Chemistry Reference
In-Depth Information
been used to characterise how students describe and evaluate themselves as aca-
demic learners and is considered to have a reciprocal relationship with academic
achievement (Marsh & Martin,
2011
). That is, just as high achievement is likely to
lead to a student holding a positive academic self-concept, actually having a
positive academic self-concept can influence achievement. A positive self-concept
about oneself as a chemistry student is likely to be especially important when
learning material that cannot be immediately seen to
. This is impor-
tant, as learning of complex and abstract material is not a quick process, but may
rather take place over extended periods such as weeks and months.
'
make sense
'
4.3 Learning as a Slow Process: (1) The Bottleneck
in the System
Research into cognition suggests that the conscious processing of information is
highly dependent upon a component of our mental apparatus referred to as
working
'
memory
(Baddeley,
2003
). There is much evidence that a good deal of our
cognitive processing (including much we would sensibly class as thinking) occurs
pre-consciously (Taber,
2013b
)—however, working memory is
'
we do our
conscious thinking, planning and problem-solving. Yet, working memory has been
shown to have very modest capacity, such that we can only mentipulate a very limited
amount of novel information at any one time. This has implications both for planning
effective teaching and for how learners experience learning of complex material.
Teaching that presents new concepts and information at too great a rate is unlikely to
lead to effective learning as it will overload working memory (Jong,
2010
). This is not
only inefficient but is likely to be demotivating, as the learner will usually be aware
that they are not effectively juggling all the new information and so is likely to feel
stressed by the mismatch between learning demands and apparent learning capacity.
The constructivist teacher needs therefore to ensure that the pace of meeting
novel material matches what learners can effectively process. However, this is not
easy to judge because the perceived complexity of information presented is sub-
jective in the sense that it depends upon how an individual is able to conceptualise it
in terms of existing conceptual frameworks. Our cognitive systems spontaneously
'
where
'
'
information to more efficiently use working memory (Mathy & Feldman,
2012
), but this generally relies upon recognising
familiar
patterns in information
perceived. Teachers, as subject experts, may underestimate the complexity of what
is being presented as perceived by a student who is a relative novice. For example,
equations representing common chemical reactions may actually be perceived by
novices as complex strings (Taber & Bricheno,
2009
).
Also, a system that looks very complicated to one learner might spontaneously
trigger an analogy with something familiar to another learner, such that it is more
readily related to, and so accommodated within, existing mental structures. Here,
individual differences become very important. When asked to generate their own
analogies for scientific concepts, learners may offer quite idiosyncratic examples
chunk
'
Search WWH ::
Custom Search