Why Education Needs to Focus on Learning
The Strathclyde Institute of Education’s Jonathan Firth questions whether the learning process is given sufficient attention.
Most people would agree that teachers and other educators should know something about learning. It’s a fundamental idea for any practitioner, impacting on so many other skills and decisions. However, there is reason to question how well the learning process is understood by educators, and the extent to which it is covered in teacher preparation courses.
In education, learning is often defined as something like the following: “Actively making sense of to-be-learned information by mentally reorganizing and integrating it with one’s prior knowledge, thereby enabling learners to apply what they have learned to new situations” (Fiorella & Mayer, 2015, p. 717). Definitions usually imply that knowledge or skills should be retained over a lengthy period of time, or even permanently (Soderstrom & Bjork, 2015); we wouldn’t consider students to have ‘learned’ if the content of a course was forgotten within a few hours or days (even if the forgetting only happened after a test or exam). The latter, temporary scenario is often called ‘performance’ rather than learning.
Clearly, it’s difficult to view educational encounters as successful when students don’t learn anything. It may therefore be assumed that an understanding of how people learn will underpin curriculum design and be a major focus in the preparation of new teachers. However, in a recent book, John Hattie and colleagues (Hattie et al., 2024, p. 8) argue that the concept of learning, is “all too absent in debates about teaching.” They add: “…many have noted the lack of discussion about learning and learning theories in initial teacher education texts and courses”.
It might seem surprising for anybody to suggest that learning would be absent in discussions of teaching or education, or in teacher preparation. But in a study in the Netherlands, Surma et al. (2018) found that textbooks covering learning strategies were used in a minority of teacher education programmes.
Here in Scotland, the GTCS Standards for Provisional Registration are a set of competence-based standards that new teachers in Scotland must demonstrate by the end of their course. How many mention learning? On the face of it, quite a lot – there are 127 mentions of ‘learn/learning/learners’ across a 9-page document. However, a closer look reveals that only two statements are, at least in my view, directly relevant to the process of how students learn:
- “Demonstrate knowledge and understanding of pedagogical and learning theories…” (p. 7).
- “Use a variety of questioning techniques and a range of digital and traditional approaches to enhance learning and teaching…” (p. 9).
Both of these are a little vague; they don’t tell us which theories, for example, or which questioning techniques should be included.
This sits in line with a general trend in Scottish educational policy where specific guidance is eschewed in favour of empowering educators with autonomy in decision making, a situation with good intentions but which often manifests as vagueness and the potential for diverse interpretations (Humes, 2016). Without more detail, it is left open to practitioners, schools and teacher education courses to decide what exactly should be covered under a heading such as ‘learning theories’.
Regardless of the education system involved, leaving issues of how to support learning open to interpretation supposes that educators can gauge learning with reasonable accuracy, and act accordingly. Research suggests that this may be over-optimistic. A number of studies have provided educators with a choice of scenarios for how to promote learning, and found that the majority reject evidence-based alternatives (e.g., Halamish, 2018). There is also widespread endorsements of neuromyths among teachers internationally (e.g., Ruiz-Martin et al, 2022) – flawed ideas about learning and the brain that have no research support (see this previous post for an example).
This evidence helps us to see that learning as a process is not intuitively obvious, and it follows that clear guidance for new educators is greatly needed. This could include explanations of issues such as how learning depends on memory, the role of judgments and strategies and strategies during self-regulated learning, and the risks of mistaking classroom performance for learning (see above). It could also include specific classroom strategies that draw on these principles, as relevant to the courses and learners involved.
On balance, I agree with Hattie and colleagues that new teachers should be taught about how learning works. This issue should be a central concern of any Education course or programme of professional development.
References
Fiorella, L., & Mayer, R. E. (2016). Eight ways to promote generative learning. Educational Psychology Review, 28, 717–741.
Halamish, V. (2018). Pre-service and in-service teachers’ metacognitive knowledge of learning strategies. Frontiers in Psychology, 9, 2152.
Hattie, J., Timothy, O., Hattie, K., & Donoghue, G. (2024). Great learners by design: Principles and practices to supercharge learners. Corwin Press.
Humes, W. (2013). The origins and development of curriculum for excellence: Discourse, politics and control. In M. Priestley & G. Biesta (Eds.), Reinventing the curriculum: New trends in curriculum policy and practice (pp. 13–34). Bloomsbury.
Ruiz-Martin, H., Portero-Tresserra, M., Martínez-Molina, A., & Ferrero, M. (2022). Tenacious educational neuromyths: prevalence among teachers and an intervention. Trends in Neuroscience and Education, 29, 100192.
Soderstrom, N. C., & Bjork, R. A. (2015). Learning Versus Performance An Integrative Review. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 10(2), 176–199.
Surma, T., Vanhoyweghen, K., Camp, G., & Kirschner, P. A. (2018). The coverage of distributed practice and retrieval practice in Flemish and Dutch teacher education textbooks. Teaching and Teacher Education, 74, 229–237.
Published 29/11/2024
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