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Lecture

Interactive Learning Activities: Empathy Studies and Metacognition

In course

HUM-432: How people learn: Designing Learning Tools I

The students will understand the cognitive and social factors which affect learning - particularly in science and engineering. They will be able to use social research techniques as part of the design process to understand end users. ...

Description

This lecture introduces a structured plan for the semester, including pre-class activities, in-class clicker questions, and post-class empathy studies. Students will engage in empathy studies on learners to design a learning artifact in semester two, developing a valuable skill for future design projects. The importance of diverse teams and skills for working in diverse teams will also be addressed through a workshop. The effectiveness of interactive teaching, particularly peer instruction, is highlighted, along with the concept of desirable difficulty. The lecture concludes with a discussion on Miller's magic number and the term metacognition, emphasizing the course's focus on understanding and managing one's own thinking and learning process.

Instructors (2)

Nihat Kotluk

Dr. Kotluk is currently a post-doc at the EPFL. He focuses mainly on emotions in the decision-making process, moral reasoning, and ethics in Engineering Education. He also works on equality and diversity issues. He has an academic background in both STEM and social sciences. Dr. Kotluk has acquired advanced skills in education, inclusive pedagogy, and science teachers' training. He has 14 years of teaching experience and has trained high school students in physics and teachers in pedagogy and research methods, among others. Dr. Kotluk has strong teaching and learning communication skills. He holds a Ph.D. in Educational Science, Curriculum, and Instruction. In his thesis, he studied the perceptions and practices of educators in culturally relevant pedagogy and developed recommendations to put more emphasis on inclusion in pre-service teacher education. With his research, he opened a new discussion in the academic community in Turkey and internationally. In his recent work, he analyzes the educational challenges facing refugee communities and other marginalized groups. In the study, he focused on whether and how teachers implemented the principles of culturally relevant and sustaining pedagogies and the challenges teachers faced while trying to implement these principles with Syrian students in Turkey. In his more recent work, he has studied moral emotions, moral reasoning in engineering ethics, and equality and diversity issues in engineering education. His teaching and research interests include emotions in engineering education, culturally responsive STEM education, equity and diversity in education, and multicultural education.

Roland John Tormey

I am a sociologist and learning scientist researching and teaching on engineering education. I'm particularly focused on the roles of emotion and self-regulation in engineering teaching and learning. My profile is accessible here.

Official source

Ontological neighbourhood

Psychology

Basic psychology: Cognitive psychology

Related concepts (26)

Learning

Learning is the process of acquiring new understanding, knowledge, behaviors, skills, values, attitudes, and preferences. The ability to learn is possessed by humans, animals, and some machines; there is also evidence for some kind of learning in certain plants. Some learning is immediate, induced by a single event (e.g. being burned by a hot stove), but much skill and knowledge accumulate from repeated experiences. The changes induced by learning often last a lifetime, and it is hard to distinguish learned material that seems to be "lost" from that which cannot be retrieved.

Working memory

Working memory is a cognitive system with a limited capacity that can hold information temporarily. It is important for reasoning and the guidance of decision-making and behavior. Working memory is often used synonymously with short-term memory, but some theorists consider the two forms of memory distinct, assuming that working memory allows for the manipulation of stored information, whereas short-term memory only refers to the short-term storage of information.

Metacognition

Metacognition is an awareness of one's thought processes and an understanding of the patterns behind them. The term comes from the root word meta, meaning "beyond", or "on top of". Metacognition can take many forms, such as reflecting on one's ways of thinking and knowing when and how to use particular strategies for problem-solving. There are generally two components of metacognition: (1) knowledge about cognition and (2) regulation of cognition.

Memory

Memory is the faculty of the mind by which data or information is encoded, stored, and retrieved when needed. It is the retention of information over time for the purpose of influencing future action. If past events could not be remembered, it would be impossible for language, relationships, or personal identity to develop. Memory loss is usually described as forgetfulness or amnesia. Memory is often understood as an informational processing system with explicit and implicit functioning that is made up of a sensory processor, short-term (or working) memory, and long-term memory.

Baddeley's model of working memory

Baddeley's model of working memory is a model of human memory proposed by Alan Baddeley and Graham Hitch in 1974, in an attempt to present a more accurate model of primary memory (often referred to as short-term memory). Working memory splits primary memory into multiple components, rather than considering it to be a single, unified construct. Baddeley & Hitch proposed their three-part working memory model as an alternative to the short-term store in Atkinson & Shiffrin's 'multi-store' memory model (1968).

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