2 What Is Learning?
Delia watched her classmates file out of the classroom and into the hallway, laughing and joking with one another, probably on their way to do something fun to kick off the weekend. Not Delia, though. She instead hung back in the classroom as usual, waiting for the last students to file out, hoping to have a couple of minutes of the instructor’s time to clear up some questions she had about the day’s material. But no, Delia could see the instructor hurrying to gather his things and rush out, probably to avoid her. He didn’t seem to like spending any time in the classroom after class, especially if it was to help a struggling student. Delia dropped her head, wondering how her classmates seemed to learn so easily.
Definition
To improve your learning, first give some thought to what learning is. If you’re still thinking that learning involves opening your mind so that the instructor can pour material in, then you may need a new definition of learning. To learn isn’t to accumulate large quantities of material in random fashion. That’s more like an encyclopedia or, indeed, a trash heap. To learn has more to do with changing your behavior in persistent ways consistent with the goal of instruction. And the goal of instruction isn’t generally to make you good at trivia games. Every course, seminar, training, or other unit of instruction has a goal advancing the larger goal of the curriculum or overall course of study within which the instruction occurs. So, when thinking about learning, you begin with the goal of your studies. You are learning when your studies produce persistent gains toward your instructional goal.
Effectiveness
Notice, though, that learning involves striving in effective ways toward that goal. Striving alone isn’t learning. Studying, in other words, isn’t enough. Your studying must shift your capacities in the direction of the learning goal. Learning takes striving, but the striving must produce lasting gains toward the instructional goal. If your studies aren’t moving you toward the goal line, then you aren’t learning. Indeed, you’d better change your studying. Studying itself doesn’t discourage students. Indeed, students generally appreciate how privileged studying is compared to, say, laying drain tile in the icy muck of your boss’s fields or laying shingles on a steep-pitched, hundred-degree roof. Rather, studying discourages students when their efforts do not produce gains. Students stop striving in their studies when their scores and grades fail to reflect the quantity of their efforts. If effort doesn’t matter to the outcome, then why continue to make the effort? Learning means making gains. Students strive when their striving produces gains.
Adjustment
If learning involves effective striving toward the instructional goal, then constantly adjusting one’s efforts at studying must be a critical aspect of learning. One sees it all the time: students get into a habit of repeatedly doing the same thing in their studies, when their first effort produces modest gains. They’ll make outline after outline because their first outline helped a little on the first quiz. And they’ll stare for hours on end at their outlines, memorizing every word, for the same reason. Yet when their gains wear off, they won’t try something else, believing instead that if they just keep striving, gains will eventually come, like madness itself. That one capacity to make continual adjustments marks capable learners. The point isn’t simply that they won’t accept failure. The point is that they won’t even accept wasted study time and effort. They make it work, changing things up until it does work. Failure may occur here and there, but failure isn’t an option. Failure is instead a signal to change. Indeed, the learner simply tries to fail early rather than often or persistently. An early failure before the consequences are large is exactly what the learner needs to find more-effective study methods.
Assessment
You may now have noticed another aspect of learning, essential to adjusting, which we’ve just seen is essential to effectiveness: a learner must continually assess whether their striving is helping them make gains. Without continual assessment, a learner has no way of gauging whether adjustments in study practices are necessary. For instance, how does one know when reading an assigned passage once, or instead twice, or even three or four times, is enough to meet the instructional goal? Well, you’ve got to assess. Ask and try to answer a question over the reading. Take a practice quiz on the reading’s content. Try explaining the reading to someone. Or try to demonstrate what the reading describes. And if you fail, then you know you need to do better in some way with the reading. If, for another example, your goal is to improve your basketball shot, then sure, repeatedly watch a video of an excellent shooter’s technique. But is that enough? Of course not. You’d better go test your use of the technique. And if you haven’t improved your shot, then you’d better try something else. Constantly assess your studies. Take a metacognitive stance.
Persistent
Notice, too, that learning involves persistent gains toward the instructional goal. If students lose their new capacities as quickly as they gain them, then whatever they’re doing to study isn’t helping. Take, for instance, the practice of reading a unit, taking a quiz over the unit at week’s end, and then going on to the next reading the following week, ending with another quiz, and so on to the end of the course. If that’s all you do, then guess what? That’s right: you’ll have forgotten most of what you learned by the time of the final exam. Retaining information takes spaced rehearsal, about which you’ll read more later. Don’t just study to learn something briefly and have it dissipate as quickly as it came. Study so that what you learn persists and you can use what you learn in the way that your instructional goal projected.
Transferable
Here’s one more critical aspect of learning that many of us miss. The instructional goal is seldom to perform in the setting in which one first learns. The goal is usually to transfer whatever knowledge, skill, or ethic one acquired at one’s leisure in the classroom, clinic, laboratory, library, or study hall into a test center, performance hall, or similar venue for evaluation, and then into the field, whether the field is a home, job, recreation, or other dimension of life. We don’t want to learn simply for the sake of the classroom. We want our learning to benefit us in some other forum outside of the instruction’s locus. The instructional goal is not a 100 score on the exam and an A grade in the course. The score and grade are simply immediate rewards to stimulate effort and mimic the success that one expects later when applying the learning in the goal’s field. Whenever studying, keep in mind where and how you expect to use what you learn, and prepare to transfer your learning to that field.
Anticipation
The fact that you’ll likely need to replicate your learning in a different setting than the one in which you learned should shape your studying. Your studies should anticipate the setting in which you ultimately need to perform. A major problem with studying is that students acquire and rehearse the knowledge or skill in one setting, when they’ll have to exhibit the knowledge or skill in another setting. The setting more deeply affects how you recall and use the knowledge or skill than you might imagine. Simply shifting your study space from your room to the library and then to the cafeteria will help you transfer whatever you acquire to the next setting in which you need finally to perform. The light, sound, surfaces, and other environmental stimuli of the space in which you study are a part of your learning. Vary the environmental stimuli to cancel them out, so that you retain your learning independent of the environment.
Studies
We now have a working definition for learning, which is a persistent transferable change in behavior consistent with instruction’s goal. Consider, then, what studying means. We tend to think of studying as a particular practice, like sitting in a comfortable chair in one’s favorite study place, assigned materials in hand, shut off from the world. What do you picture yourself doing when telling others that you’re going to study? But studying isn’t a particular practice like reading, outlining, or completing homework or practice problems. Studying needs instead to be an active, iterative, and adaptive process. Studying may need to be all those things just mentioned including reading, outlining, and completing homework and practice problems. But fundamentally, studying involves discerning the instructional goal, engaging concertedly in activities directed toward the goal, pausing to assess progress, and re-engaging after adjusting the activities to improve progress toward the goal, while also varying the setting to ever-more-nearly approximate the conditions for the final performance.
Iterative
Admittedly, that’s a lot to consider. We’ll keep taking it apart for the rest of this guide. But consider the main point: studying is iterative, not linear. When studying, you don’t just trudge along a sodden path. When studying, you instead survey the horizon for the goal, surge ahead, pause, reconnoiter, circle partway back, take stock, return to the point you’d just reached, survey the horizon again to see if the goal is nearer, advance a little farther, pause again, circle back again, take stock again, and so on. Studying should generally be more like advancing circles than a linear push. Pushing ahead is fine unless you’re heading in the wrong direction, which one doesn’t know without continual return to evaluate progress toward the goal.
Procedure
Studying and learning thus involve a substantial degree of procedural knowledge, meaning to have an idea for how to proceed, even if not yet knowing the precise course and outcome. Indeed, learning is by nature always procedural and heuristic, referring to pragmatic, experiential, hands-on, trial-and-error advance. Learning can’t be by perfect method. Learning has far too many variables with too great complexity. Those variables include your prior knowledge and skill level, how far away is the goal, how many discrete objectives you must accomplish to reach the goal, the subject’s content structure, and how variable the context is for the subject. To learn effectively and consistently, you need some loosely held tools or methods with which to stumble forward with effort, as learning’s complex ends gradually come together. You are physiology, not mechanics. Lots of strange and wonderful things must happen for you to learn. Gain the procedures or heuristics for effective learning, and have confidence in them. And then go enjoy the great learning game.
Failure
Accept another few words about failure, already mentioned once above. Failure plays an important part in learning. Students who learn most effectively are not students who avoid failure most effectively. They are instead students who quickly risk failure so as to try again with appropriate adjustments. Failure is not a bad thing when encountered early in the learning process. Indeed, studying should invite early risk and failure for prompt correction. The problem with failure is when students have no early assessment opportunities with prompt feedback and correction. And that, unfortunately, is instruction’s classic failure, not to offer early and frequent formative practice with prompt feedback. Readings may lack the organization, prioritization, relevance, and other features to adequately guide students. Instruction may not define the criteria for mastery, compounding the inadequacy of assigned readings. Students get too little formative feedback from which to diagnose their errors and correct their performance. Don’t let poor instruction or poor study methods be your downfall. Take responsibility for your learning by adhering to that iterative process that spurs adjustments.
Reflection
How would you define learning? On a scale from one to ten, how would you rate yourself as a learner? How good are you at telling when your studying is ineffective? Do you frequently adjust your study methods? What do you do to assess your studying progress? Do you look for assessment opportunities? Have you had instances where you quickly learned a subject but your learning failed to persist, so that you forgot everything in a relatively short time? Have you had instances where your learning failed to transfer from the environment in which you learned to the environment in which you needed to perform? As you are studying, do you anticipate your final performance conditions so that you are sure you can perform as you need to do so? Do your studies follow an iterative process to ensure that you are making progress? If so, how would you describe that iterative process? Do you have strong procedural skills for studying? Are you willing to risk failure early in your study efforts so that you can get corrective feedback?
Key Points
Learning is a persistent change in behavior toward instruction goals.
Learning involves striving in effective ways toward defined goals.
Learning requires adjustment in study methods to reach goals.
Learning requires frequent assessment of progress toward goals.
Learning must produce persistent, not temporary, behavior changes.
Learning must allow for transfer of skills to the final conditions.
Studies should anticipate final performance conditions.
Studying should involve an iterative process measuring progress.
Procedural skills are critical to effective studies, adjusting for progress.
Early failure with prompt corrective feedback aids learning.