On the one hand, many parents and teachers complain that the curriculum in primary schools is too demanding for children. In a rapidly developing world, new skills, foreign languages and abilities that we want to develop in individuals are accumulating in order to give them as many opportunities as possible in the future. With the growth of the Internet and easily accessible information, so-called lifelong learning is especially important. Lifelong learning is the awareness, motivation and ability to be willing to learn throughout life. But can children really learn? Many have great problems, as they do not have the tools developed to effectively tackle the processing of substances. You can read why schools should put more emphasis on how to learn in the article below.
Why should schools put more emphasis on how to learn in the first place? If we think about it, the answer is quite simple. Children and adolescents (as well as, of course, adults) who do not know how to learn are like a carpenter without the proper tools to make a table. There may be a sea of untapped potential in them, which will never be realized if they do not know how to catalyze, supplement and express it. Slovenian schools they are already aware of the great importance of equipping children with how to study at all. One of the attempts to help children learn strategies that would help them learn easier and waste less time memorizing and understanding new information is, for example, a project Learning to learn, where children are taught basic techniques for easier and more effective learning. V the list below we reveal some tricks that you or your child can they help in better learning.
These are techniques that can help you learn better.
It is necessary to study with breaks in between.
Cognitive psychologists have solid and clear evidence, that learning is most effective if it is spread over a longer period of time, with longer and longer breaks in between. What does this mean in practice? You will remember the most if, for example, you study for two hours, then take a one-hour break. Then repeat the material and study again for two hours. Then take a two-hour break, after which you repeat the material again. The next pause is even longer, and then the repetition follows again.
Explaining what has been learned to a friend.
Pedagogists and educational psychologists have found that small groups, which include students who understand and master the material to varying degrees, perform very well in learning. Therefore, classes are occasionally held in groups of no more than four students, in which one master the material, two understand it relatively well, and one has problems. This kind of work pays off for all four students! Why? It turns out that even better students deepen their understanding of the material when they have to explain what they learn to students who are doing worse. That is when we often only find out where our knowledge has holes and if we can articulate what we know in an understandable way. The technique of explaining a subject to another is thus an excellent tool for more successful learning.
Create a mental pattern.
A lot of kids don't like mental patterns, and teachers keep selling them as a great learning and memorizing tool. And the latter is true, but only under a certain condition: a thought pattern is defined not only by a typical form with central information in the middle and branching subsections around the title, but above all by how it is made and what information it contains. A mental pattern is a meaningful learning material when each student makes their own. It should only contain essential keywords, which means that the student must first read all the material, extract the essence, imagine the arrangement of the material in the mental pattern, and only then can he start creating the mental pattern. As an interesting point, we add that one of the reasons why the thought pattern is supposed to be effective is that the information in the brain is also supposed to be organized into a network that is analogous to the appearance of the thought pattern.
Find out which learning style suits you best.
Depending on how we process information most easily, people can be divided into three different types: auditory, visual and kinesthetic type. Auditory types learn the easiest and fastest if they hear the information. Visual types absorb knowledge the fastest when they see (various graphs and pictures especially help them). For optimal learning, kinesthetic types need to try the thing, make it, participate in some activity that deals with the material they have to master. The division into these three types does not mean that we belong to only one, but that we do we usually have one of the types more pronounced. If we are the auditory type, it does not mean that we only fill in the information that we hear, but that this information is the easiest to remember. So what can we do to make learning easier? On the one hand, it is to be well aware of which type is most pronounced in our country. Where possible, we adapt the material to this type of learning.
- For an auditory type, this means that, for example, he can record the material and then listen to it.
- The visual type should include as many graphs and creation of thought patterns as possible in learning.
- The kinesthetic type should try to use the material in a real situation.
On the other hand, it is important that we strengthen those two ways of learning that we have less expressed. This is important mainly because we often cannot adapt the material in an appropriate way - in school, for example, visual and auditory information is more common than kinesthetic information.
