Chapter 6, page 77
Teach students to activate prior conceptions on their own. If a teacher begins every lesson with
discussion questions to activate students’ prior conceptions, her students will likely learn more from her
lessons. But what will happen when the students are studying something on their own, when the teacher is
not present? Without the teacher there to ask those questions, the students may fail to activate their prior
conceptions. Therefore, teachers should teach students to take control of their own learning by teaching
them to activate their prior conceptions on their own. For example, teachers can encourage students to
spend a few minutes asking themselves questions such as these: What do I know about this topic? What
did we learn earlier in the year that is relevant to this topic? What do the pictures in the book tell me about
this topic?
- Provide relevant instruction when student lack sufficient prior conceptions. As we have
seen, students often lack sufficient relevant prior conceptions, which makes it difficult for them to learn
new material. When students’ prior conceptions are too scanty, teachers should help them build up their
conceptual base before starting in on new material. For instance, consider a middle-school teacher
teaching a unit on food webs. Her plan is to have students engage in inquiry by working out a food web
for a small woodland on the school grounds. Unfortunately, she fails to anticipate that many of her
students are not familiar with some of the key kinds of plants and animals (such as fungi, arthropods, and
protists) that they will need to incorporate into their food web. As a result, the students struggle with their
task because they lack the needed prior conceptions. The teacher should have taken time to help students
relearn key ideas that they had forgotten. - Teach retrieval frames. Teachers can also help students learn new material by teaching them
retrieval frames, or schemas that are generally useful across many different specific learning topics. For
example, suppose a class is studying a sixth-grade social studies text in which each chapter describes a
different nation. The teacher could help students remember the information in each chapter better by
teaching them this set of categories:
NATIONS:
people
language
geography
government
religion
customs
economy _____
Students can use this schema whenever they study a new nation to help them remember the important
information about that nation.
Why do schemas such as these help students learn more? One reason is that the schema helps
students select which information to encode into long-term memory as they are learning. A student using
the nation schema will know that it is important to remember that Morocco’s official language is Arabic
and that the government is a constitutional monarchy with a powerful king and a parliament. Second, the
schemas aid retrieval from LTM. Students can use schemas to make sure they do not leave out important
categories of information (customs, economy, and so on) as they are recalling what they know about
Morocco.