Learn how to learn first, then What you want to know

This is NOT about study habits or skills.  Nor is it learning ABOUT learning, but HOW TO ACTUALLY LEARN EVERYTHING YOU WANT TO KNOW HOW TO DO BETTER: be a better companion, parent, or do whatever work you do better, and be healthier, avoiding stress-related illness and even brain disorders like A.D.D., Bi-Polarism, and Alzheimers or Dementia.

 Learning how to learn sounds very esoteric at first; very enigmatic.   What could I mean?—Learn how to LEARN?  Everyone knows how to learn: you repeat the times tables and definitions and capitals’ names again and again, until you REMEMBER them.  THAT is learning, right?  NOOOOO!  That is toilet training, folks!  That is holding poo-poo in until the teacher says you can go, then letting it out on demand; not LEARNING.

 Think about it—in however many years of education you have, through the sometimes seemingly endless hours sitting still needlessly, upon pain of punishment and public shaming, forbidden even from harmlessly gazing out the window at the tender ages of seven, eight, nine years old when things like trees and clouds and the very ground were still magical, not mere objects of study—when did anyone ever give you so much as a single five-minute lesson about HOW TO LEARN, itself?  In the immortal phrase of the master of international mystery and intrigue in films, Charlie Chan: AMAZING!  

 Let me put this another way, to highlight the absurdity—no, INSANITY!—of what you were put through and countless students of all ages are STILL being put through, for as I think no less an authority than Einstein said insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, because the fact is that we never DO learn how to LEARN, repeating information over and over again.  We just learn how to do what we’re told, which is increasingly insufficient because computers do what they’re told faster and more accurately than even Einstein’s can!  Learning how to multiply and divide, names of things, and who won the War of 1812—IF we can even remember who fought it—when called upon to dislodge the information from the bowels of our memory, doesn’t do squat when it comes time to figure out how to USE what you learned to figure out things you HAVEN’T learned yet, because as you’ve probably noticed already, the questions on tests, and even more so at work, are rarely if ever quite the same as the ones you did in class.  How SMART is it, gentle readers, attempting to learn ANY of the many important things we dearly want to know, like companionship and parenting, business survival skills like sales and leadership and teamwork, not to mention just dealing with the puzzling way our mind sometimes works seemingly against our own best interests, without learning how to LEARN, in the first place?

 Okay, so let’s get down TO it.  The role of a teacher, according to Plato, is to show people what they already know.  What he meant by that is showing you things you DON’T understand in terms of things you already know, so you learn how to do that continually, yourself.  The goal of a student, therefore, is learning how to ACCESS what you already know, to help you understand what you don’t.  I showed a class of Second Graders, who were struggling with first learning how to fill in blank spaces of sentences from words at the top of the page, that it was like putting pieces of a puzzle together, which may at first LOOK LIKE they fit, but upon closer examination from other criteria than the obvious, don’t.  Ahhh, they’d done THAT 100 times!  The problem that immediately arises like a giant dragon for most people, and forever stands between them and ever learning how to learn, is

SELECTING what we already know that is SIMILAR enough to what we don’t, to help us understand it, as well.  THAT is our subject.

 

Hark!  You may have noticed, for instance—MUST HAVE noticed, I should say—that our mind does this INNATELY when we dream, or what else did you think all the confusion you experience then is about?  Your mind Search Engines for things you already know to help you understand things you don’t; only you can’t make heads or tails of the connections it makes when your silly insecurities and inhibitions are asleep, so your dreams baffle instead of enlighten you.  Not to worry: we will unravel the very fabric of information for you here, so you can tap your mind’s innate abilities all day long, out of a hat, on a dime, as they say; not just on a macro level about new kinds of people and new systems being discussed around a conference table, but on a micro level, comment by comment across a dining room table.

 Look around you.  Lo and behold, as different as the people you see are, we are actually very similar in structure.  As different as their clothes and book bags are, they are very similar in structure.  As different as all the elements on earth are, stacked neatly together in the Table of Elements, the structure of their atoms are again very similar, varying in the number of electrons, protons, and neutrons much the way people are different heights and weights.  Wellll, wouldn’t it stand to reason that INFORMATION also has a relatively uniform structure?

 The problem people have discerning that structure, themselves, since it is NEVER pointed out to them, is that the compartmentalized, inconsistent way composition is taught from one Grade level or text book publisher to the next, actually FALSIFIES its true nature.  Yes, Hamlet is largely a drama, but Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy is about as expository a disquisition as ever were written.   There is also as many profound lyrical components as the collected works of most other major poets.  Similarly, every essay of Montaigne’s or Time Magazine, for that matter, also contain dramatic or anecdotal elements, as well as lyrical ones, while being largely expository.  So unlike the way they are taught separately in school, as though exposition were exposition, drama were drama, and lyric were lyric, ALL good communication includes elements of all three to varying degrees.

 Here’s the rub: that process of instantaneously recognizing and using things you already understand that are similar to things you don’t know, is a function of the soundness of your verbal composition structure, just as it is difficult to get the picture if too many pieces of a puzzle are missing.  “Here’s the rub,” for instance, came to mind as I was writing this, from Hamlet’s fore-mentioned soliloquy, the way the ball bounces back into basketball players’ hands while spinning and changing directions at full speed, according to the laws of physics, because the structure of their motions are properly aligned, from having done it thousands of times and mastered the necessary speed, strength, stamina, flexibility, timing, and touch. 

 I don’t deny that there is an element of sheer talent to athletics and communicating, as there is to playing music well, but they are largely skills that anyone can learn and improve faster and farther, the more systematically someone practices.  Once you learn what the fundamental components of composition are, which we will derive from what every situation has in common—as scientifically as you learned to classify things since elementary school according to common characteristics—you can begin doing exercises and drills like those that athletes and musicians do, to improve the speed, strength, stamina, flexibility, timing, and

touch with which  you, too, can ACCESS the unexpected, not just wait around for it to appear.  A few people seem to write and speak brilliantly because they have brilliant ideas, whereas the opposite is true.  They get brilliant ideas because the soundness of their narrative structure promulgates them, just as holiday ornaments remain in the closet, so to speak, until the holiday tree is present to hang them on. 

Students often ask me if I already know what I’m going to say, or make it up as I go.  I tell them, using the same process again, that verbal skill is like when you learn math and can use it to figure out all kinds of things that come up.  

Companies spend billions on training of all kinds, but not a dime on how well people LEARN what they are taught.  Any coaching or managing about how well they APPLY it is still just more lessons, without two minutes devoted to learning HOW to apply what they learn, to begin with.  The premise is that people who want to do well, try harder, and therefore do better, or are just smarter, whereas all evidence points to everything people want to learn being at least as much of a skill as a matter of innate ability.  How good a companion, parent, student, and worker we are (whatever we put our hearts and mind to) is likewise as much or more a function of how WELL we LEARN at all, as how MUCH we learn about them and try to do them well.  Anyone can learn how to play any musical instrument or sport; only a handful of people ever get to the Olympics or Carnegie Hall.

I'll give you a hint: every book or article about doing anything well uses numerous anecdotes to illustrate their point and draws analogies between the matter at hand and the world at large, showing you things you don’t know about in terms of other things you already understand.  People who learn how to do that, themselves, continually see how things they don't know about are similar to things they already understand, and therefore learn geometrically instead of arithmetically, bringing everything they know to bear on any given matter at hand.  The entire learning curve is accelerated instead of incremental.  Sounds simple enough.  So does playing the trumpet or soccer, but as the vice chair of a medical school realized, who had been telling students for decades the power of anecdotes in eliciting information from patients, there's as much more to formulating them than meets the eye, as wielding a scalpel.  One of the postdoctoral psychologists at the Institute for Rational Emotive Therapy (now the Albert Ellis Institute) pointed out when I spoke there that they already tell psychologists to have patients formulate their situation anecdotally.  “That's like telling people who worry too much not to worry about it!” I pointed out.  I spent thirty years virtually unravelling the fabric of information, which anyone can then use to make a pillow, a curtain, or a tapestry, as they please, the way children fill in a numbered coloring book.   

        It also makes learning fun.  A seven-year old autistic child asked if I were going to do more magic tricks the second time I came to her class.  Not knowing any, I asked what she meant.  "The way you change one thing into another all the time."  A nine-year old asked regarding the "Think Outside the Box" sign outside their school's guidance counsellor's office, if this were how you get outside the box.  A ten-year old asked if you could change your whole brain this way.  "And your life," I replied; "maybe the whole darned world."  Two minutes later she asked: "What happens to people who can't get outside the box.  Less than a minute later, she realized the answer: "they're soon lost in it, as well.

        Think about the fortunes spent on after-school tutoring programs.  I believe Sylvan is around $8000 down; then you pay $150 / week!  Think about the fortunes spent on therapy and marriage counselling.  Relationships are a function of ... relating the situation at hand to

others like it in the world at large.  Wow!  How can someone relate well to others, in business or at home, who cannot relate one thing to another, in the first place?  This is complicated?  Analogies put the matter at hand in perspective with the world at large.  Perspective keeps things in proportion!  The students are looking at the teacher all day, and vice versa; the husband at the wife.  Guess what?  We magnify others' faults and minimize our own!  Learn how to LEARN; then learn how to LIVE! 

Lest I give the impression that I'm merely telling people to use anecdotes and analogies (metaphors, if you prefer), 1000 books and 10,000 sales meetings a day tell people that stories sell, or mesmerize readers and audiences the way they use them.  What I have done is broken down the one common bond between every Tony Robbins, Stephen Covey, Dale Carnegie, Norman Vincent Peale, and all the rest.  Learning HOW they write and speak—what I call The Lesson WITHIN The lesson—is actually more important than WHAT they are saying because they keep USING that process over and over again, different as each lesson may be.  When I point out how uncomplicated the process is, that is of course once I teach it, as I've done for people from 7 to 87 with or without diminished capacities. 

Here is the question of questions for you: how can you hope to use what others teach you about life or work, in person or books, lacking this one skill, without which the authors or speakers couldn't explain what they are teaching?  Think about it!

Even unleashing your passion for life, let alone other things, is a function of how fully, deeply, vividly, and clearly you can think about them.  I think; therefore I feel, not just am! 

Thank you for visiting LearnHow2Learn.com Please contact us if you have any further inquiries. Copyright 1995, 2000, 2009 David Myers. Saturday, April 11, 2009, 2:23 PM

 

Learning How To LearnThe Mediated Learning Experience (MLE)

can help you overcome learning blocks - and awaken you to the process of learning itself

An Interview with Kathy Greenberg, by Duane H. Fickeisen

One of the articles in The Learning Revolution (IC#27)Winter 1991, Page 42

Copyright (c)1991, 1996 by Context Institute

Learning, which begins before birth, becomes ever more important as the pace of change accelerates around us. Whether it involves learning how to better influence the future, or developing the needed skills for earning a livelihood, learning can be empowering, fun, and energizing - or it can be frustrating and discouraging - depending on your skills in learning. But how can we learn how to learn?

Kathy Greenberg, Associate Professor of Special Education at the University of Tennesee, Knoxville, works to help teachers mediate their students' learning experiences so that students gain practical skills in problem-solving. Her COGNET program, based on Reuven Feuerstein's Mediated Learning Experience (MLE), makes the power of effective mediation widely accessible.

Developed by Feuerstein over 30 years ago, the theory of MLE complements the earlier work by the Russian researcher Lev Vygotsky, who developed mediation as a way to assist learners in developing cognitive processes. Feuerstein extends this work to a broad cultural setting and considers what can be done to help people overcome common impediments to learning.

The theory is comprehensive and complex, and consequently it has proven difficult to understand and apply for those outside the fields of psychology and special education. Kathy's success with the application of mediation led her to seek ways to make the theory and skills in its use more widely available to parents and all professionals who provide services to learners. The 30-hour COGNET training program provides an introduction to the theory and tools to use in mediation. Participants learn to diagnose hindrances to learning, to help their students understand basic factors which affect learning, and to use learning tools efficiently.

Thanks to the US Department of Education Follow Through Program grant #030913, the program - now in its third year - is available at a reduced cost, and training workshops for parents and professional educators have been conducted in several states. An interactive video training program based on Greenberg and Feuerstein's work, directed by Quicksilver Productions and New Horizons for Learning, will be available in Spring 1991. For more information contact Dr. Kathy Greenberg at COGNET, 321 Claxton Addition, The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN 37996-3400, 615/974-2321.

Duane: How did you get involved with the Mediated Learning Experience?

Kathy: I was teaching young adolescents with learning disabilities in 1975, and I was looking for a way to help them learn to think. I felt I had some handles on how to help them learn to read and do math and other things. But they just weren't thinking.

Then I heard that George Peabody College for Teachers in Nashville wanted teachers to volunteer to receive training in a program on "learning how to learn," and then to implement that program for evaluation. The program was Feuerstein's "Instrumental Enrichment," a world-renowned program which applies the comprehensive theory on which COGNET is based.

During the very extensive, 40-hour training, I began to see ways to pull together some things that I had always known at an intuitive level. And when I used the program, the kids in my class - mostly adolescent boys - began to behave better and to pay better attention almost immediately. They began to speak up more, and there was an inaudible sigh of relief - "You mean I'm not lucky if I get it and unlucky if I don't? You mean I can be responsible for my learning?"

I still get goose bumps when I think back to that class and how they began to change. They began to see that there is a system to the way you look at the world and how you go about learning and solving your problems.

When I entered higher education, I began to work on ways to train others. It is difficult for people to get into this theory at first unless they come from the field of developmental psychology. So for eight years I worked on ways to share this theory quickly with more people. With the primer that we now use in COGNET, people are able to understand it and use it in a relatively short time.

Duane: I've found the theory somewhat inaccessible, too! What is the Mediated Learning Experience?

Kathy: It is easy to get too wide a focus, so it's better to pinpoint certain principles and stick to them to explain the theory overall.

According to Reuven Feuerstein [of the Hadassah-WIZO-Canada Research Institute in Jerusalem, Israel], who developed the theory of Mediated Learning Experience (MLE), mediated learning occurs whenever an individual deliberately places him or herself between external or internal stimuli and the learner, and transmits the stimuli in a particular way to that learner.

What distinguishes MLE are three particular characteristics which must occur within the interaction - intent, meaning, and transcendence.

Intent refers to the intent of the mediator, the caregiver, the teacher, or whomever is in charge of the interaction, to focus the attention of the learner on some particular thing. For example, if a young child picks up a ball, the mediator would help the child to look at some part of the toy or see some cause and effect - such as the way you can make a ball spin when you turn it a certain way. The mediator will focus the child's attention there rather than just following the child in whatever way the child's interest might fall. Of course, the mediator must pay attention to the child's interests and change her own behavior accordingly. The point is that the mediator makes sure that the learner goes beyond the immediate needs of the situation, in some manner which would not occur without the mediator's focusing behavior.

The second characteristic is imparting meaning. The mediator helps the learner interpret the stimuli so that the experience has a special meaning that it might not have otherwise. To continue with this example of the ball, meaning can be brought out in a specific way - related to certain stimuli, such as watching it bounce or spin - so that significance attaches to this as a very special and unique toy that you can do things with that you can't do with other toys. Imparting meaning provides a power, as Feuerstein refers to it, that keeps a person involved in the interaction so that he or she is much more interested in participating.

The third characteristic is transcendence, which has to do with making connections between the specific and the general. Transcendence is the heart of mediation. It involves moving beyond the immediate needs of whatever is going on in the current situation, or task, or what you're thinking about to develop the potential to apply it elsewhere in slightly different ways.

It can be very difficult for people to learn a skill and be able to apply it in different situations. For example, people with learning problems who are learning to add and subtract may find it difficult to add and subtract in another classroom with a different teacher. Transcendence helps the person rise above the immediate stimuli and get a different perspective.

It is important to note that mediation is often done very implicitly. For parents in primitive cultures who don't read, for example, no one has said "This is how you help the kids learn how to learn." Instead, what's been said is "This is what parents are expected to do in our culture." You need to share certain things with your children or else you are not going to be respected by other members of your society.

Today we are finding a breakdown in cultural transmission, particularly in our country. Maybe the parents and children are there in the home, but they are watching television. And yes, there is some culture transmitted from television, but it's not mediated to people. They are just exposed to it.

Duane: The theory of MLE seems intuitively correct to me. Yet in your surveys of classrooms at various levels, you found mediation was very often not being used effectively to help children learn how to learn.

Kathy: That's right. And I believe part of the reason is that there has been so much emphasis on basic skills that we are teaching isolated skills. There is very little opportunity - and in fact, sometimes teachers are told that it's wrong - to make broader connections. But if you isolate skills, you must help students place them in the context of the real world, or they will have many difficulties using them when they are needed in real life situations - as well as difficulties in learning them in the first place. If you don't help the learner find personal relevance in the skills, then you've created a worse problem.

For example, most adults today went through language arts. We had all those stupid sentences that had no meaning to us, and we were to go through and correct the punctuation and grammar. Year after year after year we did these things, and we know today that this approach is not very effective. We need to create personally relevant exercises - things that people edit because they want to get them in a form other people can understand, or because they want to share their own information - and not just some silly sentences in a text book.

Duane: The COGNET program also includes ongoing evaluation of the student's learning efficiency. What's the structure for this ongoing evaluation?

Kathy: Feuerstein describes more than 28 "Building Blocks of Thinking." But in the COGNET program, we have condensed those down to ten. We also work with eight "Tools of Independent Learning." [See sidebars below.] These tools allow you to see what it is that's really causing the child problems, so you don't just say, "This child can't learn," or "This child has not learned the subject matter." Instead you are able to say, "This child did not gather all the information before starting," or "This child had no plan for learning."

If you are already a pretty good learner, sometimes there are just one or two Building Blocks getting in your way, particularly when you are having difficulty with some task. But when you get concerned or anxious or dissatisfied or unmotivated because you are having trouble, then you begin to use the Building Blocks less efficiently - and that causes you even more difficulty. The emotional overlay is, in large part, responsible for the breakdown in learning.

So by focusing on just a few variables, you can learn to understand that that's what's getting in the way. You can turn things around and become a much more independent learner.

Duane: And that feels good and motivates further learning.

Kathy: We know from neurological research that emotions are very much a factor in learning; they profoundly affect each other. What I like about this theory is that it doesn't just focus on the cognitive side, but looks at emotions too.

It's important to note that while this theory is used as an intervention with special needs populations, it is also a way of looking at all kinds of learning situations and seeing how human beings progress and develop, not just as individuals, but as whole societies and in the world.

Duane: What does the theory have to say about assessment of intelligence and ability?

Kathy: Feuerstein and Vygotsky agree that intelligence isn't the issue - cognitive development is.

The prevailing theory of intelligence is based on the underlying assumption that the quality of cognitive functioning determines the quality of learning experiences - in simple terms, your ability to develop understanding from your experiences determines the quality of your experiences. However, Vygotsky makes a strong case that it's the other way around - the development of cognitive function lags behind learning experience.

I agree with Feuerstein that both nature and nurture determine cognitive functioning - but that the prevailing theory overemphasizes nature. Learning experiences, particularly MLE, are the major determiner of cognitive functioning.

This is another paradigm shift with profound implications for intelligence testing. When subjects are taught how to approach problem-solving tasks, and then retested on those tasks, it is possible to measure their propensity for learning. We've found that students' scores before they are taught how to solve problems are not very helpful in predicting their scores after being taught these skills. In other words, the ability to learn how to solve problems is not necessarily related to how much the student already knows. We believe these data support the assumption that mediated learning experiences are the major determiner of cognitive functioning, rather than the other way around.

Duane: That could have a dramatic effect on assessment.

Kathy: It already has. In California, Black students can no longer be placed in special education programs based on IQ scores. A very thoughtful look at this theory helped that happen.

Duane: How do teachers change their style of teaching when they become involved in this program?

Kathy: Teachers have changed rather dramatically - for example, in the way they question children, and in the types of answers they are comfortable in receiving from them. It doesn't have to be the right answer every time. Instead, they encourage children to give partially correct answers and think further, rather than co-opting what a child has said, calling on another child, or telling the child what to think. They're turning the classroom into a laboratory for learning instead of a stage for producing right answers.

Duane: That sounds powerful.

Kathy: It's very exciting to see that happen. We also find that these teachers are very much raising their expectations of children, and they are expecting more from their slower learners as well. And not giving up on them so easily.

Duane: What's ahead for the program?

Kathy: We plan to focus on determining the most effective approaches for implementing mediated learning in the classroom and the home. For example, we are investigating what happens when computer software is used to help students apply the Building Blocks and Tools.

But exciting things are happening regarding the theory of MLE as well. In the long run, the Russian psychologist, Vygotsky, is expected by some to have as much or more effect as Piaget has had on psychology. Most of his work is now in the process of being translated into English. For the next five years, there will be a volume out every year about his work, some of which is very closely related to this theory. As people begin to look at Vygotsky, they are going to see a need for Feuerstein, because Feuerstein provides great insight into specific aspects of mediated learning which can be used to improve cognitive functioning.

What everyone is coming to is that social interaction is the key to cognitive development and to learning. We've got to learn to focus on that, to see how that works, and to tap into what it is that's happening in the classroom, or one-on-one in other settings. And when we understand that better, then we can help everyone to go further and to reach his or her own potential.

10 Building Blocks Of ThinkingThe Building Blocks are prerequisite skills upon which thought processes are based. In the Mediated Learning Experience, the mediator evaluates the learner's level of competency and use of these Building Blocks and seeks to help develop those that are underused.

Approach to Task * Beginning, being involved with, and completing an event, including gathering information, thinking about the situation, and expressing thoughts or actions related to the event.

Precision and Accuracy * Awareness of the need to automatically be exact and correct in understanding and using words and ideas.

Space and Time Concepts * Understanding basic ideas about how things relate in size, shape, and distance to one another (space); and the ability to understand measurement of the period between two or more events and/or changes that occur due to these periods (time).

Thought Integration * Pulling together and using at the same time multiple sources of information which are a part of a given event.

Selective Attention * Choosing relevant pieces of information when considering thoughts or events.

Making Comparisons * Awareness of the need to automatically examine the relationship between events and ideas, especially in determining what is the same and what is different.

Connecting Events * Awareness of the need to automatically associate one activity with another and use this association in a meaningful manner.

Working Memory * Enlarging the thinking space in order to enter bits of information from the mental act, retrieve information stored in the brain, and make connections among the information gathered.

Getting the Main Idea * Awareness of the need to automatically find a fundamental element that related pieces of information have in common.

Problem Identification * Awareness of the need to automatically experience and define within a given situation what is causing a feeling of imbalance.

8 Tools Of Independent LearningThese tools are needed if a person is going to be an active generator of information and not just a passive recipient. They are described by Feuerstein as "parameters of mediated learning" and are included in the COGNET program under the following labels:

Inner Meaning * Being aware of and developing a significance inside yourself that provides intrinsic motivation for learning and remembering.

Self Regulation * Controlling your approach to learning by using metacognition (thinking about how you are thinking) to determine factors like readiness and speed.

Feeling of Competence * Knowing you have the ability to do a particular thing. Lack of this tool often results in laziness and other avoidance behaviors; presence of it results in feeling confident and motivated to learn.

Goal Directed Behavior * Taking initiative in setting, seeking, and reaching objectives on a consistent basis.

Self Development * Being aware of your uniqueness as an individual and working toward becoming all you can be.

Sharing Behavior * Communicating thoughts to yourself and others in a manner that makes the implicit explicit.

Feeling of Challenge * Being aware of the effects emotions have on novel, complex, and consequently difficult tasks; knowing how to deal with challenge.

Awareness of Self Change * Knowing that you change throughout life and learning to expect, nurture, and benefit from it.

Learning how to learnIntroduction

Learning how to learn is a process in which we all engage throughout our lives, although often we do not realise that we are, in fact, learning how to learn. Most of the time we concentrate on what we are learning rather than how we are learning it. In this unit, we aim to make the process of learning much more explicit by inviting you to apply the various ideas and activities to your own current or recent study as a way of increasing your awareness of your own learning. Most learning has to be an active process - and this is particularly true of learning how to learn. Therefore, you will find that this unit contains a number of activities for you to complete, which require you to make notes and keep records. You can either write these down in a notebook, or use word processor, whichever you feel most comfortable with.

This unit is an adapted extract from the module Skills for study

Learning outcomes 1 Getting started

o 1.1 Examples o 1.2 What do we mean by learning how to learn?

2 Thinking about your learningo 2.1 Introduction o 2.2 Your motivation o 2.3 Your learning history o 2.4 Organising your study - keeping a learning diary

3 Learning through assessmento 3.1 Introduction to applying your learning o Current section: 3.2 A summary of the phases and activities of learning how to learn

4 The preparation phaseo 4.1 Preparing o 4.2 Analysing the task o 4.3 Making a plan

5 The exploration phaseo 5.1 Exploring o 5.2 Studying the materials o 5.3 Monitoring your progress

6 The implementation phaseo 6.1 Implementing o 6.2 Monitoring your performance o 6.3 Making a self-assessment

7 The reviewing phaseo 7.1 Reviewing o 7.2 Learning from feedback o 7.3 Review the whole process

8 Learning from revision and examinationso 8.1 Introduction

o 8.2 Preparing o 8.3 Exploring o 8.4 Implementing o 8.5 Reviewing

9 Learning how to become a reflective learnero 9.1 Reflection and the four main phases of learning how to learn o 9.2 What is reflection?

10 Further reading and sources of helpo 10.1 Further reading o 10.2 Other sources of help

Next steps Acknowledgements

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DescriptionsSome pictures on this page include descriptions for visually-impaired students. Show description links

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◄ Previous: 3.1 Introduction to applying your learning

3.2 A summary of the phases and activities of learning how to learnWe can represent the process of learning how to learn in a diagram with four phases (Figure 1).

Figure 1: The four main phases of learning how to learn

Long description

Preparing for a section of study and an accompanying assignment is an essential part of the process. In this phase, you are encouraged to pause and think ahead about how and when you will tackle both studying the material and the assessment task itself.

Exploring is the phase when most of your studying is done, by both working through the course and preparing for the assignment.

Implementing covers the actual doing of your assignment - producing the assignment in a form that can be sent to your tutor.

Reviewing is the phase when your work is returned. Lessons from this phase may well help you in the next circuit as you prepare for another section of study and the next assignment.

So what should you actually do in each of these phases? Each can be divided into two activities (Figure 2), and we will look at them in turn in the following sections.

Figure 2: The eight activities of learning how to learn

Long description

4 The preparation phase4.1 Preparing

In the preparation phase you should pause before starting a new section of work and think about it as a whole. What needs to be covered? What are the various components of this block of work? What are the learning objectives or outcomes? What will you need to know and be able to do at the end of it? What is required in the assignment?

There are two main activities during this phase, both directly related to your course work and assignment:

analysing the task making a plan.

4.2 Analysing the taskThis involves you in analysing both the learning task, (e.g. working through the text, other readings, calculations, experiments) as well as the assessed task (e.g. the assignment). It is important to work out from the start just what this part of the course requires you to do as well as to know.

Activity 5

Scan through your course material, looking at section headings, activities etc. Check any other components of the course you may have been provided with or directed towards. This could be other reading, audio-visual material, or electronic texts. Then look at the assignment. Take particular note of any guidance you’ve been given. This may have been given verbally by your tutor or in student notes. Also look at the criteria that will be used in marking it. If you have a choice of questions for your assignment, look at them all at this stage – it will also help you see what to expect and look out for as you study. Make notes as you compile this overview.

4.3 Making a planHow you respond to this suggestion will depend on what sort of person you are. Many of us are great planners with timetables and lists for every part of our lives; others just get on with the priorities and everything else follows in due course. Planning is no guarantee everything will get done or that deadlines will be met, but the process of making a plan makes you focus on what the task entails and gives direction and purpose to your study. Studying does demand that most students need to plan their work and there is evidence that target setting and appropriate planning can enhance performance.

Plans can be as general or as specific as necessary depending on your purpose and preference. Remember to take into account any awareness you have of your preferred ways of working - your learning skills, styles and strategies. The aim is to help you begin to understand what approach to learning really works best for you, in the context of the course you are currently studying and your personal circumstances.

An action plan can be just a list of things to do, a chart giving deadlines, a diagram showing how the various parts of your plan interact, or a set of post-its on a sheet of card that you move around when each task is done. If you break down the overall task into a series of smaller targets, you can chart your progress in more detail. It's useful to have a way of recording your progress as well as a way of listing any sources of help that you need. You can even customise one of the more sophisticated electronic planners - if that is your preferred way of working. But do remember that your original plan may well have to be modified as you work towards your final target.

Activity 6

Now, make yourself an action plan for your next assignment. You may like the design and layout of Tim's or Sue's action plans, or you may prefer to design one for yourself.

5 The exploration phase5.1 Exploring

This is the phase when you will be studying your course material, using and developing your learning skills. The two activities of this phase are:

studying the materials monitoring your progress.

5.2 Studying the materialsThis is the period when you will be working on your course materials in preparation for the assignment. This may include working through written or electronic texts, any other associated reading or media components, possibly attending a tutorial, accessing any other information that you need and making notes or records of it. Some courses give you a lot of direct guidance on how to work through the course materials; others present you with a range of options and routes. Some courses, particularly those at higher levels, leave you to make the decisions about how to tackle your study. Take advantage of any advice offered but as you become more aware of how best you learn, you will be able to take increasing responsibility for your own learning.

As you study and prepare for the assignment, you may need to use skills or techniques in which you are less confident, possibly those identified during the preparing phase. If so, try to consciously work on the skills that need developing rather than struggling through course material, ignoring areas or activities you find difficult.

This is a good time to complete a skills audit.

Activity 7

Take a break from your work and have a look at the instructions for your next assignment. Make sure you read any student notes very thoroughly and take note of any advice your tutor provides. Really analyse the task(s) involved and identify the skills you will need to complete the assignment successfully. Then draw up and complete a form like the one shown in Figure 3 or, if you prefer, devise one that suits you and the task.

Figure 3: A form for completing a skills audit

Long description

Next: 5.3 Monitoring your progress ►

5.3 Monitoring your progressOf all the components in the learning how to learn process, this is probably the most difficult. As you study, you need to make a conscious effort to monitor your progress while working on the course, always with the main task in view. This is where a flexible plan devised in the preparation phase can be revised, particularly if you meet a difficult patch. Knowing when help is needed and where to go for it is important, especially if you discover that your learning skills need improving. Sources of help may be formally provided in the course materials, through your tutor or from an administrator. Check if there are any skills workshops or supplementary materials available (see Further reading and Other sources of help sections). Some courses offer help online - make sure you know what is available and make use of it. Other sources of help may be informal - other students, self-help groups, friends or colleagues. Major areas of difficulty, perhaps identified as you work through one part of the course or prepare an assignment, may have to be tackled at another time; ask your tutor what help is available.

All this is part of monitoring your progress as a learner and a student on a particular course. Try to take the time to review your progress, especially if your course has built in a 'pause for thought' or a review section. The emphasis of your monitoring should be on 'What am I learning?' as well as 'How am I learning it?'

Activity 8

You might like to record your progress as a learner as you work towards your next assignment. You can do this in any format that suits you - Activity 4 gives you some points to consider and here are some further ideas.

Keep a learning journal for at least a week, recording:

the timing of each study session the place of each study session what you were learning how you were learning what did and what didn't go well changes you might make in the future.

Try to rate each session on a scale of 1–10 (e.g. a rating of 1 if you feel it was a waste of time, 10 if you feel that it was really beneficial) and add a comment on why you gave it that rating.

At the end of a week (or longer) pause and look at your records.

6 The implementation phase6.1 Implementing

This is the phase when you complete your assignment. In some courses and for some assignments, the exploring and implementing phases may merge or overlap; in other courses,

considerable exploration is needed before the actual assignment can be done. If there are several parts to your assignment, part of your planning might be to move back and forth between exploring and implementing - studying for and then completing part of the question, then returning for more study before tackling the rest of the assignment. Again, find a pattern that best suits you and the task. The two activities in the implementing phase are:

monitoring your performance making a self-assessment.

6.2 Monitoring your performanceAs you move into actually doing the assignment, the emphasis on consciously trying to monitor how you are performing continues to be important. This involves checking your work while you are working on the task rather than waiting until you have almost completed it before you look back at what you have done. You may wonder why we place so much emphasis on monitoring what you are doing. The reason is that if you check regularly what and how you are doing and are aware of your progress and performance, you are less likely to lose sight of the task and more likely to make appropriate changes as you work. For example, part of monitoring your performance as you complete an assignment is to make sure you check and re-check any guidelines or criteria given any student notes or guidance you’ve received. Even though you may have done this as part of your initial preparation and planning, it is very easy to lose sight of the question as you immerse yourself in study and then rush into producing the assignment.

Advice in student notes and grading criteria are sometimes ignored by students who then cannot understand why their grades are disappointing. Sometimes students drift away from the question, forgetting any advice they may have read, so this is something you should focus on both before starting and while working on the task. If you are given the marking criteria against which you will be scored but find them difficult to understand, don't be afraid to ask your tutor for clarification so that you will know how to use the criteria to enhance your work.

Activity 9

Try to find time to pause and think about the process of actually producing the assignment. It will give you a real insight into how you demonstrate your learning and produce material for assessment. If you can keep notes as a running commentary while you do this, it will give you an opportunity to review and possibly improve the process.

6.3 Making a self-assessmentThe ability to self-assess your work is a critical skill for you to develop if you want to improve your performance. If you can assess your own work accurately and identify the gap between what is required and what you are producing, you are more likely to be able to close the gap. But making an accurate and honest self-assessment is not an easy skill to develop, even though it is crucial in learning how to learn. Some courses do ask you to self-assess your work and submit your comments as part of the assignment. If this is required by your course, take it seriously and think carefully about what you have produced. This is where you should

definitely use the marking criteria if they are provided and your tutor will give you appropriate feedback on your comments. If your course does not require this, you could put together a self-assessment form for yourself, which your tutor may agree to have a look at for you. It’s worth spending time on this as it will develop your own ability to self-assess.

Click 'view document' to open and print figure 4 as blank template.

View document [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)]

Activity 10

When you are ready to send your assignment to your tutor, spend a few minutes completing a form like the one in Figure 4. If your tutor has not provided a form like this, you can reproduce it yourself by completing Part A and attaching a note asking your tutor to respond. You can attach Part B as a separate sheet or write the headings on the back of Part A.

Figure 4: A form for your assessment of your assignment

Long description

7 The reviewing phase7.1 Reviewing

This phase takes place after a period of study and an assignment have been completed. It is when you focus on reviewing your performance on your assignment as well as the whole cycle of study you have just completed. The two activities of this phase are:

learning from feedback reviewing the whole process.

7.2 Learning from feedbackThis is actually quite a difficult thing for any student to do. It is most effective when your assignment is returned, but by then you may have moved on to the next part of the course. Even so, you do need to make time to re-visit your assignment when it is returned and take note of your tutor's comments. It is the one time when your tutor is able to give feedback and advice to you as an individual student so it is well worth taking time to really absorb their comments. Try to separate those that are about what you have included in your assignment from those about how you have presented it. Assignments that give you a clear indication of the criteria used in grading may enable you to learn more effectively from the assessment process, but some tutors explain their own criteria and you should note this carefully.

Even if you have now moved to a new topic, your tutor's comments may aid your revision of the topic. More importantly, there may also be immediate advice that you could act on and incorporate into your next and any future assignments, thus enhancing your grades. For students, a great deal of learning takes place through completing assignments and getting feedback from their tutor. This, like self-assessment, is a crucial part of the process of learning how to learn.

Activity 11

If you sent a form to your tutor, put aside some time to complete Part B when your assignment is returned.

What to do when your assignment comes back: how to gain maximum benefit from it

Assignments are not designed only for assessment - although most of them are marked in some way, they can count towards a final continuous assessment score or grade.

Working on an assignment is an active learning process from which you can gain a great deal. It is important to maximise the value of this.

When tutors receive your assignments they don't just grade them: they are normally expected to give you feedback and advice which will help you to improve your performance.

To get full benefit from your assignment, you'll need to engage with their comments and respond to them. If you do get in the habit of doing this to all your assignments, you'll learn far more from the whole exercise.

TEN TIPS FOR WHEN YOU GET YOUR ASSIGNMENT BACK

1. You'll probably look first at the grade - most people do - and this may arouse some feelings:

o if you've done better than you expected, you'll feel relievedo if it's worse than you expected, you'll feel disappointedo if it's much lower than you anticipated, you might feel angry or insulted.

There's nothing wrong with these feelings but they will affect your learning, so put the assignment away until your next study session.

o In your next study session, allow yourself about 20–30 minutes to work on it; do this even if you're now on to new work.

o Read the feedback and comments from your tutor.o Make yourself read through each question, stopping to read the comments.

Sometimes tutors put these on a separate sheet so you can refer to it as you read.o Mark (in a different coloured pen) your responses to what your tutor has written;

anything you agree or disagree with; anything you don't understand.o When you've finished re-reading, think about the grade again. If you're still unhappy,

make a note to ask about it.o Go back to the feedback and comments from your tutor and re-read it. Can you

understand what your tutor is saying.o On a separate sheet of paper or at the end of the assignment write down one or two

main points - pieces of advice; mistakes you see you made; things to remember - points which you need to bear in mind when you write the next assignment or when you revise for your exam.

o Make a note of anything that still puzzles you; comments which confuse you; criticism you feel is unjustified etc.

o Arrange to speak to your tutor about your work. Either take your notes or assignment to your next tutorial, or contact your tutor by phone or email. Make sure you both have a copy of the assignment to refer to.

At the end of every assignment you should be able to identify at least one thing that will help you to improve your performance. Then file your notes away ready for revision.

Learning from feedback is probably the most critical activity in the process of learning how to learn. Continuous assessment is not just a mechanism for judging your performance as a student, it is also meant to be part of the process of learning. But it can only contribute to learning how to learn if you, the learner, engage with this part of the process.

7.3 Review the whole process

Before you file away your assignment and return to your current study, spend a little time reviewing the whole process of preparing, exploring, implementing and reviewing your assignment. Review what you did and how you did it in each of the four phases. Trying to identify just one thing that went well and one thing that you could have done differently can help you in your future study. Remember that your review should focus on the process of the preparation for, and production of, your assignment (i.e. how you might do it differently) and not just the product itself (i.e. how you might do it better).

Here are some comments from Tim.

I've dipped in and out of this unit but I can see now that I could have gone through the whole thing a bit earlier. I really haven't made much effort to read through my tutor's comments until now - just a quick look at the feedback sheet I received - and I know that I've missed a lot. Pulling out my tutor's comments gave me something to focus on for my last assignment - I saved myself time and anguish over what to put in the essay and I got a better mark. I will certainly have a good look at my next assignment.

As you read through the description of the process with its four phases and associated activities, you probably felt that you might like to try some of them but that attempting to complete the whole process could be too demanding. That's fine - now you have a choice. You can decide to invest some time and effort in learning how to learn and therefore give the whole process a try as you start the next part of your course and prepare for the associated assignment. Or, you may choose to focus on one phase of the process and try the activities suggested just for that phase - perhaps preparing or reviewing. Possibly, you may decide that you want to really develop one or two components that seem particularly important for you. This may be because the activity is something you rarely do - like planning - and yet feel that it might make a difference to your work. Or, you may have found some of the suggestions really interesting and decide to try them out for yourself - perhaps focussing on monitoring your progress and performance or attempting to self-assess your own assignments, and then trying to apply any relevant feedback from your tutor.

8 Learning from revision and examinations8.1 Introduction

Once you have got a general understanding of the process of learning how to learn, and have tried applying it to an assignment, you may be able to see how the same approach can be applied to revision, exams or any other form of assessment at the end of your course. This section looks at how the four phases (preparing, exploring, implementing and reviewing) relate to revision and exams. You may want to remind yourself of the overall process by looking again at Figure 2.

You might prefer to skim through this section at this stage and return to it as your exam gets closer. However, the skills and the strategies that you need to use during revision and in exams may be very different from those you use during your study of other course components, so do leave time to practise them. Again, you may decide to focus on one particular phase of the process as revision time approaches.

8.2 PreparingBoth activities in this phase - analysing the task and making a plan - are critically important when it comes to preparing for an exam. Start by gathering together everything you have been sent that relates to the exam or end-of-course assessment for your current course. Also collect any advice you have had in the past about exam preparation. But the really important thing at this stage is to try and obtain a specimen exam paper or any detailed instructions relating to your end-of-course assessment. Use this information to analyse the task. While you are looking at these documents, think through what it is that you are expected to do and look back at any previous experiences you have had that might be relevant to the task. This is particularly important in preparing for an exam. Activity 12 is designed to help you if your course has an examination.

Activity 12

Before you start any revision have a look at these questions. You can either note down your responses or, preferably, share them with another student or someone who will 'interview' you, listen to your responses and perhaps question you further. The object of this exercise is to recall how you have prepared for and performed in examinations previously. If you have not taken an exam before, think about how you will probably do it this year, instead. The list starts with a general question, focuses on revision and then on the examination experience, and ends with another general question.

Revision and examinations

1. How would you summarise your overall feelings about examinations?2. About how long is your revision period - how long before the actual exam would you

start revising?3. What sort of pattern does your revision take - do you work in phases, small bits or

longer periods?4. How close to the exam do you revise - up to the night before or do you have a break?5. How carefully do you plan or structure your revision - do you plan a detailed outline

of what you will do or do you just start and work through?6. If you need to memorise material, do you have any particular way of doing it?7. Do you record material in any way - perhaps summarise it on cards or paper, or record

it?8. Do you try to include any new material while revising or stick with what you have

already studied?9. Do you try to re-organise your material - perhaps re-write notes, or select from

different parts of the course?10. Do you make use of back papers or practise actual questions?11. What do you do on the night before and the morning of the examination?12. What do you think and feel as you journey to the examination place?13. Do you stand outside talking with others or stand alone?14. Between going into the room and starting the examination do you have rituals such as

where you place the things you've taken with you? Do you meditate, pray or practise relaxation?

15. Once the examination starts, do you have a particular pattern of work - of tackling the paper?

16. Do you have a problem with timing?17. Do you check back through your work before the end?18. What do you do immediately after the examination?19. Do you contact other students or your tutor after the exam?20. Looking back at the examination(s) you have taken, do you feel you have learned

anything that has helped you, or might help you, to do better?

8.3 ExploringAlthough this sounds as though it may not seem very appropriate in the context of revision and exams, it is critically important that you re-explore the course as you do your revision or prepare your end-of-course assessment. Studying the materials is important as many exams and end-of-course assessments require you to step back and review the course as a whole as well as consider the component parts. This is where you may need different skills and strategies; so, try different ways of recording and remembering information.

Keep an eye on your schedule and monitor your progress as you work through your revision. If you are facing an exam, make sure you practise answering questions from the sample or back papers. If you are completing an end-of-course assessment, keep checking the requirements, the instructions and advice you have been given. Some end-of-course assessments ask you to do tasks that are quite different from earlier assignments.

8.4 ImplementingAs with assignments, this is the phase when you actually do the task - sit the exam or produce the final version of your end-of-course assessment. This is where monitoring your performance is really important. For most students, the crucial thing in an exam is usually to monitor the timing. Unlike the production of an assignment, an exam is a timed test; so, you need to pace yourself appropriately. Most end-of-course assessments have no time constraints although you may find the deadline very tight. Again, monitor your performance carefully. But timing is not the only thing to monitor - check that you are answering the question asked; that your calculations are accurate, and so on.

You may remember that the second component of the implementing phase was to make a self-assessment. This may sound a strange thing to suggest in relation to exams. However, generally students do not get many opportunities to improve their performance in exams so, once the actual event is over, make yourself spend a short time trying to assess your performance before the details fade in your memory.

8.5 ReviewingUndoubtedly this is the most difficult phase to apply to revision and an exam or to the preparation and production of an end-of-course assessment. Most of us heave a huge sigh of relief when it is all over and then try to put it out of our minds during the weeks while we wait for the results. When these arrive, it is very difficult to think back to the exam itself or revisit the details of the end-of-course assessment. With very little feedback to help, learning how to learn from exams or their equivalent is difficult.

It is also likely that you may have quite strong feelings about the results - delight, amazement, relief, disappointment, even despair. Whatever your reaction, remember that there are people who can help you review the process and advise you if you want or need to take action. More importantly, if you are continuing with another course and you really want to improve your learning, remind yourself that this is the best time to review both your revision period and your exam performance. Try to identify what you can learn from it that might help you to handle the process more effectively next time.

9 Learning how to become a reflective learner9.1 Reflection and the four main phases of learning how to learn

If your course encourages this approach to learning, or if you have read other material on learning how to learn, you may have come across the term 'reflection'. Maybe you have been encouraged to reflect on your learning or on your assignments. In this unit, we have deliberately not used the term until now. This is not because we think the term - or the process - is unimportant, but because it can seem vague and not particularly helpful to you as a learner. In fact, all the activities in this unit have involved reflection of some kind. In this final section, we want to explore the meaning of the term and explain how it can help you in learning how to learn (Figure 5).

Figure 5: Reflection and learning

Long description

The preparation phase involves you in looking back as well as looking forward before embarking on a section of study within a course or perhaps the course as a whole. It encourages you to pause and think purposefully before moving on and has been described as reflection-for-action.

The over-arching emphasis of both the exploring and implementing phases is of being aware of what you are doing while you are doing it - often described as reflection-in-action. Such reflection needs to be critical reflection - asking yourself questions, checking your thoughts and actions, explaining to yourself (or others) why you are saying, writing, or doing things in this way. Reflection in action is difficult but becomes easier when carried out with another person who can listen to you talking through your work or reading what you have written.

The final reviewing phase closes the cycle; it overlaps with and leads into preparation for the next section of learning and assessment, or perhaps to revision and exams. This is a time for reflection-on-action to conclude the process. Look back over the whole learning experience and identify what you have learned from studying this part of the course and completing the assignment. The emphasis should be on both the content learned and how you learned it - this is the meaning of learning how to learn.

Courses are often very demanding in terms of time and some are overloaded. You may be tempted, especially in your first year, to struggle on, preoccupied with trying to keep up. It is hard to make yourself pause and consider how you are studying and learning even when course materials invite you to do so. In most courses there are natural breaks - at the end of a unit or block of study as well as after the completion of an assignment. These are designed to help you fit in time for reflection-on-action, a conclusion for the section of work you have just completed and a preparation for starting the cycle again with the next section of your coursework.

9.2 What is reflection?Is reflection different to just thinking about your study? And how do we do it? Can someone teach you how to reflect or is it a matter of practice? Can everyone be reflective or are some students - and some people - more reflective than others?

There is no clear definition of reflection or precise way of describing what we mean by a reflective learner. But we can discuss some characteristics of the process, and encourage you to develop your own preferred ways of developing it.

Reflection is thinking for a purpose - in this unit we have linked it to wanting to become a more effective and efficient learner; someone who wants to understand their own learning. Thus, reflection is also about wanting, or at least being willing, to change the way we learn.

Reflection is analysing how we learn - taking apart our own learning processes. The activities in this unit are tools to help you do this. But reflection is also about evaluating how effectively we learn - making judgements on our own performance, and that is not always an easy or comfortable thing to do.

Most of all, reflection includes being critical - not in a negative or destructive way, but through rigorous questioning and deep probing into what and how we learn. Many people would say that the most important characteristic of an effective student in higher education is that they are capable of critical thinking - actively challenging both themselves and others.

For most of us, reflection becomes a more meaningful activity if it can be shared, either in a group or with another student. Putting your thoughts and ideas into words and getting a response from someone else, then perhaps listening to their reactions, makes the process more interactive and developmental. This interaction can be face-to-face or might be at a distance - by telephone or electronically. Even if you cannot easily engage with another student, any other person - friend or family - who is supportive of you as a student or shares your interest in learning might well enjoy sharing with you some of the activities in this unit.

Sharing ideas about the activities means that you are more likely to engage with the material. If you prefer not to share your thoughts and experiences with others, or if talking about your learning is not possible, at least take time to respond to the activities in writing. The activities in this unit do not have a 'right answer'. The examples from Tim and Sue show that students vary in the way they approach their learning and in how they reflect on its effectiveness. We hope that you have found time to record your responses and to act on them where appropriate. If you have read this far and have actively engaged in the process as we suggest, it is likely that you are well on the way to becoming a reflective learner.

Learning how to learn, however, is about more than reflection - it is about development and change. Understanding how you learn is just the first stage; taking action to develop yourself, to make changes and improve your learning is, like learning itself, an ongoing process. We hope that working through this unit has at least encouraged you to start.

10 Further reading and sources of help10.1 Further reading

OU books

The Good Study Guide, by Andrew Northedge, published by The Open University, 2005, ISBN 0 7492 59744

The Sciences Good Study Guide, by Andrew Northedge, Jeff Thomas, Andrew Lane, Alice Peasgood, published by The Open University, 1997, ISBN 0 7492 341 1 3

The Arts Good Study Guide, by Ellie Chambers and Andrew Northedge, published by The Open University, 1997, ISBN 0 7492 8745 4

Other books

Writing at University: A guide for students, by P. Creme and M. R. Lea, published by Open University Press, Buckingham, 1997

Reading, Writing and Reasoning: A guide for students, by G. J. Fairbairn and C. Winch, published by The Society for Research into Higher Education and Open University Press, Buckingham, 1996

A Guide to Learning Independently, by L. Marshall and F. Rowland, published by Open University Press, Buckingham, 1996

Calculating and Computing for Social Science and Arts Students, by R. Solomon and C. Winch, published by Open University Press, Buckingham, 1994

10.2 Other sources of help

Websites

/ www.open.ac.uk/ goodstudyguide [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)]

This Open University site is a companion site to the Good Study Guide series of books.

Next stepsAfter completing this unit you may wish to study another OpenLearn Study Unit or find out more about this topic. Here are some suggestions:

Extending and developing your thinking skills (LDT101_2) [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)]

Revision and examinations (LDT101_1) Education

If you wish to study formally at The Open University, you may wish to explore the courses we offer in this curriculum area:

Educational Technology and Practice Education

Or find out about studying and developing your skills with The Open University:

OU study explained Skills for study

Or you might like to:

Post a mesage to the unit forum, to share your thoughts about the unit or talk to other OpenLearners

Review or add to your Learning Journal Rate this unit

AcknowledgementsThe content acknowledged below is Proprietary (see terms and conditions [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] ) and is used under licence.

Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following sources for permission to reproduce material in this unit:

The content acknowledged below is Proprietary and is used under licence.

This publication has been written by Maggie Coats with contributions from Maggie Boxer and Maureen Haywood and produced by the Student Services Communications Team on behalf of the Open University Centre for Educational Guidance and Student Support.

Thanks are due to the following people who read and commented on the draft material:

Denise Bates, Margaret Johnson, Liz Manning, Jenny Marris, Beth Mackay, Roberta Nathan, Patrick Kelly, Kathleen Gilmartin.

Steering group: Margaret Johnson, Vicki Goodwin, Kathleen Gilmartin, Jenny Marris, Juliet Bishop, Liz Manning, Patrick Kelly, Roberta Nathan, Clive Barrett, Beth Mackay, Denise Bates, Heather Laird, Janine Talley, Maggie Coats.

Production team: Penelope Lyons, Mandy Anton, Jenny Nockles, Roy Lawrance, Beth Mackay, Angela Driver.

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How to Learn How to LearnBy braniac, eHow User

updated March 01, 2011

Print this article

How to Learn How to Learn

Learning how to learn is a key to success in school and in life. A lot of attention is paid to creating good study habits, which are invaluable, but understanding and using multiple learning strategies are important, too, in learning how to learn. Here are several things you can do to help you learn more readily.

Difficulty:

Moderate

Instructions

Things You'll Need

Desire to Know Wish to Improve Self-Discipline

1.o 1

Study Learning Success Factors

You'll need motivation to learn how to learn efficiently, because it involves effort on your part. Motivation is a critical success factor and for children, parental motivation and involvement are vitally important. Other learning success factors include early childhood education/stimulation, early success in school, and proper rest and nutrition. Make sure you or your children get sufficient rest and adequate nutrition to learn most effectively.

o 2

Understand Different Learning Styles

Learning styles describe how people prefer to learn. There are different learning style theories and their value is debated, but learning how to learn efficiently depends in part on what your learning style preferences are.

Some people prefer visual modes of learning; others feel better learning via auditory methods while still others prefer kinesthetic or "hands on" learning. (There are other learning style models, too.) The challenge is to do well in all learning styles but to know what your preferences are when choices are available so that you can be most efficient, in school and out. See the Resources section for articles on Learning Styles for further information.

o 3

Employ Multiple Learning Strategies

Learning how to learn efficiently also involves using multiple strategies to learn difficult material and to aid retention of new subject matter. You'll need to learn these strategies or skills well:• How to read textbook material• Personal time management• Good note taking• Listening effectively• Preparing written summaries• Preparing flash cards• Effective studying• How to prepare for tests/exams• How to do written assignments such as term papers

Writing helps the mind learn and retain material. Effective reading saves time and improves learning. See the Resources section for a link to the excellent Dartmouth Academic Skills Center for more detailed information on these and related strategies. Also see the article below on "How to Learn Efficiently and Effectively."

o 4

Use Learning Motivations

Why do you need or want to learn the subjects that you are studying? Keep in touch with your goals and the payoffs that learning can provide. Specific motivations aid you both in learning how to learn and in learning particular subjects. Look up the average lifetime earnings for the income rewards deriving from higher levels of education. These alone should be powerful motives for making the effort to learn.

o 5

Develop Good Learning Habits

Good habits make productive behavior easier. Habits also make learning how to learn a practical skill by using the techniques involved over and over until they are almost automatic. Education and study burdens are lessened tremendously by developing and sticking with good habits, such as studying right after classes are over (while the material is fresh), having a quiet and

comfortable place to study, taking short breaks each hour but reading and studying for at least five hours every single day if in college. Make sure you use any valuable time between classes to review and study the earlier class and to prepare for the next one.

o 6

Reading is More than Fundamental

Effective reading is the most crucial skill you'll need in school and in learning how to learn. Get all the help you need if you have any weaknesses in reading. And read everything you can in the time you have, in order to get comfortable with all types of material, and especially read deeply in subjects that interest you the most.

o 7

Learn How to Learn

Keep a "Learning Journal" to record your learning goals, preferred learning styles, most productive learning strategies, and key learning habits that you think you'll need to succeed. Then record your actual time devoted to learning specific subjects so that you can monitor and adjust your efforts as required to get the results you want. Become a scientist when it comes to your own learning behavior and you will truly have learned how to learn.

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LEARNING HOW TO LEARN

For our purposes, there are two quite different traditions about learning how to learn. One stems from the Deep and Surface learning strategies studies (about responses to being taught), and the other from the work of Gregory Bateson.

Bateson maintained that many discussions about learning were confused by category errors about the kind of learning they were about. He suggested that there are a number of levels, in which each superior level is the class of its subordinates (rather like Kelly's notion of superordinate and subordinate constructs).

Bateson himself uses the analogy of movement:

Learning 0 is direct experience: I put my hand in the fire – it gets burned

Learning 0 is like the position of an object

Learning I is what we routinely refer to as "learning": generalisation from basic experiences. I have experienced "hand in fire" and "being burned", and I won't do it again. This is straightforward and compatible even with behavioural views, as well as the cycle of experiential learning.

Learning I is its speed when it moves

Learning II (which he sometimes called "Deutero-Learning") contextualises Learning I experiences. It is about developing strategies for maximising Learning I through the extraction of implicit rules, and also putting specific bits of Learning I in context: I don't generally risk getting burned, but I might do so to save someone else from a fire.

Learning II is acceleration (or deceleration)—a change in speed

Learning III contextualises Learning II, and is not understood, but it may be the existential (or spiritual) level: What does it say about me that I would risk getting burned in order to ...?

Learning III is a change in the rate of acceleration — a change in the change of the change of position... The higher the level, the less we understand about the process, and although such higher level learning undoubtedly takes place, the more difficult it is deliberately to manage it.

Note that levels of learning are different from levels of understanding, as exemplified in Bloom's taxonomy of educational objectives, and also to be distinguished from the similar terminology of Gagné.

This account does not do justice to Bateson's very complex thinking, which starts from posing the question why people get better with practice at doing fairly meaningless tasks such as remembering nonsense syllables.

The interesting question for academic practice is the qualitative shift required to move from Learning 1 to Learning II, which some people find more difficult than others, perhaps in specific subject areas. How do we help them to achieve it? This may be the biggest remaining problem in in pedagogic/andragogic practice.

Some clues are contained in

reflection, in problem-based learning and action learning, situated learning, and even in intelligence,

but we still don't have reliable answers.

Rant

This is more properly located on my personal site, but I can't contain myself. In the UK, we have this misbegotten, patronising, arrogant, (insert whatever other insulting adjectives you favour) idea of "teaching" "key skills" at college level.

"Key skills"—derived from the generic skills employers say that they want—include "Communication" and "Application of Number" [the comparative of "numb"—sorry, but I am ranting] (what are the schools supposed to have been teaching for eleven years before students reach further education?) and "teamworking" and "improving own learning" etc.

Note that I refer above to "the generic skills employers say that they want"; there is some evidence, which I can't presently be bothered to look up, which suggests that there is a mismatch between what employers actually go for when appointing their staff, and what they say they go for when asked by trade and official bodies.

What is more, it is routine for universities to require the specification of key skills outcomes on the templates even for post-graduate courses. How patronising and infantilising can you get? Fortunately, most academics treat such requirements with the contempt they deserve.

It has been my misfortune for several years to have to observe some very gifted student teachers wrestling with the thankless task of getting learners to provide evidence of "key skills" competence. They have stopped an animated discussion in class, for example, to get students to "discuss"—in a very desultory fashion—some topic in which they have no interest whatever, in order to be able to tick a box on a competence check-list. It is even more stupid than the idea of "Liberal Studies", which is where I started my teaching career: at least that was "high-minded" in its conception.

What the education control-freaks fail to realise is that some things are only learned by experience and practice. You can't short-circuit the process by teaching them.

Rant over! The relevance of this to the present topic is that the "soft" key skills project confuses Learning I and Learning II: you cannot address the key skills (which are Learning II) by simply adding on more Learning I competences: this is precisely the "category error" against which Bateson inveighs But the key skills advocates (and here I risk alienating my closest colleague and friend) seem to believe that all skills are at the same level. "Application of Number", and IT skills may be Learning I, but the "wider" key skills ("Working with Others", "Problem Solving", "Improving Own Learning and Performance") and even the central key skill of "Communication"—which includes the "discussion" requirement—are clearly Learning II, and although we know they can be learned, we do not know how to teach them in any meaningful way.

It's only fair to offer a right to reply: this links to the official key skills site, although it is interesting to note that it has recently become more difficult to find a clear statement in ministry policy about Key Skills.

If you really haven't got a life, you can always look at this riveting site about Key Skills "qualifications". To reference this page copy and paste the text below:

Atherton J S (2011) Learning and Teaching; Learning how to learn [On-line: UK] retrieved 30 July 2011 from http://www.learningandteaching.info/learning/learnlea.htm

Comments (including broken links etc.) welcome (even needed ) please: email me here

Original material by James Atherton: last up-dated overall 10 February 2010

Read more: Learning how to learn http://www.learningandteaching.info/learning/learnlea.htm#ixzz1TYaedTeR Under Creative Commons License: Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives

BLOOM’S TAXONOMY"Taxonomy” simply means “classification”, so the well-known taxonomy of learning objectives is an attempt (within the behavioural paradigm) to classify forms and levels of learning. It identifies three “domains” of learning (see below), each of which is organised as a series of levels or pre-requisites. It is suggested that one cannot effectively — or ought not try to — address higher levels until those below them have been covered (it is thus effectively serial in structure). As well as providing a basic sequential model for dealing with topics in the curriculum, it also suggests a way of categorising levels of learning, in terms of the expected ceiling for a given programme. Thus in the Cognitive domain, training for technicians may cover knowledge, comprehension and application, but not concern itself with analysis and above, whereas full professional training may be expected to include this and synthesis and evaluation as well. 

Cognitive: the most-used of the domains, refers to knowledge structures (although sheer “knowing the facts” is its bottom level). It can be viewed as a sequence of progressive contextualisation of the material. (Based on Bloom, 1956)

The model above is included because it is still common currency, but Anderson and Krathwohl (2001) have made some apparently minor but actually significant modifications, to come up with:

Revised taxonomy of the cognitive domainfollowing Anderson and Krathwohl (2001)

Note the new top category, which is about being able to create new knowledge within the domain, and the move from nouns to verbs.

In higher education, "understand" is still—in my view—problematic in its positioning. There is a higher, contextualised level of "understanding" which comes only with attempting to evaluate ideas and to try them out in new ways, or to "create" with them. It is what I expect at Master's level. The taxonomy is an epistemological rather than psychological hierarchy, but it also has a basic chronological element: you achieve certain levels before others. This higher, Gestalt, level of understanding comes last, in my experience: my principal evidence is in the use of research methods. The "real", intuitive, contextualised, critical, strategic understanding only happens when you have tried to be creative within the field... Argue with me (use the "comments welcome" link below). And thanks to all the people who have done so; I hope you found it a useful activity. I did!

More on the revised version, including the magical verbs to use in objectives at different levels

Yet more

Apologies to the reader who prefers "Analyzing"!

Affective: the Affective domain has received less attention, and is less intuitive than the Cognitive. It is concerned with values, or more precisely perhaps with perception of value issues, and ranges from mere awareness (Receiving), through to being able to distinguish implicit values through analysis. (Kratwohl, Bloom and Masia (1964))

Psycho-Motor: Bloom never completed work on this domain, and there have been several attempts to complete it. One of the simplest versions has been suggested by Dave (1975): it fits with the model of developing skill put forward by Reynolds (1965), and it also draws attention to the fundamental role of imitation in skill acquisition.

To reference this page copy and paste the text below:

Atherton J S (2011) Learning and Teaching; Bloom's taxonomy [On-line: UK] retrieved 30 July 2011 from http://www.learningandteaching.info/learning/bloomtax.htm

Comments (including broken links etc.) welcome (even needed ) please: email me here

Original material by James Atherton: last up-dated overall 10 February 2010

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LEARNING AUTHORITY

A great deal of learning takes place in a social context, whether that be the family or the classroom or the work-group (hence social constructivism and situated learning). It is thus subject to social pressures which, while they may not appear directly relevant to the subject matter to be learned, influence underlying attitudes and perspectives affecting motivation, the value and priority to be given to academic work, and so on. This page refers to three classic studies in this area:

Defining the Situation

T S Eliot claimed that "mankind cannot bear very much reality" A correspondent points out that I am being disingenuous here ( i.e. telling fibs) Eliot actually says "human kind" ("Burnt Norton" line 42 in the "Four Quartets", 1959): but why has it taken three years for someone to notice? Does it say something about the assumed authority of what we read on the web? (I thought of amending that on the grounds of sexism, but then my partner told me it was exactly right). Be that is it may, neither sex can bear much ambiguity or meaninglessness. Frankl built a whole school of psychotherapy ("Logotherapy) on "Man's (there it is again) search for meaning". John Keats spoke of the need to cultivate "negative capability" or the ability not to jump to conclusions, a theme later taken up by W R Bion. But this desire to find an "answer" is very strong, and can easily lead to inappropriate learning.

McHugh's (1968) fascinating and frequently amusing book recounts an experiment in which subjects were introduced to a supposedly new form of counselling. They were told that the counsellor who would be working with them was very skilled and very wise. They were invited to describe a problem or dilemma to the “counsellor”, whom they could not see and with whom they could only communicate by intercom., and to ask ten questions, each of which had to be capable of being answered with a “yes” or a “no”. After they had heard the answer to each question, they should reflect aloud on what they made of it, before formulating the next question. What they did not know was that the “counsellor” was simply an experimenter working down a predetermined list of

randomly-generated “yes” and “no” answers. The transcripts of the “interviews” show how the subjects struggled to make sense of the answers they received, and how few of them realised or were prepared to concede that the entire process was meaningless. Moreover, a considerable proportion reported that the experience had been helpful in clarifying their problems!

Logotherapy site

The source of "negative capability"

Negative capability in the psychoanalytic study of organisations

Obedience to Authority

Milgram (1973) took this issue a stage further in his famous or notorious sequence of experiments on “Obedience to Authority”. The stimulus came from reading the reports of Nazi atrocities and the "only obeying order" defence, but its generality was confirmed afterwards by the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam war, in which a platoon of American soldiers murdered an entire village of non-combatant children, women and men. (There is a more recent parallel in the incidents at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.) Such an atrocity is not uncommon in war, but that does not make it any more excusable, and Milgram and his colleagues were concerned about the psychological processes at work which would make young Americans act so much out of character and contrary to the values which they has been brought up with. Were they peculiar or personality-disordered in some way, or was there some feature of the social situation which had caused them to act so cruelly?

He devised an experiment—with several variations—in which a subject would be ordered to administer electric shocks of increasing severity to a stooge of the experimenter. The subjects were recruited through advertisements in the local press, in the name of a prestigious university, to participate in psychological experiments to do with learning. They received a small fee for their participation. On keeping their appointment, in most cases on the university premises, they were introduced to the “experimenter”, who was an official-looking figure in a white coat, and to another “subject”. The conditions were varied over the series of experiments, but in the simplest form the meeting between the two subjects was manipulated so that the real subject became the “teacher” and a stooge the “learner”.  The task was explained as being to study the effects of punishment on the capacity of the learner to learn a sequence of nonsense syllables. The punishment took the form of an electric shock, supposedly administered from a panel under the control of the “teacher”, who was guided and instructed by the experimenter (unknown to the subject, of course, there were no shocks, and the stooge was acting). The panel was calibrated in 15-volt increments to show the intensity of the shock administered, from “slight shock” through “very strong shock” to “danger: severe shock”. The high end of the scale was simply marked “XXX”. The maximum shock possible was 450 volts. Each time the stooge got his answers wrong, the subject was instructed, in standard phrases, to increase the shock. If he or she balked, the experimenter would respond with further standardised responses as appropriate, such as, “the experiment requires that you continue”, or re-assure the subject that “there would be no tissue damage”.

Before embarking on the experiments, Milgram consulted a number of psychologists and psychiatrists as to their opinion of what proportion of the subjects would be prepared to administer the most severe shocks. Their consensus was that a very small number—perhaps

0.1% of the subjects—of manifestly or latently psychopathic or otherwise disturbed individuals might go through with it, but the vast majority would not. Lay people estimated that perhaps 1% would go all the way.

In the event, in seven of the eighteen experimental conditions, about two-thirds of the subjects administered the most severe shocks. In five conditions fewer than 10% of the subjects went all the way, but all of these were variations in which the authority of the experimenter was discounted or undermined in some way.

One of the things which comes over most vividly in Milgram’s book, from the transcripts of the experimental sessions, is the distress of the subjects at “having to” obey the experimenter. They protested, trembled, sweated, and cried—but they still obeyed.

Ethical considerations mean that the experiments would never get clearance in academe nowadays, but the entertainment industry is not so squeamish. (And there are several high school re-enactments on YouTube).

Nowadays we live in an age which we fondly believe is less in thrall to authority. Nevertheless, the authority of the teacher in the classroom tends to be preserved, amplified by a culture of dependence, and this can all to easily lead to students playing at guessing what the teacher wants to hear (Holt 1970) and hence to surface learning. Denying that this is likely to happen because of our liberal intentions in the classroom is not enough.

The Stanley Milgram site

On the My Lai massacre

More than you wanted to know about Abu Ghraib

Group pressure 

The pressure which can be exerted even in relatively small groups has been vividly illustrated by another of the canon of classic experiments in social psychology. Asch (1955) primed a group of stooges to make an error at predetermined points in an exercise of estimating which of a group of three lines of varying length was the same length as a test line. One of the members of the group, however, was not a stooge, but an experimental subject. In the basic version of the experiment 32% of the subjects ended up disbelieving the evidence of their own senses about the length of the line and agreeing with the other members of the group (although this conceals substantial variations: three-quarters of the subjects conformed at least once, but only 5% did so every time). This basic figure could be modified by variations in the form of the experiment, as with the the Milgram study, such as the presence of an ally for the dissenting member in the group.

Again, Asch's series of experiments has provoked much discussion and further research, and dispassionate evaluation might not attach the same significance to the results as they attracted in the Cold War era: nevertheless subsequent research has tended to show much likelier conformity effects on matters of opinion than on factual questions.

Reproducing Asch's experiment: variable results

So what?

These and other experiments suggest that the classroom is an arena of heightened suggestibility. This is potentially a moral issue for teachers, but more to the present point is the extent to which it militates against the formulation of critical thinking and intellectual initiative in students, unless conscious and deliberate efforts are made to promote these qualities. The natural tendency of the system is always in the direction of Subject dominance and Learner subordination.

To reference this page copy and paste the text below:

Atherton J S (2011) Learning and Teaching; Authority and learning [On-line: UK] retrieved 30 July 2011 from http://www.learningandteaching.info/learning/authority.htm

Comments (including broken links etc.) welcome (even needed ) please: email me here

Original material by James Atherton: last up-dated overall 10 February 2010

Read more: Authority and learning http://www.learningandteaching.info/learning/authority.htm#ixzz1TYbe4aeH Under Creative Commons License: Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives

IMITATIONThere is a tendency to think of imitation as the "lowest" form of learning — "mere" imitation — and as having little place in the exalted reaches of adult and higher education. Nevertheless, Blackmore (1999) — whatever you think of the more specific claims of her thesis — has reclaimed it by demonstrating not only how effective a form of learning imitation is, but also the sophistication required in order to be able to imitate.

Compared with the behavioural model of learning, which is a form of time-conflated evolution — of several potential responses to a situation, one or two are reinforced, and so on — imitation gets straight to the point. The teacher demonstrates or models (whether or not she is aware of so doing), and the learner imitates. There are no "wrong" answers or dead ends: the quality of the learning is purely in the faithfulness of the reproduction of the action which has been demonstrated...

and of course the ability to select what it is appropriate to imitate (no, sticking out your tongue just so at the point of throwing the clay is not an essential feature of learning to be a potter)

and the ability to put oneself in the shoes of the demonstrator (there's a world of difference between watching the chef toss a pancake and feeling the weight of the pan yourself).

Imitation is more about "process" than "content"

The potency of imitation as a component of learning in social situations has been developed by the social learning theorists, associated particularly with the work of Albert Bandura, and it is undoubtedly a potent factor in developing the social infrastructure of the class group in educational settings. Students may model their conduct and attitudes on the teacher or on a leader within the student group — for better or for worse.

It also has implications for learning in the cognitive and psychomotor domains as well as the affective: and it goes on regardless of the intentions of the teacher. It can be argued that since it goes on willy-nilly, it is worthy of much more attention than it normally receives.

More on social learning   theory Information on Bandura's work with links and video Outline of Bandura's work

Neuroscientific perspective

One of the most interesting contributions of the "cognitive revolution", making use of new imaging techniques to examine brain functioning since the 1990s, has been the discovery in monkeys of "mirror neurons". These are neurons which fire both if the animal does something itself, and if it observes the action being done by another (which can mean either seeing or hearing, apparently). These neurons are claimed by researchers to constitute a neurological basis for imitation. At the time of writing in 2010, such neurons have not been discovered in humans. Whether this is due to inability to be as invasive in researching human brains as in animal experimentation, or whether the greater plasticity of the human brain makes such dedicated cells unnecessary or even undesirable is not clear.

There is an excellent, if dated (2000) and perhaps over confident, paper; Mirror Neurons and imitation learning as the driving force behind "the great leap forward" in human evolution by V.S. Ramachandran here (accessed 9 February 10) For once--given that this is cutting edge stuff--I would recommend Wikipedia as a source for the present state of research and debate.

Modelling

Modelling oneself on someone (a "role-model") is a more generalised and sophisticated variation on imitation, based on the tacit question, "What would so-and-so do in this situation?" It is an important issue in the socialisation of young people, for whom role-models might be parents, or prominent peers, or media figures, and has a venerable history (such as the original Mentor, and Thomas à Kempis' "Imitation of Christ", one of the great spiritual classics of all time).

Imitation and modelling choices belong to the students. I gather that the title "guru" is conferred by the disciple—not claimed by the master. So modelling is an undercurrent in all kinds of teaching: it leads to a variation on Kant's categorical imperative for the teacher—"always act as if you were prepared to be a model for your students". Gulp!

"Do as I say, not as I do" is not an option.

To reference this page copy and paste the text below:

Atherton J S (2011) Learning and Teaching; Imitation and social learning [On-line: UK] retrieved 30 July 2011 from http://www.learningandteaching.info/learning/imitation.htm

Comments (including broken links etc.) welcome (even needed ) please: email me here

Original material by James Atherton: last up-dated overall 10 February 2010

Read more: Imitation and social learning http://www.learningandteaching.info/learning/imitation.htm#ixzz1TYcAqf2e Under Creative Commons License: Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives

THE LEARNING & TEACHING SYSTEM"Teaching" as an activity does not exist: or at least it is meaningless to think about it in isolation. There is always an interaction between the Teacher, the Learner and the Subject being taught.

 This is not a wholly banal point, because;

The Subject is not neutral: it imposes its own discipline. Early mathematics is linear, for example, because you have to learn to count before you can do anything else. Some other subjects allow you to sequence the curriculum with more freedom.

The Learner has her or his own attributes, motivation and baggage, and these may or may not "fit" with the subject and/or the teacher. The Learner is usually also part of a wider class group of other learners, which may help or hinder (or indeed be irrelevant to) the learning process.

The Teacher, too has her or his own values, preferred approach to learning, history of learning the Subject, and level of skill.

All this takes place within a Context, which may define the reasons for the teaching-learning (compulsory schooling and the National Curriculum), the desired outcome (expressive, as in "learning for its own sake" or instrumental "I need the qualification for a better job"), and the power relationship between the Teacher and the Learner(s).

This model is explored in much more detail on the Doceo site

In different situations, the balance between the three main components may be represented through three points of a triangle of varying configuration.

 

One basic model represents the common situation where the Subject is at the top, indicating that it determines the structure of the Teacher and Learner relationship, but the Teacher comes next — the servant of the Subject, but the master/mistress of the Learner. Very broadly speaking, this may be consistent with cognitive approaches to learning.

 

In another variant, on the other hand, the Teacher is clearly in the dominant position, managing the relationship between the Subject and the Learner. Socially, either the interests of the Learner or the demands of the Subject or both may be subordinated to the requirements of the Teacher: this may be the kind of situation which obtains in schools where there is a substantial issue of control, and where the selection and interpretation of the Subject matter may be in the hands of the Teacher. The relatively greater importance of compliance rather than understanding may suggest a behaviourist approach. In contrast, however, it may also be

the model of apprenticeship, or of situated learning, where the “community of practice” is the Teacher

 

It can be contrasted with a further pattern, which is more analogous to supervision of a dissertation or thesis: the relationship between Learner and Subject is close, and the two are in a dominant position. The role of the Teacher is simply to provide a service to the Learner's work with the Subject. As you might expect, this is consistent with humanist approaches.

Clearly there are many other possible variations: it is instructive to try to map out one's own work in this way, perhaps starting by playing around with three different coins. Proximity and dominance present two basic dimensions to start with. One can look at the situation as it is, and then how you would like it to be, and try to work out what is involved in getting from one to the other!

 

To reference this page copy and paste the text below:

Atherton J S (2011) Learning and Teaching; Learning and teaching system [On-line: UK] retrieved 30 July 2011 from http://www.learningandteaching.info/learning/learntea.htm

Comments (including broken links etc.) welcome (even needed ) please: email me here

Original material by James Atherton: last up-dated overall 10 February 2010

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

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THE LEARNING CURVE

It is a cliché today to refer to a “steep learning curve” to indicate that something is difficult to learn. In practice, a curve of the amount learned against the number of trials (in experiments) or over time (in reality) is just the opposite: if something is difficult, the line rises slowly or shallowly. So the steep curve refers to the demands of the task rather than a description of the process.

A correspondent has pointed out that this usage is quite different from that in production management, where the learning curve refers to decreasing costs of unit production as a result of "learning" in the broadest sense, including initial set-up costs. Click here for a fuller account

As the figure of a fairly typical learning “curve” shows, it does not proceed smoothly: the plateaux and troughs are normal features of the process.  

Note that this is depicted as a generally rising line: the curve noted above is a falling one, as indeed were Thorndike's original curves

 

In the acquisition of skills, a major issue is the reliability of the performance. Any novice can get it right occasionally (beginner’s luck), but it is consistency which counts, and the progress of learning is often assessed on this basis. The following stages are an adaptation of Reynolds’ (1965) model. She also points out that learning skills is largely a matter of them

“soaking in”, so that performance becomes less self-conscious as learning progresses, and that the transition from one phase to another is marked by a release of energy, in the form of the freedom to concentrate on other things. (The horizontal line represents a notional threshold of  “competence”)

 

She also suggests that the final phase (which I have referred to as “Second Nature”) is characterised by an ability to teach the skill. At earlier stages, the learner is not confident enough to analyse their own practice thoroughly enough to be able to teach it: there is a feeling of mystique and fragility —if I examine it too closely I might not be able to perform as well again. (Reminiscent of the story of the young centipede, who was getting along fine until someone asked him which leg came next.)

There is an interesting distinction to be drawn between learning which follows this pattern, and that in which increasing sophistication and expertise is characterised by increasing reflection — in the one case the better you get the less you think about it (as in driving or typing), in the other the better you get the more you think about it (as in teaching, or perhaps selling). I suspect that it is not the skill itself which draws this distinction, but the degree of uncertainty in the immediate environment.

Linked to the Reynolds idea is the popular "progression of competence" model:

Unconscious incompetence Conscious incompetence Conscious competence Unconscious competence

— which of course assumes that the last is the most desirable state. (Although there are various candidates for a fifth state)

No-one seem to know definitively where this comes from. Thanks to Alan Chapman of this excellent linked site for indefatigable efforts to run it down!

See the linked argument about forms of practice

To reference this page copy and paste the text below:

Atherton J S (2011) Learning and Teaching; Learning curves [On-line: UK] retrieved 30 July 2011 from http://www.learningandteaching.info/learning/learning_curve.htm

Comments (including broken links etc.) welcome (even needed ) please: email me here

Original material by James Atherton: last up-dated overall 10 February 2010

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

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RECISTANCE FOR LEARNING

A fuller account of this topic is available here

Behaviourists seem to believe that people learn only when it's worth their while. Humanists seem to believe everyone wants to learn. But learning is a form of personal change, and that can be resisted as often as it is embraced.

Generally speaking, when people fail to learn something which they have been taught, the failure is attributed to one or more of three factors:

lack of motivation  lack of ability or aptitude   poor teaching.

Experience, however, suggests a fourth factor which is often neglected:

the cost of learning.

See also this note

The economic cost of undertaking higher education is a real factor for many students in much of the UK at the moment, but "cost" is here used psychologically. It implies the loss involved for the (superficially) competent and experienced adult in "changing their ways". This change may be termed "supplantive learning", to be contrasted with simple "additive learning" in that instead of just adding new knowlege or skills to an existing repertoire, supplantive learning calls into question previous ways of acting or prior knowledge and replaces them (Atherton, 1999).

Supplantive learning is difficult enough when it is entirely under the learner's control, but when it is required, demanded or forced, or creeps up out of awareness, or there is significant emotional investment in previous beliefs or ways of acting, it becomes problematic. 

 

Simple, unproblematic supplantive learning entails a drop in morale which comes from temporarily diminished competence in the skill or understanding. Problematic supplantive learning overlays this with an experience analogous to crisis.

The natural course of such learning follows three stages: Recent work on "Threshold Concepts" suggests that engaging with them can entail a similar process, which is described as an experience of "liminality". Click here to go a suite of pages about this.

De-stabilisation: in which the previous way of thinking or acting is upset  Disorientation: the "trough" in which loss of competence and morale combine to

make the learning difficult, and there is a considerable temptation to return to the "old way".  

Re-orientation: the gradual climb out of the trough, which follows a similar pattern to the curve of "normal" additive learning. 

It can be precipitated in three ways:

By external crisis, which forces the change   By "hitting bottom", in which there is no way but up, from the bottom of the trough

(as in the recovery programme of Alcoholics Anonymous)   By a "facilitating environment", which provides a safe opportunity to change, but

does not force it.

Clearly, only the third is acceptable in educational terms.  

Note: There is another quite different usage of the phrase "supplantive learning" particularly in US literature on the curriculum. There it is used to refer to teacher-centred or "reception", rather than "discovery" or learner-centred stategies, which are known as "generative" learning. (Sorry, no very informative links available) [Back]

 

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SITUATED LEARNING

This clumsy phrase is the central principle of a quite different kind of learning theory, situated learning, which is primarily social rather than psychological and originates from Lave and Wenger (1991).

Based on case-studies of how newcomers learn in various occupational groups which are not characterised by formal training, they suggest that legitimate peripheral participation is the key. The case-studies include traditional midwives in Yucatan, tailors in Liberia, butchers in supermarkets, and quartermasters in the US Marine Corps. (I am not quite clear what quartermasters do in that service, but it is clearly different from in UK services)

It is legitimate because all parties accept the position of “unqualified” people as potential members of the “community of practice”

Peripheral because they hang around on the edge of the important stuff, do the peripheral jobs, and gradually get entrusted with more important ones

Participation because it is through doing knowledge that they acquire it. Knowledge is situated within the practices of the community of practice, rather than something which exists “out there” in books.

It may be clumsy but it is worth almost as much as "Zone of Proximal Development" in the jargon stakes

More

 

The inadequacy of the diagram is that the whole situation is seen as fluid: there is no one boundary to the community of practice, and the position of “master” as I have labelled it following the apprenticeship model (which this resembles but which is only one instance of it) is not held by a particular figure. Note that communities of practice overlap, so that someone who is “central” in one may be peripheral in another. For present purposes, the diagram will serve.

The model has a number of implications:

Knowledge is defined as what is done, and as far as I can gather its rationale is subordinate to its embodiment (pardon the language).

It rejects the separation of training and learning from practice.

It therefore suggests that in terms of the hidden curriculum, and the distortion of knowledge which takes place in making it learnable within a curriculum (its categorisation into discrete elements and its grading from easy to difficult), training is inimical to learning:

There are links with the question   of how people become "experts" in their field

"The central grounds on which forms of education that differ from schooling are condemned [in conventional educational argument/ policy/ discourse] are that changing the person is not the central motive of the enterprise in which learning takes place [...]. The effectiveness of the circulation of information among peers suggests, to the contrary, that engaging in practice, rather than being its object, may well be the condition for the effectiveness of learning."

(Lave and Wenger, 1991:93) 

(Amplification in brackets inserted)

This point had already been made rather more vividly by Becker (1963).

Comment

It is no criticism of the model to point out that as initially set out by Lave and Wenger, it is confined to rather special groups, and does not deal with current preoccupations with accreditation and accountability of occupational groups: it does not set out to address these concerns. But..

It is not always clear how legitimate peripheral participation differs from occupational socialisation, and it is well-established that such socialisation does not necessarily embody best practice (viz. "canteen culture" in the police, and the problem of the "incompetent workplace" in NVQ programmes).

The epistemological model — owing much to Bourdieu (1977) — is of most interest. Knowledge is performance, rather than a commodity: but this in turn implies that such knowledge only has validity within a community of practice: it is situated knowledge or part of the "habitus", in Bourdieu’s terms. See also the critique by Tennant (1997)

Communities of Practice

Wenger (1998) has built on and elaborated the idea of the community of practice, depicting its elements co-existing rather like yin and yang:

based on Wenger 1998; 63

He unpicks the interplay between features of the community, including that between its participative aspect (the fluid and ephemeral interaction with other members) and its structural or "reified" aspect, where the products of interactions and negotiations take a fixed form in documented rules and procedures and products. The reified side of the community dictates how the participation operates; the participative interprets the reified, sometimes in supporting and sometimes subversive ways. In academe it is usually the latter.

This provides an illuminating perspective on the relationship between the institutional setting of learning, including its physical setting through to its curriculum and accreditation, and the practice of teaching and learning within the community.

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SOLO TAXONOMY

The SOLO taxonomy stands for:

Structure ofObservedLearningOutcomes

It was developed by Biggs and Collis (1982), and is well described in Biggs and Tang (2007)

It describes level of increasing complexity in a student's understanding of a subject, through five stages, and it is claimed to be applicable to any subject area. Not all students get through all five stages, of course, and indeed not all teaching (and even less "training" is designed to take them all the way).

There are fairly clear links not only with Säljö on conceptions of learning, but also, in the emphasis on making connections and contextualising, with Bateson's levels of learning, and even with Bloom's taxonomy in the cognitive domain. Like my pyramidal representation of Bloom, the assumption is that each level embraces previous levels, but adds something more:

1 Pre-structural: here students are simply acquiring bits of unconnected information, which have no organisation and make no sense.

  2 Unistructural: simple and obvious connections are made, but their significance is not grasped.

3 Multistructural: a number of connections may be made, but the meta-connections between them are missed, as is their significance for the whole.

4 Relational level: the student is now able to appreciate the significance of the parts in relation to the whole.

5 At the extended abstract level, the student is making connections not only within the given subject area, but also beyond it, able to generalise and transfer the principles and ideas underlying the specific instance.

I confess to a slight distrust of this kind of "progressive" model, which aspires inexorably to a final state. I am not convinced that every subject area fits the model, but nevertheless it is quite a good guide, and gives some idea of the place of the Gestalt insight (at the fourth, relational level). What it does not deal with is the student who establishes a relational construct which is nevertheless wrong, and those who pursue wild geese at the extended

abstract level because they are insufficiently informed at more modest levels. See Umberto Eco's "Foucault's Pendulum".

However, the emerging field of work on Threshold Concepts and Troublesome Knowledge links in very effectively with the SOLO taxonomy and offers some points about how the above issues might be addressed. Go here to follow up.

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OTHER LEARNING ANGLES

When I started accumulating the material for what eventually became this site, many years ago, I was naïve enough to believe the neat classifications of "learning theory" the textbooks promulgated.

It is worth asking why textbooks do this (divide everything up so neatly) when anything of any interest is so much messier.

Is it because they believe students find a hierarchical structure easier to "learn" (i.e. memorise) than a number of separate ideas?HIRST P and WOOLLEY P (1982) [Social Relations and Human Attributes London; Tavistock. p.37] argue that the hierarchical system developed in mediaeval times when scholars did not have access to original sources in books, and had to memorise material.  They may be right.

o But what does that say about how they see their readers? I am struck by the way in which authors of popular science books seem so much better at making them "flow" than are text-book authors covering much the same material.

Or is it because—being tied to the linear structure of the book [which is not actually linear in the hands of a skilled reader who can scan, skip, skim, and really read, of course]—they need that structure for themselves in order to put the book together? One of my reasons for writing for the web like this is that I am not tied to

such a linear, sequential pattern: hyperlinks enable you to jump about and follow the way you want to explore the topics.

And why do they have the need to interrupt a perfectly readable account of something with a "box-out"? Or even worse, a question for the reader to think about? (Texts on teaching are particularly given to this facile device.) The questions occur to me quite naturally, thank you very much. I don't need to be patronised.

I am of course aware of the irony that I am now doing exactly what I castigate!

Question for the reader: what does this say about me? Responses other than; "Hasn't got enough common sense to tie his own shoe-laces." and "Totally devoid of interpersonal skills" (both fed back to me indirectly today—and both fair comment!) welcome! Address below.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch—there are many ideas on learning which do not fit neatly into the usual neat categories of:

o Behaviourism  o Cognitive theories of learning  o Humanistic approaches to learning  

— which is as it should be. Learning is a multi-faceted phenomenon which cannot be packaged quite so simply. All theories are abstractions from the infinite complexity and confusion of reality: groupings or packages of theories are meta-abstractions, and to let them dominate distorts things too much.

So the topics in this section (links listed on the left)—tend to be on the blurred boundaries of learning theories, but nonetheless relevant to the practice of teaching and learning.

 

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This is a seriously big issue in large organisations in particular: I have to draw the line somewhere on this site, but see Sternberg and Horvath (1999) and (on-line) Imel, 2003 There are of course also links to "not knowing what you know"

TACIT KNOWLEDGE AND IMPLICITE LEARNING

More on Polanyi and the concept

Tacit (silent) knowledge (Polanyi, 1958) and implicit learning (see Berry [ed.] 1997) have in common the idea of not knowing what you do know or have learned. "Tacit knowledge" has been all but hi-jacked by management gurus (following the economist Friedrich Hayek), who use it to refer to the stock of expertise within an organisation which is not written down or even formally expressed, but may nevertheless be essential to its effective operation.

Originally, Polanyi's interest was in the kind of knowledge which we routinely use and take for granted, such as the ability to recognise the face of a friend: it is irreducible to explicit propositional knowledge and cannot be articulated. It cannot therefore be taught, although of course there is obvious evidence that it can be learned or acquired. It may therefore (and here I wander away from the formal theory) be associated with Gestalt understanding, and procedurally — in the form of "know-how" — with a "knack" for doing something.

All that one can do to "teach" such knowledge is to provide opportunities for people to learn it, perhaps through exposure to examples: there is nevertheless a qualitative leap between individual examples of either propositional knowledge or practical skill, and the ability to integrate them into something which is "more than the sum of its parts". The distinction is similar to that between Bateson's Learning I and Learning II. Ideas of situational learning similarly suggest that it is most effectively "picked up" in real world situations, and that attempts to reduce it to standard teachable forms are in danger of distorting or destroying it (Becker, 1963).

Implicit Learning

If tacit knowledge is about the content of what is learned, implicit learning is about the process, and it remains a contentious debate in psychology. A typical experiment in the field is to expose subjects to strings of letters which are governed by orderly rules (or a "grammar"), such as DEFKLM and JKLPQR, and others which are not: the subjects are not expected to try to articulate the rules. The subjects are later shown further sets of letters and asked to say which are "grammatical" and which not: they tend to be able to distinguish between them without knowing quite how they do it (Reber, 1967). This is taken as evidence that they have "unconsciously" learned a rule: not only can they not specify the rule, but they do not even know that they have learned a rule.

This is perhaps not surprising: it applies after all to all the forms of non-human learning which have ever been studied. But is it just a matter of picking up individual "tricks" or may more complex and coherent learning be taking place unconsciously? My impression in reading the literature is that

much of the research is limited by its methodology: the tendency of subjects to try to find ways to explain or rationalise the discovery that they have learned something, when they don't know how it happened, is likely for ever to undermine attempts to find interesting real-world examples.

However, in learning in the professions in particular, the process of acquiring the "know-how" of the mature practitioner is still little understood, and its relationship with formal training remains problematic. Berry (1997) reports that in one of her experiments:

It was found that in both cases, practice significantly improved ability to control the tasks, but had no effect on ability to answer post-task, written questions. In contrast, verbal instructions about the best way to control the tasks had no significant effect on control performance, although they did make people significantly better at answering the questions. [...] these basic findings have been replicated and extended in a number of follow-on studies [...] (Berry 1997:2)

It is still not clear where this area of research is leading, but it may well be particularly important for educational practice in the future. The quotation certainly poses some interesting questions about skill development (in teaching, for example), and the relevance or otherwise of the ability to talk (or write—for assessment purposes) about it!

See also the "progression of competence" and "situated learning" models; implicit learning also has some relevance to Bateson's original observations about how the skill of learning itself can change, which led to the identification of his levels of learning.

Reference (this page only)

STERNBERG R J and HORVATH, J A. (eds) (1999) Tacit Knowledge in Professional Practice: Researcher and Practitioner Perspectives. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. [Back]

 

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CULTURAL CONSIDERATION

What counts as "learning" for educational purposes depends on cultural, social, economic and political factors, because implicit in education as a deliberate enterprise is the notion of prescription. Education is supposed to be a "Good Thing". So having a phobia about worms may be learned behaviour, but it does not count as Education. Nor does acquiring greater skill in breaking into cars as a result of learning from peers in prison.

 

The process starts with what the society considers to be desirable knowledge, and indeed what counts as knowledge at all: consider the ambivalence about astrology, or complementary and alternative medicine. The social structure is also reflected in the attitude to the knowledge — is it unquestioned truth, to be learned and reproduced but not modified, or is it provisional knowledge on which critical faculties can be trained? (As one sociologist said, "Newton stood on the shoulders of those who went before: sociologists stand on their heads!") This leads into culturally endorsed models of the learning process, and variable acceptance of the initiative of the learner — as seen in constructivism or andragogy.

The subject matter, framed by culture, imposes its own discipline: it may be linear (like maths, in which you have to learn the concept of number, counting, addition, substraction, multiplication and division, in that order, before you can go on to anything else) or accessible at any point. It may be governed by a clear philosophical structure (like science), or by its history (like law), or none of these. It may be convergent or divergent. See inter al. Kolb on this.

The society produces an educational system in its image, whether it makes use of informal — “situated” learning — or is seduced (as Illich would see it) by the Western model of dedicated educational institutions, whose inadequacies have been so clearly discussed in Becker’s wonderful essay.

Slightly off topic, but click here for some of the most concentrated wisdom on teaching on the net, from Howard Becker to a former student

Then that educational system imposes its own constraints on what can be taught and learned and what counts as learning, through its assessment and accreditation procedures. This in turn is filtered and interpreted by the teacher. The micro-culture of the learner's group or class may encourage, inhibit or distort various kinds of learning. Then there is the learner as a person, making continuous "cost-benefit decisions" (Claxton, 1996) about what it is worth learning, and endowed with certain aptitudes and preferences: until finally we reach the "learning bit" of that person.

Critical Approaches to Education

For a selection of different critical stances to the construction of knowledge and educational assumptions, start (!) with some "golden oldies";

PLATO "The Republic" for starters...

DEWEY J (1938) Experience and Education New York: Macmillan

FREIRE P (1972) The Pedagogy of the Oppressed Harmondsworth: Penguin

ILLICH I (1970) De-Schooling Society Harmondsworth: Penguin

There is a good overview of issues in the field in this paper: Brookfield on Adult Learning (even this is getting a little old, from 1995)

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THEORY OF LEARNINGThere are three sets of learning theory generally used in educational circles, under the headings of:

Behaviourist A particular embodiment of a positivist "scientific" approach to learning

Humanistic Arising from a value-base of empowering and even liberating the learner

with Constructivism somewhere in-between this and

Cognitive which includes everything else apart from

sheer imitation, which does not seem to be dignified with a theoretical home and

situated learning theory , which is primarily social, but raises important questions about how we expect people to learn.

Cognitive theories are very varied and this site does not pretend to cover all of them.

All of them make important points, and this site is not partisan: the issue is the "range of convenience" of each of the models. In other words what are they good for, or at?

Note that because education and training are professional rather than academic disciplines (i.e. “contaminated” by assumptions about what ought to be the case as well as what is so) they are selective in the way in which theories of learning have been approached, adopted, distorted and developed.

...and education is prone to fads and fashions.

Currently there are two major fads about learning (rather than about how to teach, which has a rather faster turnover) and this is probably the best place to draw your attention to them;

"learning styles"; discussed here and, rather less temperately, here simplistic application of findings from neuroscience.

The latter is the biggest change since I started writing the initial versions of the site almost ten years ago. The introduction of functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) scanners had made possible the identification of which parts of the brain are working hardest when a

person undertakes various tasks, such as speaking, solving a problem, recalling a memory, and so on. All these tasks are part of real-world learning, and therefore to discover for example that solving a puzzle involving spatial awareness calls upon a different part of the brain from that used in a puzzle concerning logical inference, may suggest that different subjects and disciplines are learnt in different ways, and perhaps should be taught differently.

So we have advocates for left-brain/right-brain differentiation, in particular, and for "accelerated learning" or "brain-based learning" programmes. They make grandiose claims which cannot be justified. Unfortunately there is little critical evaluation, especially on the web.

This YouTube clip explains why, very well.

This is not to say, however, that some of the "tricks" do not work in helping people to learn. They may well do, but for much less abstruse reasons. Mind-mapping, for example, is a good idea, but people making claims for it might profitably use Occam's Razor, and look for simple reasons rather than highly technical ones. "Brain-Gym" (no link! If you really want to find it, do it yourself) recommends inter al. that children take frequent short breaks in learning and do something physical. Makes good sense, but it probably doesn't matter much what they do, more that they do it. Ditto for having drinks. (See Goldacre, 2008, ch. 2)

So for the kind of biological insight which is worth having, turn (although now rather dated) to Claxton, 1998. He covers similar ground to Malcolm Gladwell's "Blink" (2006), but does it rather better.

And to apply it to practice see Zull (2002).

Clearly, ideas from genetics are now also assuming great prominence. This too is a minefield, because of the same kind of over-simplification of nature vs. nurture, or having a "gene for" this and that. See Ridley (2004) for one of the best guides.

For an excellent overview of the theories see Mark Smith's work at infed.org

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Humanistic "theories" of learning tend to be highly value-driven and hence more like prescriptions (about what ought to happen) rather than descriptions (of what does happen).

They emphasise the "natural desire" of everyone to learn. Whether this natural desire is to learn whatever it is you are teaching, however, is not clear.

It follows from this, they maintain, that learners need to be empowered and to have control over the learning process.

So the teacher relinquishes a great deal of authority and becomes a facilitator.

The school is particularly associated with

Carl Rogers, and Abraham Maslow (psychologists), John Holt (child education) and Malcolm Knowles (adult education and proponent of andragogy). Insofar as he emphasises experiential learning, one could also include Kolb among the

humanists as well as the cognitive theorists.

While the tenor of humanistic theory is generally wishy-washy liberal, its approach also underlies the more committed stance of “transformative learning” (Mezirow) and “conscientization” (Freire).

My heart is with humanistic theory, but I sometimes find it hard to make connections with the reality of routine practice. Its most fertile ground is with intrinsically motivated adult learners. It is not as potent now as it was in the '70s, when it often seemed to be used as an excuse for the abrogation of the realistic authority of the teacher—or perhaps we have just become more mature in our use of it. As the politicised variants show, it poses considerable challenges not only to approaches to teaching, but also to the construction of the curriculum as a whole. As society has become more fragmented and "post-modern", these challenges have become even more problematic.

Figures in Humanistic models of Learning

Carl Rogers

(1902-1987) Principally known as the founder of person-centred psychotherapy and almost the inventor of counselling, also a leading figure in the development of humanistic approaches to education. See Rogers (1980)

In the field of adult learning, do not confuse with Alan Rogers, or Jennifer Rogers!  [Back]

The excellent Theory into Practice site on Rogers And the equally excellent Informal Education site

John Holt

(1923-1985) Radical thinker and maths teacher,best known for How Children Fail. [Back]

A site about Holt, emphasising his promotion of home-schooling

Paulo Freire

(1921-1997) Brazilian educationalist: pioneer of adult literacy programmes as a means of raising the consciousness (conscientization) of South American peasants and urban underclass. Critic of the "banking" model of education, in which the elite own and construct the knowledge, and the poor are excluded. Very influential in politicised adult education. Not easy to read. See Freire (1972)  [Back]

The Freire Institute page on Freire 

 

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The cognitive school is probably best defined by exclusion: if it ain't biological, behaviourist or humanist, it's cognitive (I'm including information-processing models here).

It all starts with Gestalt theories [Wertheimer, Köhler and Koffka, and with only the vaguest connection with Gestalt therapy (Perls)]: originally theories of perception, interested in the way the brain imposes pattern on the perceived world, Gestalt moved into problem-solving learning. 

It is also much influenced by the developmental psychology of Piaget (but also read Donaldson (1984) if reading Piaget), focusing on the maturational factors affecting understanding. The accommodation/assimilation dialectic is the part most useful for understanding grown learners. 

Broadly, cognitive theory is interested in how people understand material, and thus in; 

aptitude and capacity to learn (thus fringing onto psychometrics and testing),  and learning styles (the reference is to one of the few apparently valid styles: see here

for a corrective view! and here for a slightly more balanced one). 

It is also the basis of the educational approach known as constructivism, which emphasises the role of the learner in constructing his own view or model of the material, and what helps with that.

 

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Behavioural (or "behavioral") theory in psychology is a very substantial field: follow the links to the left or right for introductions to some of its more detailed contributions impinging on how people learn in the real world. How I have the effrontery to produce a single page on it amazes even me, whatever my reservations about it!

Behaviourism is primarily associated with Pavlov (classical conditioning) in Russia and with Thorndike, Watson and particularly Skinner in the United States (operant conditioning). 

Behaviourism is dominated by the constraints of its (naïve) attempts to emulate the physical sciences, which entails a refusal to speculate about what happens inside the organism. Anything which relaxes this requirement slips into the cognitive realm. 

Much behaviourist experimentation is undertaken with animals and generalised. 

In educational settings, behaviourism implies the dominance of the teacher, as in behaviour modification programmes. It can, however, be applied to an understanding of unintended learning.

For our purposes, behaviourism is relevant mainly to: 

 Skill development, and

The "substrate" (or "conditions", as Gagné puts it) of learning

Classical conditioning:

is the process of reflex learning—investigated by Pavlov—through which an unconditioned stimulus (e.g. food) which produces an unconditioned response (salivation) is presented together with a conditioned stimulus (a bell), such that the salivation is eventually produced on the presentation of the conditioned stimulus alone, thus becoming a conditioned response. 

 

This is a disciplined account of our common-sense experience of learning by association (or "contiguity", in the jargon), although that is often much more complex than a reflex process, and is much exploited in advertising. Note that it does not depend on us doing anything.

Such associations can be chained and generalised (for better of for worse): thus "smell of baking" associates with "kitchen at home in childhood" associates with "love and care". (Smell creates potent conditioning because of the way it is perceived by the brain.) But "sitting at a desk" associates with "classroom at school" and hence perhaps with "humiliation and failure"... 

This site goes further into Watson's ideas, beyond Pavlov, and the "Little Albert" experiment.

Operant Conditioning

If, when an organism emits a behaviour (does something), the consequences of that behaviour are reinforcing, it is more likely to emit (do) it again. What counts as reinforcement, of

course, is based on the evidence of the repeated behaviour, which makes the whole argument rather circular.

Learning is really about the increased probability of a behaviour based on reinforcement which has taken place in the past, so that the antecedents of the new behaviour include the consequences of previous behaviour.

Summary of Skinner's ideas On operant conditioning Skinner's own account Wikipedia on operant conditioning And here with diagrams of experimental set-ups and video

The schedule of reinforcement of behaviour is central to the management of effective learning on this basis, and working it out is a very skilled procedure: simply reinforcing every instance of desired behaviour is just bribery, not the promotion of learning. 

Withdrawal of reinforcement eventually leads to the extinction of the behaviour, except in some special cases such as anticipatory-avoidance learning.

Notes

Two points are often misunderstood in relation to behaviourism and human learning:

The scale: Although later modifications of behaviourism are known as S-O-R theories (Stimulus-Organism-Response), recognising that the organism's (in this case, person's) abilities and motivations need to be taken into account, undiluted behaviourism is concerned with conditioning and mainly with reflex behaviour. This operates on a very short time-scale — from second to second, or at most minute to minute — on very specific micro-behaviour. To say that a course is behaviourally-based because there is the reward of a qualification at the end is stretching the idea too far.   

Its descriptive intention: Perhaps because behaviourists describe experiments in which they structure learning for their subjects, attention tends to fall on ideas such as behaviour modification and the technology of behaviourism. However, behaviourism itself is more about a description of how [some forms of] learning  occur in the wild,

as it were, than about how to make it happen, and it is when it is approached from this perspective that it gets most interesting. It accounts elegantly, for example, for ways in which attempts to discipline unruly students actually make the situation worse rather than better.

(This point is heretical!) For human beings, reinforcement has two components, because the information may be cognitively processed: in many cases the "reward" element is less significant than the "feedback" information carried by the reinforcement.

Applied to the theory of teaching, behaviourism's main manifestation is "instructional technology" and its associated approaches: click below for useful guides.

For practical illustration of reinforcement as feedback, look here. Instructional Design & Learning Theory (Mergel 1998) Gagné's model as an example of instructional technology

As a body of theory, behaviourism has really suffered from the "cognitive revolution" of recent years. However, it has the distinction of being the first truly psychological account of learning, and some of its byways still provide good accounts of otherwise inexplicable behaviour. For some reason, some of the textbooks refer to Skinner as a "neo-behaviourist". He would have been grossly insulted: he was the real thing! 

Up-dated 26 Feb 2011

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Comments (including broken links etc.) welcome (even needed ) please: email me here

Original material by James Atherton: last up-dated overall 10 February 2010

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Malcolm Knowles' "Andragogy" (supposedly the adult equivalent of "pedagogy") is a leading "brand" in adult education theory:

Andragogy assumes that the point at which an individual achieves a self-concept of essential self-direction is the point at which he psychologically becomes adult. A very critical thing happens when this occurs: the individual develops a deep psychological need to be perceived by others as being self-directing. Thus, when he finds himself in a situation in which he is not allowed to be self-directing, he experiences a tension between that situation and his self-concept. His reaction is bound to be tainted with resentment and resistance.

It is my own observation that those students who have entered a professional school or a job have made a big step toward seeing themselves as essentially self-directing. They have largely resolved their identity-formation issues; they are identified with an adult role. Any experience that they perceive as putting them in the position of being treated as children is bound to interface (sic) with their learning.

 (Knowles, 1978:56)

 Knowles' assumptions

The need to know — adult learners need to know why they need to learn something before undertaking to learn it.

Learner self-concept —adults need to be responsible for their own decisions and to be treated as capable of self-direction

Role of learners' experience —adult learners have a variety of experiences of life which represent the richest resource for learning. These experiences are however imbued with bias and presupposition.

Readiness to learn —adults are ready to learn those things they need to know in order to cope effectively with life situations.

Orientation to learning —adults are motivated to learn to the extent that they perceive that it will help them perform tasks they confront in their life situations.

based on Knowles 1990:57

Knowles' formulation of the principles of andragogy may be taken as much as an integration or summation of other learning theorists as in its own right, and therefore represents the assumptions and values underlying much modern adult educational theory. The term was actually introduced in 1833 by a German called Kapp.

Knowles (1990) draws an explicit parallel between McGregor's (1960) "Theory X" and "Theory Y" models of management thinking and pedagogic and andragogic approaches to education, and it is clear that his sympathies lie with Theory Y. He shares his assumptions with many other current educational thinkers, but in many cases they are disguised. Consensus about implicit values or ideology, however, does not constitute an excuse for not subjecting them to scrutiny: Tennant (1997), has argued that they are meaningless, culture-bound, tautologous, or unsupported by the psychological and empirical evidence.  

More about Knowles

The sheer fact that Knowles has to make his point is some evidence that it is not yet COWDUNG (Waddington’s wonderful acronym for the “COnventional Wisdom of the Dominant Group”). It could be argued that he addresses part of the problem posed by subjecting people to educational institutions; is situated learning, in less formal settings, andragogy?

Throughout Knowles' discussion is an implicit two-valued opposition of a straw man of pedagogy (which appears to be derived primarily from the educational theories of Thomas Gradgrind) and the panacea of andragogy, although he explicitly denies this.

It is axiomatic for Knowles that the role of the teacher is to provide opportunities for individuals to learn, and that the teacher cannot accept responsibility for their failure or refusal to do so: the task of learning itself is therefore owned by the learner, and with this there can be little argument (apart perhaps from the contention of Michel Thomas, the remarkable language teacher, that the responsibility is entirely with the teacher). But there is no discussion, to take just two examples, of the phenomenon of testing-out of the course leader, or of the possibility of inconsistency between the findings of different levels of evaluation ("I enjoyed the course and I learned a lot, but no, it has not made any difference to my practice").

For a comprehensive critique see Davenport (1987) and Tennant (1997). Andragogy has also been criticised from more of a training orientation by Blake and Mouton (1984), who maintain that its emphasis on learning from peers makes it an inefficient instrument for the transmission of knowledge, although they value the way in which it avoids (or evades) the problems of resentment of authority and counter-dependence which they see as implicit in the normal "pedagogic" structure.

I am of course being seriously unfair: I just resent the smugly self-righteous way in which Knowles seems to have cornered the market in respecting and empowering adults in education. Education is as much prone to "branding" as any other product, and this is one of the more blatant brands: like most brands, however, its "unique selling proposition" is, if not spurious, at best marginal.

Bottom line: don't patronise your students!

An even-handed discussion of andragogy

A non-Knowlesian account of andragogy

And a paper by Knowles himself which I think undermines his whole point—but make up your own mind!

Aside from the specific links above, there are two definitive sites for adult learning which you should bookmark and explore:

www.infed.org: a superb resource with discursive, even-handed but critical discussions of the major thinkers in the field, and

Roger Hiemstra's site : with a wealth of ideas and reflection informed by practice, and links to other sites (including, I'm pleased to say, this one).

An associated theme

Knowles maintains that his usage of andragogy refers to the teaching of adults. Strictly, however, it addresses the teaching of men ("andros" is Greek for "man"). That then poses the question whether there is such a thing as "gynaegogy", or the teaching of women. I hesitate to dip my male toe in such waters, but it is a legitimate question.

(Apart from passing references on my pages, the word only appears once elsewhere on the web, as of today, 4 May 2009)

The major text in this area is Belenky et al (1986) Women's Ways of Knowing which has been both influential and controversial. The study is based on 135 case-study interviews of women, from which the authors derive five "ways of knowing". I do not pretend to have studied or fully to understand this, or indeed its relationship with teaching and learning, but it is worth introducing you to it.

Feminist thinking has also had a strong input into ideas of "transformative learning"

To reference this page copy and paste the text below:

Atherton J S (2011) Learning and Teaching; Knowles' andragogy: an angle on adult learning [On-line: UK] retrieved 30 July 2011 from http://www.learningandteaching.info/learning/knowlesa.htm

Comments (including broken links etc.) welcome (even needed ) please: email me here

Original material by James Atherton: last up-dated overall 10 February 2010

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

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The importance of reflecting on what you are doing, as part of the learning process, has been emphasised by many investigators. Reflective Observation is the second stage (in the usual representation) of the Kolb learning cycle.

Donald Schön (1983) suggested that the capacity to reflect on action so as to engage in a process of continuous learning was one of the defining characteristics of professional practice. He argued that the model of professional training which he termed "Technical Rationality"—of charging students up with knowledge in training schools so that they could discharge when they entered the world of practice, perhaps more aptly termed a "battery" model—has never been a particularly good description of how professionals "think in action", and is quite inappropriate to practice in a fast-changing world.

The cultivation of the capacity to reflect in action (while doing something) and on action (after you have done it) has become an important feature of professional training programmes in many disciplines, and its encouragement is seen as a particularly important aspect of the role of the mentor of the beginning professional. Indeed, it can be argued that “real” reflective practice needs another person as mentor or professional supervisor, who can ask appropriate questions to ensure that the reflection goes somewhere, and does not get bogged down in self-justification, self-indulgence or self-pity!

The quality and depth of the reflection, however, is not specified within this formulation: and it is interesting that two different traditions of professional development emphasise seemingly contradictory aspects. Reynolds (1965), and particularly Dreyfus and Dreyfus (1986) discuss how developing practitioners come gradually to take for granted aspects of their practice which initially preoccupied them, and move on to be concerned about (reflect upon) wider matters. This taking-for-granted on the one hand, and reflection on the other, offers a view of how reflection-on-action deepens in the course of a career.

See the Learning Curve and Expertise

Argyris and Schön (1978) differentiate between "single-loop" and "double-loop" learning, drawing on a distinction made by Ashby (1960) in a seminal work on cybernetics. For our purposes, single-loop learning is a simple version of the Lewin/Kolb cycle, in which performance is evaluated through reflection and then corrected or improved. In double-loop learning, the whole activity is part of a larger cycle, in which the reflection takes place on the fact of engaging in the activity and the assumptions implicit in it. This is the kind of reflection explored in Boud, Keogh and Walker (1985), and relates to Bateson's learning II and even learning III.

For critical discussion of the idea see Tennant (1997) and for a full exposition see Moon (1999). The latter has an interesting discussion in her chapter 5 of the prominence of

reflection in the discourse of professionalism in teaching and nursing in particular. She suggests that it is more about reinforcing professional identity than about improving practice, and comments;

"In education, the main interest in reflective practice has come from teacher education more than those engaged in teaching, or who are concerned about learning..." and

"A generalization that seems to apply to teaching, nursing and social work is the fact that there is relatively little concern for the effect of reflective practice on the subject of the professional's action ... Since the improvement in learning [etc.] is deemed central to the purposes of these professions, this seems to be a surprising omission. ... Copeland, Birmingham and Lewin (1993) ask a critical question: 'Do students of highly reflective teachers learn more or better or even differently?'"

(Moon, 1999:57)

Ouch!

More on Schön and Reflective Practice Links and Bibliography on reflective practice with an education emphasis An ERIC digest on reflective practice

Critical Reflection

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