avenues for research. Comprised of eight chapters, this book begins with an overview of the theoretical underpinnings of the teaching and learning approaches to the improvement of education, followed by a discussion on DARPA's preliminary work on an empirically based learning-strategy training program as well as its efforts to expand and modify the program. In order to provide an intellectual foundation for this program, several fields are surveyed for potential learning strategies, namely, cognitive psychology, artificial intelligence, behavioral modification, and motor learning. An instructional systems development approach for learning strategies is also proposed. The final chapter deals with models of evaluation extant in education and training and discusses the specific application of transactional evaluation to the DARPA Learning Strategies Research Program. This monograph should be of interest to students, teachers, and educational psychologists.

Learning Strategies and Learning Styles

A style is any pattern we see in a person's way of accomplishing a particular type of task. The "task" of interest in the present context is education-learning and remembering in school and transferring what is learned to the world outside of school. Teachers are expressing some sort of awareness of style when they observe a particular action taken by a particular student and then say something like: "This doesn't surprise me! That's just the way he is. " Observation of a single action cannot reveal a style. One's impres sion of a person's style is abstracted from multiple experiences of the person under similar circumstances. In education, if we understand the styles of individual students, we can often anticipate their perceptions and subsequent behaviors, anticipate their misunderstandings, take ad vantage of their strengths, and avoid (or correct) their weaknesses. These are some of the goals of the present text. In the first chapter, I present an overview of the terminology and research methods used by various authors of the text. Although they differ a bit with regard to meanings ascribed to certain terms or with regard to conclusions drawn from certain types of data, there is none theless considerable agreement, especially when one realizes that they represent three different continents and five different nationalities.