Peer interaction and the learning of critical thinking skills

Decision Making is the cognitive process resulting in the selection of a belief or a course of action among several alternative possibilities. Every decision-making process produces a final choice that may or may not prompt action.

Learning Principles Theory and Research-based Principles of Learning The following list presents the basic principles that underlie effective learning. These principles are distilled from research from a variety of disciplines.

Students come into our courses with knowledge, beliefs, and attitudes gained in other courses and through daily life.

As students bring this knowledge to bear in our classrooms, it influences how they filter and interpret what they are learning. However, when knowledge is inert, insufficient for the task, activated inappropriately, or inaccurate, it can interfere with or impede new learning.

How students organize knowledge influences how they learn and apply what they know. Students naturally make connections between pieces of knowledge.

When those connections form knowledge structures that are accurately and meaningfully organized, students are better able to retrieve and apply their knowledge effectively and efficiently.

In contrast, when knowledge is connected in inaccurate or random ways, students can fail to retrieve or apply it appropriately. As students enter college and gain greater autonomy over what, when, and how they study and learn, motivation plays a critical role in guiding the direction, intensity, persistence, and quality of the learning behaviors in which they engage.

When students find positive value in a learning goal or activity, expect to successfully achieve a desired learning outcome, and perceive support from their environment, they are likely to be strongly motivated to learn. To develop mastery, students must acquire component skills, practice integrating them, and know when to apply what they have learned.

Critical thinking - Wikipedia

Students must develop not only the component skills and knowledge necessary to perform complex tasks, they must also practice combining and integrating them to develop greater fluency and automaticity. Finally, students must learn when and how to apply the skills and knowledge they learn.

As instructors, it is important that we develop conscious awareness of these elements of mastery so as to help our students learn more effectively. Learning and performance are best fostered when students engage in practice that focuses on a specific goal or criterion, targets an appropriate level of challenge, and is of sufficient quantity and frequency to meet the performance criteria.

Students are not only intellectual but also social and emotional beings, and they are still developing the full range of intellectual, social, and emotional skills. While we cannot control the developmental process, we can shape the intellectual, social, emotional, and physical aspects of classroom climate in developmentally appropriate ways.

Basic Interpersonal Communicative Skills (BICS) and Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency (CALP)

In fact, many studies have shown that the climate we create has implications for our students. To become self-directed learners, students must learn to monitor and adjust their approaches to learning. Learners may engage in a variety of metacognitive processes to monitor and control their learning—assessing the task at hand, evaluating their own strengths and weaknesses, planning their approach, applying and monitoring various strategies, and reflecting on the degree to which their current approach is working.

Unfortunately, students tend not to engage in these processes naturally.

IM Specific Research - Interactive Metronome

When students develop the skills to engage these processes, they gain intellectual habits that not only improve their performance but also their effectiveness as learners. Skill acquisition and the LISP tutor.

Self-regulation of motivation and action through internal standards and goal systems. On the self-regulation of behavior.Incorporation of Feedback during Beat Synchronization is an Index of Neural Maturation and Reading Skills Kali Woodruff Carr, Ahren B.

Fitzroy, Adam Tierney, Travis White-Schwoch, Nina Kraus. [Print Version] June – Creating Effective Collaborative Learning Groups in an Online Environment. Jane E.

Defining and Valuing Interaction in Distance Education

Brindley and Christine Walti University of Oldenburg, Germany. Peer mentoring is a form of mentorship that usually takes place between a person who has lived through a specific experience (peer mentor) and a person who is new to that experience (the peer mentee).

An example would be an experienced student being a peer mentor to a new student, the peer mentee, in a particular subject, or in a new school. In the first of a new series of study skills for CLIL, Jean Brewster takes the very topical subject of thinking skills and looks at how CLIL teaching embraces many of the thinking skills principles and how this benefits the learner.

Most teachers have experienced classes in which student interaction has been more limited than they would like, with students becoming reticent when asked to 'talk to your partner about..'.

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