The Way Students Learn: Acquiring Knowledge from an Integrated Science and Social Studies Unit

This article explores, through an analysis of 5 students' experiences in an integrated science and social studies unit on Antarctica, how the students acquired new knowledge. It looks at how new knowledge was constructed from prior knowledge and how prior knowledge was shaped by new knowledge. This is done through examples of 3 types of learning. The first example describes the way students represented and integrated new experiences in working memory using a model of the learning process designed to predict what students will learn and remember from their classroom experiences. The second example develops this model by exploring how the acquisition of specific information shaped students' understanding of larger curriculum topics. In the third example, the role of inference and implicit knowledge is illustrated through an analysis of how students acquired knowledge in the absence of relevant resources or experiences. These examples are also used to explain how different students learned different things from the same classroom activities and how different classroom activities created different learning processes. Implications for the design of more effective classroom tasks and activities are described.