All tagged prior knowledge
In this week’s post, Cindy and I (Althea) talk about our work with medical student learners. We have both worked for medical schools for a little over a year now and we’ve learned some things! We discuss common challenges for learning in medical school, efficient learning strategies, learning in the context of attentional disorders and anxiety, and what it means to prepare future healers.
If we can understand new information in the context of what we already know, we are more likely to to retrieve it later on. As students go from novice to expert they will learn most effectively if they go from direct instruction to independent, problem-based, or inquiry-based approaches.
One of the challenges to studying the effects of prior knowledge on learning is that it is difficult to control in an experiment … This highlights one of the trade-offs that happen when we conduct research on complex topics. Prior knowledge takes a long time to develop, and our development of that knowledge is based on many factors. This makes it difficult to manipulate! … I was therefore really interested to see a recent study that attempted to do just that - manipulate prior knowledge in order to examine its effects on learning.
Every student comes into class with some type of prior knowledge which influences how well they will learn material. The more prior-knowledge they have, the more they will be able to learn. A recent paper by Witherby and Carpenter (2021) neatly summarized this effect in a set of experiments.
