Real-Life Learning Projects Considered 6&5 deal about planning, and influence, and causation, and teamwork. But while this could be true of a good history course, it often is in no way actually the case. If history courses were designed to teach students to think within the context of history, they would be much more important than they now are. As long as we think that history is about getting the facts about who signed what declaration when, we are missing the forest for the trees from a teaching point of view. Now, of course, some subjects lend themselves very easily to em- phasis of the 12 cognitive processes. Science courses could, for ex- ample, be entirely about experimentation or diagnosis or causation, and they would be very useful if they were. But instead we encourage learning the facts about who did what experiment and we teach for- mulas to be memorized and we teach about equations. Experimenta- tion is indeed a very exciting subject. (Ask any 2-year-old who ex- periments with what best goes in his mouth on a daily basis.) But schooling manages to make it a very dull subject by teaching who did what experiment when. One reason that we have managed to create dullness out of materi- al that can be inherently interesting is the absurd emphasis on testing that has dominated the world of education in the past years. Below are three questions (quite typical ones) from an AP psychology exam. Ivan P Pavlov is famous for his research on (A) teaching machines. (B) perceptual learning. (C) forward conditioning. (D) classical conditioning. (E) backward conditioning. A stimulus that elicits a response before the experimental manipulation is a (an) (A) response stimulus (RS). (B) unconditioned stimulus (UCS). (C) generalized stimulus (GS). (D) conditioned stimulus (CS). (E) specific stimulus (SS). HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_023811