Although there are many cognitive factors that affect academic performance, the current psychological research mainly focuses on three aspects: knowledge level, learning strategies and thinking strategies.
(A) the difference in knowledge level
The knowledge in anyone's mind is learned in a way of gradual accumulation. A journey of a thousand miles depends on "accumulated steps." For various reasons, there are obvious differences in knowledge accumulation between gifted students and poor students. This difference is not only quantitative, but also qualitative.
1. Differences in knowledge. Students who are backward in a certain field are often accompanied by the lack of accumulated knowledge in this field. For example, in a study, the basic knowledge of organic synthesis of top students and poor students was measured. The results show that the correct rate of excellent students is 85%, and the correct rate of poor students is 19%. Insufficient knowledge accumulation brings many unfavorable factors to the later learning, which affects the memory ability, reading comprehension ability and thinking ability in the later learning of related knowledge. For example, the research on the capacity of short-term memory proves that the capacity of short-term memory is 7 2 chunks. The more relevant knowledge blocks in your mind, the stronger your short-term memory ability. The reading comprehension experiment also proves that the more familiar students are with the theme of the article they read and the richer their background knowledge, the better their reading comprehension will be. The research on solving mathematical application problems proves that the stronger the short-term memory ability, the stronger the ability to solve application problems.
The study of subject knowledge is systematic and accumulated. If the previous knowledge is insufficient and there are loopholes in the basic knowledge, it will have a very adverse impact on the later learning, leading to obstacles in learning. Therefore, when helping poor students, we should pay special attention to the leakage of knowledge, make up for it in time, and avoid heavy accumulation.
2. Differences in knowledge quality. Excellent students and poor students not only have significant differences in the amount of knowledge they have mastered, but also have qualitative differences in the knowledge they have mastered This difference is mainly manifested in three aspects.
(1) The level of concept mastery is obviously different. Poor students can recite the definition of a concept, but they only understand the definition literally and don't really form a correct understanding in their minds. This is a very superficial understanding. They may also replace scientific concepts with everyday concepts, resulting in misinterpretation of concepts. They can't grasp the difference between similar concepts and have a vague understanding of them. When doing exercises, we don't think with scientific concepts, but mechanically copy the teacher's examples to answer the exercises.
(2) The proficiency of basic knowledge and skills is different. Excellent students are very skilled in mastering basic knowledge and skills, even reaching the level of automation, so they are agile in thinking, which is because "practice makes perfect". The poor students are "slow" because they are not proficient in basic knowledge and skills.
(3) The degree of knowledge organization is different. The knowledge in the brain is accumulated gradually, but it should not be accumulated. The knowledge in the mind should be organized organically to make it systematic, structured and orderly. The knowledge structure in the brains of gifted students and poor students has different characteristics. The knowledge points in the poor students' minds are listed, horizontal and piled up, while the knowledge points in the top students' minds are organically structured and arranged in layers. For another example, in a study (Chi et al., 1982), subjects were asked to classify 24 physical problems. Therefore, "novices" (freshmen who have just studied physics for one semester) tend to classify according to surface characteristics, such as grouping all "slopes" with all "springs"; The "experts" (doctoral students in physics) classify some "slope" problems and some "spring" problems according to the laws of physics on the grounds that "they all belong to the same physical movement". In this study, 20 physical terms (including slope, mass, friction, energy conservation, acceleration, etc. ) presented to the subjects, who were asked to describe what they saw within three minutes after reading these 20 terms. It turns out that the "novice" first recalls those specific and superficial terms, and finally mentions the terms related to the laws of physics. The "expert" first mentioned abstract terms related to the laws of physical motion (such as conservation of energy and Newton's law), and then described the applicable conditions of Newton's law: if there is acceleration, Newton's second theorem is used; If there is no acceleration and the resultant force is zero, Newton's first law is used.
..... Finally, the specific terms of surface features, such as slope, height and length, are mentioned. From this point of view, poor students are not as good at directing concrete and vivid knowledge with abstract and regular knowledge as gifted students. These differences in knowledge structure have a great influence on students' thinking mode of using knowledge to solve problems, which determines the quality of students' knowledge mastery.
(B) differences in learning strategies
There is no doubt that learning strategies are one of the important factors that affect academic performance. A study by China scholars measured the degree of correlation between learning strategies and academic performance. This study mainly investigates nine learning strategies: ① organizational strategy: classifying and combining learning materials; (2) Collecting information: trying to obtain information related to learning tasks through various channels; (3) Retelling memory: through practical activities, try to remember what you have learned; (4) Seek social help: Seek help from classmates, teachers or parents as much as possible; ⑤ Review: Review the texts and notes; ⑥ Self-assessment and diagnosis: check and evaluate your own learning progress or quality; ⑦ Objectives and plans: the formulation and implementation plan of learning objectives; (8) Recording and self-monitoring: recording the learning situation to supervise the completion of learning objectives and adjust the learning process in time; ⑨ Environmental construction: Try to choose or arrange a suitable environment conducive to the smooth progress of learning activities. Among them, the first five are strategies about learning methods, and the last four are learning strategies about self-adjustment in learning process.
According to the specific performance of each strategy, the researchers compiled a questionnaire containing 36 questions. The results show that the scores of learning strategies are significantly related to students' academic performance (the average scores of nine subjects, namely Chinese, algebra, geometry, physics, English, history, politics, biology and geography, at the end of the first and second grades). The comparison between poor students and excellent students shows that there is a significant difference in learning methods (P < 0.05), but the test results are more significant in learning self-regulation (P
This study proves that there are obvious differences in the mastery and application of learning strategies (especially the mastery and application of self-regulation strategies) between excellent students and poor students.
(C) differences in thinking strategies
There is a close relationship between the difference in knowledge mastery and the difference in the use of thinking strategies between gifted students and poor students.
The research on the cognitive factors that cause the significant difference between gifted students and poor students has just started, and it is one of the hot spots in psychological research today. It can be expected that there will be more excellent research results in the near future.
Second, the analysis of personality factors of learning differences between gifted and poor students
(A) Non-intellectual factors research
(C) differences in personality health
Some students' personality maladjustment is closely related to academic failure, which is mutually causal. Not only does personality adaptation affect academic performance, but academic performance will also affect personality adaptation.
For students, nothing has such a bad influence on students' personality adaptation as academic failure and frustration. A series of studies show that students' personality adaptation is moderately related to their academic performance or grade in school. Students with high academic performance rarely have personality adaptation problems, which are usually characterized by high self-integration, strong independence and maturity.
Students with personality disorders often have a series of "symptoms" that are not conducive to learning: hyperactivity, distraction, mood swings, irritability, love to make trouble, easy to produce hostile emotions, low level of ambition and so on. This kind of students lack self-confidence, feel anxious, have low tolerance for setbacks, and have withdrawal reaction (avoiding those learning tasks that they think may make them criticized or ridiculed, and often avoiding difficult learning situations). These students are immature in personality, often showing lack of sense of responsibility, independence and long-term goals, unable to control their impulses, unable to delay the satisfaction of pleasure needs, and lacking persistence in complex learning tasks. Therefore, how to provide mental health counseling and healthy personality education for poor students is also one of the important tasks of teaching students in accordance with their aptitude.
Third, educational measures for poor students
We know that improving the academic performance of poor students is the key to improve the teaching quality in a large area. Many excellent teachers have taken many effective measures to change and prevent poor students from cognitive factors and personality factors, and have gained many successful experiences. This part introduces four effective educational measures for poor students from the perspective of educational psychology: case analysis, strategy training, frustration education and cooperative learning.
(A) Case analysis method
Case analysis means that teachers find out the problems and put forward targeted corrective measures by analyzing the thinking process of specific students.
The specific implementation method of case analysis is: select some learning tasks with moderate difficulty (for example,
Ask several gifted students and several poor students to complete these learning tasks one by one in front of the teacher (ask them to think loudly in the process of completing these learning tasks). The researchers record their learning and thinking process in detail, and compare and analyze the thinking methods of gifted students and poor students, summarize the learning or thinking strategies of gifted students and find out the strategic defects of poor students. A study on China's plane geometry thinking strategy adopted this case analysis method.
(2) Strategy training
The strategy training mentioned here refers to the training of students' cognitive strategies (including learning strategies of accepting knowledge and thinking strategies of using knowledge to solve problems) in combination with the teaching of subject knowledge, which can improve students' ability, help students improve their methods and improve their efficiency, thus promoting the large-scale improvement of teaching quality.
Cognitive strategy training mainly adopts two forms: lecture and process comparison.
Teaching and training method means that educators sum up effective cognitive strategies by comparing and analyzing the cases of gifted students and poor students in advance, and then compile training materials. In practical training, teachers first explain successful thinking strategies with examples, and then let students practice. After better understanding the use of effective cognitive strategies, metacognitive self-monitoring training is finally carried out. In the study of the above-mentioned plane geometry thinking strategy, in the second stage, the researcher trained five experimental classes in four schools in the form of lectures and training, and achieved ideal results.
Through certain teaching measures, the process comparison method enables poor students to compare their own thinking process with that of "experts" in the learning process, so as to experience their own shortcomings in "methods" and consciously improve their own methods. The idea of "experts" here can be the idea of real experts in the subject (for example, the idea elaborated by teaching experts in their works), or the idea of teachers or gifted students. The concrete implementation method of thinking contrast is to let students spontaneously complete a learning task before teaching new thinking skills, and then experience or verbally express what methods they have used. Finally, teachers give priority to "expert thinking" (or look at the ideas mentioned in reference books), and must not tell the truth about "expert method" before students experience it themselves.
Another way to implement this measure is to pair excellent students and poor students into a study group to complete the study task together. The teacher puts forward the problem situation to the study group, and then asks the students to give their own solutions or ideas to the problem and learn from each other. Finally, the study group puts forward the best solution to the teacher. Bloom, a famous American educational psychologist, has proved through experiments that after 10- 12 times of training, the students who have participated in this kind of training have significantly improved their grades and become more confident in their studies (Bloom &; Broder
Er, 1950). Using this measure to study and train is not only a remedy for poor students, but also beneficial to excellent students. For eugenics, expressing their thoughts will make their thinking clearer, which not only exercises their thinking ability, but also their oral expression ability. By comparing with other people's methods, eugenics will find its own "cleverness", thus making the use of good ideas transition from spontaneous to conscious. But also can improve the spirit of helping others, cooperation and self-worth of gifted students.
frustration education
Poor students encounter more difficulties and setbacks in their studies, so it is difficult to persist in their studies, and they are more likely to have a sense of boredom, inferiority and helplessness, which will further affect their academic performance, lead to more learning defects and difficulties, and form a vicious circle. The result is that the worse your grades are, the less you want to learn, and the worse your grades are.
Therefore, we must strengthen the education of emotion and will while strengthening cognitive training, pay attention to the organic combination of knowledge, emotion, will and action, and adopt the measures of "comprehensive management". It is one of the effective comprehensive measures to educate poor students to bear setbacks. According to the contemporary psychotherapy theory, the education mode of "knowledge-action-emotion" is an ideal method of frustration education.
The "knowledge" mentioned here refers to ideological education. To improve students' frustration tolerance and persistence, we should first make students realize the importance of frustration tolerance, establish a correct attitude towards frustration and understand the appropriate methods to deal with setbacks.
On the basis of "understanding and reasoning", conduct "guidance and action" so that students can actually use the frustration coping skills they have learned to overcome setbacks and make progress and success in this process. Therefore, at this stage, students must face the setbacks that they can overcome through hard work, and the evaluation standard of "success" is that they can achieve it through hard work, which is a peach that can be picked by jumping up.
On the basis of success or progress, there is a more important link-"moving with emotion". In order to let students experience the joy and success brought by facing up to difficulties, overcoming setbacks and overcoming self, this positive emotional experience will become a positive reinforcement of hard work. This is also an internalization process of external induction or compulsory requirements, and it is an indispensable part of cultivating students' conscious behavior.
Of course, the sequence of knowledge, action and love mentioned above is not immutable. It should be used flexibly and circularly according to different situations, so as to gradually improve students' learning ability and the development level of non-intellectual factors.
cooperative learning
A large number of foreign experiments have proved that cooperative learning is of great benefit to the development of poor students. In cooperative learning, poor students can persist in completing homework with the help of gifted students, which not only makes up for the lack of knowledge in the process of persisting in completing homework, but also imitates and masters the good learning methods and thinking skills of gifted students, and gradually enhances their self-confidence and interest in learning. Cooperative learning is an effective teaching form to improve the quality of education in a large area.
Cooperative learning is a process in which students work together to achieve teaching objectives. Generally, students are divided into several study groups (2-4 people in each group are appropriate), and they are assigned study tasks to ensure that all members of the group study materials. Then the students discuss the textbooks with each other, promote each other's understanding of the textbooks and encourage each other to study hard. Teachers' responsibility is to guide, instruct, encourage and urge.
Generally speaking, in actual teaching, the more emotional education involved in teaching, the more complicated and difficult to master the knowledge to be learned, the less teaching materials and equipment needed, and the more students need to learn from each other, the more cooperative learning should be used. Advanced conceptual reasoning and problem solving occupy the largest proportion of time in teaching, which can develop students' thinking ability and are most suitable for cooperative learning.
Cooperative learning can be carried out in class, but more importantly, it is carried out outside class. In order to ensure the smooth progress of extracurricular cooperative learning, teachers must do the following work.
1. Strengthen prior guidance. Generally speaking, teachers should strengthen guidance in the following aspects. First, we should guide students to distinguish what is suitable for cooperative learning and what is not. Secondly, we should guide students how to set learning goals. Third, strengthen the guidance of learning methods and guide students how to understand, remember and think in cooperation in advance. Fourth, we should strengthen the guidance of cooperation skills and tell students in advance how to cooperate in the learning tasks of the day.
2. Ensure cooperative learning time. Cooperative learning should be institutionalized and clear in time. The time for cooperative study every day is about half an hour.
3. Form a * * * responsibility system. Each member of the cooperative learning group must be responsible for the group, and each group must be responsible for the whole class. In order to form a system and atmosphere of collective responsibility, the organizational form of cooperative learning should ensure that team members take turns to play various roles (such as team leader, target inspector, idea evaluator, etc.). ).
4. Pay attention to the process and methods. The biggest advantage of cooperative learning is that it is convenient for students to reflect on the process of self-cognition, which is helpful to the formation of metacognitive experience and the improvement of metacognitive monitoring ability. In cooperative learning, we must attach importance to the cognitive process and methods, so as to really promote the improvement of learning methods and the improvement of learning efficiency.
5. The assessment, appraisal and ranking in the class must be carried out in cooperative learning groups, not in individuals.
Fourth, the main difference-oriented teaching methods
Traditional classroom teaching emphasizes the consistent learning progress of the whole class, and as a result, the thirst for knowledge of gifted students is not fully satisfied, and poor students often can't keep up with the progress and meet the teaching requirements. How to adapt teaching to students' individual differences is a concern of educational circles all over the world. In order to answer this question, people have designed many new teaching models to adapt to individual differences. Below we mainly introduce four teaching modes: personalized teaching system, self-study teaching method, master learning and hierarchical teaching.
(A) personalized teaching system
Personalized teaching system of instruction, also known as Keller Plan (PSI for short), was founded by P.S.Keller and his colleagues in 1968. Its purpose is to avoid single lecture-style teaching and rigid time arrangement, let students advance at their own pace, and at the same time ensure that they really master the teaching materials. PSI can give students more opportunities for personal choice, which is called personalized teaching system.
In Keller's plan, each course is usually divided into about twenty study units, each unit includes an overview, a table listing all the goals to be achieved, and a suggested procedure (including reading notes or referring to specific parts of textbooks). After each student finishes a certain unit, he has to be questioned and examined by various points. Only when he has a high degree of mastery of these knowledge points (generally 90% or higher accuracy) can he be allowed to enter the next unit. If the standard is not reached, the teacher or "supervisor" (usually the students who have finished the unit) will ask the students to review the unit again and take another test of the unit again. This kind of test can be conducted at any time when students think they have achieved their goals, and lower test scores are not included in their grading level. The teacher or supervisor only records the unit tests passed by each student, and the score is determined by the number of units completed by each student in a semester or a quarter. For students who have successfully completed each unit of study, priority is given to listening to reports, watching movies and participating in demonstrations as encouragement.
PSI has five distinct characteristics:
1. Self-paced. In a limited time, students can control the progress of unit learning according to their own wishes.
2. master. Students are not allowed to enter the next unit before reaching the standard.
3. Students help each other. In order to strengthen the communication between students, PSI designates students who pass the course as counselors for freshmen.
4. guidance. In the study guidance of each unit, put forward the study objectives and suggestions, and point out the available resources and related experiments.
5. Freestyle speech. Students don't have to go to the teacher's lecture, but voluntarily. The purpose of teaching is to inspire, guide and supplement.
PSI can stimulate students' learning motivation, arouse their enthusiasm, make them feel involved, effectively promote the personalization of teaching and enhance the mutual influence among students. PSI is generally more suitable for students with higher grades and stronger independence, and it is more difficult to implement it among primary school students and students with stronger dependence. In addition, its conflict with the traditional concept of course arrangement and grading is also an urgent problem to be solved.
(B) Teaching methods of self-study counseling
Since 1980s, Lu Zhongheng and others have conducted systematic experimental research on self-help teaching of mathematics in middle schools, and established a student-centered and teacher-led teaching method. This method coordinated the main role of students and the leading role of teachers in the teaching process, fully mobilized the enthusiasm of both teachers and students, and achieved good teaching results.
In this study, a self-taught textbook written by the experimenter was used. The textbook includes three books: ① The textbook is a self-study textbook which is convenient for students to read, different from ordinary textbooks; (2) exercise books, leaving blank for students to do exercises, with a fixed position, which is convenient for teachers to read and coach; (3) exam books, convenient for teachers to check the learning effect of students. The compilation of this self-study textbook has implemented nine psychological principles, namely: appropriate steps; Know the result immediately; Bedclothes; Directly expose essential features; From expansion to compression; Variant review; Step by step thinking; Reversible association; There is evidence step by step.
According to the purpose and present situation of teaching experiment, the experimenter puts forward seven teaching principles of self-study counseling: students should study independently under the guidance of teachers; Strengthen motivation; The combination of class collectivity and individuality; Combine enlightenment (inspiration and guidance), reading (reading textbooks), practice (doing problems) and understanding (timely feedback); Self-inspection is combined with other inspections; Try to use variant review; Strengthen intuition by modern means.
In self-study tutoring teaching, the teacher allows students to have 30-35 minutes of self-study in a class, and finally sets aside 10 minutes for inspiration, questions, answers and summary. A series of related experiments show that the class adopting this teaching form not only surpasses the control class in academic performance, self-study ability and transfer ability, but also promotes the improvement of students' psychological quality, such as analytical ability and reasoning ability. The teaching form of self-study counseling founded by Lu Zhongheng and others is a teaching method with China characteristics and facing individual differences, which opens up an important way for us to effectively guide students' learning.
(3) Mastering learning
Mastery learning is a teaching model put forward by B.S. Bloom, a famous contemporary American educational psychologist, which aims to ensure that all students can reach a certain learning level. Its guiding ideology is: "Under proper learning conditions, almost all students can learn what the school teaches." The prototype of mastery learning is the "school learning model" put forward by J.B.Carroll of Harvard University in the mid-1960s. The main points are as follows: first, any student can complete any subject as long as he has enough study time; Secondly, the difference in academic performance in reality is caused by the difference between the amount of study time required by students and the amount of study time actually spent.
Bloom's main contribution lies in designing the program of mastering learning, and systematically studying the effect of mastering learning and its feasibility in school learning.
Bloom's mastery learning includes two parts: the preparation of mastery learning and the operation of mastery learning.
1. Grasp the preparation for learning
(1) Determine the meaning of mastery. Generally, the meaning of mastery is reflected by clear curriculum objectives (long-term) and unit objectives (short-term), summative tests and formative tests corresponding to the objectives, and academic performance standards.
(2) Divide the whole course plan into a series of smaller learning units, determine the teaching objectives of each unit, arrange the order of the units, make the units closely linked, and let students deepen step by step.
(3) Determine the factors that make up each unit. One is to compile formative tests corresponding to unit goals to help students find out mistakes and misunderstandings in their studies; The second is to stipulate the mastery standard to determine the learning level of students in this unit.
(4) Make overall planning. Teachers should make three plans before teaching: initial teaching plan; "Feedback-correction" plan; Teaching time plan.
2. Master the implementation of learning
(1) Introduce students to the general procedures of mastering learning, so that students can adapt to mastering learning methods.
(2) Teaching for mastering. Teachers adopt the form of collective teaching and teach each unit according to the unit teaching objectives. It is important that after teaching this unit, the teacher should not teach the next unit immediately, but should enter the feedback-correction link. This is a key to mastering learning. This link includes: ① formative test of the whole class. ② Analyze the results of formative test: analyze whether the students have mastered it; Find out the learning difficulties; Analyze the reasons for the difficulty. According to students' difficulties, teachers provide students with various learning materials and corrective measures to choose from. ④ Students carry out corrective learning according to their own choices. Students who have mastered this unit can freely carry out consolidation activities, or act as "little teachers" for students who have not reached the mastery level.
3. Assess mastery level
After all the textbooks have been learned, the teacher gives a final test to the whole class, and evaluates each student's academic performance. The score is the student's achievement in learning the textbooks. All students who reach or exceed the predetermined level can get an A-level.
Bloom's mastery learning has achieved remarkable results in teaching practice and has had a great influence at home and abroad, and is known as "optimistic teaching theory"; Since it was introduced to China in the mid-1980s, it has been transformed into "target teaching" with China characteristics, which has a great influence and remarkable effect in China.
(D) Hierarchical teaching
The traditional class teaching system treats all students with unified outline, unified teaching materials, unified progress and unified requirements, and tries to make students "March in a hurry". Practice has proved that this is an unrealistic idea. Some principals vividly compared this kind of teaching to "a dress that all students should wear". The social demand for talents is multifaceted and multi-level, and students' personal interests, ability structure and personality development are also very different. Students at different levels should have the freedom to choose courses and be able to develop actively. This concept is reflected in the hierarchical teaching tried by some schools in China.
In hierarchical teaching, the school offers several courses at different levels for some subjects in a grade, such as A, B and C courses for students to choose from. A-level course is not restricted by the current syllabus, and the teaching requirements are obviously higher than the current syllabus, so a new experimental textbook is adopted; B-level courses are slightly higher than the current syllabus requirements, using unified teaching materials; C-level courses are taught according to the minimum requirements of the current syllabus. The class hours of the three-level courses are unchanged and arranged at the same time for students to choose across classes. However, some subjects do not rely on students' original knowledge base, and there is no situation that they can't learn without mastering previous knowledge, so hierarchical teaching is not adopted. In this way, the students' original classes are still preserved, and the role of class collectives should be fully exerted.
Hierarchical teaching, which subject and level students take part in, adopts "dynamic management" and is adjusted once every semester.
Hierarchical teaching is different from fast class and slow class. It allows students to choose according to their major and future career orientation. Maybe one subject will take part in Class A, and the other will take part in Class C ... Unlike the fast class, which has high requirements for all subjects, the slow class has low requirements.
Hierarchical teaching is conducive to students' active development, to cultivating students' consciousness of subjectivity, success, enterprising and competition, and to cultivating students' specialties.
Computer-based learning
With the application of modern teaching methods, especially the application of computer-aided teaching methods and the emergence of computer information networks, the teaching methods oriented to individual differences will develop more rapidly and even undergo revolutionary changes. Computer-based learning (CBL) will become the most important teaching form to adapt to individual differences.