The Brain and Learning

Two new resources on how people learn and styles that can be used are found at:

Practical Application of Current Brain Research
http://www.brains.org/ 
This site is dedicated to helping the classroom teacher with articles on topics ranging from classroom differentiated teaching to brain development at different stages.  Also there is video's on modeling how to set up a Student Centered classroom. The student centered classroom is one that has different learning styles in mind when thinking and planning the instruction.  The strategies and articles help the teacher focus on the student to find various ways of reaching students.  There is also a free newsletter, Hot topics, and workshops available for the teacher.


The Information Processing Approach to Cognition
http://www.edpsycinteractive.org/topics/cogsys/infoproc.html

This site shows the model of how information is processed in the brain and what happens to the information it receives.  This model reminded me of a situation in my education class where the professor asked the class to instruct her on making a peanut butter sandwich.  The information we gave her clearly left out vital instructions that we 'assumed' she would know.  For example, we told her "to put the peanut butter on the bread" and as directed she 'put' the closed jar of peanut butter 'on' the bread. The adult learner is assumed to have the prior knowledge that putting the peanut butter on the bread equated to taking off the lid, getting a knife, getting butter out and then spreading the peanut butter on the bread. This exercise was to show that children do not have the prior knowledge while learning and that we needed to impart the information in a way that would make the information relevant and extend into the long term memory for future recall.