It seems to me that the connection between motivation and learning is the most obvious yet. Obviously, if someone is simply going through the motions to get a grade, they aren't going to remember very much in the long run, nor will the experience be very pleasant. That has certainly happened to me in my life, especially after graduating from high school, as I've taken college classes that I was required to take in order to fulfill a requirement, but wasn't really interested in and knew I would never use. Whether it was true IN REALITY that I would never use the information I can't say at this point. What mattered was that I perceived it as useless, and therefore did just what was necessary to make it through the class, breathed a sigh when I was finally finished, and promptly buried whatever I had put in short-term memory in order to pass the test. Nobody could really call that learning.
So what can an instructor do to facilitate learning? Obviously, the readings this week gave some good techniques. What makes it difficult is when you have some principle that you really must cover and it just isn't easy to think of a way to motivate students to care about it. For example, consider the prepositional phrase. It is actually very important for people to understand what a prepositional phrase is and how to identify one. It is, perhaps, one of the most vital aspects of learning parts of speech, because without understanding what a prepositional phrase is, you will most definitely make mistakes in subject/verb agreement. For example, in the sentence "The group of diplomats makes a lot of noise," a lot of people would instead say, "The group of diplomats make a lot of noise." However, remove the phrase "of diplomats" and it becomes clear that the verb has to be "makes" rather than "make." Even though it is actually very important to know about prepositional phrases, it's pretty difficult to make them gripping and motivational :) Even the name "prepositional phrase" makes people's eyes glaze over. Any ideas?
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You know, this is kind of related to the problem in engineering. A lot of people argue that you have to know calculus before you do engineering. However, having gone through some engineering courses and not having any calculus I can say that I easily learned all the math I needed to do the engineering because I loved the engineering.
ReplyDeleteI'm sure it helped that I was learning it all within a practical context.
Anyways, I think that learning new things within a real-world practical context really help. That being said, you're right about prepositional phrases. I think I would still break out in hives if someone asked me to diagram a sentence and identify all the different pieces.