“Bottom-up Learning” and Building Strong Foundations for Abstract Ideas

"For years school curriculums have emphasized top-down instruction, especially for topics like math and science. Learn the rules first—the theorems, the order of operations, Newton’s laws—then make a run at the problem list at the end of the chapter."

"Now, a small group of cognitive scientists is arguing that schools and students could take far more advantage of … [the] bottom-up ability, called perceptual learning. The brain is a pattern-recognition machine, after all, and when focused properly, it can quickly deepen a person’s grasp of a principle, new studies suggest."

The brain is attracted to pattern-discovery

This article really hit home with me for a few reasons. One point the article made is that the brain is attracted to pattern discovery; it begins scanning for patterns before we’re even aware of it happening. The brain is not necessarily attracted to rules or theorems or lists of steps and procedures. The second principle that jumped out at me is the value of giving children real materials to work with as they discover for themselves the workings of a problem or as they distill the rules we wanted to teach them in the beginning.

An example of how to create a bottom-up lesson for early computation:

And here is a game to practice knowing how many:

An example of how to create a bottom-up lesson for phonics/sound spellings:

How to create a bottom-up lesson for multiplication: