The NYS-MEP Comprehension Professional Learning Community met on December 9, 2021 for the third meeting in a series of seven. Please see the topical outline below of content discussed, as well as pre-reading, meeting materials, and additional reading resources and references.
Pre-Reading
- Highlights for Children, Inc., Little Great White by Pamela S. Turner
Meeting Materials
- PowerPoint
- Sample Unit Plan
- Blank Unit Plan
- Comprehensive Glossary
Session Outline
A. Selecting important ideas that transfer
- Big ideas in social studies – civics and history
B. Unit plans: Building knowledge and vocabulary
- Reducing cognitive load - Understanding cognitive load to better engage your students
Working memory holds a small amount of information at one time. Therefore, instructional methods should avoid overloading memory (Sweller,1994). Reduce cognitive load by building and activating prior knowledge. This knowledge must be retrieved automatically. So, instruction needs to teach it well and provide opportunities to generalize to other settings.
References
Bransford, J.D. (1984). Schema activation and schema acquisition: Comments on Richard C. Anderson’s remarks. In Learning to read in American Schools: Basal readers and content texts (pp. 259-272). Lawrence Erlbaum Publisher.
Chi, M. T. H. & VanLehn, K. A. (2012). Seeing deep structures from the interactions of surface features. Educational Psychologist, 47, 177 – 188.
Donovan, M.S. & Bransford, J.D. (2005). Introduction. In M.S. Donovan & J.D. Bransford (Eds.), How students learn: History in the classroom (pp. 1-26). Washington, DC: National Academies Press.
Hattie, J, AC & Donaghue, G.M. (2016). Learning strategies: A synthesis and conceptual model. Science of Learning, 1, 1-13.
Kintsch, W. (1998). Comprehension: A paradigm for cognition. United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press.
Lord, K.M. & Noel, A.M. (under review). Civic concepts: Opportunities to deepen elementary students’ knowledge of democratic governance and citizenship.
Lord, K.M., Noel, A.M., & Slevin, B. (2016). Social studies concepts: An analysis of the NAEP and states’ standards. Journal of Research in Childhood Education, 30, 389-405.
McCrudden, M. T., & Schraw, G. (2007). Relevance and goal-focusing in text processing. Educational Psychology Review, 19, 113– 29.
National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (2018). How people learn II: Learners, contexts, and cultures. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: https://doi.org/10.17226/24783.
Rugg, H. (1921). Needed changes in the committee procedure of reconstructing the social studies. The Elementary School Journal, 21, 688 – 702.
Sweller, J. (1994). Cognitive load theory, learning difficulty, and instructional design. Learning and Instruction, 4, 295 – 312.