Becoming A Self-Directed Learner – Part 4: Strategies For Learning.

Top performers in every field has effective strategies for achieving and improving their results.

In the same way, your children need to have a toolkit of strategies to gather, understand, and use information productively.

When they have more strategies, they will be better prepared to improve their learning tasks and outcomes.

They need to know how to choose the right strategy for a learning task or situation and know how to apply it correctly to achieve the learning outcome. As they grow up, they need to continue to improve the way they manage information and learning strategies.

It is not possible to go through all the strategies in this Love Note. Suffice to say, the purpose of learning is to be able to store information in the long-term memory.

To do that, there are three basic strategies that can be adopted.

First, rehearsal strategies.

They say that repetition is the mother of learning.

Help your children to apply this strategy through taking notes, copying information, repeating information verbally and in a written format, and underlying words in learning materials.

The downside to rehearsal strategies is that they do not help your children to connect new information to the information in their brain and the inputs around them. If they don’t know how to connect and relate the informational one another, it will be harder to remember and store them.

Secondly, elaboration strategies.

Elaboration strategies include helping your children to summarize informational materials into key points. They can also paraphrase and rephrase the information using their own model, concept or words.

They can also compare and contrast different information and come out with examples to support the learning process.

A useful strategy for doing well in
assessments is to develop questions related to the information and formulate answers for them.

Finally, organising strategies.

If your children does not know how to organise the information, they will not be able to remember them effectively.

At the basic level, they can organise the information using symbols and maps and other kinds of representations.

They can organise the information according to hierarchies. For example, organising information from big picture to the various details.

To illustrate, the history of economics can be divided into four phases: the Agrarian Age, the Industrial Age , the Information Age, and the Post-Information Age. We can then explore the changes during each of the ages.

Information can also be organized in sequences. For example, to improve learning performance, you must first know your current performance. Then, you need to have a goal for improving performance follow by strategies on how to achieve the goal.

Information can also be organized in matrices, tables and diagrams.

All these strategies help to organise the information and show the connection and interrelationship between these information. They can be used to help them connect the dots with current and future informational inputs.

By doing that, it will drive your children to store relevant information and retrieve them more easily when they need them.

In conclusion, it is important to continue to help your children expand their methods for learning and for applications in real life situation. It will help them learn under any situation, both within the classroom and without and throughout their life.

Go4It!

I hope this message will find a place in your heart.

By the way, I have also recorded other reflections.

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Please read my reflections and continue to teach me.

Life is FUNtastic!