The Science of Learning, Best Practices for Teaching and Learning

Research into how students learn has grown enormously over the last twenty-five years, and the field continues to expand. We know, for example, that students are not passive recipients of information, but, instead, actively construct their own knowledge and understanding. We also know that instructors who have a good sense of themselves as teachers—their instructional preferences, their beliefs about teaching—are particularly effective in the classroom. This session will provide an introduction to how people learn, and an opportunity to explore your own philosophy about teaching and learning. This course was produced by the MIT Office of Educational Innovation and Technology with support from MIT Academic Media Production Services and the support of the Education Development Center, Inc. and the U.S. Agency for International Development. Copyright © 2013, Massachusetts Institute of Technology This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.