Types of Learners

Continuing my posts about Ken Bain's book, What the Best College Teachers Do.

In Chapter 2, Bain also provides a couple of lists about motivations behind learners and types of learners.

Motivation:

1. Deep Learners: "Some people respond primarily to the challenge of mastering something"
2. Bulimic Learners: "Others react well to competition, to the quest for the gold and the chance to do better than anyone else....They learn for the test and then quickly expunge the material to make room for something else"
3. Performance Avoiders: "people who seek primarily to avoid failure...In the classroom, they often become surface learners...they fear failure...They often resort to memorization and trying simply to reproduce what they hear" (40).

Of course, it is from the first group that we our students. This is not practical. Students will be deep learners for subjects in which they have an innate interest. As instructors, we can (and should) try to spark that interest in our student. I think we have to understand, however, that not every student will be in this group. The flip side, unfortunately, I think is even more true. Instructors can (and do) sometimes kill the interest in students and thus create an environment that promotes (at best) #2, but more likely #3.

I frequently fear that X will fall into the third category. The boy wants so much to please his dad that I'm afraid I have not provided an environment where it is safe to fail. I must try harder to reassure my little man that failure is a natural part of learning.

The next list is the list of types of learners:

1. Received knowers: "Truth for the received knower...is external." This category focuses on knowing the facts but understanding very little.
2. Subjective knowers: "All knowledge is a matter of opinion." In literature classes, we frequently run into this. We also find it in comp, where a student excuses a grade by stating the teacher didn't agree with the opinion.
3. Procedural knowers: "play the game." These are Jon's learners. Play the game to get through the class to get the requirement towards the transcript. They can be very good students, but education is still extrernal.
4. Commitment: "Students become independent, critical, and creative thinkers, valuing the ideas and ways of thinking to which they are exposed and consciously and consistently trying to use them."

There are two type of Committed learners:

1. Separate knowers: "like to detach themselves from an idea, remaining objective, even skeptical, and always willing to argue about it."
2. Connected knowers: "look at the merits of other people's ideas instead of trying to shoot them down" (42-3).

I find myself most often in the separate knower category. I imagine that most college instructors find themselves in one of the forms of committed knowers. Bain points out that the best college teachers try to reach students at all levels. The teacher reaches to the students and tries to move them a bit further towards commitment.

Mental Models

Wow! I don't know where to start. I am simply a jumble of different thoughts and ideas. I've been reading a very good book entitled, What the Best College Teachers Do, by Ken Bain. I've read the second chapter of this book, and I wanted to record several thoughts. The first thing that struck me was the fact that many students complete a class and do not change their thought patterns at all...even A students!

The thing that Dr. Bain points out is that students mostly attach the new knowledge to their old ways of thinking. If the new knowledge challenges the old way of thinking (isn't this one of the points of getting an education?), then students are more likely to merely memorize what they need to know for the class without caring enough to change the old way of thinking. I almost changed "caring" in the above sentence because it could be misread to think that I'm putting down students. Far from it. The point is that changing mental models is hard, and it disrupts one's life. Most students (even most people) would rather stick with a mistaken mental model than change it...unless the mistaken model fails so much that the student is forced to reevaluate.

The point that Bain makes is that there is a difference of opinion in what needs to happen first. Some believe that students must first acquire a certain basis of knowledge before they can reason, evaluate...all of that stuff that involves a mental model. Bain sides with the other side. He states that new information is constantly being evaluated based on the old model and if the new information doesn't fit, it is quickly forgotten. If we really want students to learn, then we need to engage the mental models.

Students must learn the facts while learning to use them to make decisions about what they understand or what they should do. To them [the sample of the best college teachers], "learning" makes little sense unless it has some sustained influence on the way the learner subsequently thinks, acts, or feels. So they teach the "facts" in a rich context of problems, issues, and questions. (29)

I hope that those in the Humanities division find this book as inspiring as I do. I find myself eager to get back into the classroom to try some of this stuff out.