Discovery and Meaningful Learning - Essay Example

The sessions of discovery learning incorporate three key ideas including problem solving, learner management, integrating and connecting (Harari & Legge, 2000, p. 20). Problem solving motivates learners to come up with solutions by generalizing knowledge and pull information together. Learner management allows participants, in small teams, or alone to learn at their own pace in their own ways. Integrating and connecting encourage new knowledge integration into the existing knowledge base of the learner, which helps in connecting to the real world.

Meaningful Learning According to Harari and Legge (2000), meaningful learning means that learned knowledge, for instance, a fact becomes fully understood by a person and the person knows how the fact relates to the stored facts in the brain. It is expedient to contrast meaningful learning and rote learning, which is much less desirable, for us to understand the concept. Rote learning involves memorizing something with no full understanding, and one does not know how the relationship between the new information and the stored knowledge.

For instance, let us say we learn five facts in a course during a term or a semester through rote learning. The five facts learned have a relationship in real life, but they are stored in memory as separate items. The brain stores the facts as distinct unrelated information that can be recalled individually when a student learns them through rote learning. When the student recalls one of the five facts, he, or she does not recall the other four facts at that moment. This means that when the student thinks of fact A, the thought does not lead him/her to think of fact B-E.

We can illustrate this as follows. The facts learned seem to have no relationship between them at all, yet close examination reveals a relationship of the facts. Meaningful learning contrasts with rote learning in that what a student learns, even if they are different facts in a course, he/she can relate as the facts have a relational manner in the storage memory. The brain stores the facts together since they have relationship (Harari & Legge, 2000, p. 37). When the student recalls one of the facts, he or she will also recall the other facts at the same time, or a short time afterwards.

This means that recalling fact E, triggers the memory for the other facts, B and D, which in turn leads to the recalling of fact A and C. We refer to this phenomenon as spread of activation. This is what entails meaningful learning. A student who learns by meaningful learning can solve problems in an easier way than the one who learns by rote learning. Thus, we find the value of meaningful learning; a way of learning that relates facts helping one to solve problems related rather than treating problems differently, which have a relationship.

The figure below shows how meaningful learning happens. Discovery learning makes sure that the brains of the learners become engaged during all learning times. Thus, this learning method, although it accelerates the process of education, it leads to higher retention levels than traditional approaches of learning. There are certain benefits of discovery learning including condensed training