At Community Care First-Aid we aim for your understanding not for your memorization. We will teach you the logic behind first-aid and CPR so when the time comes to take action you will actually know the purpose for your actions and what goals you are trying to achieve.
We realize that in order for you to experience meaningful learning and to retain knowledge for longer it is important to link new information to existing knowledge. The following example illustrates this point:
FUN MEMORY GAME
In the next 10 seconds look at the letters below and try to remember as many letters as you can. After 10 seconds write all the letters you have remembered on a piece of paper. Be careful, a letter can appear more than once.
How many letters did you remember?
Now let’s try this game again. Look at the letters and try to remember as many as you can in the next 10 seconds. After 10 seconds write all the letters you remembered on a piece of paper.
How many letters did you remember now?
Most people remember more letters in the second game, can you see WHY? Although all the letters in both games are identical, hence, we are trying to learn the same content, it is only when this content relates to something we already know it makes much more sense to us. This is exactly the way we teach our courses.
We aim that about 60%-70% of the course content will come from our students, therefore linking students existing knowledge with new information. By using appropriate teaching techniques that are more suitable for adult learners such as: open discussions, questions and answers and case studies (scenarios) we achieve active learning from our students.
This type of learning has been determined to result in longer knowledge retention and meaningful learning of the course content, which in our case also means a better chance to save lives!
*The game is adopted from: Lujan, H. L., & DiCarlo, S. E. (2006). Too much teaching, not enough learning: What is the solution? Advan. Physiol. Edu., 30(1), 17-22.
