Tag Archives: cognition/learning/understanding

John Dewey on Freedom, Accomplishment, and Maturity

“A society of free individuals in which all, through their own work, contribute to the liberation and enrichment of the lives of others, is the only environment in which any individual can really grow normally to his full stature.”

John Dewey (1859-1952)

Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.

Term of Art: Metamemory

“metamemory: Knowledge or beliefs about one’s own memory, its strengths and weaknesses, whether one has remembered particular items, and so on. The word is also used to denote regulation or control of memory, as described under metacognition.

[From Greek meta beside or beyond + English memory]”

Excerpted from: Colman, Andrew M., ed. Oxford Dictionary of Psychology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Arnold Toynbee on the Importance of Applying Knowledge

“History not used is nothing, for all intellectual life is action, like practical life, and if you don’t use the stuff,–well, it might as well be dead.”

Arnold J. Toynbee on NBC (1955)

Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.

Daniel Willingham on Reading and Sound

“A lot of technical experiments indicate that sound and meaning are separate in the mind, but everyday examples will probably be enough to make this idea clear. We know meaning and sound are separate because you can know one without the other.”

Excerpted from: Willingham, Daniel T. The Reading Mind: A Cognitive Approach to Understanding How the Mind Reads. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2017.

Term of Art: Metacognition

“metacognition: Knowledge and beliefs about one’s own cognitive processes, an important class of metacognition being metamemory, The term is also sometimes applied to regulation of cognitive functions, including planning, checking, or monitoring, as when one plans one’s cognitive strategy for memorizing something, checks one’s accuracy when performing mental arithmetic, or monitors one’s comprehension while reading, and these forms of metacognition are called metacognitive regulation in contradistinction to metacognitive knowledge. Writings on metacognition can be traced back at least as far as De Anima and the Parva Naturalia of the Greek philosopher Aristotle (384-322 BC), and the phenomenon was brought to prominence during the 1970s largely by the US psychologist John H. Flavell (born 1928), who focused attention on developmental aspects of metacognition. In an influential article in the journal Psychological Review in 1977, the US psychologists Richard E. Nisbett (born 1941) and Timothy D. Wilson (born 1951) summarized a range of evidence suggesting that people are often unaware of the factors influencing their own choices, evaluations, and behavior, and that the verbal reports that they give when questioned are often quite erroneous and misleading.”

[From Greek meta beside or beyond + English cognition]

Excerpted from: Colman, Andrew M., ed. Oxford Dictionary of Psychology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Term of Art: Attention

“attention: The focus of consciousness on something in the environment, or on a sensation or an idea. Attention includes a number of elements that are essential to all activities, including

  • arousal: being ready to receive stimuli
  • vigilance: being able to select stimuli from those presented over a broad period of times
  • persistence or continuity: being able to sustain a mental effort and select stimuli that are presented often
  • monitoring: checking for and correcting errors

The length of time in which a child can pay attention to something (the attention span) increases with age, interest, and intelligence level.

Breakdowns in these different elements can cause a variety of problems. A breakdown in vigilance, for example, might cause someone to select or focus on the wrong details. A breakdown in monitoring might lead to repeated careless errors. Persistence or continuity is necessary for a complex task to be completed.”

Excerpted from: Turkington, Carol, and Joseph R. Harris, PhD. The Encyclopedia of Learning Disabilities. New York: Facts on File, 2006.

Jerome Bruner on Deep Learning and Understanding

“Grasping the structure of a subject is understanding it in a way that permits many other things to be related to it meaningfully. To learn structure, in short, is to learn how things are related…. To take an example from mathematics, algebra is a way of arranging knowns and unknowns in equations so that the unknowns are made knowable. The three fundamentals involved…are commutation, distribution, and association. Once a student grasps the ideas embodied by these three fundamentals, he is in a position to recognize wherein “new” equations to be solved are not new at all. Whether the student knows the formal names of these operations is less important for transfer than whether he is able to use them.”

Jerome Bruner

The Process of Education

Excerpted from: Wiggins, Grant, and Jay McTighe. Understanding by Design. Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 1998. 

Term of Art: Reactive Attachment Disorder

“A mental disorder of infancy or early childhood (beginning before age 5 years) characterized by disturbed and developmentally inappropriate patterns of social relating, not resulting from mental retardation or pervasive developmental disorder, evidenced either by a persistent failure to initiate or respond appropriately in social interactions (inhibited type), or by indiscriminate sociability without appropriate selective attachments (uninhibited type). By definition, there must also be evidence of pathogenic care, assumed to be responsible for the disturbed social relating, in the form of persistent disregard for the child’s basic emotional or physical needs or repeated changes in major attachment figures.”

Excerpted from: Colman, Andrew M., ed. Oxford Dictionary of Psychology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Ted Sizer on Public Education and Public Engagement

“Few citizens really know what’s going on in their schools. They settle for the familiar and ignore the substance.”

Theodore R. Sizer (1932-2009)

Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.

A. Lawrence Lowell on the Accumulation of Knowledge

“[On why universities have so much learning] ‘The freshmen bring a little in and the seniors take none out, to it accumulates through the years.”

A. Lawrence Lowell

Quoted in Reader’s Digest, May 1949

Excerpted from: Shapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.