The Discovery Learning Theory
Summary of Article: This article briefly discusses the history of Discovery Learning , what it looks like in practice , and a few positives and negatives about the theory. According to Coffey, this theory was founded by Jerome Bruner, a psychologist and cognitive learning theorist, in 1967 (2009). The author details a few of the goals of the Discovery Learning theory and one that stood out was to promote “a ‘deep’ understanding.” As an educator, I strive to instill a deep understanding of concepts in my students.
Description of Theory: Discovery Learning really puts the majority of the learning responsibility on the student. It’s practices encourage students to ask questions, do research, think about their personal …show more content…
The Elaboration Theory was introduced by Charles Reigeluth, an American educational theorist in 1979 (Pappas, 2014). According to Pappas, “The Elaboration Theory relies upon the idea that instruction should be offered to learners in increasing order of difficulty.” (2014) Some of the mentioned strategies are: organizing the structure of course work, the simple to complex theory and summaries of the content. The concepts of topical and spiral sequencing are also discussed in this article. This theory seems to be supported by a lot of the current state …show more content…
This approach is very effective with my students. They need to firmly understand a concept before it becomes more difficult. They benefit from topical sequencing as opposed to spiral because with spiral, skills are touched on here and there and eventually become more complex. With my current students, they need a concept to be fully developed before moving to a new concept. I am noticing that more and more with math. The elaboration theory emphasizes the importance of having an organized curriculum or coursework. This idea is very important and the way that the Elaboration Theory organizes coursework, by increasing level of difficulty, seems like it would be very appropriate for a lot of students. I can see one instance in which this theory could be a hindrance, gifted or higher achieving students. For example, I had a student that picked up math concepts extremely quickly. He needed very little instruction or support from me and was very successful. To him, breaking down how to add a subtract multi-digit numbers into, first adding 1-digit numbers and moving up to multi-digit numbers really hindered him. He lost interest in lessons because he could do the standard algorithm with no problem. He didn’t need to draw pictures of tens and ones to understand; he just knew what to do. For students like
Summary of Article: This article briefly discusses the history of Discovery Learning , what it looks like in practice , and a few positives and negatives about the theory. According to Coffey, this theory was founded by Jerome Bruner, a psychologist and cognitive learning theorist, in 1967 (2009). The author details a few of the goals of the Discovery Learning theory and one that stood out was to promote “a ‘deep’ understanding.” As an educator, I strive to instill a deep understanding of concepts in my students.
Description of Theory: Discovery Learning really puts the majority of the learning responsibility on the student. It’s practices encourage students to ask questions, do research, think about their personal …show more content…
The Elaboration Theory was introduced by Charles Reigeluth, an American educational theorist in 1979 (Pappas, 2014). According to Pappas, “The Elaboration Theory relies upon the idea that instruction should be offered to learners in increasing order of difficulty.” (2014) Some of the mentioned strategies are: organizing the structure of course work, the simple to complex theory and summaries of the content. The concepts of topical and spiral sequencing are also discussed in this article. This theory seems to be supported by a lot of the current state …show more content…
This approach is very effective with my students. They need to firmly understand a concept before it becomes more difficult. They benefit from topical sequencing as opposed to spiral because with spiral, skills are touched on here and there and eventually become more complex. With my current students, they need a concept to be fully developed before moving to a new concept. I am noticing that more and more with math. The elaboration theory emphasizes the importance of having an organized curriculum or coursework. This idea is very important and the way that the Elaboration Theory organizes coursework, by increasing level of difficulty, seems like it would be very appropriate for a lot of students. I can see one instance in which this theory could be a hindrance, gifted or higher achieving students. For example, I had a student that picked up math concepts extremely quickly. He needed very little instruction or support from me and was very successful. To him, breaking down how to add a subtract multi-digit numbers into, first adding 1-digit numbers and moving up to multi-digit numbers really hindered him. He lost interest in lessons because he could do the standard algorithm with no problem. He didn’t need to draw pictures of tens and ones to understand; he just knew what to do. For students like