Promoting Meaningful Learning in All Student Populations - Research Paper Example

Meaningful learning refers to the gained knowledge that is fully understood by the individuals and they know how that fact is related to other situations that are happening around them. On the other hand, in rote learning the students are required to memorize the concept without developing full understanding and hence, they are unable to relate the new information with the previous one. As the brains stores data in distinct form therefore, in rote learning students are unable to relate different ideas with each other and in such a case, knowledge can only be retrieved by them from the brain when it is recalled individually.

On the other hand, in meaningful learning, the facts are stored in a relational manner. In this way, the knowledge is stored together and is related to each other. In this manner, when one fact is recalled the brain recalls the other facts automatically. Understanding of the Article In the article, Promoting Students’ Learning in Genetics with the Learning Cycle, Dogru-Atay, Pinar Tekkaya and Ceren (2008) discusses that though it is important for the institutes to adopt promotional learning for the students, there are however few of the abstract concepts like genetics that cannot be learned by the students only by meaningful understanding.

For such difficult concepts, the study has designed a research on Learning Cycle. According to this pattern, the concept is passed to the students in three steps: exploration, concept introduction and concept application. In the exploration, the students are provided with the concrete experience that is inter-related to the content that is to be learned by them. This phase allows the students to gather all the information that they already know about the topic. Once the students have explored the idea, the teachers are then supposed to link the idea to the students’ knowledge with relevant scientific concept.

After this step, the students are engaged in the additional activities in which the students apply their new knowledge to the situation. In this paper, the researcher talks about different methods that can be used for delivering the lecture. The different researches that are discussed in the paper show that through learning cycle, the students learn more than any other setting. The papers validate that the students who learn through meaningful learning are able to connect the various concepts with each other.

The other advantage of meaningful learning is that students develop ability of reasoning. They do not only depend on the material given to them, they tend to develop personal understanding of the topic. The researcher has discussed that as through learning cycle the students are able develop reasoning ability, this approach also helps the students to solve the genetics problems. The other concept that is discussed in this article is the dependency of learning on the gender. Few of the discussed researches are of the view that there is no significant difference in biological achievements in boys and girls.

On the other hand, other researchers have either favoured boys in their better understanding of the biological concepts or they have favoured girls. In this paper, to understand the genetic achievement of the students the researcher has used Genetics Achievement Test (GAT), Learning