The way students learn: Acquiring knowledge from an integrated science andsocial studies unit

This article explores, through an analysis of 5 students' experiences in an integrated science and social studies unit on Antarctica, how the students acquired new knowledge. It looks at how new knowledge was constructed from prior knowledge and how prior knowledge was shaped by new knowledge. This is done through examples of 3 types of learning. The first example describe s the way students represented and integrated new experiences in working me mory using a model of the learning process designed to predict what student s will learn and remember from their classroom experiences. The second exam ple develops this model by exploring how the acquisition of specific inform ation shaped students' understanding of larger curriculum topics. In the th ird example, the role of inference and implicit knowledge is illustrated th rough an analysis of how students acquired knowledge in the absence of rele vant resources or experiences. These examples are also used to explain how different students learned different things from the same classroom activit ies and how different classroom activities created different learning proce sses. Implications for the design of more effective classroom tasks and act ivities are described.