Learning Curve: student perceptions have a huge impact on understanding
When a student encounters difficulty in understanding a particular topic, teachers, myself included, form opinions based on our experience with that student. We inform parents of our perceptions, offer our views and seldom hesitate to make suggestions for overcoming those difficulties.
However, over the years, I have learned that it often helps simply to ask the student concerned why they think that they are struggling.
Students learn better when they perceive the learning environment positively
Studies repeatedly show that student perceptions are an important determinant of student behaviour - and an understanding of these perceptions can be more useful in explaining their behaviour than the well-intentioned inferences sometimes made by teachers.
Apropos of this, there is often confusion among the terms sensation, perception, thinking and cognition.
Sensation is simple - it depends upon the sense organs. Perception on the other hand is a more complex mental process. It depends not only upon the attention paid to material, but also upon previous experience.
Cognition is described as the mental process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses. Our knowledge influences the way we perceive the world. Thus perception and cognition are related.
As a parent what does one take away from all this?
