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 27 Church Road Hove East Sussex, BN3 2FA UK This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” 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: