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Innate and Non-innate learning

I am reading a book called 'What did you ask at school today?' by Kamala V Mukunda. Would like to share some learning. The book is intended for teachers as primary audience, nevertheless, good for any adult to gain deeper understanding on learning process.

She talks about brain structure, innate and non-innate learning aspects and talks about synergy needed between the two in the first two chapters.

Firstly, innate learning is something that would not need explicit training. For example, kids learning the language. They wont feel strained or stressed during this kind of learning, just because they enjoy the process, where as non-innate learning focuses more on class room learning. It is accepted that learning through playful means will have more impact on kids than the impact through the structured learning. A physcologist, David Geary puts it this way - while learning through playful means has more impact, children should be encouraged to learn the skills through structured learning even when there is lack of motivation. Because, not all skills can be taught in playful mood. For example, differentiation and integration in mathematics. To do this, the teacher has to demonstrate and students need to be attentive so that the process can be repeated to wire the concept of differention and integration in the brain.

In this context, the author talks about primary learning, where the students experience and learn, proved to be more effective than secondary learning, where the teacher teaches (passive) the concepts in a structured way. Both methods have their side of advantages and disadvantages. In former case, the students must know what they want to learn and in the latter case, the students must be attentive enough to follow the teacher. Experiments have been conducted to understand the process of knowledge discovery, where one set of students were provided learning infrastructure to learn on their own while the other set of students were provided the same infrastructure, but were asked to experiment along with instruction manual. At the end of the experiment, the basic concepts were examined and both the teams showed good understanding of the concepts. When the concepts were examined a year later, the latter team had emerged stronger. Thus, it was concluded that Guided knowledge discovery is more effective than Self learning knowledge discovery. Interesting ... isnt it?

Also, it is important to teach the kids to differentiate between the concepts and process from the early age. For example, how do you define 'heat' and how do you explain 'perspiration'.
In the next post, I will share my learning on 'Constructivism', 'Procedural learning'.

Its an interesting book, still going through, will post bits and pieces as I cruise ...

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