LEARNING

1. What are the barriers to learning ?

Social and cultural barriers
Practical and personal barriers
Emotional barriers
Workplace barriers
Learning disabilities
peer pressure and family background
transport; time; disability; caring
responsibilities; childcare; finance;
cost; age; language; and lack of access
to information
lack of self-esteem or confidence due
to low skills levels; negative personal
experience of learning; previously
undetected or unaddressed learning
disabilities; social problems such as
unemployment, abuse or bullying
time off; access; discrimination;
unsupportive managers; shift work;
isolation
Learning disabilities affect how people
understand information, communicate,
or learn new skills, and include
difficulty reading, difficulty writing, and
difficulty with mathematics.

2. What is learning ?

2.1 Learning is “a process that leads to change, which occurs as a result of

experience and increases the potential for improved performance and future
learning” . The change in the learner may happen at the level of knowledge,
attitude or behavior. As a result of learning, learners come to see concepts,
ideas, and/or the world differently.

2.2 Learning is not something done to students, but rather something

students themselves do. It is the direct result of how students interpret
and respond to their experiences.
2.3 Regardless of the field of study, students need to have significant
opportunities to develop and practice intellectual skills/thinking
processes (e.g. problem-solving, scientific inquiry), motor skills and
attitudes/values that are important to their fields of study. In addition,
students need opportunities to develop interpersonal and social skills
(often referred to as soft skills) that are important for professional and
personal success. Examples of these skills include teamwork, effective
communication, conflict resolution and creative thinking. As teaching
assistants and instructors, we need to keep in mind that there is much
more to learning than content and that we should pay attention not only
to the content but also to thinking processes and other types of learning.
3. Mention the outcomes of learning ?
3.1 Learning outcomes describe what students are expected to
demonstrate. Learning outcomes describe what students are able to
demonstrate in terms of knowledge, skills, and values upon completion
of a course, a span of several courses, or a program.
3.2 The learning outcomes must
3.2.1 Identify specifically what should be learned.
3.2.2 Serve as guidelines for content, instruction & assessment.
3.2.3 Must be achievable and measurable.
3.2.4 Should connect directly to the assessment criteria that are used
to judge achievement.
3.2.5 Focus on learning rather than teaching .
3.2.6 Should be shared with the learner so that expectations are
transparent.
3.2.7 Should reflect 3 domains/6 significant learning categories
3.2.7.1. Cognitive (knowledge and intellectual skills with an
emphasis on knowing, conceptualizing, comprehending,
applying, synthesizing and evaluating)
3.2.7.2 Affective (changes in interests, attitudes, values)
3.2.7.3. Psychomotor (manipulative and motor skills)

4. Differentiate between teaching and learning .

4.1 Teaching and learning are important processes that are linked to the
acquisition of knowledge, values, traditions, skills, behaviours etc.
These two processes are at the two ends of the knowledge
acquisition process. Teaching involves imparting knowledge whereas
learning involves acquiring knowledge. This is the main difference
between teaching and learning.
4.2 Teaching - Teaching is the process of imparting knowledge or
instructing someone to do something. However, the process of
teaching may not only involve knowledge, it may also include
different forms such values, manners, skills, behaviours, traditions,
and stories. Teaching in an educational institute is undertaken by
professionals such as instructors, teachers, tutors, professors, and
lecturers. The teaching that takes place in educational institutes is
structured. The educators have schedules, syllabus, and curriculums;
the students are also categorized into different grades and classes
according to their age or knowledge levels. Traditional teaching
methods mainly include the educator lecturing the students and the
students memorizing or writing down what is said by the educator.
But contemporary teaching methods mostly involve the active
participation of the learners – the students are made to learn
through experimenting, self-study, and experience.
 4.3 Learning - Learning is the acquisition of knowledge, behaviors, skills,
values, or preferences. The process of learning continues throughout
all our lives – from the moment we are born to the moment we die.
This type of learning happens through observing, experimenting and
experiencing. Learning can occur consciously and unconsciously.
Consciously learning occur through education, personal
development, schooling, and training. We also learn without
conscious awareness through different experiences. A person’s
capacity to learn varies depending on different factors such as
personality, intelligence level, motivation, and learning style. A
person becomes more interested in learning when he is prompted by
curiosity and intrinsic motivation.

5. What do you know about learning spiral for participants ?

5.1 Spiral Learning is a teaching method based on the premise that a

student learns more about a subject each time the topic is reviewed
or encountered. The idea is that each time a student encounters the
topic, the student expands their knowledge or improves their skill
level .This model consists of 11 steps.

5.1.1 Audio-visual (Clips )

5.1.2 A teachers’ question

5.1.3 A comprehensive response

5.1.4 Grouping

5.1.5 A teacher’s questions and responses( accompanied by

images and sounds)

5.1.6 Mind Emancipation

5.1.7 Writing what have been learnt

5.1.8 Comprehensive study

5.1.9 Revise and review notes

5.1.10 A teacher’s conclusion

5.1.11 A feel of satisfaction

5.2 Goals of teaching the spiral learning model - The given model
consists of 15 goals that are measured and analyzed by items of a
questionnaire, the goals are:(They are not offered on the basis of their
importance or priority; however, they are considered important goals
according to the researchers and play a major role on applying the
model).

5.2.1 Conceptualization

-Knowing how the meaning is formed

-Applying your own language to understand a concept.

-Classifying concepts.

-Building a mind plan regarding the concepts

-Discovering a ground to achieve the next concepts.

-Mastering on applying a concept.

-Reviewing a process of framing meaning.

-Making the concepts meaningful in mind.

-Making concepts stable in the mind.

-Extending a concept’s boundary.

-Understanding a nature of concept.

-Comprehension of the concepts in reading and writing.

-Enhancing comprehension of concepts on listening, reading,

speaking and writing.

5.2.2 Creativity

-To encourage to frame new concepts.

-To promote creativity by conscious analysis.

-To manifest a creative talent through team work.

-To interest in a creative process.

-To develop new subjective paradigms.

-To involve in somehow the unreasonable and emotional

world in order to discover new facts.
To provide external judgment opportunities against creativity.

-To apply comparisons and metaphors to solve problems and

extend views.

-To recognize ambiguous aspects of unknown things which

exist further than concepts.

-To be neutral about dealing with various issues.

-To find initiative solutions to identify facts;

-To be temporary further from rationalism.

-To obtain new solutions and substitute to a definition of a

concept.

-To improve basic thoughts by the aid of metaphors.

-To recognize a concept through sympathy and share with

others.

5.2.3 Team work

-To enhance basic thoughts by sympathy and putting yourself

in others’ shoes.

-To empty your soul of yourself and accept another role.

- Conceptual sympathy with new solutions.

5.2.4 Individual work

-To promote education of self-conscious of self-capacities to

memorize.

-To express materials which are results of experiential and

acquired findings.

-To shift language of materials to the language of self-concept.

-To consider your nature of knowledge as impermanence.

-To make guess and assumption to gain concepts.

5.2.5 To declare thoughts and achieve a hypothesis

-To express a guess and assumption.

- To shift a guess and assumption to a hypothesis.

- To formulate a hypothesis through a question.

- Not to satisfy with superficial responses.

5.2.6 To acquaint with terms

-To know pronunciation of terminologies.

-To increase vocabulary storages.

-Develop language capacity.

5.2.7 To apply images

-To develop vision skills to bring out information.

-To connect a noun with its concept and image.

-Recreate subjective images through concepts.

-To extend making subjective illustration of concepts.

5.2.8 Knowledge

-To extend the boarders of knowledge.

-To regard nature of knowledge as impermanent.

-To regard self-knowledge as impermanent.

5.2.9 To interpret and criticize

-An ability to criticize scientifically.

-To identify innovative ways to interpret facts.

-To reason based on a strategy to form a concept.

5.1.10 Learning

To learn a scientific process of a research.

- To not satisfied with superficial responses.

- To internalize a concept of information.

5.1.11 Connect unfamiliar concepts with familiar ones

-To conceptualize by the aid of unfamiliar concepts.

-To connect a familiar word with an unfamiliar one.

-To relate familiar materials to unfamiliar.

-To associate unknown with known.

-To learn how to apply a new technique to find new concepts.

-To develop mind scaffolding by connection of new concepts

with old ones.

-To connect new concepts with constructed concepts in the

mind.

-To connect old knowledge to create a concept.

5.1.12 Feeling trust

-To trust self-concept by considering others’ views.

-To feel trust as a result of self-concept

5.1.13 To extend information and the capability to maintain

-To enhance materials maintenance in the mind.

-To internalize data concepts and remember concepts.

-To develop a type of required data .

5.1.14 Pre-organizer

-To reinforce a cognitive construct on a teaching process.

-To introduce major points before starting teaching .

5.1.15 Scientific thoughts

- To process data by similar techniques of scholars

- To be skillful on raising a question and research;

- To eliminate inadequate interprets from concepts of mind.

6. What are the pre-conditions of learning ?

6.1 Awareness. The students, in order to learn, need some awareness of the subject
matter at hand. That is, they must recognize that there is something they need to
learn before they can hope to learn it.

6.2 Interest. After establishing that there is much to learn, teachers must then
answer the question of why the students should learn. Otherwise, the students are
unlikely to feel very motivated and almost certainly will not learn as much as they
could.

6.3 Motivation. Although experience suggests that students are more likely to learn
if they have some interest in the subject matter, there are plenty of other reasons
for them to pursue mastery — even if they don’t care about the material or envision
using it in the future. One good reason is grades and everything that goes with them:
good academic standing; approbation from parents, peers, and others; and
admission to an academic major or graduate program .

6.4 Relevance. Students learn more efficiently and effectively if they understand the
relevance of a topic to anything else in their lives or the world at large. One of the
biggest complaints about a college education is that it’s largely theoretical. It’s also
true that a fair amount of theory is often necessary for students to fully grasp certain
concepts.

6.5 Engagement. Students who understand the relevance of what they’re learning
are more likely to become engaged with it. Engagement itself is something else they
need in order to achieve mastery.

6.6 Reinforcement. That includes the repetition that is necessary for learning,
covering concepts again and again to make sure students understand. It also includes
assessment, determining how well they are grasping concepts and then modifying
our teaching accordingly. And it entails the motivational tactics (positive or negative)
that teachers employ, such as grades, recognition, praise, constructive criticism.
 6.7 Support. Sometimes a bit of hand-holding is what situation calls for — in the
case of a terrified non-traditional student.Support can take many other forms, too. It
can mean making sure students have all the tools they need to succeed in the
course. That includes intellectual tools (like critical-thinking skills), technical ones
(mathematical formulae, organizational structures, or taxonomies), and physical
resources (lab equipment, texts, and other course materials).

7. Discuss the core concept of learning that facilitates training and development.

7.1 Meaningful learning is contextual and situational, and it greatly helps trainees
to be more interested and more successful in their training. The first premise for any
deep learning to occur is to introduce the new information in a way that makes
trainees interested in acquiring it. Learning new things in a way that makes them
useful in the future, and also seeing that connection while learning occurs, makes
acquiring new information more interesting. The more retrieval paths we create and
use while learning, the deeper the new knowledge becomes and the more
confidence we have about our own learning competence.

7.2 The three core concepts that help making learning more meaningful are:

7.2.1 Cognitive approach - to create the foundation, because trainees

thinking needs to change, not just their behaviour.

7.2.2 Constructive tools - to focus on supporting trainees learning process

and create the real-life connections.

7.2.3 Cooperative tools - to guide the classroom management decision and

help trainee engage in their learning goals.

7.3 Cognitive teaching means catering to students’ intellectual needs and providing
opportunities for students to process what they have learned and negotiate
meanings ,but it is also tightly bound to increasing understanding of individual
learning and the capability for learning. Learning motivation carries the baggage of
beliefs about personal learning competence and also the family’s beliefs about being
 able to learn. These are often called to “causal attributions”, the most common of
which is the theory of learned helplessness, the belief that individuals have no
control over events that have an effect on them.

7.4 Constructive teaching means handing the tools of learning over to the student.
In the classroom, this is visible in the form of students being provided with choices.
Having choices strengthens students’ executive functions, as they are able to plan for
their actions and carry out their plans with the teacher’s support. When used in
conjunction, constructive and cognitive teaching emphasize the process of learning
and guide the individual learning process.

7.5 Cooperative teaching means that the teacher doesn’t want to use unnecessary
power over students, but strives to create a solid structure in the classroom so that
everybody knows what to do and how to behave. Rules should be created in
cooperation with students, because following rules that you have helped create is
much easier than following externally imposed rules. Cooperative teaching also
means that students are held accountable for their own learning, and the teacher is
there to help students achieve their individual learning goals.

8. What is the learning curve ? What is its relevance ?

8.1 A learning curve is the representation in graph form of the rate of learning something
over time or repeated experiences. Learning curves are a visualization of the difficulty
estimated in learning a subject over a period of time as well as relative progress
throughout the process of learning. The learning curve provides a way to show a
subject’s learn ability.

8.2 The typical plotting of a learning curve shows the time (or experience) for
learning on the x axis and the percentage of learning on the y axis. In science a steep
learning curve represents a quickly-learned subject. Difficult subjects will have a
longer duration to complete learning and, as such, a shallower curve. The relative
percentage of learning can show how some subjects can be mostly learned quickly
while some difficult aspects may remain resulting in plateaus in the graph where
learning stalls.

8.3 Stages - Normally learning curve comprises of four stages.

8.3.1 Initial stage- It is also called lag phase. In lag phase the learning
is merely zero for first few practices.

8.3.2 Steep up stage- This is the second stage. It is also called log or
exponential phase. In this stage the learning is suddenly increased and
rate of improvement is substantial.

8.3.3 Intermediate stage

8.3.4 It is also called Stationary Phase. Now, there is no progress in
learning or improvement is arrested. So, it is called Plateau.
Skinner says ‘a plateau is a horizontal stretch indicative of
apparent progress’. It places an important role in learning
process because when such a stage is reached, a learning
curve becomes almost flat.
8.4 Reasons for plateau in learning-
8.4.1 Poor or faulty method of learning.
8.4.2 Physical and mental fatigue or boredom
8.4.3 Too much difficulty or complexity of the learning material
8.4.4 Lack of proper motivation and loss of interest of the learner
8.4.5 Poor and unfavourable environment
8.4.6 Distraction and inattention of the learner
8.4.7 Satisfaction of the learner with moderate achievement
8.4.8 Final stage- This is the final stage. Here the learner has reach
the maximum limit of the improvement.

8.5 Types of curves-There are three types of learning curve based on the units
which plotted.
 8.5.1 Concave curve- This learning curve is also called positively
accelerated curve. It depicts slow initial improvement in learning that
increases with time leading towards the mastery of learning materials.
At the initial the rate of progress may be slower, but at the final the
learning rate increases noticeably. This learning curve is often
occurring in the learning situation. Here the task may be new one or
difficult one to the student at the beginning. But with the increasing
practice he is mastery over that at the end.

8.5.2 Convex curve- This learning curve is also called negatively

accelerated curve. It depicts rapid initial improvement in
learning that decreases with time. At the initial the rate of
progress maybe faster, but at the final the learning rate slows
down noticeably. This learning curve is occurring in the
learning situations where the task is simple or learner has had
previous practice on a similar task.
8.5.3 Concave and convex curve- The third curve involves the
combination of the first two concave and convex curves, is
known as Concave-Convex Curve. It looks like an English letter
‘S’. So called S-shaped curve. In the beginning this is
depending upon the nature of the learner, learning material
and the learning environment. It is normally obtained where
the situation the learner study the entire learning from zero
performance to its mastery.
8.6 Characteristics of learning curve –
8.6.1 There is an initial improvement whether it is slow or rapid.

8.6.2 No stage learning progress is uniform. There are various ups

and downs (spurts) in the learning curve even a general acceleration is
recorded.

8.6.3 In between the beginning and end of the learning curve, there is
no improvement in learning is called plateau (flat or stationary stage).
8.6.4 At the final stage in the learning curve, we can find whether
there is any little learning or no learning takes place.
8.6.5 After reaching the stationary stage or plateau the learning
curve again shows some improvement with spurts.