Active learning strategies and educational outcomes

Active Learning

Stimulus Learning in Early Education

Entering young children into education at a very early age can help them to make the critical developmental steps toward social and intellectual maturation. Often, therefore, the benefits of early education can be seen in such children as they progress through adolescence and adulthood. It is therefore imperative that individual support of such objectives as social and intellectual maturation be sought as a means to capturing the attention and imagination of young minds at a time when they are most absorbent. A wide variety of perspectives are available regarding the value of early education, identifying it as a crucial tool in helping to identify issues related to development, learning and leadership in a wide array of social and academic contexts. In addition, it can help to create a meaningful context within which simple stimulus learning can be approached. With the understanding that children will tend to learn more effectively by drawing a practical association between that which stimulates the senses and that which implies the incursion of a greater body of knowledge and conceptual understanding, stimulus learning will seek to engage the learner in a greater capacity to interpret the sounds, sights and sensations around him.

Our research presents the idea that this is among the simplest and most widely used methods of inducing understanding in those who are in early education or those in the pre-education developmental phases. One of the reasons is because of its relatively simplicity as well as the inherency for the normally developing child to begin to make inductions independently as a result of stimulus. According to the research provided to us, "simple forms of learning involve a single stimulus. A stimulus is anything perceptible to the senses, such as a sight, sound, smell, touch, or taste. In a form of learning known as classical conditioning, people learn to associate two stimuli that occur in sequence, such as lightning followed by thunder." (Encarta, 1) This is to say that by establishing something of a consistency in explaining or rationalizing the experience of sensory stimulation, the young learner can begin to make simple associations that can later be channeled into more complex conclusions. In this regard, simple stimulus learning is often one of the very first methods appropriate to producing actionable knowledge in the young learner due to its adaptability to very comprehensible concepts and situations.

This is especially true where repeat exposure occurs. For instance, in the case of habituation, the process of coming to understand something will occur as a result of an ongoing and consistent reinforcement of the association between a stimulus and an event, resulting in an unconscious acceptance of the relationship and its implications. To the point, our research tells that "habituation, one of the simplest types of learning, is the tendency to become familiar with a stimulus after repeated exposure to it. A common example of habituation occurs in the orienting response, in which a person's attention is captured by a loud or sudden stimulus." (Encarta, 1) This, therefore, will tend to capture the learner in a place of inherent comprehension, with an example such as a the smell of a cookies causing a young child to wander into the kitchen with the expectation of being fed a tasty treat. Something above a Pavlovian response, there is here a conscious recognition that the smell (stimulus) produced is necessarily affiliated with the experience of having cookies.

Naturally, the interpretation of stimulus will have much to do with context and circumstance, which are features that are achieved as the learner comes more to understand environmental clues and to differentiate circumstantial conditions. The notion that perceptual learning is a process that produces knowledge through the incorporation of a set of stimuli is reinforced by research that speaks to refinement in this area of learning. An article by Zhang et al. (2008) denotes that, for instance, "perceptual learning of visual features occurs when multiple stimuli are presented in a fixed sequence (temporal patterning), but not when they are presented in random order (roving)." (Zhang et al., 1) the idea is that the factors which create an environment should also produce a sequence of perceptual clues designed to result in assumptions and understanding regarded the environment.