Scaling learning theory to multiple pathways: Early reading as a model system

将学习理论扩展到多种途径：早期阅读作为模型系统

• 批准号: 1026794
• 负责人: Robert McMurray
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: University of Iowa
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2010
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2010-10-01 至 2011-09-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1026794&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Scaling; learning; theory; multiple; pathways

Traditionally, the early stages of learning to read were considered a process of essentially memorizing the large set of rules for translating the marks on the page into sounds that can be linked to meaningful ideas and concepts. This, after all, is the way we typically teach our children to read. However, while these rules are clearly an important educational tool, many psychologists now view learning to read as a process of encoding the statistical relationships between written letters and sounds rather than explicit rules. The brain is capable of identifying complex correlations between diverse sets of information even when these correlations are not easily describable. Successful reading strategies are likely to rely heavily on this ability. As a result, learning to read is more of a skill than a set of knowledge -- it may be more like learning to shoot a basketball than like memorizing a list of items. A research team led by Robert McMurray & Eliot Hazeltine at the University of Iowa will investigate how factors known to affect skill learning can be harnessed to improve reading ability. They will manipulate the ways in which words are organized and presented to students to find the approach that makes the critical statistics used by the relevant learning mechanisms explicit. The experiments will identify approaches that can be used to improve how we teach reading to children. Reading is a foundational skill, laying the groundwork for the entire curriculum that follows. Thus, improvements in children's reading ability can have widespread and lasting impact for their performance in school and in society in general. Additionally, because reading is an elaborate and nearly universal behavior, it provides an excellent model task for studying how humans learn complex tasks more generally.

传统上，学习阅读的早期阶段被认为是一个本质上记住大量规则的过程，这些规则用于将页面上的标记翻译成可以与有意义的想法和概念联系起来的声音。 毕竟，这是我们通常教孩子阅读的方式。 然而，虽然这些规则显然是一种重要的教育工具，但许多心理学家现在将学习阅读视为编码书面字母和声音之间的统计关系的过程，而不是明确的规则。 大脑能够识别不同信息集之间的复杂相关性，即使这些相关性不容易描述。 成功的阅读策略可能在很大程度上依赖于这种能力。 因此，学习阅读更多的是一种技能，而不是一套知识——它可能更像学习投篮，而不是记住一系列项目。 由爱荷华大学的 Robert McMurray 和 Eliot Hazeltine 领导的一个研究小组将研究如何利用已知的影响技能学习的因素来提高阅读能力。他们将操纵单词的组织方式和呈现给学生的方式，以找到使相关学习机制使用的关键统计数据变得明确的方法。 这些实验将确定可用于改进我们教授儿童阅读的方法。 阅读是一项基本技能，为后续的整个课程奠定基础。 因此，儿童阅读能力的提高可以对他们在学校和整个社会的表现产生广泛而持久的影响。 此外，由于阅读是一种复杂且几乎普遍的行为，因此它为研究人类如何更普遍地学习复杂任务提供了一个极好的模型任务。