I've got many exciting things going on this Fall, including participating in a book club with other JU faculty to read "How Learning Works" by Ambrose, et al.
The first chapter is about how students' prior knowledge about (or related to) a subject area impacts (for better or worse) their learning in that subject area. Prior knowledge & beliefs help learning if they are activated, sufficient, appropriate, and accurate. (Programmers & inductive Bible-study people will notice the AND there.) However, if prior knowledge & beliefs are unactivated, insufficient, inappropriate, or inaccurate, they're actually detrimental to the learning process. (Programmers & inductive Bible-study people will notice the OR there, and notice that a rough statistical estimate suggests that prior knowledge & beliefs harm more often than they help.)
(You might notice I included "beliefs" with "knowledge," which are not terms we usually pair together in academia. However, research increasingly indicates that what a student believes about a subject drastically impacts how well they learn it. I'll write more about that later...)
The authors provide the simple example of students learning the concept of "negative reinforcement" in behavioral psychology, in which students very often associate "negative" with bad, concluding that negative reinforcement is actually a form of punishment (thereby ignoring the "reinforcement" part of the term, which is less familiar).
It seems to me this concept is also true spiritually. Our preconceptions (of what we know & believe to be true spiritually) drastically impact our reception (or rejection) of more spiritual truth. Perhaps, even, the majority of our disagreements as Christians come from unactivated, insufficient, inappropriate, or inaccurate prior spiritual knowledge & beliefs?
No comments:
Post a Comment