Who said children are active learners

Enter the password to open this PDF file:. Cancel OK. File name: -. File size: -. Title: -. Author: -. Subject: -. Keywords: -. Creation Date: -. Modification Date: -. This short paper is generally considered as the start of a brilliant scientific career made of over sixty books and several hundred articles.

Piaget has been labeled an interactionist as well as a constructivist. His interest in cognitive development came from his training in the natural sciences and his interest in epistemology. Piaget was very interested in knowledge and how children come to know their world. He developed his cognitive theory by actually observing children some of whom were his own children. Using a standard question or set of questions as a starting point, he followed the child's train of thought and allowed the questioning to be flexible.

Piaget believed that children's spontaneous comments provided valuable clues to understanding their thinking. He was not interested in a right or wrong answer, but rather what forms of logic and reasoning the child used Singer, After many years of observation, Piaget concluded that intellectual development is the result of the interaction of hereditary and environmental factors.

As the child develops and constantly interacts with the world around him, knowledge is invented and reinvented. His theory of intellectual development is strongly grounded in the biological sciences. He saw cognitive growth as an extension of biological growth and as being governed by the same laws and principles London, He argued that intellectual development controlled every other aspect of development - emotional, social, and moral.

Piaget may be best known for his stages of cognitive development. Piaget discovered that children think and reason differently at different periods in their lives. He believed that everyone passed through an invariant sequence of four qualitatively distinct stages.

Invariant means that a person cannot skip stages or reorder them. These plastic objects are similar in many ways — they are often smooth and they have no smell and no taste. By offering a wide range of objects that are not plastic, we increase the opportunities for children to explore and learn.

Road Safety Week — November. Curious Fox knows what makes good treasure baskets and collections. Hatching kits from Incredible Eggs. View all Top Products. Contact Us Advertise With Us. Share this:. You may also be interested in This means that students are better able to continue learning once they have left school and college. Active learning encourages success Cambridge examinations do not simply test recall of knowledge.

Successful candidates draw on their understanding in order to evaluate and synthesise ideas. Therefore, Cambridge programmes and qualifications are best taught using an active learning approach. Encouraging active learning helps students to achieve higher grades, based on their enhanced skills and understanding. Because active learning encourages students to take a central role in their own learning, it prepares them better for both higher education and for the workplace.

Analytical skills also help students to be better at problem solving and applying their knowledge. Universities and employers value this. Active learning is engaging and intellectually exciting An active learning approach encourages all students to stay focused on their learning, which will often give them greater enthusiasm for their studies.

Teachers also find that they enjoy the level of academic discussion with their students which an active learning approach encourages. Listen to these educators giving their views on the benefits of active learning for their students. Which of the benefits are most relevant to your students? The learning objective is more important than the task itself. For instance, many people think that a small-group task is automatically an active learning task. People also often think that a whole-class discussion cannot be an active learning task.

In fact, whether something is an active learning task or not depends on the teacher's planning and style. Skilled teachers ask themselves questions such as: In a class discussion am I using open-ended questions to get my students thinking? In a group task do the students know what the learning aims are? In a seminar activity do the students have effective resources to support them?

All activities must be relevant to what you want the students to learn. Some learning objectives might lend themselves best to students engaging in small-group seminars or a collaborative project. Other objectives might be better with a more lecture-style approach. In enquiry-based learning, the student learns by exploring a series of questions. Sometimes these questions are set by the teacher, and sometimes by the students themselves.

Students will then decide how they can answer these questions most effectively. Teachers will be on hand to help, but students lead the process. Enquiry-based learning can be an excellent technique for encouraging active learning. However, as we will see later in the 'Active learning in practice' section, it is only one of many techniques. As with all teaching, the focus needs to be on the learning not the task. Ask yourself: Is a student-led enquiry the most effective way for my students to achieve their learning objectives in this lesson?

Skilful planning is very important. You should think about how your students will learn in each activity.

Occasionally, you might need to design a completely new activity or major classroom change. However, the changes required will often only be small ones.

You might even realise that you are already promoting active learning but you did not recognise it. However, as with any activity, you will still be in charge of the class. You will need to decide what levels of noise you are happy with. One of the exciting things about active learning is that students will want to engage with you in discussion.

Sometimes they will want to discuss your interpretations and ideas. Healthy discussion is beneficial for students and teachers. However, you are still in charge of the class, and need to decide when things are available for discussion, and when the class needs to move onto the next topic or task. Active learning does not mean that students have to move around the room.