Active Learning

Improved Essays
Practitioners in the Early Years setting must support children as active learners in order for them to develop to their fullest potential. Active learning covers a wide range of aspects, however, it is not possible to cover them all as the subject is very extensive. Nevertheless, the following aspects of active learning will be covered: neuroscience, metacognition, schema development, social cognition, the influences of adult intervention and how children learn through play. As well as exploring the aspects of active learning, this essay will consider the challenges practitioners face when working with children under three years old.

Active learning involves basing all learning around the child in real life or imaginary situations. Children
…show more content…
Through a range of activities such as: checking current knowledge, self-testing, asking questions, revising and reflecting children will be able to boost their metacognitive skills and strategies in order to assist them to reach their highest level of learning. Children can then use their knowledge and problem-solving abilities in everyday life, for example making rules for a game. From practice this was observed when ____________ (Appendix 2). Fisher, (1995) states that there are specific practices which will assist in the development of metacognitive skills and strategies - planning, monitoring, and assessing. He believed that the planning stage was vital and should involve and include children. Through the child’s involvement, they will be able to solve problems and learn on their own, showing independence. This then links in with the guidelines for education in Scottish schools, which is called a Curriculum for Excellence (Scottish Executive, 2004). The curriculum has four capacities - successful learner, confident individual, responsible citizen and effective contributor, which are there to make sure and young people can develop the relevant skills, qualities, and knowledge needed to excel in life. One of the four capacities that relate well to metacognition is successful learners. This links as the …show more content…
Schemas are repetitive and children learn more when they are actively involved in play experiences, with a more hands on approach to learning. Jean Piaget (1896-1980) was one of the first cognitive psychologists who was interested in how cognitive structures are created and how they are linked to observed behaviors. More recently theorists Worthington and Carruthers (2003) have carried out work relating to schemas. They observed children aged four to six within a class setting and schemas were commonly detected, including enveloping, enclosing, transporting, connecting, rotating, connecting, spirals, trajectories and transformation. They found that there were patterns in the child’s schemas, with the youngest of children’s schemas bases upon their knowledge and ideas. The children were able to show they could put numbers to objects, however, this may not have been in the typical way expected. Children made symbols in a number of ways, with mark-makings showing repetitive patterns – lines, circles, triangles, arrows and crosses – which are seen in their everyday life’s. These basic marks will, therefore, become the foundation for more intricate representations as they develop. Worthington and Carruthers (2003) stated that Schematic patterns will not always develop naturally, and practitioners in

Related Documents

  • Improved Essays

    Explain how you elicited and built on children’s responses to promote children’s language and literacy development through active learning.…

    • 415 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In this paper I will be exploring Piaget’s theory of cognitive development within the classroom setting. Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget, theorized that, “our thinking processes change radically, though slowly, from birth to maturity because we constantly strive to make sense of the world” (Woolfolk, Winne, & Perry, 2015, p. 37). For this reason, each interaction and experience has an impact on development in early childhood. Additionally, there are three basic components to his cognitive theory that include: organization (schema), adaptations (assimilations, accommodations, equilibrium), and stages of development (Woolfolk, et al., 2015, pp. 37-38). Schema can be described as the building blocks of thinking, which is used to understand and…

    • 334 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Piaget believes that children vigorously obtain information and adapt it to their prior knowledge and notions about the world they know. Therefore, children create their comprehension of actuality from their individual experiences. Piaget separated intellectual development into four separate periods that investigative the changes in child’s cognitive make up. The first stage is Sensorimotor where a child develops coordination of their senses with motor response and occurs within the first two years of life. Between the ages of two through seven the Precoperational stage takes place and children develop symbolic thinking, how to accurately use syntax, and fully use grammar to communicate complete ideas. As the developments of concepts are attached…

    • 162 Words
    • 1 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    Jean Piaget, a well-known Swiss scientist, philosopher and developmental psychologist dedicated to understanding how individuals gain knowledge. Piaget’s theory of cognitive development claims that individuals cannot be given information, which they immediately comprehend and use; instead, individuals must establish their own knowledge (Piaget,1953). He studied about cognitive development of children and adolescents and concluded that each of us are born with certain tendencies: organizing, thinking, into their own psychological schemas. He argued that children build conceptual structures in memory to store information and then they use that information to make sense of their world (Smith, Cowie, and Blades, 2015). Piaget thought in term of children becoming "little scientists" gathering data, processing, and making sense of the information (Powell, 2006). Initially, the inception of his ideas were based on observation of his own children as they played and learned together (Powell et al, 2010). For instance, Webb (1980) argues that if six students are taught one science lesson, each of them will have a unique learning experience. Following on, he argues that children schemas are formed through the process of assimilation and accommodation when experiencing four different stages of development (Wadsworth, 2004). When it comes to stages of Piaget’s theory:…

    • 1500 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Mark making is significance to children’s learning through imagination, symbolic play, meaning making, drawing, early writing and maps. Children that are engaged in symbolic play make meanings and show potential of the children’s understanding of symbolic language such as writing and written notation of mathematics (Vygotsky, 1978; Van Oers 2005 & Worthington, 2010). Van Oers (2005) stated that the word imagination means ‘image formation’ which means by making and using signs, where people make images from their reality. However, Pramling (2009) argued that human knowledge contains a large extent of representations and that children’s images and signs includes a more diverse range of gestures, actions, sounds, words, artefacts and graphicacy.…

    • 320 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The thinking patterns of a three-year-old preschooler vary drastically from the thinking patterns of a nine-year-old student. This comes to no surprise if you follow Piaget’s stages of cognitive thinking, it becomes obvious as to why there would be such an apparent difference between the two thinking styles.…

    • 768 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Active Learning Theory

    • 1258 Words
    • 6 Pages

    Physicists should be trained more interactively; having to think more and engage more in the concept of focus. This style of learning is called active learning. The proper definition of active learning is "a process whereby students engage in activities, such as reading, writing, discussion, or problem solving that promote analysis, synthesis, and evaluation of class content"(Active Learning 1). This learning style has proven to help students with not only their grades, but their attendance rate. According to a study done by Desluariers, Schelew, and Wieman; students who were taught using active learning were able to complete a physics test with an average score of 74% ( the average for the control was 41%) and had an increased attendance rate of 20% (3). The fact that the test scores went up shows that the subject was less difficult and the fact that the attendance rate went up shows more interest and more…

    • 1258 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Piaget began as an evolutionary biologist—he thus believed that organisms adapt to survive (Bee, 1997). Just like these organisms, children too need to adapt to their environment to ensure their survival (Bee, 1997; Carlson & Buskist, 1997). In order for a new born child to understand the world they live in they need to develop schemas (Bee, 1997; Carlson & Buskist, 1997). Schemas are units of knowledge, each pertaining to a different aspect of the world. Furthermore, schema can be classified as categories, each containing preconceived ideas (Piaget & Cook, 1952). For example, a child may develop a schema for a dog based on their one experience with a Chihuahua. However, once they encounter a different type of dog, a Labrador, the child’s schema…

    • 353 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    To Piaget, children construct an understanding of the world, experience inconsistencies with what they know and learn, and then accommodate or assimilate. Associated with Piaget’s theory is the concept of schemes, which allows children to organize experiences through first motor patterns and later on in life, by thinking. Piaget believed that an intelligence acquired from infant to adulthood occurs in four universal and consecutive stages, which are sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal…

    • 829 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    The pioneer of this process, Jean Piaget, developed four stages of cognitive development: sensorimotor stage, pre-operational stage, concrete operational stage, and formal operations stage. These stages span from birth to sixteen years of age. These stages determine what we gradually come to know as we age, and at what ages we typically acquire certain abilities in. This theory breaks down our world view of what we understood and deal with situations through what Piaget calls a “schema” (Huitt, W., & Hummel, J.…

    • 1717 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Jean Piaget (1869-1980) started to investigate children’s development after two years of working with children in Binet’s lab (Eddy, 2010).He found that children of younger aged gave different answers than those of alder age not because they have less knowledge but because they thought differently. He describes development as sequence of stages and each of these stages represents different type of thinking occurs in variable ages in different background (Vidal, 2000)…

    • 650 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    The term was initially introduced by Flavell (1976), and there are several terms used to represent the same general idea of metacognition, e.g. metacognitive beliefs, executive skills, metacomponents, self-regulation, and judgments of learning (Veenman et al, 2006). The development of all of these terms relates to the myriad of definitions and foci associated with the term metacognition.…

    • 2138 Words
    • 9 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Cognitive development is defined by Duchesne and McMaugh (2016) as a person’s capability to consider, comprehend and evoke the environment that we live in. This is impacted by experiences with physical item and actions, and also though social interaction with people around you. This concept of the capability within children interested Piaget and he sought to identify a universal process of cognitive development through questioning how their thought processes change and evolve from birth through maturation, activity and social transformation (Duchesne & McMaugh, 2016). He focused not just on what the children know, but the particular errors that children make in…

    • 1119 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    This awareness of one’s own abilities and cognitive process are used to develop a learner’s own strategies and locus of control. This is not an automatic process of thought. However, through effective teaching practices teachers, can deepen metacognitive practices in their students and a students develop strategies by teaching students to plan, monitor and evaluating their own thinking. Students that use planning strategies learn how to make predictions by studying illustrations, and skimming for boldface, and headings and reading the topic. Furthermore, comprehension is continued through how a text is organized. Monitoring strategies include rereading a text for specific clues that leads to further understanding and retentions. Metacognition reading strategies when used with Recommendations of IES Practice Guides provides a baseline, with scaffolding practices to encourage reading…

    • 929 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Piaget was a major influence on cognitive learning theory. His theory is based on five important aspects surrounding children’s learning and development (see appendix 1). He focuses on a child’s intellectual development and created his own word ‘schemas’ (see appendix 2). Piaget suggested that a child acts their own environment “the (child’s) Solo mind taking…

    • 1165 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays