MEANING AND INSTRUCTIONAL PLANNING

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MEANING AND INSTRUCTIONAL PLANNING
What do we know about how people learn?

• Learners do not merely receive or even discover
  information.
• All learning depends on prior knowledge.
• To understand something is to know relationships.

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Learners do not merely receive or even discover
information.
Learners construct meaning. Learners actively
search for meaning and will try to find
regularity and order in what they see, hear,
read, etc., even when the information with which
they are working is incomplete.
Learners will construct explanations for what
they are learning and that in the beginning these
explanations might be rather naive but will be
revised and may become quite sophisticated as the
learning process proceeds.
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All learning depends on prior knowledge.
Learners try to link new information to what they
already know in order to make it meaningful.
That is, they actively try to incorporate new
information into existing knowledge frameworks
through which the new information becomes
understandable.
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To understand something is to know relationships.
Human knowledge is stored in clusters and
organized into frameworks that people use both to
interpret familiar situations and to reason about
new ones. Pieces of information that are
isolated from such frameworks are the "stuff" of
rote learning. They are not perceived as
meaningful and are usually soon forgotten.
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• There are two kinds of relationships that make
  information meaningful
• The relationship among the elements of the new
  information.
• The relationship between the new information and
  knowledge already held by the learner.