The principles of adult learning include getting the learners involved in the planning and evaluation of the training and making sure they understand the reason for learning something. When researching factors that contribute to the educational process I found this to be made up of four categories, the learner, the teacher, the subject matter and the instruction method. Out of these four I focused on two Individual and two environmental factors.
Of all of the factors that can affect how people learn I believe that motivation is one of the most important. Someone who is motivated to learn generally succeeds, even if they have to work long and hard to do so. Learning generally breaks down as the level of interest declines. Attention span varies among both children and adults. Some people simply prefer to be on the go and have difficulty completing a lesson or task for any length of time. Since the most popular method of teaching requires students to listen and read, often while sitting still, students who have a short attention span might have difficulty learning.
An external factor that influenced my session was the time limit. This affected all my preparation and planning as I was constantly thinking of ways to make things shorter so I could ensure I covered everything thoroughly. Had I had more time to play with I could have covered the basics in much more details. Another external factor I want to mention is distraction. Distraction is the divided attention of an individual or group from the chosen object of attention onto the source of distraction. Students learn far quicker when there is a lack of interruption. This could include people moving around, talking, and equipment not working. Students distracted during learning take less in, leading to shortened attention spans and topics being covered multiple times.
I firmly believe Confucius was correct when he said ‘I hear and I forget, I see and I remember and I do and I understand’. The purpose...