5 How Do I Learn?
Frank had been a strong learner in high school. Indeed, Frank was his class valedictorian. Yet when he entered the honors program in college, Frank met his match with the challenging academic subjects and the pace at which the program expected him to learn. At first, Frank used his old tried-and-true techniques for learning. But he soon found that his old techniques took more time than the courses allowed. As a result, Frank struggled throughout his first term. Gradually, though, he learned new techniques from superior classmates and a learning-resource center he sought out after doing poorly on his mid-term exams. Fortunately, Frank did better on his final exams. And his studies took off the following term, as he grew accustomed to his new techniques and relied on them more heavily.
Models
Before considering techniques for learning, consider models for learning. If you have some sense of the various learning theories or models, you’ll better understand the source and workings of the techniques. Indeed, a model for learning attempts to explain why certain techniques seem to work. Keep in mind that learning isn’t visible. Learning goes on within us, and not just within the mind but through the senses and throughout the body, particularly when we apply knowledge through the exercise of refined skill. One could even say that learning goes on within the heart, spirit, and soul, considering how heavily character, personality, values, and ethics influence and exhibit learning. You need not land on any one model for your learning. You may do better by incorporating techniques from several models, insofar as each model emphasizes a different aspect or expression of learning.
Taxonomic
The prior chapter on what you learn already introduced a common taxonomic model or theory for learning. Taxonomies classify or categorize things. A taxonomic model of learning identifies different stages or aspects of learning. The classic taxonomy of learning, developed by educational psychologists, sees learners beginning with memorizing knowledge, moving up to comprehensive understanding, then applying knowledge to situations, analyzing the results, evaluating analyzed results against prior knowledge, and ending with a creative synthesis of new knowledge. You could, for instance, imagine yourself grappling in a new course first with terminology, and then deeper comprehension, and soon moving forward through repeated applications and analyses, and finally to evaluation and holistic synthesis. But in point of fact, when you are learning, you are probably engaged in all taxonomic levels at once, simultaneously memorizing, applying, testing against prior knowledge, and synthesizing. Use the taxonomic model to help you identify at what level you need to focus your studies, even as you work through all levels.
Perceptual
Perhaps it’s too obvious to say that you learn through your senses. Yet you may find yourself able to improve your learning by considering techniques and insights that a perceptual model for learning generates. A perceptual learning model focuses on the auditory, visual, tactile, and kinesthetic aspects of learning. To learn, you must generally hear, see, touch, and move. The quality of your auditory, visual, tactile, and kinesthetic stimuli, and their combination or coordination, or restriction and dissonance, can all affect your learning. It’s one thing to listen to a well-organized, well-presented lecture. It’s another thing to listen to a good lecture while simultaneously watching a well-designed and well-timed slide show. It’s yet another thing to take notes and respond in writing to prompts while listening to the lecture and watching the slide show. And it’s still another thing to then get up, move around, and go to work putting the new knowledge into bodily practice in some appropriate form. Ensure that your learning experiences are providing high-quality, well-coordinated and well-timed stimuli on all channels. If not, substitute and vary your own well-chosen stimuli to improve your learning.
Psychological
Pioneering experiments by educational psychologists throughout the middle part of the last century led to the articulation of nine necessary steps for instruction to positively affect the mind and behavior. The first steps are to gain the learner’s attention while directing the attention to the learning goal. Instruction should then trigger the prior learning to which the new learning will attach and that the new learning will extend. Instruction should then present the stimuli expected to shape the learner’s behavior, in whatever form or forms the instructor chooses. The instructor should then attend to and guide the learner toward eliciting the desired performance. The instructor should also provide prompt corrective and affirming feedback, from assessing the performance. The final steps in learning are to enhance retention by repeating the performance at intervals, while replicating performance across environments for suitable transfer of learning. While these steps may sound technical, they may help you see where you might have gaps in your instruction so that you and your instructor can fill those gaps to ensure effective learning.
Behavioral
Psychological models for learning, focusing on how the mind affects behavior, undergird behavioral learning models. Behavioral models for learning focus on the stimuli affecting the mind and the behaviors that correspond with or follow the stimuli. We learn by associating a stimulus with a response. You hear one word and think and speak a related word or take a related action. The large language models behind artificial intelligence work by such associations. Instruction, then, should focus on strengthening appropriate associations. Can’t remember your terminology? Well then, try some well-designed flashcards presenting brief trigger words followed by the full memory prompt on the card’s other side if you can’t recall it. Slowly remove the prompt so that the trigger alone elicits the recall. We also learn through reward and punishment, especially intermittent reward. So, present the stimulus and, if the student gives the correct response, give some brief positive acknowledgment, not every time but every few times. If you need to speed your learning of mounds of intricate details so that your responses become automatic, try behavioral techniques. Properly administered, they can be immensely powerful.
Cognitivist
Cognitive models of learning help us imagine how the mind’s processes might be receiving, storing, organizing, and retrieving knowledge. Of course, the mind is doing so using incredibly complex and rapid electrical patterns and chemical processes, across an uncountable number of neural cells formed into impenetrable networks. Cognitive models vastly simplify those physiological and weirdly mental processes into computer-like analogies, when the mind isn’t a computer. Yet a cognitive learning model can help you modify your learning to improve it. Information overload, for instance, may help you reduce the stimuli to manageable amounts. Recognizing the proper framework within which you need to store the new learning, and its proper storage order, may aid your learning’s organization and retrieval. Rehearsing your storage and retrieval of information strengthens retrieval routes. Appreciate the cognitive model of learning for helping you understand the structures and systems that your mind may need to acquire for you to learn.
Humanist
Humanist models of learning can also help you refine and improve your learning. We are essentially human, which means to have a broad range of personal needs and interests. The more that a learning experience can meet those needs and pique those interests, the better you may perform. We need safety, for instance, so you should seek a safe and secure learning environment. We tend to engage most when choosing and directing our own course out of intrinsic and internal motivation, more so than through an instructor’s manipulation of externalities. Humanist approaches help students identify their preferred learning goals, offer choices for achieving those goals, and foster self-directed learning, self-reflection, and self-evaluation. Ensure that your learning has at least a touch of your own humanity within it, and perhaps a healthy dose, and your learning will likely be more productive than without its human element.
Socratic
Educators and students generally share an interest in developing a deeper capacity to think critically and originally than systems learning may tend to produce. We don’t want to make computers out of ourselves. We have plenty of such machines to serve us. We want instead to be able to investigate the world, challenge premises, and engage in conversation and dialogue with others to produce new insight. A Socratic theory or practice of learning pursues that deeper thought. Socratic instruction features questions from the instructor and answers from the students, followed by more instructor questions challenging the premises that student answers hold. Students gradually learn to hold answers as preliminary and tentative, subject to challenge and change in a dialectic or back-and-forth process aimed at approaching truth, if not ever entirely realizing truth. While Socratic instruction can frustrate students who need answers, it can also sharpen the mind.
Techniques
You’ve now read a few brief summaries of some of the major learning theories, of which many more exist. Theories, though, aren’t likely what you’re seeking to improve your learning. You’re instead more likely interested in techniques. Much of the rest of this guide addresses techniques around various common study activities, for example for memorizing, reading, note-taking, reasoning, writing, problem solving, taking tests, and reciting. You’ll find plenty of techniques for learning. Just understand that learning isn’t so much a matter of tricks and techniques. If you end up focusing on the techniques over the larger goals of learning reflected in the above learning theories, you’ll miss out on important things. Indeed, you won’t achieve your learning goals simply with tips, tricks, and techniques. Use a variety of techniques, and swap techniques in and out, as you study. But keep your eyes on the larger goals of learning.
Engagement
Before we move on to those studying activities and associated techniques, though, consider the following several guides that may encourage you in selecting the right approaches. If all the research, theorizing, and investigation about learning amounts to anything, that conclusion may be that the more active and engaged you are in your learning, the better you are likely to learn. Passivity in your learning generally won’t work. You must instead engage your full faculties to learn. We are not sponges. You cannot simply drop us into an environment and have us soak up what it presumes to teach us. We must instead interact with our environment in order to adapt and learn. Thus, if you find yourself silently reading assigned material so passively that it passes before your eyes barely triggering an acknowledgment, you’re likely not learning. Likewise, if you find an hour-long, stultifying lecture lulling you to sleep, you’re likely not learning. If your course isn’t offering you engaging stimuli and resources, then go seek them out. Active learning tends to work, while passive learning tends not to work.
Spacing
Another general guide to your learning has to do with the frequency and spacing of your studies. Whatever knowledge you’re learning, procedure you’re practicing, or skill you’re refining, don’t just do it all at once. Don’t lump or clump it all together, get it out of the way, and assume you’ve done enough. Instead, spread out your studies over time, returning repeatedly to them to rehearse them over again. Important things happen in your learning when you study a unit or topic, pause for an hour, half day, overnight, couple of days, or week, and then repeat the study of the same unit or topic once again, and then later again, and if possible yet again. Once is not enough. Twice with time in between helps. Several times spread across a few days or a couple of weeks helps greatly. Several more times spread out over a few weeks or months makes for confirmed learning. Spread. It. Out.
Interleaving
An associated general guide to your learning has to do with studying different topics, units, or subjects in between your repeated, spaced study of one unit or topic. Educators call the practice interleaving your studies. Interleaving is a bit like building a sandwich with a layer of bread, meat, cheese, and lettuce, and then repeating the same layers once again. Just as with spaced studies, interleaving studies does something important to aid your learning. Your temptation may be to do the opposite, to do all your studying of one unit or topic within a course or subject before moving on to the next unit or topic in a different course or subject, so as not to confuse topics, units, and subjects. Strangely, though, separating out subjects tends to produce fewer learning gains. We instead tend to learn more when we layer or interleave different subjects, back and forth from one to another. Perhaps our brains need a break, or we need to consolidate memories, or we just need a change of pace. Whatever explanation you choose, try both to space and interleave your studies.
Assessment
Accept one last general guide to promoting and improving your learning: take frequent quizzes, tests, and exams. Constantly evaluate and assess your learning as you study. If your reading assignments have periodic questions to answer, even just in your mind, then answer them. They are a form of interim, formative assessment. If your instructor offers practice tests or quizzes for no credit, take them, multiple times if possible. If your course materials don’t include any practice assessments, go find some in the library, online, or from another resource. If you can’t find any practice assessments, then make your own. Education researchers are well aware of what they call the testing effect. When you pull information back out of your mind, you tend to strengthen both the memory and reliable retrieval of it. You do best if you have the answers available to promptly confirm or correct your response. But remarkably, the testing effect can work to some degree even without prompt feedback. Test yourself as frequently as you can, and your learning should improve.
Reflection
By which of the above models or theories do you most-commonly think of your learning? Which of the above models make the greatest sense to you? Which of the above models have the greatest appeal to you? Which of the above models might you want to consider and implement to improve your learning? As to the perceptual model of learning, do you consider yourself primarily an auditory, visual, tactile, or kinesthetic learner? Which sense impression would you rather pursue in your studies, listening, looking, writing, or enacting? Have you used psychological learning techniques, seeking prompt confirming or corrective feedback for your repeatedly rehearsed performances? Have you used behavioral learning models, particularly flashcards or similar prompt/response tools to quicken and automatize your learning through operant conditioning and association? Or do you prefer to think of your learning as involving your mental construction of schema and frameworks? Do you need an especially safe, supportive, and learner-focused instructional program, giving you greater autonomy and liberty? How well or poorly do you respond to Socratic examination of your ideas, in dialogue with a superior thinker? Do you actively engage in your learning, or do you believe that you may be more passive than you should be? Have you tried spacing your studies and interleaving them, too? Do you use practice tests to your best advantage?
Key Points
Your studies may improve when you understand models of learning.
Taxonomic models help you identify levels or stages of learning.
Perceptual models help you measure the quality and variety of stimuli.
Psychological models help you pursue practice and formative feedback.
Behavioral models promote associations through instant rewards.
Cognitivist models focus on building mental schema or frameworks.
Humanist models promote learner autonomy and choices.
Socratic models challenge assertions through back-and-forth dialogue.
Active engagement produces greater gains than passive learning.
Spacing and interleaving studies promotes greater learning gains.
Frequent formative assessment with prompt feedback aids learning.