Sunday, September 19, 2010

Learning about how we learn

This week, I spent some time browsing for efficient, useful, and informative web resources dealing with one of my favorite topics: the study of how people learn.  After scouring the web, I have narrowed it down to my 2 favorite sites.  I personally value efficiency, so, you will notice that my sites include what I consider to be efficient ways of linking to additional resources for further research.

First is the Theory into Practice Database.  This is a website with "50 major theories of learning and instruction."  It provides summaries of the theories and within a summary, it includes links to related theories.  Each summary also includes applications, examples, a reference list, and often has links to the original work of the theorist being discussed.  Another aspect of this site that makes it very efficient is that you can browse theories by their name, by learning domain, or by learning concept.  If, for example, I was trying to plan instruction and I knew I wanted to differentiate according to learning styles, I could go to the learning concepts and choose Cognitive/Learning Styles.  Here, I would find not only summaries of the different theories but links to multiple sites dealing with learning styles.  This seems like a great reference site for me to refresh my memory on different theories as I am designing instruction.

I am very excited about the second site, Science Daily.  Although I find much of this site to be intriguing, I plan to focus on the educational psychology subsection within the mind and brain section.  Science Daily is a science news site that covers breaking news in science as well as research articles, videos, book reviews, etc.  According to the site, "Science daily is best known for showcasing the top news stories form the world's leading universities and research organizations."  Under the educational psychology topic, one can find the latest news, articles, videos, images, books, and an RSS link.  Personally, I could spend hours on a site like this.  Each article contains links to related articles on the site.  This resource will help keep me abreast of the very latest in educational psychology research.  Did I mention that I'm really excited about this site?

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