Principles Of Abilities And Human Learning

Michael J.A. Howe

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2012
• Topic: Psychology
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135471811
• Subtopic: Cognitive Psychology & Cognition
• Index: Psychology

This book is about human abilities and the ways in which people acquire and extend them. It contains many useful facts about people's learning and the mental processes that make it possible. Chapter one looks at the kinds of events that create learning, and identifies some important general principles of human learning. Chapter two examines the capabilities that children gain in their early years. They acquire a number of basic capacities that they can draw upon throughout life. These include language, reading, and numerical abilities. The acceleration of early abilities is also considered. Chapter three raises a number of intriguing questions about abilities. What exactly are they? What are their most important charactersitics? How can different capabilities and items of knowledge become joined to one another? The answers are surprisingly different from what common sense predicts.; Chapter four Considers The Important Contributions Of Motivation. A Person Has To Have good reasons for engaging in learning activities. Motivation supplies incentives for doing whatever is necessary in order to make learning happen. Chapter five investigates more advanced attainments. It looks at the effects of practising and other ways in which individuals extend their expertise. The use of memory aids and learning techniques is examined. Other topics include the influence of intelligence, creativity, the possible roles of innate gifts and talents, and child prodigies and geniuses. The best way to apply discoveries concerning learning and the acquisition of abilities is to use them for our own daily activities. Chapter six addresses the question of how to learn and study more effectively. It introduces ways of reading more effectively, and gives advice on improving writing skills and studying for exams. The aim here is to help the reader to succeed better at gaining needed capabilities.

1

Gaining human abilities

This book is about human abilities and the ways in which people acquire and extend them. There are plenty of reasons for wanting to know about abilities, one being that we can make practical use of this knowledge to help add to our own capabilities and attainments. The fact that we can learn is often taken for granted, but a moment's reflection reminds us that there is something quite marvellous about the power that people have to transform themselves by acquiring capabilities in the form of new skills and knowledge. The unique individual each of us becomes is partly created by the learning activities that make a person capable and well informed. The book contains many useful facts about people's learned capabilities and the mental processes that make it possible for individuals to gain them.

Where do abilities come from?

How do our abilities arise? The answer to that question is not immediately obvious. Imagine that you are sitting on a park bench and a spaceship lands in front of you. Out jumps a little space alien. He dances around for a few seconds, sings a song, and finally jumps on a bicycle and disappears back into the spaceship. You find yourself wondering how the alien was capable of doing those things. What was needed to make the accomplishments possible? What made the little alien able to do the actions you observed? There are a number of possibilities:

One is that some kind of internal mechanism governs the activities, just as clockwork dolls are made to move by cogs and levers. The machinery that would be necessary in order for the little alien to carry out the actions you saw would have to be more complicated than that. Yet some impressively complex kinds of behaviour have been observed in living creatures that have brains which are wired-up in advance to act in particular ways. In certain insects, for example, such “pre-wired” brains carry out lengthy sequences of actions.

A second possible explanation is that the little alien's brain operates like a computer that has been programmed to do the dancing, singing, and bicycling activities you observed. Striking human-like feats are possible when a computer is combined with software that instructs it how to utilise its processing capacities. Perhaps aliens, like computers, are programmed to undertake human-like activities.

However, you are now informed that the little alien is not really an alien after all, but just a human child in fancy dress. Does that discovery influence your efforts to explain the behaviours you saw? It certainly does. It is now clear that neither of the two explanations is correct. You can quickly rule out the first one, that the behaviour was controlled by pre-wired mental mechanisms. The brains of humans, unlike those of insects, are not wired-up in advance to perf orm complicated activities. This is fortunate for humans, for although it is true that pre-wired brains can do certain things quite well, they also have crippling limitations. The actions of which pre-wired brains are capable are rigid and stereotyped. They have none of the flexibility that allows people to adapt their behaviour to the varying demands of human life.

The second possibility can be eliminated, too. It is true that human brains are similar to computers in some ways, but in other ways they are not like computers at all. In contrast with computers, people cannot extend their capabilities just by inserting into themselves, or “reading in”, instructions in the form of software that tells the processing capacities what to do. We may wish that was possible: if only I could just plug a f oreign language program into my brain one evening and wake up the next morning speaking fluent French or impeccable Chinese! That many people want to believe that this can be done is demonstrated by the healthy sales of so-called “Subliminal” auditory tapes in Britain and America. The idea is that you listen to a tape, and messages that you are not aware of hearing enter your brain, making you healthier, slimmer, better at remembering, more self-confident, or more attractive to the opposite sex, according to the content of the subliminal information on the tape. There is just one problem with this: it doesn't work, except in the world of science fiction! That way of gaining new abilities is closed to us, because human minds do not work that way. Unlike computers, our brains are not capable of gaining new knowledge and new skills without our making an active effort.

The fact is that we humans are capable of doing things for reasons that are quite unlike the reasons why computers and clockwork dolls can carry out various activities. We have to acquire for ourselves the various kinds of knowledge and skills that make us capable of living successful and independent lives. That acquisition process often involves a degree of active effort and attention, and the process of gaining new capabilities can be a time-consuming one, and sometimes arduous. People undertake various mental activities in order to gain the various kinds of knowledge and skill that humans require. We have a useful shorthand word for these mental activities. The word is learning.

Learning and what it achieves

Learning and human abilities are closely related to each other. The abilities people gain are largely the outcome of their learning activities. Much of the learning that people do contributes to the acquisition and improvement of their abilities.

To return to our little alien, knowing that he was not an alien after all, but a young human being, we can be sure that the capabilities we observed had to be acquired by that individual. They were not built-in like those of a clockwork doll or an insect having a pre-wired brain. Nor were they simply plugged into the child's brain in the way that software is inserted into a computer. Somehow or other the child learned them.

Everyone agrees that learning is important, but we do not always appreciate just how heavily each of us depends on our capacity to learn. As well as enabling people to gain all kinds of usef ul inf ormation and everyday skills, ranging from brushing one's teeth to reading a book, learning profoundly influences the ways in which we actually experience our day-to-day lives:

Our preferences and our likes and dislikes are largely learned.

So too are our attitudes, interests, and tastes.

Your sense of humour and my capacity to enjoy a good joke depend on what each of us has learned in the past.

Learning, or its absence, constrains the kinds of conversations we are capable of having.

Our choices of movies to see, books to read, and music to listen to, and our pref erences when we choose a newspaper or magazine, or select a television channel, are all strongly influenced by our previous learning.

So, as well as equipping us with the knowledge and skills that allow us to get on with our lives, learning plays a big role in forming the kind of individual each person becomes. Differences between people in what they have learned can largely explain why men and women vary so much in the ways in which they perceive and make sense of the events that comprise daily living, and in how they react to many kinds of experiences.

One reason why psychologists study human learning is to gain a better understanding of how human abilities are acquired. Investigations of human learning lead to practical insights that can be applied in order to help make people more effective learners. In this book we shall discover how learning makes it possible for individuals to acquire some of the skills a person needs. We also explore the ways in which people gain the various kinds of knowledge and information that help someone to become a competent adult.

Learning takes many different forms, but common to all of them is the fact that they involve the person becoming altered in some way, thereby gaining new abilities or extending old ones. In forming new abilities, two broad categories of learned changes are particularly crucial:

First, much learning involves a person gaining some or other kind of knowledge. Broadly speaking, a person's knowledge, which is often based on language, takes the form of the various items of information and other things the individual knows about. People extend their knowledge as an outcome of attending to items of information that are unfamiliar but nevertheless understandable.

Second, as a result of learning, various mental and physical skills are acquired. In contrast with knowledge, many skills are unrelated to language. They take the form of actions that a person can do. Skills are often gained by doing an activity or by practising. Sometimes this involves imitating the skills of another person.

In practice, many of the attainments and accomplishments that people acquire through learning involve combinations of both knowledge and skills. Human abilities often involve knowledge and skills combined. Many of the most important practical questions about human psychology revolve around the ways in which learning provides people with useful knowledge and skills. Here are just a few examples. These are some of the questions that have prompted the writing of this book:

How are mental and physical skills gained?
What does it mean to have expertise?
How are people's abilities related to their intelligence levels?
Why and how do people differ in what they can do?
How important is early learning, and what are its long-term effects?
In what ways do a person's abilities depend on family background?
How can parents help their children to learn?
How does existing knowledge affect new learning and remembering?
How effective is memory training?
Do skills transfer?
What study skills are most effective?
How do children gain general-purpose strategies for learning?
How does motivation influence abilities?
How do people become successful at physical skills?
In what ways do personality and temperament affect learning?
How and why do certain people become geniuses?
What are the advantages and disadvantages of specialising?
What are child prodigies?

There are plenty of reasons for wanting to be able to answer questions like these. There is no guarantee that reading this book will make you an expert on all these matters, but it will make you well equipped to give informed answers.

How this book is arranged

We can think of the mental machinery that makes it possible f or people to learn as being not unlike a kind of manufacturing process. It is a process that enables individuals to forge ahead and extend their capabilities by adding to their knowledge and skills. In the present chapter a main goal will be to begin to understand how the learning process actually works.

We start by enquiring into the kinds of events that create learning or help make it possible. We ask, “What has to happen in order for learning to take place?” Also, “When and why does learning occur?” Research studies have revealed some important f acts about the ways in which we humans acquire our capabilities. Some of the findings of research into human learning will be described in the remainder of this chapter. We shall discover that it is possible to extract some important general principles of human learning.

Chapter 2 examines some of the abilities that people gain in their early years. Young children acquire a number of basic capacities that they can draw on throughout life. These include language, reading, numerical abilities, and various physical skills. The chapter considers the question of whether it is possible and desirable to accelerate early abilities. It also investigates the effectiveness of learning programmes that are intended to compensate children for the ill-effects of early deprivation.

Chapter 3 raises a number of questions about the actual nature of abilities. What exactly are abilities? What are they like? What are their most important characteristics? How can different capabilities and different items of knowledge become joined to one another? In what circumstances does something learned in one situation transfer to new or different tasks, or become applicable to new challenges? What is the relationship between specific abilities and general intelligence? The answers to some of these questions are surprisingly different from what common sense might lead us to expect.

Chapter 4 starts with the fact that because the necessary mental activities that produce learning demand a certain amount of time and effort, a person has to have good reasons for engaging in them. One way of expressing this is by saying that for the manuf acturing of learning to take place there needs to be some kind of fuel to make the process work. The fuel for human learning is provided by motivation. This supplies a person with the reason or incentive for doing whatever is necessary in order to make learning happen, making it possible for abilities to be gained. There are negative as well as positive motivational influences, but motivation drives people's efforts to learn. Chapter 4 investigates how that occurs.

The abilities that were examined in Chapter 2 provide a foundation on which it is possible to build more advanced human accomplishments. Some of these abilities are surveyed in Chapter 5, which investigates relatively complex and difficult attainments. ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1.Gaining human abilities
• 2.How children gain basic capabilities
• 3.People’s abilities: What are they?
• 4.The role of motivation
• 5.Towards more advanced abilities
• 6.Becoming a more successful learner
• Glossary
• References
• Author index
• Subject index