Prompt: Share a story about your best learning experience (could be a formal course or something more personal). Why did you enjoy it?

Last semester I took a course discussed about economic development (Econ 320) and I very much enjoyed it. Instead of just conveying concepts by explaining them and organize the information into PowerPoint, like most other courses do. The professor also assigned us several articles and videos to look over as tasks. Those articles and videos are very informative, which included such as argument paper indicates different measurements of income inequality, TED talks about how world population and poverty are changing throughout history, and documentary of first nations’ situation, etc.. Even though these leaning materials are not testable but those mentioned facts about economic development caused my curiosity and interest in this topic. Also, much information from those materials have changed my preconceived opinions about global economic development, and even those opinions have seemed like common sense to me before. This kind of findings gives me motivation to learn and the motivation is exactly what drives me to finish reading or watching. After that, we also have to write down our understanding and findings from the materials for the in-class discussion as groups the day after. At last, we will summarize what we have gained after group discussion.

If we consider course teaching from a theoretical perspective, I think the professor was both a cognitivist and a constructivist. The cognitivism approach was applied by conveying the course materials combined with extended materials stage by stage. The knowledge from extended learning materials are related to presented testable concepts but were conveyed in a different way. After finishing those materials, we will not only gain a better understanding of course content but also will have an update to our prior preconceived knowledge about economic development. And for constructivism strategy, the course materials were used as a premise to let us know how those economic concepts and definitions can be applied to or interpreted in real-world scenarios. And the professor always says that there does not need to be only one true answer for most economic questions. So, group meetings will allow students to know others’ different opinions from peer interaction. After all, I think proper extended learning materials are also quite important for learners to develop interests in the learning topic.

After reading Xiaoqing’s post, it’s good to know how she applied three learning three theories to her own learning experiences. And I also agree that my learning experiences were primarily conveyed by a cognitivist approach. I think maybe learning under cognitivism has already become the most practical way for learners currently.