This book was written for all those who believe that learning can be more effective than it now is, either in schools or in any other educational setting. The work grows out of sixty years of the authors' combined experience and research dealing with problems of educating in classroom and field settings.

For almost a century, students of education have suffered under the yoke of the behavioral psychologists, who see learning as synonymous with a change in behavior. We reject this view, and observe instead that learning by humans leads to a change in the meaning of experience. The fundamental question of this book is, How can we help individuals to reflect upon their experience and to construct new, more powerful meanings?

Furthermore, behavioral psychology, and much of currently popular “cognitive science,” neglects the significance of feelings. Human experience involves not only thinking and acting but also feeling, and it is only when all three are considered together that individuals can be empowered to enrich the meaning of their experience. All readers of this book have surely experienced sometime during their schooling the debilitating effect of an experience that threatened their self-image, their sense that “I'm OK.” We have found repeatedly in our research studies that educational practices that do not lead learners to grasp the meaning of the learning task usually fail to give them confidence in their abilities and do nothing to enhance their sense of mastery over events.