TTC Teaching Company - How We Learn 2012
360 MB (378,290,220 bytes)
Learning is a lifelong adventure. It starts in your mother's womb, accelerates to high speed in infancy and childhood, and
continues through every age, whether you're actively engaged in mastering a new skill, intuitively discovering an unfamiliar
place, or just sleeping, which is fundamental to helping you consolidate and hold on to what you've learned. You are truly born to
learn around the clock.
But few of us know how we learn, which is the key to learning and studying more effectively. For example, you may be surprised by
the following:
People tend to misjudge what they have learned well, what they don't yet know, and what they do and do not need to practice.
Moments of confusion, frustration, uncertainty, and lack of confidence are part of the process of acquiring new skills and new
knowledge.
Humans and animals explore their worlds for the sake of learning, regardless of rewards and punishment connected with success.
You can teach an old dog new tricks. In fact, older learners have the benefit of prior knowledge and critical skills—two
advantages in learning.
Shedding light on what's going on when we learn and dispelling common myths about the subject, How We Learn introduces you to this
practical and accessible science in 24 half-hour lectures presented by Professor Monisha Pasupathi of the University of Utah, an
award-winning psychology teacher and expert on how people of all ages learn.
A Course about You
Customers of The Great Courses are already devoted to lifelong learning and may be surprised at how complicated the process of
learning is. We have a single word for it—learn—but it occurs in a fascinating variety of ways, which Professor
Pasupathi recounts in detail. She describes a wide range of experiments that may strike a familiar chord as you recognize
something about yourself or others:
Scripts: We have trouble recalling specific events until we have first learned scripts for those events. Young children are
prodigious learners of scripts, but so are first-time parents, college freshmen, foreign travelers, and new employees.
Variable ratio reinforcement: Children whining for candy are usually refused, but the few occasions when parents give in encourage
maximal display of the behavior. The same principle is behind the success of slot machines and other unpredictable rewards.
Storytelling: Telling stories is fundamentally an act of learning about ourselves. The way we recount experiences, usually shortly
after the event, has lasting effects on the way we remember those experiences and what we learn from them.
Sleeper effect: Have you ever heard something from an unreliable source and later found yourself believing it? Over time, we tend
to remember information but forget the source. Paradoxically, this effect is stronger when the source is less credible.
Dr. Pasupathi's many examples cover the modern history of research on learning—from behaviorist theory in the early 20th
century to the most recent debates about whether IQ can be separated from achievement, or whether a spectrum of different learning
styles and multiple intelligences really exist.
What You Will Learn
You start by examining 10 myths about learning. These can get in the way of making the fullest use of the extraordinary capacity
for learning and include widespread beliefs, such as that college-educated people already know how to maximize learning or that a
person must be interested in a subject in order to learn it.
Professor Pasupathi then covers mistaken theories of learning, such as that lab animals and humans learn in the same way or that
the brain is a tabula rasa, a blank slate that can absorb information without preparation. Babies might seem to be a
counterexample, showing that you can learn from scratch. However, you examine what newborns must know at birth in order for them
to learn so much, so quickly.
Next you explore in depth how humans master different tasks, from learning a native language or a second language, to becoming
adept at a sport or a musical instrument, to learning a new city or a problem-solving strategy, to grasping the distinctive style
of thinking required in mathematics and science. Then you look inside the learning process itself, where many factors come into
play, including what is being learned and the context, along with the emotions, motivations, and goals of the learner. You close
by considering individual differences. Some people seem to learn without effort. How do they do it?
Tips on Learning
Along the way, Professor Pasupathi offers frequent advice on how to excel in many different learning situations:
Mastering material: Testing yourself is a very effective strategy for mastering difficult material. Try taking a blank sheet of
paper and writing down everything you can recall about the subject. Then go back and review the material. Next, try another blank
sheet of paper.
Second-language learning: Becoming fluent in a second language in adulthood is difficult because your brain is tuned to your
native language and misses important clues in the new language. To overcome this obstacle, immerse yourself among native speakers
of the new language.
Motivating a child: When trying to motivate a schoolchild to learn, avoid controlling language, create opportunities to give the
child a sense of choice, and be careful about excessive praise and other forms of rewards, which can actually undermine learning.
Maintaining a learning edge: Middle-aged and older adults can preserve their learning aptitude by exercising to maintain
cardiovascular health, staying mentally active, and periodically trying a new challenge, such as learning to draw or studying new
dance steps.
Adventures in Learning
Winner of prestigious teaching awards from her university's chapter of Psi Chi, the National Honor Society in Psychology, Dr.
Pasupathi brings today's exciting field of learning research alive. Her descriptions of ongoing work in her field, in which she is
a prominent participant, are vivid and insightful, allowing you to put yourself into a given experiment and ask, "How would I
react under these circumstances? What does this tell me about my own approach to learning?"
By the time How We Learn ends, you will appreciate the incredible breadth of what we learn in our lifetimes, understand the
commonality and diversity of human learning experiences, and come away with strategies for enhancing your own adventures in
learning.
"Learning is a human birthright," says Professor Pasupathi. "Everything about us is built for lifelong learning—from our
unusually long childhood and our large prefrontal cortex to our interest in novelty and challenge." And she finds reason for
optimism about the future of humanity due to our almost miraculous capacity to learn.
About Your Professor
Dr. Monisha Pasupathi is Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Utah. She holds a Ph.D. in Psychology from
Stanford University. She joined the faculty at Utah in 1999 after completing a postdoctoral fellowship at the Max Planck Institute
for Human Development in Germany.
Professor Pasupathi has been honored multiple times for her teaching. She was named Best Psychology Professor by her university's
chapter of Psi Chi, the National Honor Society in Psychology. Psi Chi also awarded her the Outstanding Educator Award and Favorite
Professor Award.
Professor Pasupathi's research focuses on how people of all ages learn from their experiences, particularly through storytelling.
She is coeditor of Narrative Development in Adolescence: Creating the Storied Self, and her work has been published widely in
scholarly journals.
Directory of \TTC Teaching Company - How We Learn 2012
01 Myths about Learning.mp3
02 Why No Single Learning Theory Works.mp3
03 Learning as Information Processing.mp3
04 Creating Representations.mp3
05 Categories, Rules, and Scripts.mp3
06 What Babies Know.mp3
07 Learning Your Native Tongue.mp3
08 Learning a Second Language.mp3
09 Learning How to Move.mp3
10 Learning Our Way Around.mp3
11 Learning to Tell Stories.mp3
12 Learning Approaches in Math and Science.mp3
13 Learning as Theory Testing.mp3
14 Integrating Different Domains of Learning.mp3
15 Cognitive Constraints on Learning.mp3
16 Choosing Learning Strategies.mp3
17 Source Knowledge and Learning.mp3
18 The Role of Emotion in Learning.mp3
19 Cultivating a Desire to Learn.mp3
20 Intelligence and Learning.mp3
21 Are Learning Styles Real.mp3
22 Different People, Different Interests.mp3
23 Learning across the Lifespan.mp3
24 Making the Most of How We Learn.mp3
How We Learn.txt
25 File(s) 360 MB (378,290,220 bytes)
TTC Teaching Company - How We Learn 2012
