First Blog

In learning a new topic, or designing a curriculum, decisions must be made.  How much time is available for the learning tasks?  What is the scope of what is to be learned?  That is, the content and curriculum.  But just as important is to learn according to a balance between understanding, procedure, and skills .  These can be divided by time and effort devoted to each. As shown in Figure 1 all three are shown as equally balanced. Figure 1 Each of these is important almost in a competitive way.  Avoid any one or two of them and essentially nothing of value can be learned.  As a math professor, I often hear the lament, “I understand the material; I just can’t solve the problems.”  Imagine if your doctor says something similar, “I understand you have an intestinal problem, I just don’t know how to treat it.”  Or the airline pilot who says, “I have my pilots license, I’ve just never flown this kind of plane.”  In each of these the learning was not balanced as it should be.   How s