How Students Learn

How do you get a fourth-grader excited about history? How do you even begin to persuade high school students that mathematical functions are relevant to their everyday lives? In this volume, practical questions that confront every classroom teacher are addressed using the latest exciting research on cognition, teaching, and learning. How Students Learn: History, Mathematics, and Science in the Classroom builds on the discoveries detailed in the bestselling How People Learn. Now, these findings are presented in a way that teachers can use immediately, to revitalize their work in the classroom for even greater effectiveness. Organized for utility, the book explores how the principles of learning can be applied in teaching history, science, and math topics at three levels: elementary, middle, and high school. Leading educators explain in detail how they developed successful curricula and teaching approaches, presenting strategies that serve as models for curriculum development and classroom instruction. Their recounting of personal teaching experiences lends strength and warmth to this volume. The book explores the importance of balancing students' knowledge of historical fact against their understanding of concepts, such as change and cause, and their skills in assessing historical accounts. It discusses how to build straightforward science experiments into true understanding of scientific principles. And it shows how to overcome the difficulties in teaching math to generate real insight and reasoning in math students. It also features illustrated suggestions for classroom activities. How Students Learn offers a highly useful blend of principle and practice. It will be important not only to teachers, administrators, curriculum designers, and teacher educators, but also to parents and the larger community concerned about children's education.Table of ContentsFront Matter1 IntroductionPart I HISTORY - 2 Putting Principles into Practice: Understanding History3 Putting Principles into Practice: Teaching and Planning4 They Thought the World Was Flat? Applying the Principles of How People Learn in Teaching High School HistoryPart II MATHEMATICS- 5 Mathematical Understanding: An Introduction6 Fostering the Development of Whole-Number Sense: Teaching Mathematics in the Primary Grades7 Pipes, Tubes, and Beakers: New Approaches to Teaching the Rational-Number System8 Teaching and Learning FunctionsPart III SCIENCE - 9 Scientific Inquiry and How People Learn10 Teaching to Promote the Development of Scientific Knowledge and Reasoning About Light at the Elementary School Level11 Guided Inquiry in the Science Classroom12 Developing Understanding Through Model-Based InquiryA FINAL SYNTHESIS: REVISITING THE THREE LEARNING PRINCIPLES - 13 Pulling ThreadsBiographical Sketches of Committee Members and ContributorsIndex