Six Things Educators Should Know About Learning
In this reflection on research, the Strathclyde Institute of Education’s Jonathan Firth discusses the intricacies of everyday learning processes, and the barriers that students and educators face.
1. What a student can do at the end of a lesson or practice session is a poor guide to what has been learned
In education, students are often judged by what they can do at the end of a class. Perhaps the teacher/lecturer asks questions in a plenary, for example, or gives students a quiz or task. If the correct answers are forthcoming, it might be assumed that everyone has ‘learned’ the intended material.
Cognitive psychologists know that this, unfortunately, is not the case. Forgetting proceeds very rapidly after an initial study session; what is retained will be much less than what was studied.
And it gets worse: the more confident and accurate students are during practice and the fewer mistakes they make, the worse forgetting will be! This is where desirable difficulties come in...
2. Some difficulties are desirable
Following on from the previous point, there are clear, evidence-based ways of tackling the high levels of forgetting that all students experience. If you are an educator, you may be familiar with how demoralising it is when students forget things that had been studied so carefully before. As memory researcher Henry Roediger III commented: “...it’s not like they can’t remember the material when they move to a more advanced class. It’s like they’ve never seen it before” (cited by Carey, 2010).
Difficulties such as spacing out practice, active retrieval, and elaborative questioning help to slow down this forgetting. However, they also make the learning process more difficult and error-prone, meaning that students tend to avoid such techniques!
It’s therefore valuable for schools to gradually build an understanding of how learning works across younger age groups, rather than waiting until the exam years (Firth, 2021).
3. Memory and understanding are not opposed
The value of elaborative questioning – that is, actively explaining and questioning material, not just trying to memorise it – shows that memory is not just about taking in random, unconnected facts. Far from it. New learning builds on what is already known (Wittrock, 1974).
While it’s certainly possible for people to cram lists of facts, such information tends to be quite rapidly forgotten. We remember things better (and forgetting is slower) when we understand them. Likewise, understanding of new ideas is supported by having relevant information in long-term memory. Memory and understanding go hand in hand.
4. Knowledge and skills are not separate
The connection between memory and understanding indicates that the knowledge-skills dichotomy is over simplistic. For all the discussions about a skills-focused or a knowledge-focused curriculum, these things are not separate, and cannot sensibly be separated.
Despite the popularity of Bloom’s taxonomy, it’s often overlooked that its objectives contain both knowledge and a process/skill within each statement. That is, each learning objective concerns knowing something, as well as the thing that learners have to do with that knowledge (see e.g. Anderson et al., 2001).
Trying to separate skills out, and assuming that such skills will be transferrable across situations, is hugely over-optimistic and impractical (see my previous post on this here). It’s actually very hard for a learner to transfer a skill such as problem solving, creativity or analysis from one context to another, and becomes impossible if they don’t have the relevant knowledge. Meanwhile, using knowledge in a complex way, e.g. for problem solving, helps to consolidate that knowledge (Bransford et al., 2000).
5. We need to be mindful of how learning transfers
This last point leads on to the fifth idea – transfer is hard! By ‘transfer’, researchers mean the ability to use what has been learned outside of the original learning context. For example, if a learner studies statistics in their Maths class and then applies it when designing a Psychology research project, this is an example of transfer.
Transfer is challenging for learners, and it gets harder still when the situations don’t appear similar. Often learners just won’t recognise that their prior learning is relevant.
A good example of this came from a study by Gick and Holyoak (1983). In the study, participants read about a problem faced by a general marching an army towards a castle. The streets of the town were too narrow for the whole army to advance at once, but attacking along a single street would be too weak. The solution was to advance from multiple angles, splitting the army and converging at the same point.
Participants were then shown a problem where a laser was needed to remove a tumour, but a single strong laser would be too damaging. What was the solution? Despite having just studied the ‘general’s army’ problem, most didn’t hit on the very similar solution – using multiple smaller lasers that converged on the tumour. That is to say, their learning didn’t transfer (even after a very short delay).
6. Metacognition can help with transfer
There are some things that can help with transfer. Perhaps unsurprisingly, participants in the Gick and Holyoak study described above were much more likely to solve the second problem if the researchers pointed out the similarities between the two problems. A prompt in the right direction was all it took, in many cases.
This is an example of metacognition – what people know about their own thinking and learning. If a learner has relevant information, they might not use it if they don’t know it’s relevant.
Metacognition involves strategies that help learners to make choices and better manage their learning. This can be as simple as developing the habit of checking their own notes to look for relevant information. Learners can also be taught to question their own assumptions, boosting critical thinking. And they can be trained in effective study strategies, so that they space out their practice, and avoid some of the forgetting mentioned earlier.
I say much more about all six of these issues in my free weekly newsletter.
References
Anderson, L.W. (Ed.), Krathwohl, D.R. (Ed.), Airasian, P. W., Cruikshank, K. A., Mayer, R. E., Pintrich, P. R., Raths, J., & Wittrock, M. C. (2001). A taxonomy for learning, teaching, and assessing: A revision of Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives (Complete edition). Longman.
Bransford, J. D., Brown, A. L., & Cocking, R. R. (2000). How people learn: Brain, mind, experience and school. National Academy Press.
Carey, B. (2010). Forget what you know about good study habits. https://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/07/health/views/07mind.html
Firth, J. (2022). Understanding the human mind – a foundation for self-regulated study. Impact, 14, 6–9.
Gick, M. L., & Holyoak, K. J. (1983). Schema induction and analogical transfer. Cognitive Psychology, 15(1), 1–38.
Wittrock, M. C. (1974). Learning as a generative process. Educational Psychologist, 11(2), 87–95.
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