The International Baccalaureate Programme (IB) has at the heart of its mission to develop inquiring, knowledgeable, and caring young people who help to create a better and more peaceful world through intercultural understanding and respect. (See www.ibo.org for further information.)

The IB curriculum is based on the research from the cognitive sciences, from which we derive our understanding of human learning processes and the development of competence in students. Central to this research is the concept of transfer, or how students translate ideas from one context to another. If students are successful in applying what they have learned to other contexts, then learning has taken place.

How does this happen? Students need opportunities to mold, shape, wrestle with, and apply what they are learning. Students need to work with authentic problems, and their learning must be assessed in meaningful ways that allow students to demonstrate what they know. These deeper and more complex connections imprint the learning into long-term memory. The IB curriculum frameworks are designed so that students must apply what they are learning and demonstrate their understanding of given concepts. For example, woven throughout the Middle Years Programme curriculum are five Areas of Interaction which encourage students to take responsibility for themselves and their surroundings: Health and Social Education, Community and Service, Approaches to Learning, Environments, and Human Ingenuity.

Three cognitive principles provide the foundation to foster this transfer of classroom learning to real-world contexts. They are engaging prior understandings, the role of factual knowledge and conceptual frameworks, and metacognition. These principles are also foundational to the International Baccalaureate Programme. For further research on these principles, see Bransford, John D., et al, How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School (1999), and the National Research Council’s How Students Learn: History, Mathematics, and Science in the Classroom (2005).

Principle 1: Engaging Prior Understandings

Students come to the classroom with their own set of observations and experiences, dispositions, and personal ideas. IB experiences begin with students’ prior knowledge and experiences as building blocks for future learning of concepts. For example, the following are common preconceptions about mathematics:

• Mathematics is about learning to compute.

• Mathematics is about “following rules” to guarantee correct answers.

• Some people have the ability to “do math” and some don’t.

IB students experience mathematics in a very different way. Rooted in real-world problems, students are challenged to develop solutions by thinking flexibly about authentic issues. Learners must be able to explain and write about the process through which they arrive at their solutions, an essential metacognitive activity.

Misconceptions arise when students have ideas that clash with accepted theories of the world. For example, elementary students might think that a number with three digits is always bigger than one with two (i.e., 3.24 is more than 4.6 because it has more digits.) See “Math Misconceptions”, by Steve McCormack, Teacher Magazine, 42, January 2006 for further details about misconceptions. By engaging in hands-on inquiry activities, IB students gain an in-depth understanding of fractions rather than memorizing rules about decimals.

Through ongoing formative assessment, IB teachers discover what students know about concepts, in terms of accurate presentation of information, misconceptions that obstruct understandings, and gaps in general knowledge that should be filled. Teachers utilize this knowledge to scaffold instruction according to student needs.

Principle 2: The Role of Factual Knowledge and Conceptual Frameworks

What are the central ideas around the topic and how do the facts fit? What are the organizers around foundational ideas of a discipline?

Educators often feel pressured to cover a vast curriculum quickly so that students are exposed to facts that might be addressed on standardized achievement tests. “We don’t have time to go in depth,” stressed educators often say. However, the research strongly suggests that if students do not have a framework on which to “hook” skills and bits of information, student recall is not nearly as high.

A big idea about fractions is that fractions are about proportionality: e.g., ¼ is always the same portion of the whole, but that the size of that portion changes depending on the size of the whole. Percents, ratios, and decimals are part of the same big idea of proportionality (i.e., ¼, .25, 25 %). Frequently, students do not see them as part of the same concept.

Different communities think of “facts” in different ways. This is an important part of the IB experience. For example, in the Diploma Programme capstone course, Theory of Knowledge, instructors encourage students to discover how we know. This involves consideration of knowledge across the disciplines: i.e., what counts as knowledge in one discipline or "area of knowledge," such as the natural sciences, often has a different vetting process from knowledge arrived at in another area of knowledge, such as history. A previous Theory of Knowledge essay prompt encouraged students to account for the fact that most of us would say that an object such as a desk is solid, while a physicist might describe it as made up largely of empty space. Another prompt asks students to consider whether historians and mathematicians mean the same thing when they use the word explain.

IB units of study are designed around a central idea or question, in contrast to a list of facts about a given topic. In-depth into concepts is preferable to superficial coverage. For example, the Higher Level (HL) Diploma Programme courses in high school are two years in length. An IB Chemistry class might require students to demonstrate an understanding of Le Chatelier’s principle by doing more than calculating the formula. To demonstrate true understanding, students must be able to use formulas for calculating mathematical equilibrium expressions, as well as have facility in visualizing changes in atomic arrangements between "product" and "reactant" configurations. A guiding question for teaching and learning the principle might be this: “What is the relationship between Le Chatelier's principle and kinetic-molecular theory?”

Principle 3: Metacognition

Metacognition refers to the habits of mind necessary for learners to assess their own progress, rather than relying solely on external indicators. Stated differently, metacognition is self-monitoring and a key skill of lifelong learners. A critical role that IB teachers play is teaching students how to learn, how to self assess what they know and do not know, and how to devise a plan to access needed information. A healthy classroom culture allows teachers and students to model this “thinking aloud.” Self-reflective questions might include the following: How can I draw on my past successes to solve this new problem? What do I already know about the problem, and what resources do I have available or need to generate? How accurate are my data sources? Guiding questions in the IB curriculum foster student abilities to think about their own learning: How do my justifications for new-found knowledge inspire new avenues of inquiry?

The role of self-monitoring is critical to all facets of learning. For example, good readers monitor their own comprehension. They know what to do when they don’t understand something they have read. They use strategies such as rereading, using context, adjusting the rate, looking at pictures, and reading ahead to make sense of what they do not yet understand. Effective teachers explicitly teach these comprehension strategies. Students in the natural sciences pursue questions of inquiry through experimentation and then determine what they still need to know. This is how scientific understanding is advanced. Our evolving understanding of Pluto is one such example. The same could be said for mathematics.

A healthy dose of skepticism about students’ own conclusions as a result of this kind of thinking is part of the IB curriculum. A teacher of Theory of Knowledge (TOK), once stated about students, “I want them to second-guess their research processes and ask themselves what sources they might have overlooked or which sources they might be overemphasizing. I believe that the Theory of Knowledge course gives them the tools that they need to self-monitor” (e-mail communication with Tom Jackoboice, March 6, 2008).

Conducting research, critical analysis of reading material, and writing about conclusions are central strategies in the IB curriculum. Each of these strategies requires students to self-direct their learning, a central tenet of the IB learner profile. IB students become lifelong learners with a strong sense of international community and a sincere sense of honor and purpose.

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Kristen Weeks Neal, Ph.D., is Senior Advisor for Product Development, Modern Red SchoolHouse and may be reached at krisneal@comcast.net.

Sharon Chaney, Ed.D., is MNPS Director of Advanced Academics and may be reached at sharon.chaney@mnps.org.