Innovation Profile 079

Mind-sized chunks are essential for learning

A skill such as reading, counting or singing requires one to use a large number of pieces of knowledge and individual skills. It is easy to forget that these were learnt individually, sometimes painfully slowly.

In the later years of schooling we expect students to be able to learn tasks and ideas that involve a number of 'chunks' of knowledge/skill. Secondary school and college teachers are sometimes surprised when students need a learning task breaking down into smaller 'mind-sized chunks'.

Digital learning content used in primary schools shows us all how effectively knowledge and skills can be broken into the right-sized chunks to aid learning. We all need this. Sometimes a very able pupil can have great difficulty in grasping what appears to the teacher to be a very simple point.

Have a look at the learning content produced by Sherston. Their product list at http://www.sherston.com gives good descriptions of a very wide range of educational software. Many different techniques are used to enable children to focus on the individual pieces of knowledge and specific skills that must be combined in order to achieve a learning objective.

Consider how many 'chunks' of skill and knowledge are necessary to work with fractions. You must recognise and understand numbers, conceptually understand division of a whole into parts, know the 'code' of how fractions are written and learn new words.

Anything can be split into smaller learning chunks if necessary - ask a teacher of mentally disabled children how small a learning objective they sometimes have to struggle to achieve. Of course the process of learning includes learning how to deal with ever-larger 'chunks' of learning. But the art of teaching must include helping learners to break these chunks down into smaller chunks if they need to.

The techniques of display, presentation, animation and interaction that Sherston use in their software could be applied at any age. Next time someone you are teaching struggles to understand or do the task, challenge yourself to work out which particular bit of the task is causing them the problem.

And then try to find a new way of helping them tackle that specific problem. You may find you also begin to understand better how to do the task.

The Sherston Company Profile on our web site will give you an overview of the company and a list of other Innovation Profiles connected with it.

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If you know of examples of innovative use of ICT-for-learning that others would be interested in, please email innovations@eep-edu.org

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