Principles Of Abilities And Human Learning (Principles of Psychology : a Modular Introduction)

165 Pages·1998·12.54 MB·English

by  Michael Howe

PRINCIPLES OF ABILITIES AND HUMAN
LEARNING
Principles of Abilities and
Human Learning
Michael J.A.Howe
Copyright © 1998 by Psychology Press Ltd, a member of the Taylor & Francis group
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by photostat,
microform, retrieval system, or any other means without the prior written
permission of the publisher.
Psychology Press, Publishers
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UK
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005.
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Cartoons by Rachael Adams.
Cover design by Joyce Chester.
ISBN 0-203-01639-4 Master e-book ISBN

ISBNs 0-86377-532-2 (Hbk)
0-86377-533-0 (Pbk)
Contents
1. Gaining human abilities 1
Where do abilities come from? 1
Learning and what it achieves 3
How this book is arranged 6
Principles of learning: 1. Active mental processing 7
Principles of learning: 2. Making meaningful connections 10
Principles of learning: 3. Repetition 14
Summary 17
2. How children gain basic capabilities 19
The beginnings of learning 19
Language 23
Reading 30
The beginnings of numeracy 35
Physical skills 39
Advantages and disadvantages of accelerated early learning 41
Compensating for early deprivation 43
Getting prepared for school 47
Summary 49
3. People’s abilities: What are they? 51
What is an ability? 51
Are abilities fixed or fluid? 53
To what extent are a person’s different abilities independent of one 59
another?
Do abilities transfer? 61
v
Do specific abilities depend on general intelligence? 63
Are some abilities unchangeable? 66
Summary 67
4. The role of motivation 69
Indirect influences on learning: Attention, motivation, and study 69
habits
Attending 72
Varieties of motivation 74
Good learning and study habits 92
Summary 94
5. Towards more advanced abilities 97
Applying learning principles: 1 & 2, Active mental processing and 98
forming meaningful connections
Applying learning principles: 3, Practice and training 103
The idea of expertise 105
Gaining exceptional abilities 107
Innate gifts and talents 112
Prodigies 116
What is a genius? 119
Creativity 120
Summary 122
6. Becoming a more successful learner 123
Being more effective 123
The value of organising one’s time and activities 126
Reading to learn 130
Writing 135
Studying f or examinations 140
Summary 141
Glossary 143
vi
References 147
Author index 153
Subject index 155
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.
2 PRINCIPLES OF ABILITIES AND HUMAN LEARNING

● 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
GAINING HUMAN ABILITIES 3
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: