They constitute a direct link between research and practice. The committee sees the influence of research on these mediating arenas as weak. The research base on learning and teaching has not been consoli- dated in a way that gives consistent, clear messages in formats that are useful for practice. As a result, the various mediating arenas that influence practice are often not aligned either with research findings or with each other. In synthesizing a broad body of research, How People Learn provides an opportunity to provide research-based messages that are clear and directly relevant to classroom practice.
Students come to the classroom with preconceptions about how the world works.
If their initial understanding is not engaged, they may fail to grasp new concepts and information presented in the classroom, or they may learn them for purposes of a test but revert to their preconceptions outside the classroom. This finding requires that teachers be prepared to draw out their students' existing understandings and help to shape them into an understanding that reflects the concepts and knowledge in the par- ticular discipline of study. To develop competence in an area of learning, students must have both a deep foundation of factual knowledge and a strong conceptual frame- work. But this factual information is not enough. Key to expertise is the mastery of concepts that allow for deep understanding of that information, transform- ing it from a set of facts into usable knowledge.