Learning Processes Quotes

As a college student, what really interested me was the human brain and human intelligence.

As a graduate student, I wrote a long paper connecting the dots between mathematical models of learning and language development in children. It was published in a major journal.

Scientists learn about the world in three ways: They analyze statistical patterns in the data, they do experiments, and they learn from the data and ideas of other scientists. The recent studies show that children also learn in these ways.

I decided that since I was trying to teach 'style' of thinking in science and engineering, and 'style' is an art, I should therefore copy the methods of teaching used for the other arts - once the fundamentals have been learned.

We think scientific literacy flows out of how many science facts can you recite rather than how was your brain wired for thinking. And it's the brain wiring that I'm more interested in rather than the facts that come out of the curriculum or the lesson plan that's been proposed.

I've never argued that humans are massively hot-wired. What I was trying to point out was that you can't understand how we learn unless you identify the learning mechanisms. And these have some genetic basis.

Exciting discoveries in neuroscience are allowing us to fit educational methods to new understandings of how the brain develops.

Sharing knowledge is not about giving people something, or getting something from them. That is only valid for information sharing. Sharing knowledge occurs when people are genuinely interested in helping one another develop new capacities for action; it is about creating learning processes.

Developmental scientists like me explore the basic science of learning by designing controlled experiments.

Because psychologists have been able to discover, exactly as in a slow-motion picture, the way the human creature acquires knowledge and habits, the normal child has been vastly helped by what the retarded have taught us.

People's conceptions about themselves and the nature of things are developed and verified through four different processes: direct experience of the effects produced by their actions, vicarious experience of the effects produced by somebody else's actions, judgments voiced by others, and derivation of further knowledge from what they already know by using rules of inference

The possibility of observing the developments of the psychical life of the child as natural phenomena and experimental reactions transforms the school itself in action into a kind of scientific laboratory for the psychogenetic study of man.

I work in a mix of areas and am informed by them all: child development, psycholinguistics, education, and most especially, cognitive neuroscience.

It is with children that we have the best chance of studying the development of logical knowledge, mathematical knowledge, physical knowledge, and so forth.

There are no genes or areas in the brain devoted uniquely to reading. Rather, our ability to read represents our brain's protean capacity to learn something outside our repertoire by creating new circuits that connect existing circuits in a different way.

We do not need to be able to say what "human nature" is in order to be able to say that some training is "against human nature.

Everything from airplanes to kitchen blenders and even chopsticks comes with an instruction manual. Children, despite all their complexity, do not.

The intellectual evolution of the race consists in an increase in the number, delicacy, complexity, permanence and speed of formation of such associations.

The human young must learn to perceive these affordances, in some degree at least, but the young of some animals do not have time to learn the ones that are crucial for survival.

No organism can afford to be conscious of matters with which it could deal at unconscious levels. Broadly, we can afford to sink those sorts of knowledge which continue to be true regardless of changes in the environment, but we must maintain in an accessible place all those controls of behavior which must be modified for every instance. The economics of the system, in fact, pushes organisms toward sinking into the unconscious those generalities of relationship which remain permanently true and toward keeping within the conscious the pragmatic of particular instances.

I wanted to answer big questions about humanity, about how it is that we understand about the world, how we can know as much as we do, why human nature is the way that it is. And it always seemed to me that you find answers to those questions by looking at children.