Social Science Learning and Teaching Design

Author: Yang Xinde, Cai Weijing | Editor-in-Chief/Origin: Mainland China
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-04-01
Features: [Excerpt:] Students establish connections between new and old knowledge through perception, allowing them to integrate new information into their own knowledge system. When needed, they can recall and articulate it—this process is the acquisition of declarative knowledge. With relevant knowledge and necessary repetitive learning, people can easily master declarative knowledge, a learning ability that is developed early in childhood. However, when learning symbols, facts, holistic knowledge, and schema knowledge, students' specific processing processes differ. Below, we will discuss the learning and teaching of different types of declarative knowledge separately.
1. Learning and Teaching of Symbols
Symbol learning involves establishing a bidirectional connection between name symbols and their meanings based on the psychological mechanism of paired association. The process and conditions of symbol learning can be explained by association learning theory or conditioning theory. Psychologists who hold an associationist view, such as Ebbinghaus, Pavlov, Thorndike, and Skinner, argue that learning is a process of establishing connections between stimuli and responses. In social sciences, symbols like names of people, places, and timelines are acquired in this way.
The process of symbol learning is as follows:
- External stimuli are provided, such as giving the name "Yangtze River" (a general stimulus), and students perceive it by reading aloud or writing silently (a general response).
- Teachers or other external environments provide feedback on whether the response is correct, informing the learner whether it is right or wrong.
- Correct responses reinforce the learning behavior, while incorrect responses followed by correction also reinforce it.
Therefore, the learning process and conditions can be explained by mechanical association theory or stimulus-response and reinforcement theory.
For primary and secondary school students, as long as they can distinguish stimuli and receive necessary reinforcement, learning the names of things is quite effortless. The presentation of stimuli, reinforcement after responses, and the quantity of repetitive practice are the main factors influencing the establishment of stimulus-response connections.
Learning symbols involves storing them in long-term memory so they can be easily recalled when needed. Therefore, the key to learning name symbols is memory—without memory, there is no learning.
Information processing theory suggests that humans have two information storage systems: the short-term memory system retains information for up to one minute, while the long-term memory system retains information for minutes to a lifetime. Through repetition and rehearsal, individuals transfer information from short-term to long-term memory.
Ebbinghaus's research also found that the forgetting of symbols follows a pattern of initial rapid decline followed by slower decline. Repetitive learning reduces forgetting, and meaningful learning is less prone to forgetting than mechanical learning. Therefore, to prevent newly learned names from being forgotten, learning methods must be improved, and knowledge retention must be promoted.
Name learning in social sciences has the following characteristics: