learning essay meaning

What Is Learning? Essay about Learning Importance

What Is learning? 👨‍🎓️ Why is learning important? Find the answers here! 🔤 This essay on learning describes its outcomes and importance in one’s life.

Introduction

The Key Concepts

Learning is a continuous process that involves the transformation of information and experience into abilities and knowledge. Learning, according to me, is a two way process that involves the learner and the educator leading to knowledge acquisition as well as capability.

It informs my educational sector by making sure that both the students and the teacher participate during the learning process to make it more real and enjoyable so that the learners can clearly understand. There are many and different learning concepts held by students and ways in which the different views affect teaching and learning.

What Is Learning? The Key Concepts

One of the learning concept held by students is, presentation of learning material that is precise. This means that any material that is meant for learning should be very clear put in a language that the learners comprehend (Blackman & Benson 2003). The material should also be detailed with many examples that are relevant to the prior knowledge of the learner.

This means that the learner must have pertinent prior knowledge. This can be obtained by the teacher explaining new ideas and words that are to be encountered in a certain field or topic that might take more consecutive lessons. Different examples assist the students in approaching ideas in many perspectives.

The learner is able to get similarities from the many examples given thus leading to a better understanding of a concept since the ideas are related and linked.

Secondly, new meanings should be incorporated into the students’ prior knowledge, instead of remembering only the definitions or procedures. Therefore, to promote expressive learning, instructional methods that relate new information to the learner’s prior knowledge should be used.

Moreover, significant learning involves the use of evaluation methods that inspire learners to relate their existing knowledge with new ideas. For the students to comprehend complex ideas, they must be combined with the simple ideas they know.

Teaching becomes very easy when a lesson starts with simple concepts that the students are familiar with. The students should start by understanding what they know so that they can use the ideas in comprehending complex concepts. This makes learning smooth and easy for both the learner and the educator (Chermak& Weiss 1999).

Thirdly, acquisition of the basic concepts is very essential for the student to understand the threshold concepts. This is because; the basic concepts act as a foundation in learning a certain topic or procedure. So, the basic concepts must be comprehended first before proceeding to the incorporation of the threshold concepts.

This makes the student to have a clear understanding of each stage due to the possession of initial knowledge (Felder &Brent 1996). A deeper foundation of the study may also be achieved through getting the differences between various concepts clearly and by knowing the necessary as well as the unnecessary aspects. Basic concepts are normally taught in the lower classes of each level.

They include defining terms in each discipline. These terms aid in teaching in all the levels because they act as a foundation. The stage of acquiring the basics determines the students’ success in the rest of their studies.

This is because lack of basics leads to failure since the students can not understand the rest of the context in that discipline, which depends mostly on the basics. For learning to become effective to the students, the basics must be well understood as well as their applications.

Learning by use of models to explain certain procedures or ideas in a certain discipline is also another learning concept held by students. Models are helpful in explaining complex procedures and they assist the students in understanding better (Blackman & Benson 2003).

For instance, in economics, there are many models that are used by the students so that they can comprehend the essential interrelationships in that discipline. A model known as comparative static is used by the students who do economics to understand how equilibrium is used in economic reason as well as the forces that bring back equilibrium after it has been moved.

The students must know the importance of using such kind of models, the main aspect in the model and its relationship with the visual representation. A model is one of the important devices that must be used by a learner to acquire knowledge. They are mainly presented in a diagram form using symbols or arrows.

It simplifies teaching especially to the slow learners who get the concept slowly but clearly. It is the easiest and most effective method of learning complex procedures or directions. Most models are in form of flowcharts.

Learners should get used to learning incomplete ideas so that they can make more complete ideas available to them and enjoy going ahead. This is because, in the process of acquiring the threshold concepts, the prior knowledge acquired previously might be transformed.

So, the students must be ready to admit that every stage in the learning process they get an understanding that is temporary. This problem intensifies when the understanding of an idea acquired currently changes the understanding of an idea that had been taught previously.

This leads to confusion that can make the weak students lose hope. That is why the teacher should always state clear similarities as well as differences of various concepts. On the other hand, the student should be able to compare different concepts and stating their similarities as well as differences (Watkins & Regmy 1992).

The student should also be careful when dealing with concepts that seem similar and must always be attentive to get the first hand information from the teacher. Teaching and learning becomes very hard when learners do not concentrate by paying attention to what the teacher is explaining. For the serious students, learning becomes enjoyable and they do not get confused.

According to Chemkar and Weiss (1999), learners must not just sit down and listen, but they must involve themselves in some other activities such as reading, writing, discussing or solving problems. Basically, they must be very active and concentrate on what they are doing. These techniques are very essential because they have a great impact to the learners.

Students always support learning that is active than the traditional lecture methods because they master the content well and aids in the development of most skills such as writing and reading. So methods that enhance active learning motivate the learners since they also get more information from their fellow learners through discussions.

Students engage themselves in discussion groups or class presentations to break the monotony of lecture method of learning. Learning is a two way process and so both the teacher and the student must be involved.

Active learning removes boredom in the class and the students get so much involved thus improving understanding. This arouses the mind of the student leading to more concentration. During a lecture, the student should write down some of the important points that can later be expounded on.

Involvement in challenging tasks by the learners is so much important. The task should not be very difficult but rather it should just be slightly above the learner’s level of mastery. This makes the learner to get motivated and instills confidence. It leads to success of the learner due to the self confidence that aids in problem solving.

For instance, when a learner tackles a question that deemed hard and gets the answer correct, it becomes the best kind of encouragement ever. The learner gets the confidence that he can make it and this motivates him to achieve even more.

This kind of encouragement mostly occurs to the quick learners because the slow learners fail in most cases. This makes the slow learners fear tackling many problems. So, the concept might not apply to all the learners but for the slow learners who are determined, they can always seek for help incase of such a problem.

Moreover, another concept held by students is repetition because, the most essential factor in learning is efficient time in a task. For a student to study well he or she should consider repetition, that is, looking at the same material over and over again.

For instance, before a teacher comes for the lesson, the student can review notes and then review the same notes after the teacher gets out of class. So, the student reviews the notes many times thus improving the understanding level (Felder & Brent 1996). This simplifies revising for an exam because the student does not need to cram for it.

Reviewing the same material makes teaching very easy since the teacher does not need to go back to the previous material and start explaining again. It becomes very hard for those students who do not review their work at all because they do not understand the teacher well and are faced by a hard time when preparing for examinations.

Basically, learning requires quite enough time so that it can be effective. It also becomes a very big problem for those who do not sacrifice their time in reviews.

Acquisition of the main points improves understanding of the material to the student. Everything that is learnt or taught may not be of importance. Therefore, the student must be very keen to identify the main points when learning. These points should be written down or underlined because they become useful when reviewing notes before doing an exam. It helps in saving time and leads to success.

For those students who do not pay attention, it becomes very difficult for them to highlight the main points. They read for the sake of it and make the teacher undergo a very hard time during teaching. To overcome this problem, the students must be taught how to study so that learning can be effective.

Cooperative learning is also another concept held by the students. It is more detailed than a group work because when used properly, it leads to remarkable results. This is very encouraging in teaching and the learning environment as well.

The students should not work with their friends so that learning can be productive, instead every group should have at least one top level student who can assist the weak students. The groups assist them in achieving academic as well as social abilities due to the interaction. This learning concept benefits the students more because, a fellow student can explain a concept in a better way than how the teacher can explain in class.

Assignments are then given to these groups through a selected group leader (Felder& Brent 1996). Every member must be active in contributing ideas and respect of one’s ideas is necessary. It becomes very easy for the teacher to mark such kind of assignments since they are fewer than marking for each individual.

Learning becomes enjoyable because every student is given a chance to express his or her ideas freely and in a constructive manner. Teaching is also easier because the students encounter very many new ideas during the discussions. Some students deem it as time wastage but it is necessary in every discipline.

Every group member should be given a chance to become the group’s facilitator whose work is to distribute and collect assignments. Dormant students are forced to become active because every group member must contribute his or her points. Cooperative learning is a concept that requires proper planning and organization.

Completion of assignments is another student held learning concept. Its main aim is to assist the student in knowing whether the main concepts in a certain topic were understood. This acts as a kind of self evaluation to the student and also assists the teacher to know whether the students understood a certain topic. The assignments must be submitted to the respective teacher for marking.

Those students who are focused follow the teacher after the assignments have been marked for clarification purposes. This enhances learning and the student understands better. Many students differ with this idea because they do not like relating with the teacher (Marton &Beaty 1993). This leads to very poor grades since communication is a very essential factor in learning.

Teaching becomes easier and enjoyable when there is a student- teacher relationship. Assignment corrections are necessary to both the student and the teacher since the student comprehends the right method of solving a certain problem that he or she could not before.

Lazy students who do not do corrections make teaching hard for the teacher because they make the other students to lag behind. Learning may also become ineffective for them due to low levels of understanding.

Acquisition of facts is still another student held concept that aims at understanding reality. Students capture the essential facts so that they can understand how they suit in another context. Many students fail to obtain the facts because they think that they can get everything taught in class or read from books.

When studying, the student must clearly understand the topic so that he or she can develop a theme. This helps in making short notes by eliminating unnecessary information. So, the facts must always be identified and well understood in order to apply them where necessary. Teaching becomes easier when the facts are well comprehended by the students because it enhances effective learning.

Effective learning occurs when a student possesses strong emotions. A strong memory that lasts for long is linked with the emotional condition of the learner. This means that the learners will always remember well when learning is incorporated with strong emotions. Emotions develop when the students have a positive attitude towards learning (Marton& Beaty 1993).

This is because they will find learning enjoyable and exciting unlike those with a negative attitude who will find learning boring and of no use to them. Emotions affect teaching since a teacher will like to teach those students with a positive attitude towards what he is teaching rather than those with a negative attitude.

The positive attitude leads to effective learning because the students get interested in what they are learning and eventually leads to success. Learning does not become effective where students portray a negative attitude since they are not interested thus leading to failure.

Furthermore, learning through hearing is another student held concept. This concept enables them to understand what they hear thus calling for more attention and concentration. They prefer instructions that are given orally and are very keen but they also participate by speaking. Teaching becomes very enjoyable since the students contribute a lot through talking and interviewing.

Learning occurs effectively because the students involve themselves in oral reading as well as listening to recorded information. In this concept, learning is mostly enhanced by debating, presenting reports orally and interviewing people. Those students who do not prefer this concept as a method of learning do not involve themselves in debates or oral discussions but use other learning concepts.

Learners may also use the concept of seeing to understand better. This makes them remember what they saw and most of them prefer using written materials (Van Rosum & Schenk 1984). Unlike the auditory learners who grasp the concept through hearing, visual learners understand better by seeing.

They use their sight to learn and do it quietly. They prefer watching things like videos and learn from what they see. Learning occurs effectively since the memory is usually connected with visual images. Teaching becomes very easy when visual images are incorporated. They include such things like pictures, objects, graphs.

A teacher can use charts during instruction thus improving the students’ understanding level or present a demonstration for the students to see. Diagrams are also necessary because most students learn through seeing.

Use of visual images makes learning to look real and the student gets the concept better than those who learn through imaginations. This concept makes the students to use text that has got many pictures, diagrams, graphics, maps and graphs.

In learning students may also use the tactile concept whereby they gain knowledge and skills through touching. They gain knowledge mostly through manipulative. Teaching becomes more effective when students are left to handle equipments for themselves for instance in a laboratory practical. Students tend to understand better because they are able to follow instructions (Watkins & Regmy 1992).

After applying this concept, the students are able to engage themselves in making perfect drawings, making models and following procedures to make something. Learning may not take place effectively to those students who do not like manipulating because it arouses the memory and the students comprehends the concept in a better way.

Learning through analysis is also another concept held by students because they are able to plan their work in an organized manner which is based on logic ideas only. It requires individual learning and effective learning occurs when information is given in steps. This makes the teacher to structure the lessons properly and the goals should be clear.

This method of organizing ideas makes learning to become effective thus leading to success and achievement of the objectives. Analysis improves understanding of concepts to the learners (Watkins & Regmy 1992). They also understand certain procedures used in various topics because they are sequential.

Teaching and learning becomes very hard for those students who do not know how to analyze their work. Such students learn in a haphazard way thus leading to failure.

If all the learning concepts held by students are incorporated, then remarkable results can be obtained. A lot information and knowledge can be obtained through learning as long as the learner uses the best concepts for learning. Learners are also different because there are those who understand better by seeing while others understand through listening or touching.

So, it is necessary for each learner to understand the best concept to use in order to improve the understanding level. For the slow learners, extra time should be taken while studying and explanations must be clear to avoid confusion. There are also those who follow written instructions better than those instructions that are given orally. Basically, learners are not the same and so require different techniques.

Reference List

Benson, A., & Blackman, D., 2003. Can research methods ever be interesting? Active Learning in Higher Education, Vol. 4, No. 1, 39-55.

Chermak, S., & Weiss, A., 1999. Activity-based learning of statistics: Using practical applications to improve students’ learning. Journal of Criminal Justice Education , Vol. 10, No. 2, pp. 361-371.

Felder, R., & Brent, R., 1996. Navigating the bumpy road to student-centered instruction. College Teaching , Vol. 44, No. 2, pp. 43-47.

Marton, F. & Beaty, E., 1993. Conceptions of learning. International Journal of Educational Research , Vol. 19, pp. 277-300.

Van Rossum, E., & Schenk, S., 1984. The relationship between learning conception, study strategy and learning outcome. British Journal of Educational Psychology , Vol. 54, No.1, pp. 73-85.

Watkins, D., & Regmy, M., 1992. How universal are student conceptions of learning? A Nepalese investigation. Psychologia , Vol. 25, No. 2, pp. 101-110.

What Is Learning? FAQ

Why Is Learning Important? Learning means gaining new knowledge, skills, and values, both in a group or on one’s own. It helps a person to develop, maintain their interest in life, and adapt to changes.
Why Is Online Learning Good? Online learning has a number of advantages over traditional learning. First, it allows you to collaborate with top experts in your area of interest, no matter where you are located geographically. Secondly, it encourages independence and helps you develop time management skills. Last but not least, it saves time on transport.
How to Overcome Challenges in Online Learning? The most challenging aspects of distant learning are the lack of face-to-face communication and the lack of feedback. The key to overcoming these challenges is effective communication with teachers and classmates through videoconferencing, email, and chats.
Chicago (A-D)
Chicago (N-B)

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What is learning? A definition and discussion

What is learning? A definition and discussion. Is learning a change in behaviour or understanding? Is it a process? Mark K Smith surveys some key dimensions and ideas.

A definition for starters : learning is a process that is often not under our control and is wrapped up with the environments we inhabit and the relationships we make. it involves encountering signals from the senses; attending to them; looking for connections and meanings; and framing them so that we may act., contents : introduction · definition · what do people think learning is · learning as a product · learning as a process · experience · reflective thinking · making connections · committing and acting · task-conscious or acquisition learning, and learning-conscious or formalized learning · learning theory · further reading · references · acknowledgements · how to cite this article see, also, what is education.

Over the last thirty years or so, ‘learning’ has become one of the most used words in the field of education. Adult education became lifelong learning; students became learners, teachers facilitators of learning; schools are now learning environments; learning outcomes are carefully monitored. This learnification of the language and practice of education (Biesta 2009, 2018: 245) is in part due to the rise of individualizing neo-liberal policies. Developments in learning theory have also contributed.

Yet, for all the talk of ‘learning’, there has been little questioning about what it is, and what it entails. As Jan De Hower et. al. (2013) noted, ‘questions about learning are addressed in virtually all areas of psychology. It is therefore surprising to see that researchers are rarely explicit about what they mean by the term’.

There has been a similar situation in the field of education. It is almost as if ‘learning’ is something is unproblematic and can be taken for granted. Get the instructional regime right, the message seems to be, and learning (as measured by tests and assessment regimes) will follow.

The reality is that learning, as Lynda Kelly (2002) put it, ‘is a very individual, complex, and, to some degree, an indescribable process: something we just do, without ever thinking too much about it’. It is also a complex social activity. Perhaps the most striking result of recent research around learning in childhood and adolescence is that very little comes through conscious and deliberate teaching (Gopnik 2016: 60). It comes from participation in life.

[O]ther kinds of social learning are more sophisticated, and more fundamental. They are evolutionarily deeper, developmentally earlier, and more pervasive than schooling. They have been much more important across a wide range of historical periods and cultural traditions. Children learn by watching and imitating the people around them. Psychologists call this observational learning. And they learn by listening to what other people say about how the world works—what psychologists call learning from testimony. (Gopnik 2016: 89)

Here we go back to basics – and begin by examining learning as a product and as a process.

We also look at Alan Roger’s (2003) helpful discussion of task-conscious or acquisition learning, and learning-conscious or formalized learning.

From there we turn to competing learning theories – ideas about how learning may happen.

What do people think learning is?

Some years ago, Säljö (1979) carried out a simple, but very useful piece of research. He asked adult students what they understood by learning. Their responses fell into five main categories:

Learning as a quantitative increase in knowledge . Learning is acquiring information or ‘knowing a lot’.
Learning as memorising . Learning is storing information that can be reproduced.
Learning as acquiring facts, skills, and methods that can be retained and used as necessary.
Learning as making sense or abstracting meaning . Learning involves relating parts of the subject matter to each other and to the real world.
Learning as interpreting and understanding reality in a different way . Learning involves comprehending the world by reinterpreting knowledge. (quoted in Ramsden 1992: 26)

As Paul Ramsden (1992) pointed out, we can see immediately that conceptions 4 and 5 in are qualitatively different from the first three.

Conceptions 1 to 3 imply a less complex view of learning. Learning is something external to the learner. It may even be something that just happens or is done to you by teachers (as in conception 1). In a way learning becomes a bit like shopping. People go out and buy knowledge – it becomes their possession.

The last two conceptions look to the ‘internal’ or personal aspect of learning. Learning is seen as something that you do to understand the real world.

In some ways the difference here involves what Gilbert Ryle has termed ‘knowing that , and ‘knowing how’. The first two categories mostly involve ‘knowing that’. As we move through the third we see that alongside ‘knowing that’ there is growing emphasis on ‘knowing how’. This system of categories is hierarchical – each higher conception implies all the rest beneath it. ‘In other words, students who conceive of learning as understanding reality are also able to see it as increasing their knowledge’ (Ramsden 1992: 27).

There is also a difference between answer 1 and answers 2-5. The former has a stronger focus on learning as a learning as a thing or product. Learning is more of a noun here. The other answers look to learning only as a process.

Learning as a product

Pick up a standard psychology textbook – especially from the 1960s and 1970s and you will probably find ‘learning’ defined as a change in behaviour. Sometimes it was also defined as a permanent change. By the 1980s less crude definitions gained in popularity. For example, Robert Gagne defined learning as ‘a change in human disposition or capacity that persists over a period of time and is not simply ascribable to processes of growth (1982: 2). In the 1990s learning was often described as the relatively permanent change in a person’s knowledge or behaviour due to experience:

{This] change may be deliberate or unintentional, for better or for worse. To qualify as learning, this change must be brought about by experience – by the interaction of a person with his or her environment. … the changes resulting from learning are in the individual’s knowledge or behaviour’ (Woolsfolk 1998: 204-205)

In these examples, learning is approached as an outcome – the product of some process. It can be recognized or seen. ‘Learning’, wrote De Hower et. al. (2013) is seen as a function that maps experience onto behaviour. In other words, here learning is defined as ‘an effect of experience on behaviour’

Viewing learning as a product, a thing, has the virtue of highlighting a crucial aspect of learning – change. Its apparent clarity may also make some sense when conducting experiments. However, it is a blunt instrument. For example:

Does a person need to perform for learning to have happened?
Are there other factors that may cause behaviour to change?
Can the change involved include the potential for change? (Merriam and Caffarella 1991: 124)

Not all changes in behaviour resulting from experience involve learning; and not all changes in behaviours are down to experience. It would seem fair to expect that if we are to say that learning has taken place, experience could have been used in some way. For example, while conditioning may result in a change in behaviour, the change may not involve drawing upon experience to generate new knowledge. Not surprisingly, many theorists have, thus, been less concerned with overt behaviour than with changes in the ways in which people ‘understand, or experience, or conceptualize the world around them’ (Ramsden 1992: 4) (see cognitivism below). The focus for them, is gaining knowledge or ability using experience.

There have been attempts to redefine product or functional definitions of learning. For example, Domjan (2010: 17) discusses learning as an enduring change in the mechanisms of behaviour. De Houer et. al (2013) look at the adaptation of individual organisms to their environment during the lifetime of the individuals (after Skinner 1938).

There have also been attempts to group outcomes. The best known of these is Benjamin S. Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives (1956) (Bloom chaired a group of members of the American Psychological Association (APA) exploring educational objectives – and edited the first volume of their work). The APA group identified three key areas or domains of educational objectives or learning:

Cognitive: mental skills (knowledge).
Affective: growth in feelings or emotional areas (attitude or self).
Psychomotor: manual or physical skills (skills).

These domains (knowledge, attitudes and skills) have become part of the fabric of the field of education – both formal and informal. Each domain has then been split into different categories to analyse the nature of learning and to create a hierarchy of objectives.

Most attention, not surprisingly, has been given to the cognitive domain . A recent version of the taxonomy (Anderson et. al. 2001) had six categories – remember, understand, apply, analyse, evaluate, create and then broke these down into according to the type of knowledge involved: factual, conceptual, procedural, metacognitive.

Attention was also paid to the affective domain in the second volume of the taxonomy (Kraftwohl et. al. 1964). Its categories were: receiving ideas; responding to ideas, phenomena; valuing ideas, materials; organization of ideas, values; characterisation by value set (or to act consistently in accordance with values internalised) (O’Neill and Murphy 2010). In this model, as O’Neill and Murphy comment, ‘The learner moves from being aware of what they are learning to a stage of having internalised the learning so that it plays a role in guiding their actions’.

The original taxonomy of the psychomotor domain has also been updated by Dave (1970). This mapping has several levels: perception /observing; guided response /imitation; mechanism; complex response; adaptation; and origination

Use of Blooms taxonomy faded during the late 1960s and 1970s but became a standard feature of practice again with the rise of national curriculums in places like the United Kingdom, and the concern with learning objectives and learnification that Biesta (2009) discusses (see above).

Gardeners or carpenters

The attraction of approaching learning as a product is that it provides us with something relatively clear to look for and measure. The danger is that it may not obvious what we are measuring – and that the infatuation with discrete learning objectives pushes people down a path that takes people away from the purpose and processes of education. It turns educators into ‘woodworkers’ rather than ‘gardeners’ (Gopnik 2016). As carpenters:

… essentially your job is to shape that material into a final product that will fit the scheme you had in mind to begin with. And you can assess how good a job you’ve done by looking at the finished product. Are the doors true? Are the chairs steady? Messiness and variability are a carpenter’s enemies; precision and control are her allies. Measure twice, cut once…. When we garden, on the other hand, we create a protected and nurturing space for plants to flourish. It takes hard labor and the sweat of our brows, with a lot of exhausted digging and wallowing in manure. And as any gardener knows, our specific plans are always thwarted…. And yet the compensation is that our greatest horticultural triumphs and joys also come when the garden escapes our control. (Gopnik 2016: 22)

Learning as a process

In Säljö’s categories two to five we see learning appearing as processes – memorizing, acquiring, making sense, and comprehending the world by reinterpreting knowledge. In his first category we find both process – acquiring – and product – a quantitative increase in knowledge. As might be expected, educationalists often look to process definitions of learning. They are interested in how activities interact to achieve different results. Similarly, researchers concerned with cognition are drawn to uncovering the ‘mental mechanisms’ that drive behaviour (Bechtel 2008).

Exploring learning as a process is attractive in many ways. It takes us to the ways we make sense of our thoughts, feelings and experiences, appreciate what might be going on for others, and understand the world in which we live. For us as educators, the attraction is obvious. The more we know about what activities are involved in ‘making sense’ and if, and how, they can be sequenced, the better we can help learners.

Given the role that ‘experience’ has in definitions of learning within psychology, it is not surprising that probably the most influential discussion of learning as a process is David Kolb’s exploration of experiential learning .

Kolb on experiential learning

Kolb (with Roger Fry) created his model out of four elements:

concrete experience,
observation and reflection,
the formation of abstract concepts, and
testing in new situations.

He represented these in the famous experiential learning circle that involves (1) concrete experience followed by (2) observation and experience followed by (3) forming abstract concepts followed by (4) testing in new situations (after Kurt Lewin ).

Kolb and Fry (1975) argue that the learning cycle can begin at any one of the four points – and that it should really be approached as a continuous spiral.

There are a number of problems with this view of the learning process (see: https://infed.org/mobi/david-a-kolb-on-experiential-learning/ ) but it does provide a helpful starting point for practitioners.

Kolb claims that he based his model on the work of Piaget, Lewin and Dewey. As Reijo Miettinen (2000) has shown it was a rather loose relationship. To approach learning as a process it is best to go back to Dewey – both because of his concern with experience, and his exploration of the nature of thinking/reflection. As a result we are going to look at:

The nature of experience.
Reflective thought.
Making connections.
Committing and acting (or rejecting and not acting).

So far, we have not looked at ‘experience’ in detail. It is a well-worn term often used with little attention to meaning. In the twentieth century it was, arguably, the work of John Dewey that did much to help rescue the notion – although even he gave up on it after a long struggle (Campbell 1995: 68). Experience, for him, was the ‘complex of all which it is distinctively human’ (Dewey 1929). It is ‘not a rigid and closed thing; it is vital, and hence growing’ (Dewey 1933) and stands at the centre of educational endeavour. The business of education, he wrote, ‘might be defined as an emancipation and enlargement of experience’ (1933: 340).

Dewey distinguished between two senses of the word: ‘having an experience’ and ‘knowing an experience’. The ‘having points to the immediacy of contact with the events of life; ‘knowing’ to the interpretation of the event (Boud et al 1993: 6). Sometimes experience can be seen just in the former sense – as a sensation. However, perhaps the most helpful way of viewing ‘experience’ is as an act of consciousness, an encounter with signals from the senses (see Gupta 2006: 223-236) for a discussion of experience as an act of consciousness).

Experience : Sometimes experience can be seen as a sensation. Perhaps the most helpful way of viewing it is as an act of consciousness, an encounter with signals from the senses.

Towards the end of his life, however, John Dewey regretted using the term ‘experience’ – partly because it was often misunderstood as an individual experience. He had long believed experience had a strong social dimension. In Experience and Nature, he argued:

Experience is already overlaid and saturated with the products of the reflection of past generations and by-gone ages. It is filled with interpretations, classifications, due to sophisticated thought, which have become incorporated (Dewey 1925: 40)

Subsequently, this concern with culture and the social nature of thinking became expressed in the work of influential educators such as Jerome Bruner (1996) and cognitive researchers interested in the ‘social brain’ (see Liberman 2013). Interestingly, cognitive researchers have generally held on to the idea of experience as part of the way of making sense of the process of learning while incorporating the social.

Reflective thinking

John Dewey took as his starting point practical, material life, activity. He saw non-reflective experience based on habits as a dominant form of experience. Reflection occurred when people sense or see a ‘forked road’ – contradictions or inadequacies in their habitual experience and ways of acting (Miettinen 2000).

Dewey defined reflective thought as ‘active, persistent, and careful consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the grounds that support it and the further conclusions to which it tends’ (Dewey 1933: 118). He set out five phases or aspects.

Suggestions, in which the mind leaps forward to a possible solution.
An intellectualization of the difficulty or perplexity that has been felt (directly experienced) into a problem to be solved.
The use of one suggestion after another as a leading idea, or hypothesis, to initiate and guide observation and other operations in collection of factual material.
The mental elaboration of the idea, or supposition as an idea or supposition (reasoning, in the sense in which reasoning is a part, not the whole, of inference).
Testing the hypothesis by overt, or imaginative action. (See Dewey 1933: 199-209) (For a discussion of these see Reflection, learning and education ).

Later writers such as Boud, Keogh and Walker (1985) made emotions more central. For them reflection is an activity in which people ‘recapture their experience, think about it, mull it over and evaluate it’ (ibid: 19). They reworked Dewey’s five aspects into three.

Returning to experience – that is to say recalling or detailing salient events.
Attending to (or connecting with) feelings – this has two aspects: using helpful feelings and removing or containing obstructive ones.
Evaluating experience – this involves re-examining experience in the light of one’s intent and existing knowledge etc. It also involves integrating this new knowledge into one’s conceptual framework. (ibid: 26-31)

This way of approaching reflection has the advantage of connecting with common modes of working e.g. we are often encouraged to attend to these domains in the process of supervision and journal writing. However, it is still a normative model, a process that the writers think should happen. It does not describe what may actually be happening when learning. For example, as Cinnamond and Zimpher (1990: 67) put it, ‘they constrain reflection by turning it into a mental activity that excludes both the behavioural element and dialogue with others involved in the situation’. Furthermore, do things happen in neat phases or steps?

Making connections

To be fair to John Dewey, he did appreciate that thinking may not proceed in nice, clear steps, and that the elements he identified in reflective thought are interconnected. As we have already seen, he talked about ‘suggestions, in which the mind leaps forward to a possible solution’. While Dewey talked of phases it is more helpful to think of these as processes that are, in effect, occurring concurrently. Nearly a hundred year later, thanks to advances in cognitive science, we have a better understanding of what might be going on.

It is becoming quite clear that the brain learns and changes as it learns. This process, called neuroplasticity or just plasticity, refers to the brain’s ability to rewire or expand its neural networks… New information enters the brain in the form of electrical impulses; these impulses form neural networks, connecting with other networks and the stronger and more numerous the networks the greater the learning. The brain learns when challenged. (Merriam and Bierema 2014: 171-2)

Alison Gopnik (2016) has highlighted the difference between children’s and adult’s brains around these processes.

Young brains are much more “plastic” than older brains; they make more new connections, and they’re much more flexible… A young brain makes many more links than an older one; there are many more possible connections, and the connections change more quickly and easily in the light of new experiences. But each of those links is relatively weak. Young brains can rearrange themselves effortlessly as new experiences pour in. As we grow older, the brain connections that we use a lot become swifter and more efficient, and they cover longer distances. But connections that we don’t use get “pruned” and disappear. Older brains are much less flexible. Their structure has changed from meandering, narrow pathways to straight-ahead, long-distance information superhighways. As we get older our brains can still change, but they are more likely to change only under pressure, and with effort and attention. (Gopnik 2016: 31)

Young brains are designed to explore, to generate alternatives and to experiment. Older brains are designed to exploit – to move quickly to what works. We need both of course, but the danger is that we push children away from discovery learning and into making the ‘correct’ connections (what could be called mastery learning). A further problem is that in times of significant change these connections are difficult to undo – we need the ‘messiness’ of exploration and discovery. There is a basic tension between exploration and exploitation (Cohen et. al. 2007) and what John Dewey was attempting to do was to hold onto both.

Framing and acting (or not acting)

One of the important aspects of the taxonomies of outcomes we explored earlier is that they take us beyond the cognitive domain (knowledge). To function well in the world, we must attend to the affective (attitudes and feelings), psychomotor (manual or physical skills), and relational. If learning is fully about change we have to connect reflection with acting – and with our mindset or frame of reference (what social pedagogues describe as haltung ).

Also, once we have appreciated that experience cannot be approached without taking into account the social nature of learning, and of how our brains work, then it becomes clear that we need to look at what Aristotle described as the ‘practical’ (see what is praxis ). We must frame our reflection and action.

Framing . As we have already seen, for John Dewey, thinking begins with a ‘forked-road’ – a question or situation that requires making choices. Within ‘practical’ orientation we must think about this situation in the light of our understanding of what is good or what makes for human flourishing. For Aristotle, this meant being guided by a moral disposition to act truly and rightly; a concern to further human well-being and the good life. This is what the ancient Greeks called phronesis and requires an understanding of other people. It also involves moving between the particular and the general.

The mark of a prudent man [is] to be able to deliberate rightly about what is good and what is advantageous for himself; not in particular respects, e.g. what is good for health or physical strength, but what is conducive to the good life generally. (Aristotle 2004: 209)

This process involves interpretation, understanding and application in ‘one unified process’ (Gadamer 1979: 275). It is something we engage in as human beings and it is directed at other human beings.

Acting . As can be seen from the diagram above, the outcome of the process of making judgements is a further process – interaction with others, tools etc. In traditional product definitions of learning this could be called behaviour. It might be that people decide not to change their behaviour or thinking – they carry on as they were. Alternatively, there could be a decision to change something. This might involve:

Planning . Classically this process involves developing pathways and strategies to meet goals; and deciding what might work best.

Trying out . Putting the plan into action.

Evaluating and try again . Here we go back to where we began – return to experience; reflect and building understandings; frame; and act. (Smith forthcoming)

Elsewhere, we have explored the nature and process of pedagogy – and the orientation to action (see what is pedagogy?) In Aristotle’s terms pedagogy comprises a leading idea ( eidos ); what we are calling haltung or disposition ( phronesis – a moral disposition to act truly and rightly); dialogue and learning ( interaction ) and action ( praxis – informed, committed action) (Carr and Kemmis 1986; Grundy 1987). In the following summary, we can see where learning sits from the perspectice of the educator/pedagogue.

Consciousness of learning

One of the significant questions that arises is the extent to which people are conscious of what is going on. Are they aware that they are engaged in learning – and what significance does it have if they are? Such questions have appeared in various guises over the years – and have surfaced, for example, in debates around the rather confusing notion of ‘ informal learning ‘.

One particularly helpful way of approaching the area has been formulated by Alan Rogers (2003). Drawing especially on the work of those who study the learning of language (for example, Krashen 1982), Rogers sets out two contrasting approaches: task-conscious or acquisition learning and learning-conscious or formalized learning.

Task-conscious or acquisition learning . Acquisition learning is seen as going on all the time. It is ‘concrete, immediate and confined to a specific activity; it is not concerned with general principles’ (Rogers 2003: 18). Examples include much of the learning involved in parenting or with running a home. Some have referred to this kind of learning as unconscious or implicit. Rogers (2003: 21), however, suggests that it might be better to speak of it as having a consciousness of the task. In other words, whilst the learner may not be conscious of learning, they are usually aware of the specific task in hand.

Learning-conscious or formalized learning . Formalized learning arises from the process of facilitating learning. It is ‘educative learning’ rather than the accumulation of experience. To this extent there is a consciousness of learning – people are aware that the task they are engaged in entails learning. ‘Learning itself is the task. What formalized learning does is to make learning more conscious to enhance it’ (Rogers 2003: 27). It involves guided episodes of learning.

When approached in this way it becomes clear that these contrasting ways of learning can appear in the same context. Both are present in schools. Both are present in families. It is possible to think of the mix of acquisition and formalized learning as forming a continuum.

At one extreme lie those unintentional and usually accidental learning events which occur continuously as we walk through life. Next comes incidental learning – unconscious learning through acquisition methods which occurs during some other activity… Then there are various activities in which we are somewhat more conscious of learning, experiential activities arising from immediate life-related concerns, though even here the focus is still on the task… Then come more purposeful activities – occasions where we set out to learn something in a more systematic way, using whatever comes to hand for that purpose, but often deliberately disregarding engagement with teachers and formal institutions of learning… Further along the continuum lie the self-directed learning projects on which there is so much literature… More formalized and generalized (and consequently less contextualized) forms of learning are the distance and open education programmes, where some elements of acquisition learning are often built into the designed learning programme. Towards the further extreme lie more formalized learning programmes of highly decontextualized learning, using material common to all the learners without paying any regard to their individual preferences, agendas or needs. There are of course no clear boundaries between each of these categories. (Rogers 2003: 41-2)

This distinction is echoed in different ways in the writings of many educationalists – but in particular in key theorists such as Kurt Lewin , Chris Argyris , Donald Schön , or Michael Polanyi .

Learning theory

The focus on process obviously takes us into the realm of learning theories – ideas about how or why change occurs. On these pages we focus on five different orientations (taken from Merriam, Caffarella, & Baumgartner 2007).

The behaviourist orientation to learning
The cognitive orientation to learning
The humanistic orientation to learning
The social/situational orientation to learning
The constructivist/social constructivist orientation to learning

As with any categorization of this sort the divisions are a bit arbitrary: there could be further additions and sub-divisions to the scheme, and there are various ways in which the orientations overlap and draw upon each other.

The five orientations can be summed up in the following figure:

Five orientations to learning (after Merriam and Bierema 2012)

As can seen from the above schematic presentation and the discussion on the linked pages, these approaches involve contrasting ideas as to the purpose and process of learning and education – and the role that educators may take. It is also important to recognize that the theories may apply to different sectors of the acquisition-formalized learning continuum outlined above. For example, the work of Lave and Wenger is broadly a form of acquisition learning that can involve some more formal interludes.

6.1 What Is Learning?

Learning objectives.

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

Explain how learned behaviors are different from instincts and reflexes
Define learning
Recognize and define three basic forms of learning—classical conditioning, operant conditioning, and observational learning

Birds build nests and migrate as winter approaches. Infants suckle for nourishment. Dogs shake water off wet fur. Salmon swim upstream to spawn, and spiders spin intricate webs. What do these seemingly unrelated behaviors have in common? They all are unlearned behaviors. Both instincts and reflexes are innate (unlearned) behaviors that organisms are born with. Reflexes are a motor or neural reaction to a specific stimulus in the environment. They tend to be simpler than instincts, involve the activity of specific body parts and systems (e.g., the knee-jerk reflex and the contraction of the pupil in bright light), and involve more primitive centers of the central nervous system (e.g., the spinal cord and the medulla). In contrast, instincts are innate behaviors that are triggered by a broader range of events, such as maturation and the change of seasons. They are more complex patterns of behavior, involve movement of the organism as a whole (e.g., sexual activity and migration), and involve higher brain centers.

Both reflexes and instincts help an organism adapt to its environment and do not have to be learned. For example, every healthy human baby has a sucking reflex, present at birth. Babies are born knowing how to suck on a nipple, whether artificial (from a bottle) or human. Nobody teaches the baby to suck, just as no one teaches a sea turtle hatchling to move toward the ocean. Learning, like reflexes and instincts, allows an organism to adapt to its environment. But unlike instincts and reflexes, learned behaviors involve change and experience: learning is a relatively permanent change in behavior or knowledge that results from experience. In contrast to the innate behaviors discussed above, learning involves acquiring knowledge and skills through experience. Looking back at our surfing scenario, Julian will have to spend much more time training with his surfboard before he learns how to ride the waves like his father.

Learning to surf, as well as any complex learning process (e.g., learning about the discipline of psychology), involves a complex interaction of conscious and unconscious processes. Learning has traditionally been studied in terms of its simplest components—the associations our minds automatically make between events. Our minds have a natural tendency to connect events that occur closely together or in sequence. Associative learning occurs when an organism makes connections between stimuli or events that occur together in the environment. You will see that associative learning is central to all three basic learning processes discussed in this chapter; classical conditioning tends to involve unconscious processes, operant conditioning tends to involve conscious processes, and observational learning adds social and cognitive layers to all the basic associative processes, both conscious and unconscious. These learning processes will be discussed in detail later in the chapter, but it is helpful to have a brief overview of each as you begin to explore how learning is understood from a psychological perspective.

In classical conditioning, also known as Pavlovian conditioning, organisms learn to associate events—or stimuli—that repeatedly happen together. We experience this process throughout our daily lives. For example, you might see a flash of lightning in the sky during a storm and then hear a loud boom of thunder. The sound of the thunder naturally makes you jump (loud noises have that effect by reflex). Because lightning reliably predicts the impending boom of thunder, you may associate the two and jump when you see lightning. Psychological researchers study this associative process by focusing on what can be seen and measured—behaviors. Researchers ask if one stimulus triggers a reflex, can we train a different stimulus to trigger that same reflex? In operant conditioning, organisms learn, again, to associate events—a behavior and its consequence (reinforcement or punishment). A pleasant consequence encourages more of that behavior in the future, whereas a punishment deters the behavior. Imagine you are teaching your dog, Hodor, to sit. You tell Hodor to sit, and give him a treat when he does. After repeated experiences, Hodor begins to associate the act of sitting with receiving a treat. He learns that the consequence of sitting is that he gets a doggie biscuit ( Figure 6.2 ). Conversely, if the dog is punished when exhibiting a behavior, it becomes conditioned to avoid that behavior (e.g., receiving a small shock when crossing the boundary of an invisible electric fence).

Observational learning extends the effective range of both classical and operant conditioning. In contrast to classical and operant conditioning, in which learning occurs only through direct experience, observational learning is the process of watching others and then imitating what they do. A lot of learning among humans and other animals comes from observational learning. To get an idea of the extra effective range that observational learning brings, consider Ben and his son Julian from the introduction. How might observation help Julian learn to surf, as opposed to learning by trial and error alone? By watching his father, he can imitate the moves that bring success and avoid the moves that lead to failure. Can you think of something you have learned how to do after watching someone else?

All of the approaches covered in this chapter are part of a particular tradition in psychology, called behaviorism, which we discuss in the next section. However, these approaches do not represent the entire study of learning. Separate traditions of learning have taken shape within different fields of psychology, such as memory and cognition, so you will find that other chapters will round out your understanding of the topic. Over time these traditions tend to converge. For example, in this chapter you will see how cognition has come to play a larger role in behaviorism, whose more extreme adherents once insisted that behaviors are triggered by the environment with no intervening thought.

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LEARNING SKILLS

What is Learning?

Search SkillsYouNeed:

Learning Skills:

A - Z List of Learning Skills
Learning Approaches
Learning Styles
8 Types of Learning Styles
Understanding Your Preferences to Aid Learning
Lifelong Learning
Decisions to Make Before Applying to University
Top Tips for Surviving Student Life
Living Online: Education and Learning
8 Ways to Embrace Technology-Based Learning Approaches
Critical Thinking Skills
Critical Thinking and Fake News
Understanding and Addressing Conspiracy Theories
Critical Analysis
Study Skills
Top Tips for Study
Staying Motivated When Studying
Student Budgeting and Economic Skills
Getting Organised for Study
Finding Time to Study
Sources of Information
Assessing Internet Information
Using Apps to Support Study
What is Theory?
Styles of Writing
Effective Reading
Critical Reading
Note-Taking from Reading
Note-Taking for Verbal Exchanges
Planning an Essay
How to Write an Essay
The Do’s and Don’ts of Essay Writing
How to Write a Report
Academic Referencing
Assignment Finishing Touches
Reflecting on Marked Work
6 Skills You Learn in School That You Use in Real Life
Top 10 Tips on How to Study While Working
Exam Skills
Writing a Dissertation or Thesis
How to Write a Research Proposal
Ethical Issues in Research
Dissertation: The Introduction
Researching and Writing a Literature Review
Writing your Methodology
Dissertation: Results and Discussion
Dissertation: Conclusions and Extras
Research Methods
Introduction to Research Methods
Designing Research
Quantitative and Qualitative Research Methods
Qualitative Research Designs
Interviews for Research
Focus Groups
Qualitative Data from Interactions
Quantitative Research Designs
Sampling and Sample Design
Surveys and Survey Design
Observational Research and Secondary Data
Analysing Research Data
Analysing Qualitative Data
Simple Statistical Analysis
Statistical Analysis: Types of Data
Understanding Correlations
Understanding Statistical Distributions
Significance and Confidence Intervals
Developing and Testing Hypotheses
Multivariate Analysis
Teaching, Coaching, Mentoring and Counselling
Teaching Skills
The Importance of Structure in Education
Organisational Skills for Teachers
Motivation Skills for Teachers
Should a Teacher Be Strict or Friendly?
What is Coaching?
Coaching Skills
Developing Your Coaching Philosophy
Understanding Coaching Maturity
Coaching at Home
What is Life Coaching?
What is Mentoring?
Mentoring Skills
Learning from Mentoring
What is Counselling?
Approaches to Counselling
Becoming a Counsellor
Employability Skills for Graduates
Writing a CV or Résumé
Writing a Covering Letter
Applying for a Job
Interview Skills
The Skills Gap
Transferable Skills

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Almost every action we take is the result of past learning yet, for some people, learning still remains an activity undertaken in, or associated with, an educational context.

As babies we learn to eat, to gain attention, to crawl, to walk, etc. and as we develop into children, and our bodies become more functional, we learn an inordinate range of skills.

Traditionally, research and studies around learning focused primarily on early-years learning through childhood and adolescence. However, it is now recognised that learning is a continuous process that commences at birth and continues until death; it is the process through which we use our experience to deal with new situations and to develop relationships.

See our page: Lifelong Learning for more information.

A lot of our learning occurs randomly throughout life, from new experiences, gaining information and from our perceptions, for example: reading a newspaper or watching a news broadcast, talking with a friend or colleague, chance meetings and unexpected experiences.

Many experiences in life provide us with learning opportunities from which we can choose whether or not to learn. This type of experiential learning is in contrast to more formal approaches to learning such as training, mentoring , coaching and teaching , all of which have some type of structure in that they are planned learning involving a facilitator.

Teaching, training and other structured learning opportunities are activities that one person does to another, while learning is something we can only do for ourselves.

Learning involves far more than thinking: it involves the whole personality - senses, feelings, intuition, beliefs, values and will. If we do not have the will to learn, we will not learn and if we have learned, we are actually changed in some way. If the learning makes no difference it can have very little significance beyond being random ideas that float through our consciousness.

Learning needs to meet some personal need and recognising and identifying such needs enables us to evaluate whether the learning has been worthwhile and successful.

Learning occurs when we are able to:

Gain a mental or physical grasp of the subject.
Make sense of a subject, event or feeling by interpreting it into our own words or actions.
Use our newly acquired ability or knowledge in conjunction with skills and understanding we already possess.
Do something with the new knowledge or skill and take ownership of it.

Key Principles of Learning

There are a vast range of theories that attempt to explain and demonstrate the way that people learn.

Such theories can often contrast with each other depending on the type of learning they describe, for example traditional learning theories associated with children and adolescents engaged in ‘schooling’ may differ from theories associated with adult learning.

The following list is generic and identifies the key principles associated with all types of learning and can be applied to group situations as well as when learning alone or with a mentor, tutor or trainer.

This list is not exhaustive but it should, however, help you to understand some of the key concepts of learning.

People learn best when they are treated with respect and are not talked down to or treated as ignorant. Establishing ground rules at the start of a training session will reinforce this important principle However, for the training to be most effective and to involve full participation, the trainer should model such exemplar behaviour.

Learning opportunities should, when possible, be linked to previous positive experience - this involves self-awareness on the part of the learner and understanding and empathy on the part of any facilitator. Learning can be blocked by past negative experiences - some people who hated school cannot bear to be in a classroom situation, for example.

When possible learners should take part in the planning of learning activities. Learners should be encouraged to be self-directing in terms of goal-setting since this usually improves commitment and motivation and increases participation. Facilitators should examine the expectations of the learner at the start of a course or session to help to encourage self-direction.

People learn best when their physical environment is comfortable. In group situations a positive emotional and supportive environment is also important; individuals in groups tend to learn best when they can socialise and interact with other group members.

Interaction with a facilitator is vital. People need to be able to react, question and voice opinions on what they are learning. Generally, in group situations, quieter members should be gently encouraged for their input.

Learning activities and/or delivery need to be varied , to cover the range of different learning styles and help the learner maintain interest and motivation. In a classroom setting, for example, including discussions or other activities, especially some sort of problem solving, as part of a lesson or lecture will enable learners to interact and engage with the subject.

Instant rewards help. People learn best if the results and/or rewards of learning are made clear and can be demonstrated during or immediately after the learning experience.

Self-evaluation and reflective practice is important. Learners should be encouraged to reflect on what they have learnt and think about ways that they can further their knowledge. See our page: Reflective Practice for more information.

The PACT Learning Cycle

Many attempts have been made by academics and others to map and explain the learning processes. It is generally recognised that learning takes place in a repetitive cycle, an ongoing series of processes.

The diagram below represents a generic learning cycle and uses the acronym PACT. The cycle is relevant to all types of learning.

The PACT learning cycle stages are:

Procure. New knowledge (theory) or ability (skill) is acquired.
Apply. The new knowledge or skill is then practiced in some way.
Consider. The results of the practice are evaluated and/or assessed.
Transform. The original knowledge or ability is modified accordingly.

The cycle then continues and repeats.

The PACT cycle should help to demonstrate that learning is an iterative process: our learning evolves as we develop and we utilise early knowledge for later understanding.

There are many examples of these processes in action - usually we learn the basics of a subject or skill before progressing to intermediate, advanced and ultimately expert levels. At each stage we build on the knowledge and experience we have already acquired, gaining further knowledge, experience or techniques and repeating the learning cycle.

Learning Capacity

Our individual learning capacity varies considerably and will depend not only on ability but also on motivation, personality, learning style and an awareness of our own learning processes.

Working on an awareness of your own learning processes means 'learning how to learn'. For example, in university settings students are usually taught some study skills, which include learning how to seek information when needed and how to use it appropriately.

Learning is an internal activity and a key personal development skill.

Learning is not something that can be directly observed in others. We can, however, observe the results of learning in ourselves and others – this is why, in formal learning situations, assessment is such a crucial part of the teaching process.

The results of academic assessment, essays, exams etc. are simply attempts to measure how much an individual has learnt but they cannot measure the actual process of learning.

Learning brings about changes in the way we act, think and/or feel about ourselves, other people and the world around us. Such changes may be permanent or temporary depending on our own perceptions of the importance and relevance of the gained knowledge.

What are your chances of acceptance?

Calculate for all schools, your chance of acceptance.

Your chancing factors

Extracurriculars.

How to Write Stanford’s “Excited About Learning” Essay

This article was written based on the information and opinions presented by Johnathan Patin-Sauls and Vinay Bhaskara in a CollegeVine livestream. You can watch the full livestream for more info.

What’s Covered:

Choosing an idea vs. an experience, learning for the sake of learning, learning as a means to other ends, be specific.

Stanford University’s first essay prompt asks you to respond to the following:

“ The Stanford community is deeply curious and driven to learn in and out of the classroom. Reflect on an idea or experience that makes you genuinely excited about learning. (100-250 words)”

For this short answer question, your response is limited to a maximum of 250 words. In this article, we will discuss considerations for choosing to write about an idea or experience, ways to demonstrate a love or enthusiasm for learning, and why you should be as specific. For more information and guidance on writing the application essays for Stanford University, check out our post on how to write the Stanford University essays .

Regardless of if you choose either an idea or experience that makes you genuinely excited about learning as a topic, there are a few considerations for each.

Most people gravitate towards writing about an idea. One challenge that arises with an idea-focused essay is that applicants who are passionate about an idea often become hyper focused on explaining the idea but neglect to connect this idea to who they are as a person and why this idea excites them.

When writing about an experience, it is important to strike a balance between describing the experience and analyzing the impact of the experience on you, your goals, and your commitment to learning.

This essay question allows you to expand on your joy for learning and your genuine curiosity. Stanford is searching for students who are naturally curious and enjoy the process of learning and educating themselves. For example, a compelling essay could begin with a riveting story of getting lost while hiking the Appalachian Trail and describing how this experience led to a lifelong passion for studying primitive forms of navigation.

There is a strong tendency among applicants to write about formal academic coursework, however, the most compelling essays will subvert expectations by taking the concept of learning beyond the classroom and demonstrating how learning manifests itself in unique contexts in your life.

If you’re someone for whom learning is a means to other ends, it is important that you convey a sense of genuine enthusiasm and purpose beyond, “I want to go to X school because it will help me get Y job for Z purpose.” You may be motivated to attend college to obtain a certain position and make a comfortable income, however these answers are not necessarily what admissions officers are looking for. Instead, it can be helpful to relate an idea or experience to something more personal to you.

Academic & Professional Trajectory

Consider relating the idea or experience you choose to a major, degree program, research initiative, or professor that interests you at Stanford. Then go beyond the academic context to explain how the idea or experience ties into your future career.

For instance, if you are interested in the concept of universal health care, then you might describe your interest in applying to public health programs with faculty that specialize in national health care systems. You might then describe your long term career aspirations to work in the United States Senate on crafting and passing health care policy.

Personal Values & Experiences

Another way to tie the ideas in this essay back to a more personal topic is to discuss how the idea or experience informs who you are, how you treat others, or how you experience the world around you.

You could also focus on an idea or experience that has challenged, frustrated, or even offended you, thereby reinforcing and further justifying the values you hold and your worldview.

Community Building & Social Connectedness

You may also explore how this idea or experience connects you to a particular community by helping you understand, build, and support members of the community. Stanford is looking to find students who will be engaged members of the student body and carry out the community’s core mission, values, and projects, so this essay can be an opportunity to highlight how you would contribute to Stanford.

Be specific in your choice of idea or the way in which you describe an experience. For example, a response that focuses on the joys of learning philosophy is too broad to be particularly memorable or impactful. However, the mind-body problem looking at the debate concerning the relationship between thought and consciousness is a specific philosophical idea that lends itself to a rich discussion.

33 What Is Learning?

[latexpage]

Learning Objectives

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

Explain how learned behaviors are different from instincts and reflexes
Define learning
Recognize and define three basic forms of learning—classical conditioning, operant conditioning, and observational learning

Birds build nests and migrate as winter approaches. Infants suckle at their mother’s breast. Dogs shake water off wet fur. Salmon swim upstream to spawn, and spiders spin intricate webs. What do these seemingly unrelated behaviors have in common? They all are unlearned behaviors. Both instincts and reflexes are innate behaviors that organisms are born with. Reflexes are a motor or neural reaction to a specific stimulus in the environment. They tend to be simpler than instincts, involve the activity of specific body parts and systems (e.g., the knee-jerk reflex and the contraction of the pupil in bright light), and involve more primitive centers of the central nervous system (e.g., the spinal cord and the medulla). In contrast, instincts are innate behaviors that are triggered by a broader range of events, such as aging and the change of seasons. They are more complex patterns of behavior, involve movement of the organism as a whole (e.g., sexual activity and migration), and involve higher brain centers.

In classical conditioning, also known as Pavlovian conditioning, organisms learn to associate events—or stimuli—that repeatedly happen together. We experience this process throughout our daily lives. For example, you might see a flash of lightning in the sky during a storm and then hear a loud boom of thunder. The sound of the thunder naturally makes you jump (loud noises have that effect by reflex). Because lightning reliably predicts the impending boom of thunder, you may associate the two and jump when you see lightning. Psychological researchers study this associative process by focusing on what can be seen and measured—behaviors. Researchers ask if one stimulus triggers a reflex, can we train a different stimulus to trigger that same reflex? In operant conditioning, organisms learn, again, to associate events—a behavior and its consequence (reinforcement or punishment). A pleasant consequence encourages more of that behavior in the future, whereas a punishment deters the behavior. Imagine you are teaching your dog, Hodor, to sit. You tell Hodor to sit, and give him a treat when he does. After repeated experiences, Hodor begins to associate the act of sitting with receiving a treat. He learns that the consequence of sitting is that he gets a doggie biscuit ( [link] ). Conversely, if the dog is punished when exhibiting a behavior, it becomes conditioned to avoid that behavior (e.g., receiving a small shock when crossing the boundary of an invisible electric fence).

A photograph shows a dog standing at attention and smelling a treat in a person’s hand.

Instincts and reflexes are innate behaviors—they occur naturally and do not involve learning. In contrast, learning is a change in behavior or knowledge that results from experience. There are three main types of learning: classical conditioning, operant conditioning, and observational learning. Both classical and operant conditioning are forms of associative learning where associations are made between events that occur together. Observational learning is just as it sounds: learning by observing others.

Review Questions

Which of the following is an example of a reflex that occurs at some point in the development of a human being?

child riding a bike
teen socializing
infant sucking on a nipple
toddler walking

Learning is best defined as a relatively permanent change in behavior that ________.

occurs as a result of experience
is found only in humans
occurs by observing others

Two forms of associative learning are ________ and ________.

classical conditioning; operant conditioning
classical conditioning; Pavlovian conditioning
operant conditioning; observational learning
operant conditioning; learning conditioning

In ________ the stimulus or experience occurs before the behavior and then gets paired with the behavior.

associative learning
observational learning
operant conditioning
classical conditioning

Critical Thinking Questions

Compare and contrast classical and operant conditioning. How are they alike? How do they differ?

Both classical and operant conditioning involve learning by association. In classical conditioning, responses are involuntary and automatic; however, responses are voluntary and learned in operant conditioning. In classical conditioning, the event that drives the behavior (the stimulus) comes before the behavior; in operant conditioning, the event that drives the behavior (the consequence) comes after the behavior. Also, whereas classical conditioning involves an organism forming an association between an involuntary (reflexive) response and a stimulus, operant conditioning involves an organism forming an association between a voluntary behavior and a consequence.

What is the difference between a reflex and a learned behavior?

A reflex is a behavior that humans are born knowing how to do, such as sucking or blushing; these behaviors happen automatically in response to stimuli in the environment. Learned behaviors are things that humans are not born knowing how to do, such as swimming and surfing. Learned behaviors are not automatic; they occur as a result of practice or repeated experience in a situation.

Personal Application Questions

What is your personal definition of learning? How do your ideas about learning compare with the definition of learning presented in this text?

What kinds of things have you learned through the process of classical conditioning? Operant conditioning? Observational learning? How did you learn them?

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What Is the Psychology of Learning?

Learning in psychology is based on a person's experiences

Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

James Lacy, MLS, is a fact-checker and researcher.

The psychology of learning focuses on a range of topics related to how people learn and interact with their environments.

Are you preparing for a big test in your psychology of learning class? Or are you just interested in a review of learning and behavioral psychology topics? This learning study guide offers a brief overview of some of the major learning issues including behaviorism, classical, and operant conditioning .

Let's learn a bit more about the psychology of learning.

Definition of Learning in Psychology

Learning can be defined in many ways, but most psychologists would agree that it is a relatively permanent change in behavior that results from experience. During the first half of the 20th century, the school of thought known as behaviorism rose to dominate psychology and sought to explain the learning process. Behaviorism sought to measure only observable behaviors.

3 Types of Learning in Psychology

Behavioral learning falls into three general categories.

Classical Conditioning

Classical conditioning is a learning process in which an association is made between a previously neutral stimulus and a stimulus that naturally evokes a response.

For example, in Pavlov's classic experiment , the smell of food was the naturally occurring stimulus that was paired with the previously neutral ringing of the bell. Once an association had been made between the two, the sound of the bell alone could lead to a response.

For example, if you don't know how to swim and were to fall into a pool, you'd take actions to avoid the pool.

Operant Conditioning

Operant conditioning is a learning process in which the probability of a response occurring is increased or decreased due to reinforcement or punishment. First studied by Edward Thorndike and later by B.F. Skinner , the underlying idea behind operant conditioning is that the consequences of our actions shape voluntary behavior.

Skinner described how reinforcement could lead to increases in behaviors where punishment would result in decreases. He also found that the timing of when reinforcements were delivered influenced how quickly a behavior was learned and how strong the response would be. The timing and rate of reinforcement are known as schedules of reinforcement .

For example, your child might learn to complete their homework because you reward them with treats and/or praise.

Observational Learning

Observational learning is a process in which learning occurs through observing and imitating others. Albert Bandura's social learning theory suggests that in addition to learning through conditioning, people also learn through observing and imitating the actions of others.

Basic Principles of Social Learning Theory

As demonstrated in his classic Bobo Doll experiments, people will imitate the actions of others without direct reinforcement. Four important elements are essential for effective observational learning: attention, motor skills, motivation, and memory.

For example, a teen's older sibling gets a speeding ticket, with the unpleasant results of fines and restrictions. The teen then learns not to speed when they take up driving.

The three types of learning in psychology are classical conditioning, operant conditioning, and observational learning.

History of the Psychology of Learning

One of the first thinkers to study how learning influences behavior was psychologist John B. Watson , who suggested in his seminal 1913 paper Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It that all behaviors are a result of the learning process. Psychology, the behaviorists believed, should be the scientific study of observable, measurable behavior. Watson's work included the famous Little Albert experiment in which he conditioned a small child to fear a white rat.

Behaviorism dominated psychology for much of the early 20th century. Although behavioral approaches remain important today, the latter part of the century was marked by the emergence of humanistic psychology, biological psychology, and cognitive psychology .

Other important figures in the psychology of learning include:

Edward Thorndike
Ivan Pavlov
B.F. Skinner
Albert Bandura

A Word From Verywell

The psychology of learning encompasses a vast body of research that generally focuses on classical conditioning, operant conditioning, and observational learning. As the field evolves, it continues to have important implications for explaining and motivating human behavior.

By Kendra Cherry, MSEd Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

Center for Teaching

Assessing student learning.

Forms and Purposes of Student Assessment

Assessment is more than grading, assessment plans, methods of student assessment, generative and reflective assessment, teaching guides related to student assessment, references and additional resources.

Student assessment is, arguably, the centerpiece of the teaching and learning process and therefore the subject of much discussion in the scholarship of teaching and learning. Without some method of obtaining and analyzing evidence of student learning, we can never know whether our teaching is making a difference. That is, teaching requires some process through which we can come to know whether students are developing the desired knowledge and skills, and therefore whether our instruction is effective. Learning assessment is like a magnifying glass we hold up to students’ learning to discern whether the teaching and learning process is functioning well or is in need of change.

To provide an overview of learning assessment, this teaching guide has several goals, 1) to define student learning assessment and why it is important, 2) to discuss several approaches that may help to guide and refine student assessment, 3) to address various methods of student assessment, including the test and the essay, and 4) to offer several resources for further research. In addition, you may find helfpul this five-part video series on assessment that was part of the Center for Teaching’s Online Course Design Institute.

What is student assessment and why is it Important?

In their handbook for course-based review and assessment, Martha L. A. Stassen et al. define assessment as “the systematic collection and analysis of information to improve student learning” (2001, p. 5). An intentional and thorough assessment of student learning is vital because it provides useful feedback to both instructors and students about the extent to which students are successfully meeting learning objectives. In their book Understanding by Design , Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe offer a framework for classroom instruction — “Backward Design”— that emphasizes the critical role of assessment. For Wiggins and McTighe, assessment enables instructors to determine the metrics of measurement for student understanding of and proficiency in course goals. Assessment provides the evidence needed to document and validate that meaningful learning has occurred (2005, p. 18). Their approach “encourages teachers and curriculum planners to first ‘think like an assessor’ before designing specific units and lessons, and thus to consider up front how they will determine if students have attained the desired understandings” (Wiggins and McTighe, 2005, p. 18). [1]

Not only does effective assessment provide us with valuable information to support student growth, but it also enables critically reflective teaching. Stephen Brookfield, in Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher, argues that critical reflection on one’s teaching is an essential part of developing as an educator and enhancing the learning experience of students (1995). Critical reflection on one’s teaching has a multitude of benefits for instructors, including the intentional and meaningful development of one’s teaching philosophy and practices. According to Brookfield, referencing higher education faculty, “A critically reflective teacher is much better placed to communicate to colleagues and students (as well as to herself) the rationale behind her practice. She works from a position of informed commitment” (Brookfield, 1995, p. 17). One important lens through which we may reflect on our teaching is our student evaluations and student learning assessments. This reflection allows educators to determine where their teaching has been effective in meeting learning goals and where it has not, allowing for improvements. Student assessment, then, both develop the rationale for pedagogical choices, and enables teachers to measure the effectiveness of their teaching.

The scholarship of teaching and learning discusses two general forms of assessment. The first, summative assessment , is one that is implemented at the end of the course of study, for example via comprehensive final exams or papers. Its primary purpose is to produce an evaluation that “sums up” student learning. Summative assessment is comprehensive in nature and is fundamentally concerned with learning outcomes. While summative assessment is often useful for communicating final evaluations of student achievement, it does so without providing opportunities for students to reflect on their progress, alter their learning, and demonstrate growth or improvement; nor does it allow instructors to modify their teaching strategies before student learning in a course has concluded (Maki, 2002).

The second form, formative assessment , involves the evaluation of student learning at intermediate points before any summative form. Its fundamental purpose is to help students during the learning process by enabling them to reflect on their challenges and growth so they may improve. By analyzing students’ performance through formative assessment and sharing the results with them, instructors help students to “understand their strengths and weaknesses and to reflect on how they need to improve over the course of their remaining studies” (Maki, 2002, p. 11). Pat Hutchings refers to as “assessment behind outcomes”: “the promise of assessment—mandated or otherwise—is improved student learning, and improvement requires attention not only to final results but also to how results occur. Assessment behind outcomes means looking more carefully at the process and conditions that lead to the learning we care about…” (Hutchings, 1992, p. 6, original emphasis). Formative assessment includes all manner of coursework with feedback, discussions between instructors and students, and end-of-unit examinations that provide an opportunity for students to identify important areas for necessary growth and development for themselves (Brown and Knight, 1994).

It is important to recognize that both summative and formative assessment indicate the purpose of assessment, not the method . Different methods of assessment (discussed below) can either be summative or formative depending on when and how the instructor implements them. Sally Brown and Peter Knight in Assessing Learners in Higher Education caution against a conflation of the method (e.g., an essay) with the goal (formative or summative): “Often the mistake is made of assuming that it is the method which is summative or formative, and not the purpose. This, we suggest, is a serious mistake because it turns the assessor’s attention away from the crucial issue of feedback” (1994, p. 17). If an instructor believes that a particular method is formative, but he or she does not take the requisite time or effort to provide extensive feedback to students, the assessment effectively functions as a summative assessment despite the instructor’s intentions (Brown and Knight, 1994). Indeed, feedback and discussion are critical factors that distinguish between formative and summative assessment; formative assessment is only as good as the feedback that accompanies it.

It is not uncommon to conflate assessment with grading, but this would be a mistake. Student assessment is more than just grading. Assessment links student performance to specific learning objectives in order to provide useful information to students and instructors about learning and teaching, respectively. Grading, on the other hand, according to Stassen et al. (2001) merely involves affixing a number or letter to an assignment, giving students only the most minimal indication of their performance relative to a set of criteria or to their peers: “Because grades don’t tell you about student performance on individual (or specific) learning goals or outcomes, they provide little information on the overall success of your course in helping students to attain the specific and distinct learning objectives of interest” (Stassen et al., 2001, p. 6). Grades are only the broadest of indicators of achievement or status, and as such do not provide very meaningful information about students’ learning of knowledge or skills, how they have developed, and what may yet improve. Unfortunately, despite the limited information grades provide students about their learning, grades do provide students with significant indicators of their status – their academic rank, their credits towards graduation, their post-graduation opportunities, their eligibility for grants and aid, etc. – which can distract students from the primary goal of assessment: learning. Indeed, shifting the focus of assessment away from grades and towards more meaningful understandings of intellectual growth can encourage students (as well as instructors and institutions) to attend to the primary goal of education.

Barbara Walvoord (2010) argues that assessment is more likely to be successful if there is a clear plan, whether one is assessing learning in a course or in an entire curriculum (see also Gelmon, Holland, and Spring, 2018). Without some intentional and careful plan, assessment can fall prey to unclear goals, vague criteria, limited communication of criteria or feedback, invalid or unreliable assessments, unfairness in student evaluations, or insufficient or even unmeasured learning. There are several steps in this planning process.

Defining learning goals. An assessment plan usually begins with a clearly articulated set of learning goals.
Defining assessment methods. Once goals are clear, an instructor must decide on what evidence – assignment(s) – will best reveal whether students are meeting the goals. We discuss several common methods below, but these need not be limited by anything but the learning goals and the teaching context.
Developing the assessment. The next step would be to formulate clear formats, prompts, and performance criteria that ensure students can prepare effectively and provide valid, reliable evidence of their learning.
Integrating assessment with other course elements. Then the remainder of the course design process can be completed. In both integrated (Fink 2013) and backward course design models (Wiggins & McTighe 2005), the primary assessment methods, once chosen, become the basis for other smaller reading and skill-building assignments as well as daily learning experiences such as lectures, discussions, and other activities that will prepare students for their best effort in the assessments.
Communicate about the assessment. Once the course has begun, it is possible and necessary to communicate the assignment and its performance criteria to students. This communication may take many and preferably multiple forms to ensure student clarity and preparation, including assignment overviews in the syllabus, handouts with prompts and assessment criteria, rubrics with learning goals, model assignments (e.g., papers), in-class discussions, and collaborative decision-making about prompts or criteria, among others.
Administer the assessment. Instructors then can implement the assessment at the appropriate time, collecting evidence of student learning – e.g., receiving papers or administering tests.
Analyze the results. Analysis of the results can take various forms – from reading essays to computer-assisted test scoring – but always involves comparing student work to the performance criteria and the relevant scholarly research from the field(s).
Communicate the results. Instructors then compose an assessment complete with areas of strength and improvement, and communicate it to students along with grades (if the assignment is graded), hopefully within a reasonable time frame. This also is the time to determine whether the assessment was valid and reliable, and if not, how to communicate this to students and adjust feedback and grades fairly. For instance, were the test or essay questions confusing, yielding invalid and unreliable assessments of student knowledge.
Reflect and revise. Once the assessment is complete, instructors and students can develop learning plans for the remainder of the course so as to ensure improvements, and the assignment may be changed for future courses, as necessary.

Let’s see how this might work in practice through an example. An instructor in a Political Science course on American Environmental Policy may have a learning goal (among others) of students understanding the historical precursors of various environmental policies and how these both enabled and constrained the resulting legislation and its impacts on environmental conservation and health. The instructor therefore decides that the course will be organized around a series of short papers that will combine to make a thorough policy report, one that will also be the subject of student presentations and discussions in the last third of the course. Each student will write about an American environmental policy of their choice, with a first paper addressing its historical precursors, a second focused on the process of policy formation, and a third analyzing the extent of its impacts on environmental conservation or health. This will help students to meet the content knowledge goals of the course, in addition to its goals of improving students’ research, writing, and oral presentation skills. The instructor then develops the prompts, guidelines, and performance criteria that will be used to assess student skills, in addition to other course elements to best prepare them for this work – e.g., scaffolded units with quizzes, readings, lectures, debates, and other activities. Once the course has begun, the instructor communicates with the students about the learning goals, the assignments, and the criteria used to assess them, giving them the necessary context (goals, assessment plan) in the syllabus, handouts on the policy papers, rubrics with assessment criteria, model papers (if possible), and discussions with them as they need to prepare. The instructor then collects the papers at the appropriate due dates, assesses their conceptual and writing quality against the criteria and field’s scholarship, and then provides written feedback and grades in a manner that is reasonably prompt and sufficiently thorough for students to make improvements. Then the instructor can make determinations about whether the assessment method was effective and what changes might be necessary.

Assessment can vary widely from informal checks on understanding, to quizzes, to blogs, to essays, and to elaborate performance tasks such as written or audiovisual projects (Wiggins & McTighe, 2005). Below are a few common methods of assessment identified by Brown and Knight (1994) that are important to consider.

According to Euan S. Henderson, essays make two important contributions to learning and assessment: the development of skills and the cultivation of a learning style (1980). The American Association of Colleges & Universities (AAC&U) also has found that intensive writing is a “high impact” teaching practice likely to help students in their engagement, learning, and academic attainment (Kuh 2008).

Things to Keep in Mind about Essays

Essays are a common form of writing assignment in courses and can be either a summative or formative form of assessment depending on how the instructor utilizes them.
Essays encompass a wide array of narrative forms and lengths, from short descriptive essays to long analytical or creative ones. Shorter essays are often best suited to assess student’s understanding of threshold concepts and discrete analytical or writing skills, while longer essays afford assessments of higher order concepts and more complex learning goals, such as rigorous analysis, synthetic writing, problem solving, or creative tasks.
A common challenge of the essay is that students can use them simply to regurgitate rather than analyze and synthesize information to make arguments. Students need performance criteria and prompts that urge them to go beyond mere memorization and comprehension, but encourage the highest levels of learning on Bloom’s Taxonomy . This may open the possibility for essay assignments that go beyond the common summary or descriptive essay on a given topic, but demand, for example, narrative or persuasive essays or more creative projects.
Instructors commonly assume that students know how to write essays and can encounter disappointment or frustration when they discover that this is sometimes not the case. For this reason, it is important for instructors to make their expectations clear and be prepared to assist, or provide students to resources that will enhance their writing skills. Faculty may also encourage students to attend writing workshops at university writing centers, such as Vanderbilt University’s Writing Studio .

Exams and time-constrained, individual assessment

Examinations have traditionally been a gold standard of assessment, particularly in post-secondary education. Many educators prefer them because they can be highly effective, they can be standardized, they are easily integrated into disciplines with certification standards, and they are efficient to implement since they can allow for less labor-intensive feedback and grading. They can involve multiple forms of questions, be of varying lengths, and can be used to assess multiple levels of student learning. Like essays they can be summative or formative forms of assessment.

Things to Keep in Mind about Exams

Exams typically focus on the assessment of students’ knowledge of facts, figures, and other discrete information crucial to a course. While they can involve questioning that demands students to engage in higher order demonstrations of comprehension, problem solving, analysis, synthesis, critique, and even creativity, such exams often require more time to prepare and validate.
Exam questions can be multiple choice, true/false, or other discrete answer formats, or they can be essay or problem-solving. For more on how to write good multiple choice questions, see this guide .
Exams can make significant demands on students’ factual knowledge and therefore can have the side-effect of encouraging cramming and surface learning. Further, when exams are offered infrequently, or when they have high stakes by virtue of their heavy weighting in course grade schemes or in student goals, they may accompany violations of academic integrity.
In the process of designing an exam, instructors should consider the following questions. What are the learning objectives that the exam seeks to evaluate? Have students been adequately prepared to meet exam expectations? What are the skills and abilities that students need to do well on the exam? How will this exam be utilized to enhance the student learning process?

Self-Assessment

The goal of implementing self-assessment in a course is to enable students to develop their own judgment and the capacities for critical meta-cognition – to learn how to learn. In self-assessment students are expected to assess both the processes and products of their learning. While the assessment of the product is often the task of the instructor, implementing student self-assessment in the classroom ensures students evaluate their performance and the process of learning that led to it. Self-assessment thus provides a sense of student ownership of their learning and can lead to greater investment and engagement. It also enables students to develop transferable skills in other areas of learning that involve group projects and teamwork, critical thinking and problem-solving, as well as leadership roles in the teaching and learning process with their peers.

Things to Keep in Mind about Self-Assessment

Self-assessment is not self-grading. According to Brown and Knight, “Self-assessment involves the use of evaluative processes in which judgement is involved, where self-grading is the marking of one’s own work against a set of criteria and potential outcomes provided by a third person, usually the [instructor]” (1994, p. 52). Self-assessment can involve self-grading, but instructors of record retain the final authority to determine and assign grades.
To accurately and thoroughly self-assess, students require clear learning goals for the assignment in question, as well as rubrics that clarify different performance criteria and levels of achievement for each. These rubrics may be instructor-designed, or they may be fashioned through a collaborative dialogue with students. Rubrics need not include any grade assignation, but merely descriptive academic standards for different criteria.
Students may not have the expertise to assess themselves thoroughly, so it is helpful to build students’ capacities for self-evaluation, and it is important that they always be supplemented with faculty assessments.
Students may initially resist instructor attempts to involve themselves in the assessment process. This is usually due to insecurities or lack of confidence in their ability to objectively evaluate their own work, or possibly because of habituation to more passive roles in the learning process. Brown and Knight note, however, that when students are asked to evaluate their work, frequently student-determined outcomes are very similar to those of instructors, particularly when the criteria and expectations have been made explicit in advance (1994).
Methods of self-assessment vary widely and can be as unique as the instructor or the course. Common forms of self-assessment involve written or oral reflection on a student’s own work, including portfolio, logs, instructor-student interviews, learner diaries and dialog journals, post-test reflections, and the like.

Peer Assessment

Peer assessment is a type of collaborative learning technique where students evaluate the work of their peers and, in return, have their own work evaluated as well. This dimension of assessment is significantly grounded in theoretical approaches to active learning and adult learning . Like self-assessment, peer assessment gives learners ownership of learning and focuses on the process of learning as students are able to “share with one another the experiences that they have undertaken” (Brown and Knight, 1994, p. 52). However, it also provides students with other models of performance (e.g., different styles or narrative forms of writing), as well as the opportunity to teach, which can enable greater preparation, reflection, and meta-cognitive organization.

Things to Keep in Mind about Peer Assessment

Similar to self-assessment, students benefit from clear and specific learning goals and rubrics. Again, these may be instructor-defined or determined through collaborative dialogue.
Also similar to self-assessment, it is important to not conflate peer assessment and peer grading, since grading authority is retained by the instructor of record.
While student peer assessments are most often fair and accurate, they sometimes can be subject to bias. In competitive educational contexts, for example when students are graded normatively (“on a curve”), students can be biased or potentially game their peer assessments, giving their fellow students unmerited low evaluations. Conversely, in more cooperative teaching environments or in cases when they are friends with their peers, students may provide overly favorable evaluations. Also, other biases associated with identity (e.g., race, gender, or class) and personality differences can shape student assessments in unfair ways. Therefore, it is important for instructors to encourage fairness, to establish processes based on clear evidence and identifiable criteria, and to provide instructor assessments as accompaniments or correctives to peer evaluations.
Students may not have the disciplinary expertise or assessment experience of the instructor, and therefore can issue unsophisticated judgments of their peers. Therefore, to avoid unfairness, inaccuracy, and limited comments, formative peer assessments may need to be supplemented with instructor feedback.

As Brown and Knight assert, utilizing multiple methods of assessment, including more than one assessor when possible, improves the reliability of the assessment data. It also ensures that students with diverse aptitudes and abilities can be assessed accurately and have equal opportunities to excel. However, a primary challenge to the multiple methods approach is how to weigh the scores produced by multiple methods of assessment. When particular methods produce higher range of marks than others, instructors can potentially misinterpret and mis-evaluate student learning. Ultimately, they caution that, when multiple methods produce different messages about the same student, instructors should be mindful that the methods are likely assessing different forms of achievement (Brown and Knight, 1994).

These are only a few of the many forms of assessment that one might use to evaluate and enhance student learning (see also ideas present in Brown and Knight, 1994). To this list of assessment forms and methods we may add many more that encourage students to produce anything from research papers to films, theatrical productions to travel logs, op-eds to photo essays, manifestos to short stories. The limits of what may be assigned as a form of assessment is as varied as the subjects and skills we seek to empower in our students. Vanderbilt’s Center for Teaching has an ever-expanding array of guides on creative models of assessment that are present below, so please visit them to learn more about other assessment innovations and subjects.

Whatever plan and method you use, assessment often begins with an intentional clarification of the values that drive it. While many in higher education may argue that values do not have a role in assessment, we contend that values (for example, rigor) always motivate and shape even the most objective of learning assessments. Therefore, as in other aspects of assessment planning, it is helpful to be intentional and critically reflective about what values animate your teaching and the learning assessments it requires. There are many values that may direct learning assessment, but common ones include rigor, generativity, practicability, co-creativity, and full participation (Bandy et al., 2018). What do these characteristics mean in practice?

Rigor. In the context of learning assessment, rigor means aligning our methods with the goals we have for students, principles of validity and reliability, ethics of fairness and doing no harm, critical examinations of the meaning we make from the results, and good faith efforts to improve teaching and learning. In short, rigor suggests understanding learning assessment as we would any other form of intentional, thoroughgoing, critical, and ethical inquiry.

Generativity. Learning assessments may be most effective when they create conditions for the emergence of new knowledge and practice, including student learning and skill development, as well as instructor pedagogy and teaching methods. Generativity opens up rather than closes down possibilities for discovery, reflection, growth, and transformation.

Practicability. Practicability recommends that learning assessment be grounded in the realities of the world as it is, fitting within the boundaries of both instructor’s and students’ time and labor. While this may, at times, advise a method of learning assessment that seems to conflict with the other values, we believe that assessment fails to be rigorous, generative, participatory, or co-creative if it is not feasible and manageable for instructors and students.

Full Participation. Assessments should be equally accessible to, and encouraging of, learning for all students, empowering all to thrive regardless of identity or background. This requires multiple and varied methods of assessment that are inclusive of diverse identities – racial, ethnic, national, linguistic, gendered, sexual, class, etcetera – and their varied perspectives, skills, and cultures of learning.

Co-creation. As alluded to above regarding self- and peer-assessment, co-creative approaches empower students to become subjects of, not just objects of, learning assessment. That is, learning assessments may be more effective and generative when assessment is done with, not just for or to, students. This is consistent with feminist, social, and community engagement pedagogies, in which values of co-creation encourage us to critically interrogate and break down hierarchies between knowledge producers (traditionally, instructors) and consumers (traditionally, students) (e.g., Saltmarsh, Hartley, & Clayton, 2009, p. 10; Weimer, 2013). In co-creative approaches, students’ involvement enhances the meaningfulness, engagement, motivation, and meta-cognitive reflection of assessments, yielding greater learning (Bass & Elmendorf, 2019). The principle of students being co-creators of their own education is what motivates the course design and professional development work Vanderbilt University’s Center for Teaching has organized around the Students as Producers theme.

Below is a list of other CFT teaching guides that supplement this one and may be of assistance as you consider all of the factors that shape your assessment plan.

Active Learning
An Introduction to Lecturing
Beyond the Essay: Making Student Thinking Visible in the Humanities
Bloom’s Taxonomy
Classroom Assessment Techniques (CATs)
Classroom Response Systems
How People Learn
Service-Learning and Community Engagement
Syllabus Construction
Teaching with Blogs
Test-Enhanced Learning
Assessing Student Learning (a five-part video series for the CFT’s Online Course Design Institute)

Angelo, Thomas A., and K. Patricia Cross. Classroom Assessment Techniques: A Handbook for College Teachers . 2 nd edition. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1993. Print.

Bandy, Joe, Mary Price, Patti Clayton, Julia Metzker, Georgia Nigro, Sarah Stanlick, Stephani Etheridge Woodson, Anna Bartel, & Sylvia Gale. Democratically engaged assessment: Reimagining the purposes and practices of assessment in community engagement . Davis, CA: Imagining America, 2018. Web.

Bass, Randy and Heidi Elmendorf. 2019. “ Designing for Difficulty: Social Pedagogies as a Framework for Course Design .” Social Pedagogies: Teagle Foundation White Paper. Georgetown University, 2019. Web.

Brookfield, Stephen D. Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher . San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1995. Print

Brown, Sally, and Peter Knight. Assessing Learners in Higher Education . 1 edition. London ;Philadelphia: Routledge, 1998. Print.

Cameron, Jeanne et al. “Assessment as Critical Praxis: A Community College Experience.” Teaching Sociology 30.4 (2002): 414–429. JSTOR . Web.

Fink, L. Dee. Creating Significant Learning Experiences: An Integrated Approach to Designing College Courses. Second Edition. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2013. Print.

Gibbs, Graham and Claire Simpson. “Conditions under which Assessment Supports Student Learning. Learning and Teaching in Higher Education 1 (2004): 3-31. Print.

Henderson, Euan S. “The Essay in Continuous Assessment.” Studies in Higher Education 5.2 (1980): 197–203. Taylor and Francis+NEJM . Web.

Gelmon, Sherril B., Barbara Holland, and Amy Spring. Assessing Service-Learning and Civic Engagement: Principles and Techniques. Second Edition . Stylus, 2018. Print.

Kuh, George. High-Impact Educational Practices: What They Are, Who Has Access to Them, and Why They Matter , American Association of Colleges & Universities, 2008. Web.

Maki, Peggy L. “Developing an Assessment Plan to Learn about Student Learning.” The Journal of Academic Librarianship 28.1 (2002): 8–13. ScienceDirect . Web. The Journal of Academic Librarianship. Print.

Sharkey, Stephen, and William S. Johnson. Assessing Undergraduate Learning in Sociology . ASA Teaching Resource Center, 1992. Print.

Walvoord, Barbara. Assessment Clear and Simple: A Practical Guide for Institutions, Departments, and General Education. Second Edition . San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2010. Print.

Weimer, Maryellen. Learner-Centered Teaching: Five Key Changes to Practice. Second Edition . San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2013. Print.

Wiggins, Grant, and Jay McTighe. Understanding By Design . 2nd Expanded edition. Alexandria,

VA: Assn. for Supervision & Curriculum Development, 2005. Print.

[1] For more on Wiggins and McTighe’s “Backward Design” model, see our teaching guide here .

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Why is Learning Important? A Deep Dive Into the Benefits of Being a Lifelong Learner

Free Guide: 5 L&D Trends to Watch Out for in 2021

Learning and development is changing and to stay ahead of the curve you need to know the ways in which it’s doing so.

Learning is important (at least to us here at Learnerbly 😉).

But why is learning important?

Education - both formal and informal - is essential to the development of considerate, compassionate, and cooperative societies, the success of organizations, and the personal pursuit of happiness.

In this article, we unpack what continuous learning and education can mean to the life of each individual, to the organization's they are part of, and to their broader societies.

Looking at this issue from a different angle, we then reflect on some of the potential consequences of not practicing continuous learning—or at least of not prioritizing education in our day-to-day lives.

What Does Learning Even Mean?

Learning is essential to humanity. It’s so embedded in our lives that we rarely consider what it means .

Learning is the process of gaining new skills, knowledge, understanding, and values. This is something people can do by themselves, although it’s generally made easier with education: the process of helping someone or a group of others to learn.

With educational support, learning can happen more efficiently. Education is also how we collect and share all the skills and knowledge we learn individually. Benefitting from education instead of having to build new skills and knowledge by ourselves from scratch is part of what it means to live in a society instead of in isolation.

Learning and education impart more than just knowledge and skills. They also transmit the values, attitudes, and behaviors we have decided to share.

For example, education has helped us to create and maintain the shared belief that when someone does something particularly harmful, they deserve a fair legal trial no matter their crime.

In simple terms, learning and education help hold together human life and civilization as we know it. They are what we use to make our societies better for ourselves, those around us, and those who come after us.

This is why the right to free elementary education is enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights , which states that “education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms” and that “it shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups”.

What Does Learning Mean for Us Today?

Learning is not unique to humans. Scientists have observed many different animals teaching their young skills like how to find food and keep themselves safe.

Among humans, educational practices can be traced back practically as far as human life goes. Evidence of teaching and learning has been found from remnants of human life dating back thousands of years BCE—and that’s just where we’ve found written evidence. Oral and practical education (for example, early humans physically teaching their children to hunt and forage for food) likely go back even further.

Learning has continued all over the world throughout the history of human life, in more ways than we have time to write about here. However, the Fourth Industrial Revolution will have a massive impact on how we as a global society approach education going forward.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution refers to the rapid rise of new technologies including big data, artificial intelligence, automation, and the Internet of Things. Life in this new technological landscape demands that we change our approach to education in a number of ways.

One major shift we’ll all have to make is the move from viewing education as something finite (something we do at school and university so we can go into the working world and then never have to study again) to something that keeps going throughout our lives as we gain new skill after new skill.

To face a future of constant technological change, we’ll need to adapt to continuous learning as a new norm. In his book Future Shock, US writer and businessperson Alvin Toffler wrote that “the illiterate of the 21st Century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn and relearn.”

The future of education lies in integrating continuous learning into our everyday personal and professional lives even more than we already do.

This might be why the Finnish Innovation Fund Sitra has proposed that compulsory, publicly funded education covers not just elementary school—as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights puts forward—but continuous learning, too.

Sitra cites US American biologist E.O. Wilson, who said “We are drowning in information, but yearn for wisdom. Therefore, the world will be led by those… who are able to compile the correct information at precisely the right moment while thinking critically and making important decisions wisely.”

How Learning Supports Our Wellbeing

We’ve talked about why education is important to society as a whole, but continuous learning also benefits the personal life of anyone who engages with it. Here's how.

Research suggests that people who practice continuous or lifelong learning are happier on average. This may be because lifelong learning helps people to keep developing their passions and interests, which bring us happiness.

Learning about topics that interest us makes most of us feel happy, at least in the moment, as does spending time honing hobbies we are passionate about (which is also an act of lifelong learning!). It stands to reason that building time for these things into your personal life would contribute to your overall happiness.

Continuous learning also helps us to keep pursuing our personal and professional development goals, and all the achievements along the way are a great source of happiness for many of us.

It also helps us keep boredom at bay, which is another way of increasing our happiness.

Several scientific studies have shown that lifelong learning activities can help people maintain better brain function as they age.

One study found that people with Alzheimer’s who practice more learning throughout their lives start to display dementia symptoms later than those who have spent less time learning. In other words, lifelong learning might be able to slow the onset of Alzheimer’s.

Another study found that spending time learning to play a new musical instrument can help delay cognitive decline. A third study found that spending time learning new skills, namely digital photography and quilting, helped elderly people to improve their memories.

How Learning Supports Our Work

Continuous learning—especially in the form of workplace learning—also offers a host of professional benefits for both employees and their organizations. These include:

One key way that continuous learning helps both employees and their companies is by helping people upskill, which means improving their existing skill sets and broadening them with new skills.

Upskilling is good for employees because it equips them with the knowledge and skills they need to pursue their personal and professional development goals, for example by upskilling towards a promotion.

Building a more highly skilled workforce through continuous learning is also beneficial to companies. More skilled employees can do their jobs better and faster, and research shows that companies with a strong learning culture are 52% more productive.

Employees learning new skills to pursue promotions also benefits companies because internal promotion is generally a more time-efficient and cost-effective solution than hiring externally.

Lastly, companies who support their employees' continuous learning boast demonstrably higher staff engagement, which in turn boosts productivity and profitability . This is also beneficial to individual employees, because being engaged at work generally means enjoying your job and finding it meaningful.

Adaptability

As we mentioned earlier, the Fourth Industrial Revolution is pushing employees to pursue continuous learning throughout their lives as they will have to constantly adapt to new knowledge and technological changes, which keep appearing faster and faster.

Engaging in continuous learning means becoming accustomed to incorporating new knowledge all the time, and this is essential in order to keep adapting.

It's important to make learning continuous because this gives people the skills they need to adapt, empowering them to stay competitive in the job market, pursue promotions in their current jobs, and keep pace with knowledge and technological changes in their everyday lives.

Investing in an adaptable workforce by supporting continuous learning is also key to any company that wants to remain competitive and relevant in its industry.

Learning also drives innovation, which describes the new ideas and technological and cultural developments that people come up with to solve problems and improve their societies.

Research shows that companies that have a strong learning culture are 92% more likely to innovate by developing new products and processes, and 56% more likely to be first to market with these new developments.

Innovation is important for society as a whole because the benefits of these new developments can be shared to help improve all of our lives. The fast-tracking of the Covid-19 vaccines are a great example of an organizational innovation that has been developed to combat a global pandemic.

Learning can also help people build the critical thinking skills they need to view problems in new, innovative ways.

What Happens If We Don’t Prioritize Learning?

Another way to reflect on why learning is so important is to think about all the potential negative consequences of not prioritizing learning enough.

The flipside of everything we’ve said in this article is that a society that didn’t prioritize learning would have a lack of shared knowledge and skills for people to benefit from. It would also have a lack of shared ideas and values, which could stoke conflict and war as people and their leaders might struggle more to find common goals on which they can agree.

Not prioritizing learning about other people and cultures would also diminish our ability to understand people who are different from us, and this too would contribute to increased conflict and violence.

People who don’t prioritize continuous learning enough in their own lives are likely to be less happy or fulfilled, as they spend less time exploring their interests and working on personal development.

Elderly people who spend less time on learning are likely to experience faster cognitive degeneration than those who learn regularly.

Companies that don’t prioritize their people’s learning are less productive, less profitable, and have lower staff engagement rates than those that do. They’re also less likely to remain competitive in their industries or produce novel products or services.

People who don’t get enough learning support at work are more likely to be disengaged and see their skills stagnate compared to those who work with companies that invest in their people’s learning.

They will also struggle more with pursuing career development , as they have little support for the upskilling they need to do to grow in their work.

Lastly, if we don’t prioritize learning enough as we face an uncertain—but certainly technologically advancing—future, we will likely have a more difficult time adjusting to the changes ahead of us and making the most of future opportunities.

Continuous learning is important because it helps people to feel happier and more fulfilled in their lives and careers, and to maintain stronger cognitive functioning when they get older.

Making learning continuous helps companies boost their productivity, profitability, adaptability to change, and potential to innovate in their industries.

Learning is important to society as a whole because it helps different groups of people to share knowledge, agree on mutual values, and understand one another better.

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Importance of Learning: Essay Intro Examples and Tips

Table of Contents

Learning is a continuous process. It doesn’t just stop at school. There’s a broad selection of learning topics that you can write about for your essay. You can talk about E-learning, Key Concepts of Learning, and so on. Regardless of the topic you’ve been assigned to write on, it’s essential to do some thorough research. And to start your essay right, you will need a winning learning essay introduction.

You need to make your essay introduction informative while still being interesting. This is why we’ve gathered the best intro examples and writing tips you can use. Check them out and start winning those essays!

A wall sign in the shape of a pencil that says

Writing Tips for a Great Learning Essay Introduction

Keep it interesting.

Your learning essay introduction can make or break your essay. There are many ways you can keep it interesting and professional. Here are just some ideas to hook your reader in.

Include a surprising fact that conveys something about the problem to be addressed in the paper.
Find an interesting quote that summarizes your arguments well.
Put your readers in a different situation using rhetorical questions to make them think about your topic in a new way.
Start with an anecdote or story to get your readers emotionally engaged.

Present statistical data

Do your research and gather concrete statistical data you can cite in your intro. Not only does this make your essay look more credible, but it also serves as proof to strengthen your argument.

Be mindful of your intro length.

An intro that’s too long might overwhelm your readers. But an introduction that’s too short won’t be able to introduce and elaborate on your work fully. A good rule of thumb in determining the proper intro length is that it should be 10% of the overall length of your essay. If your essay is 2000 words long, your intro should be approximately 200 words long.

8 Introduction Examples for Learning Essays

Example 1: the benefits of online learning.

Your life is a continuous learning process, and you never stop learning. Whenever you attend school, you will learn new things every day. But learning is not just limited to students. No matter how old you are, you can learn new things.

Online learning is an excellent way for people of all ages to learn new things. There are many online courses available that can help you learn new skills. Online learning can help you accomplish your goals, whether learning about a new topic or improving your existing skills. It’s also convenient and flexible, so you can study at your own pace. With its many benefits, online learning is becoming more popular every year.

Example 2: The Importance of Learning

Learning provides us with new knowledge that will significantly impact our well-being. As an individual, learning new skills and techniques can help you have an intelligent conversation with others. If a person has learned the necessary business skills, they would be a great asset to a company. After college students learn all the educational knowledge, they can move forward in their lives to be better and bigger. Learning can provide many benefits for individuals, but they must seek it out passionately. One cannot expect to learn a new skill or technique every day.

Example 3: Learning Process

It is helpful to try something new instead of doing the same thing every single day. When people experience new things and learn new material, they are learning. Many people do not realize it, but we are learning something new every day. Learning causes a permanent change in behavior or knowledge that comes from experience. It can also be adaptive and flexible to meet life’s demands. There’s nothing as important as the process of learning. Learning transforms and engages one’s brain. When people are introduced to new things, their thinking and ideas can change forever.

Example 4: How Learning Changes Us

Learning is a continuous process that is constantly changing for me. Through it, I feel better than I did the day before. Learning has enabled me to discover myself as an individual and discover my strengths and weaknesses. I continue to become better every day.

Example 5: The Introduction To E-Learning

E-learning is a recognized educational practice that supports a flexible model of knowledge access. It enables education and training to serve a numerically larger audience than traditional methods can adequately support. Teachers are still necessary for students and always will be, but the fact that e-learning is now widespread can revolutionize education. E-learning can be changed, modified, and adapted to changing student needs. Distances are no longer an obstacle to someone studying. However, some e-learning methods require some initiation/training to familiarize themselves.

Example 6: Benefits of Mastering English

Language has become critical to understanding technology and information in this age of globalization. If you can’t master a foreign language, it becomes very challenging to communicate with people worldwide. Multifarious and multicultural societies have their own languages. Therefore, worldwide interaction and communication must be supported by one global language. English is that one global language. A good grasp of English is beneficial since it gives us many opportunities for success.

Example 7: E-Learning is The Future

Most e-learning programs have grown exponentially in recent years. Online courses offer students a convenient and flexible way to learn, resulting in increased conversions among students of all ages. There is no doubt that e-learning is the future of education. A traditional classroom learning method will always be necessary. But the fast-growing online network provides valuable resources to educate people from all walks of life. The flexibility of e-learning also allows people to study at their own pace and in their own time. More and more people are turning to e-learning to further their education.

Example 8: Online Learning for Workers

In today’s increasingly competitive job market, workers must constantly refresh their skills and knowledge. Traditional schools and colleges are not always possible for busy adults to balance work and family obligations. But thanks to the internet, access to quality educational resources has become easier. You can now learn new skills and knowledge online without leaving your office. They are an ideal solution for busy professionals. With so many online learning portals now available, there is no excuse for learning new skills or improving your existing skill set.

Wrapping Up

Writing a learning essay introduction can seem daunting at first, but with the proper research and these tips, it will become much more manageable.

Remember, your introduction is the first impression your viewers will have of your essay , so it’s the perfect place to grab their attention. Get them excited about what your essay has to offer.

Importance of Learning: Essay Intro Examples and Tips

Abir Ghenaiet

Abir is a data analyst and researcher. Among her interests are artificial intelligence, machine learning, and natural language processing. As a humanitarian and educator, she actively supports women in tech and promotes diversity.

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Meaningful Learning: Definition, Benefits, Examples

meaningful learning definition and characteristics

Meaningful learning is learning that is both relevant to a student’s life and aims to achieve deep understanding through the contextualization of the knowledge with prior knowledge and experience.

We tend to contrast meaningful learning to rote learning . Rote learning involves decontextualized repetition and memorization of facts. By contrast, meaningful learning requires students to examine ideas and critique them, compare them to prior knowledge , and apply them to new contexts.

Most educational researchers today believe that meaningful learning leads to deep understanding and insights, long-term knowledge, and the ability to apply knowledge to real-life.

Examples of meaningful learning strategies include: active learning, project-based learning, inquiry-based learning, experimental learning, and peer collaboration.

Meaningful Learning Definition and Characteristics

Most scholarly definitions of meaningful learning include two key features. First, the content being learned needs to be relatable to students’ lives. Second, students need to be able to connect and compare the new information to prior knowledge.

Here are a few scholarly definitions that demonstrate these key features:

“Meaningful learning as a process presupposes, in turn, both that learners employ a meaningful learning set and that the material they learn is potentially meaningful to them, that is, relatable to relevant anchoring ideas in their cognitive structures.” (Ausubel, 2012)

“Meaningful learning refers to a process in which students link new information to relevant concepts that they already possess. To learn meaningfully, individuals must consciously choose to relate new information to knowledge that they already know, rather than simply memorizing isolated facts or concept definitions.” (Champe, Harvey & Ferrier, 2005)

“Learners must see that what is being learned is meaningful and relevant to their personal and life interests, which results in a natural motivation to learn.” (McCombs & Miller, 2007)

Furthermore, meaningful learning tends to be compared to rote learning. Rote learning does not tend to relate to students’ lives, and it does not tend to be connected to prior knowledge.

Rather, rote learning is about being given information by the teacher that should be repeated and memorized. The new information tends not to be explained sufficiently, critiqued, or related to prior knowledge.

(For example, learning the times tables is a rote learning example: it involves memorizing sums through practice and repetition.)

One definition that compares meaningful to rote learning is presented below:

“Meaningful learning occurs when learning can be related to previous knowledge and related to a preexisting cognitive framework. Rote learning, on the other hand, is not linked to a cognitive framework and often remains unretained and isolated.” (Walsh, 2013)

Characteristics of Meaningful Learning

Characteristics of meaningful learning include: active engagement, relevance to prior knowledge, integration with existing knowledge, elaboration and reflection, and personal significance.

One of the more interesting definitions of meaningful learning is that of Jonassen, Peck, and Wilson (1999), because it presents a framework of five characteristics. These are:

Active engagement: Student shouldn’t learn passively (by being told information). Rather, they should use active learning strategies like experimenting, testing hypotheses, and inquiring.
Relevance to prior knowledge: Students must build upon what they already know. Teachers should start a learning experience by identifying what the learners already know, and finding out how the new information relates to that.
Integration with existing knowledge: Learning occurs when new knowledge is compared to existing knowledge. Students may assimilate the new information, meaning they realize that the new information fits very well with the existing information. Or, they may accommodate their existing knowledge to accept the new information. This means they have to fix misunderstandings they previously had in order to make the old and new information make sense. In practical terms, teachers will ask students: “Based on what you know, does this make sense?” and “Does this change your mind about what you previously knew about the topic?”
Elaboration and reflection: Elaboration means taking the new knowledge and seeing how they can use it in multiple different contexts. For example, a student might apply their new knowledge of gravity based on an apple falling and see if they can use it to measure how far a trebuchet can fling a rock.
Personal significance: The information needs to have some point that makes sense to the student. For example, instead of learning compound interest in a pure mathematical context, students might use the concept to see how much money they can have if they saved $10 per week every week until they’re 65. This makes sure the students know what value the new knowledge has for their lives.

Benefits of Meaningful Learning

Meaningful learning has a range of key benefits, including:

1. Long-term retention

Most scholars believe meaningful learning to achieve greater long-term memorization than rote learning.

This is because students have experiences and stories connected to what they learned (rather than just looking at note cards repeatedly for weeks leading up to a test).

If we have experience and memory, and our knowledge is linked like a cognitive web to other prior knowledge in our minds, then it’s easier to dig up and actively recall the information well into the future.

As Karpicke and Grimaldi (2012, p. 408) argue, “meaningful learning is thought to be robust and enduring.”

2. Transfer of knowledge to new situations

One of the downsides of rote learning is that it tends to be hard to recall and apply outside of the context in which it was learned.

For example, a language student might be good at remembering a word on a memory cards game, but when it comes to using it at the shops, they often find they can’t bring up the word they need.

By contrast, under meaningful learning, because students learned the word in meaningful contexts (in this example, potentially through role play), the word often becomes easier to recall the word in contextualized situations.

3. Motivation and interest in learning

A key feature of meaningful learning is that it has to be meaningful to a student’s life, which enhances intrinsic motivation .

When students see that what they are learning is valuable to them or relates to things they’re interested in outside of the educational context, the students develop intrinsic motivation to learn (McCombs & Miller, 2007).

By contrast, rote learning often relies on rewards and punishments – or in other words, extrinsic motivation .

4. Critical thinking skills

In meaningful learning environments, students need to compare and contrast their existing knowledge to the new information.

Through this process, they often start to notice contradictions between the new and old information that needs to be overcome in order to achieve cognitive equilibrium.

During this process, students are actively exercising their critical thinking skills .

Strategies for Promoting Meaningful Learning

Active learning : Encourage students to be active participants in the development of knowledge. Instead of giving them the answers, get them to engage in tasks that will result in them coming to the conclusions on their own. This may take the form of problem-based learning where you provide students with problems to solve rather than answers to questions.
Project-based learning: In project-based learning, students are given something to construct. It might be applying math problems to the construction of an object, applying new literacy concepts in the creation of a play, or using a particular music concept in the construction of a musical piece.
Inquiry-based learning : Give students a problem that they need to research in order to solve. This often requires students to do internet research or test hypotheses until they come up with a coherent answer. Through this process, students don’t just get an answer to questions, but also understand why the answer they have is the correct answer. This knowing why helps them to remember and recall the information in the long-term.
Making connections to prior knowledge: Start all learning scenarios with something the students already know. This gives an entry-way into the topic that students can understand and relate to. You can consistently return to the prior knowledge and ask students to continually compare the new knowledge to the old knowledge.
Incorporating student interests and relevance: If students find the content meaningful to their own lives, they will be more motivated to learn. So, teachers can look at the curriculum content they need to teach and find ways to creatively present the information in ways that demonstrate why students should be interested in learning about the topic.
Encouraging collaborative learning : Get students together to discuss the concepts and compare notes. By talking to one another, students can make cognitive connections and see ideas from multiple perspectives. This can be far more effective than having students simply work in isolation trying to hammer the ideas into their minds through repetition.

Meaningful Learning Examples

1. stem education.

STEM is a great area for meaningful learning scenarios. The scenario would involve engaging students in project-based learning.

The projects will require students to apply new information to real-world problems (preferably relatable and tangible problems that they may come across in their own lives).

For example, students could be tasked with figuring out how to engineer a new door handle for their classroom door.

To do this, they would need to figure out the physics behind ensuring the handle can hold up the whole door and how the handle can operate smoothly.

2. Language learning

In language learning, meaningful learning means learning new words and concepts through scenarios they may come across when using the language.

Instead of trying to repeat the first 1000 verbs in the language they’re learning, you might try to teach them some travel terms and phrases that they would want to know, then reverse engineer those phrases to figure out how to adjust them for different contexts.

Theoretical Connection

Meaningful learning is based upon constructivism. This is a perspective that believes learning occurs through constructing information in our minds by comparing and contrasting new information to old information.

It is contrasted to rote learning’s basis in behaviorism:

Constructivism’s Argument : We tend to remember things more effectively when making connections to prior knowledge, contextualizing knowledge, and exploring concepts through storytelling and experience. For example: you will be able to recount events better if you actually were there rather than if you’re just retelling someone else’s story. (This approach tends to be associated with active learning ).
Behaviorism’s Argument : We learn through repetition. Give the student the information they need to know, then get them to repeat it over and over again, often over a spaced period of time (see: spaced repetition), accompanied by rewards and punishments. (This approach tends to be associated with passive learning ).

Generally, contemporary education theorists believe that the constructivist classroom teaching perspective is far more effective than behaviorism.

Challenges and Potential Solutions

Lack of time and resources: To create a meaningful learning scenario, teachers need time. They may also need resources to help students create physical scenarios and projects. Then, when it comes to doing the task, it’s more time-consuming asking students to ‘construct’ the knowledge for themselves than just giving them the answer. In an era of an overcrowded curriculum, this is a tall ask.
Testing: Passing standardized tests often requires simply remembering and regurgitating facts and figures. This sort of testing lends itself to rote learning. But we know that meaningful learning is more useful long-term. As a result, state testing regimes need to change and evolve so meaningful learning is incentivized and rewarded.

Meaningful learning underpins good pedagogy . It leads to ideal higher-order thinking skills such as critical and analytical thinking . By ensuring your lessons are meaningful to students, you will be helping them to develop skills for the future and supporting their long-term cognitive development .

Ausubel, D. P. (2012). The acquisition and retention of knowledge: A cognitive view . Los Angeles: Springer Science & Business Media.

Champe, P. C., Harvey, R. A., & Ferrier, D. R. (2005). Biochemistry . New York: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins.

Jonassen, D. H., Peck, K. L., & Wilson, B. G. (1999). Learning with technology: A constructivist perspective. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall.

Karpicke, J. D., & Grimaldi, P. J. (2012). Retrieval-based learning: A perspective for enhancing meaningful learning. Educational Psychology Review , 24 (3), 401-418. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-012-9202-2

McCombs, B. L., & Miller, L. (2007). Learner-centered classroom practices and assessments: Maximizing student motivation, learning, and achievement. New York: Corwin Press.

Walsh, K. (2013). Oxford textbook of medical education . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Chris Drew (PhD)

Dr. Chris Drew is the founder of the Helpful Professor. He holds a PhD in education and has published over 20 articles in scholarly journals. He is the former editor of the Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education. [Image Descriptor: Photo of Chris]

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Essay on Importance of Learning

Students are often asked to write an essay on Importance of Learning in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Importance of Learning

The value of learning.

Learning is a crucial part of our lives. It helps us understand the world, make informed decisions, and grow as individuals.

Knowledge and Skills

Learning equips us with knowledge and skills. It makes us competent and confident, enabling us to face challenges and solve problems.

Personal Growth

Learning stimulates personal growth. It encourages curiosity and creativity, fostering a lifelong love for exploration and discovery.

Building Connections

Learning helps us connect with others. It promotes empathy and understanding, strengthening our relationships and communities.

In conclusion, learning is essential for our development, success, and happiness.

250 Words Essay on Importance of Learning

The power of learning.

Learning is an integral part of human existence. It is a process that starts at birth and continues throughout our lives, shaping our understanding of the world and our place within it. Learning is not confined to the acquisition of knowledge in a formal education setting. It extends to our daily interactions, experiences, and the continuous process of personal and professional development.

Learning and Personal Growth

Learning is the cornerstone of personal growth and self-improvement. It broadens our perspectives, fosters curiosity, and encourages us to question the status quo. Our ability to learn and adapt is what has allowed humankind to evolve and progress over time. Learning cultivates critical thinking skills, enabling us to analyze situations, solve problems, and make informed decisions.

The Socio-economic Impact of Learning

Learning also plays a significant role in socio-economic development. Education equips individuals with the skills needed to contribute to the workforce effectively, thereby driving economic growth. Moreover, it promotes social cohesion by fostering a shared understanding of societal values and norms.

Learning and Technological Advancements

In the era of rapid technological advancements, the importance of learning cannot be overstated. With the advent of AI and automation, the job market is in a constant state of flux, and the ability to learn new skills is more crucial than ever. Lifelong learning is now a necessity, not a luxury.

In conclusion, learning is a powerful tool that not only enriches our personal lives but also contributes to societal progress. It is the key to unlocking our potential and adapting to the ever-changing world around us.

500 Words Essay on Importance of Learning

The essence of learning.

Learning is a fundamental aspect of human life, serving as the foundation upon which we build our understanding of the world. It is an ongoing process that begins at birth and continues throughout our lives, shaping our perspectives, abilities, and actions. This essay explores the importance of learning, delving into its impact on personal growth, societal development, and the broader global context.

Personal Growth and Development

Learning is essential for personal growth and development. It equips us with the knowledge and skills necessary to navigate life effectively. Through learning, we acquire the ability to think critically, solve problems, and make informed decisions. It fosters creativity and innovation, enabling us to generate new ideas and solutions. Learning also facilitates emotional growth, helping us understand ourselves better, manage our emotions, and build strong interpersonal relationships.

Contributions to Society

On a societal level, learning plays a crucial role in driving progress and development. It is through learning that we gain an understanding of societal norms, values, and structures, enabling us to function effectively within our communities. Additionally, learning fosters social cohesion by promoting mutual understanding and respect among diverse groups. It equips us with the tools to challenge societal injustices and contribute to social change.

Global Impact

In the broader global context, learning is indispensable for addressing complex global challenges. It equips us with the knowledge and skills to understand these challenges, develop innovative solutions, and drive sustainable development. For instance, through learning, we can gain an understanding of climate change, develop sustainable technologies, and promote environmentally responsible behaviors.

The Role of Lifelong Learning

In an era marked by rapid technological advancement and societal change, lifelong learning has become increasingly important. It enables us to stay relevant and competitive in the evolving job market, adapt to technological advancements, and navigate societal changes effectively. Lifelong learning fosters resilience, adaptability, and a growth mindset, qualities that are crucial for success in the 21st century.

In conclusion, learning is a vital aspect of human life that shapes our personal growth, contributes to societal development, and drives global progress. It equips us with the knowledge, skills, and values necessary to navigate life effectively, foster social cohesion, and address global challenges. In the face of rapid technological and societal change, lifelong learning has emerged as a critical component of learning, enabling us to adapt and thrive in the evolving world. Therefore, it is essential that we embrace learning as a lifelong pursuit, striving to expand our knowledge, enhance our skills, and deepen our understanding of the world around us.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

If you’re looking for more, here are essays on other interesting topics:

Essay on Impact of Digital Economy on Student Learning
Essay on Learning From Others
Essay on Tuberculosis

Apart from these, you can look at all the essays by clicking here .

Happy studying!

The Role of Learning in Life, and Its Factors

Categories: Knowledge Study

About this sample

Words: 1084 |

Published: May 7, 2019

Words: 1084 | Pages: 3 | 6 min read

What is learning (essay), individual learning differences, works cited.

Toffler, A. (n.d.). Alvin Toffler Quotes. Retrieved from https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/2701.Alvin_Toffler
McLeod, S. (2018). What is Learning? Simply Psychology. Retrieved from https://www.simplypsychology.org/learning.html
Sternberg, R. J., & Williams, W. M. (2010). Educational Psychology. Pearson.
Woolfolk, A., Winne, P. H., & Perry, N. E. (2019). Educational Psychology. Pearson.
Fisher, R., & Williams, J. (2013). Unlocking Learning and Teaching with ICT: Identifying and Overcoming Barriers. Routledge.
Pressley, M., & McCormick, C. B. (2007). Child and Adolescent Development for Educators. Guilford Press.
Darling-Hammond, L., & Bransford, J. (Eds.). (2005). Preparing Teachers for a Changing World: What Teachers Should Learn and Be Able to Do. Jossey-Bass.
Tomlinson, C. A., & Moon, T. R. (2013). Assessment and Student Success in a Differentiated Classroom. ASCD.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1986). Thought and Language. MIT Press.
National Research Council. (2000). How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School. National Academies Press.

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Wayne State University

School of information sciences, school of information sciences current students, instructions for writing reflective essays.

Instructions

In the reflective essay, the student will discuss how s/he has developed as an information professional during the School. The student will discuss each of the four MLIS student learning outcomes, and demonstrate how they have become proficient in these learning outcomes.

The essay should following standard writing practice, with introduction, subheadings, and conclusion piece, free of grammar and typo mistakes. References are required.

For each MLIS learning outcome, the student uses 300-350 words to demonstrate their understanding of the learning outcome, and then uses an appropriate artifact to support their competency in the learning outcome.

Since multiple components are included in each learning outcome, the student can address one or two components for each learning outcome. Please use several sentences to justify your focus on those components.

For example : for LO#3, “Demonstrate professional competency, including critical thinking, research, communication, cultural competence, technology development, digital literacy, leadership, lifelong learning, and adherence to professional ethics”, students might address only “technology development” and “lifelong learning” components in their reflections.

As a concluding piece of the essay, the student will include their stance or philosophy of the information profession. The student will gird the philosophy piece using readings of the research, professional literature, personal experiences, and the learning outcomes. Students can address questions like: What is an information professional? What are the characteristics, qualities and knowledge that will be most important to you as an information professional?

Use of writing in the first person is encouraged. Essay Submission

The final product will be a 1400-1700 word reflective essay, with suitable and ethical citation practices followed (final word count excludes bibliography). Please note that this is not a personal history or review of courses taken during the School. Instead, it is an articulation of your growth as an information professional and your adoption of a personal professional philosophy.

You may submit the reflective essay in .doc, .docx, or pdf formats. Please do not submit the essay in .zip or .rar format.

Make sure your reflective essay has the following elements:

Introduction

Discussion of each MLIS learning outcome

Discussion of appropriate artifacts in relation to each MLIS learning outcome

Professional philosophy

Conclusion

References

Classroom Q&A

With larry ferlazzo.

In this EdWeek blog, an experiment in knowledge-gathering, Ferlazzo will address readers’ questions on classroom management, ELL instruction, lesson planning, and other issues facing teachers. Send your questions to [email protected]. Read more from this blog.

Readers Can Struggle at Any Age. Here’s How Teachers Can Help

Today’s post is the latest in a series offering strategies to support older students experiencing reading challenges.

You can see Part One here , Part Two here , Part Three here , and Part Four here .

‘Juicy Sentences’

Toni Faddis, Ed.D., previously a bilingual teacher, Reading Recovery specialist, and principal, is now a full-time professional consultant.

Douglas Fisher, Ph.D., a professor and chair of the Department of Educational Leadership at San Diego State University is also the dean of Faculty Affairs at Health Sciences High and Middle College in San Diego.

Diane Lapp, Ed.D., is Distinguished Professor of Education at San Diego State University and an academic coach at Health Sciences High and Middle College:

Readers may struggle with comprehension when sentences contain referents that appear as easily readable words, such as it, she, they, them, which , who . Authors use them so the same words and phrases aren’t repeated. They expect readers to make connections between ideas. You just did that as you read this paragraph; your brain used syntactic knowledge to make a connection between an idea (referents) and a corresponding pronoun (them) and again between the noun “authors” and the pronoun “ they.”

A referent may appear before or after a subject, so mental processing of semantic features while reading is necessary for comprehension. Struggling readers may be able to read the words but fail to make the necessary connections between ideas and referents (Goodwin, Petscher, & Reynolds, 2022). When this happens, they lose the meaning of a text.

Being able to make syntactic connections is an important part of language and reading comprehension because they help the reader to create meaning and coherence in sentences and paragraphs. High-coherence text in which authors draw explicit connections between subjects and referents may foster comprehension because the reader is more easily able to follow the author’s message.

Low-coherence passages, conversely, often require readers to be taught how to spot and connect the referent to a word or phrase in context, so they understand the overall meaning of the text (Shanahan, 2022).

Grammar, while similar to syntactic knowledge, is the set of rules that govern how words are combined to form sentences. Teaching grammar through traditional methods, such as diagramming sentences and other memorizing parts of speech out of context, aren’t effective approaches that foster language comprehension. Instead, explicit instruction that develops students’ abilities to make connections when reading low-coherence texts builds syntactic knowledge, which in turn aids language comprehension (Ozuru, Dempsey, & McNamara, 2009).

We suggest three instructional strategies using mentor sentences that we find effective to build students’ syntactic knowledge at the sentence level, which then can be transferred to multiple sentences and paragraphs.

1. Juicy Sentence Protocol . Wong Fillmore (2012) developed the Juicy Sentence Protocol to help students make sense of complex language. The protocol involves analyzing and discussing chunks of a “juicy sentence"—a sentence that is rich in meaning and complexity—to help students understand the different ways language is used to convey meaning. The table below provides an example sentence, chunked by phrases in the left column, with the corresponding questions for analysis and meaning in the right column.

Juicy sentence: When large-scale deforestation and habitat loss are left unchecked, they can lead to the extinction of keystone species, which can have a cascading effect on the biodiversity of entire ecosystems.

Using your knowledge of syntax, select a juicy sentence in an upcoming text that will be sufficiently difficult for your students to comprehend but will provide rich meaning and build students’ syntactic knowledge when phrases are decomposed and analyzed. This can be done as direct instruction, or by students in collaborative groups, or as independent practice. Check out this lesson idea from The New York Times Learning Network for sentences that have been selected from mentor texts and convertedinto digestible bites for analysis.

2. Sentence Combining. Sentence combining and reduction has also been shown to improve reading comprehension (Neville & Searls, 1991; Wilkinson & Patty, 1993). This is the process of joining two or more simple sentences to form a more complex sentence. This technique provides students with opportunities to practice syntactic skills, including adding referents, while paying attention to the clarity, conciseness, and sophistication of ideas. We model this strategy below:

Present Sentence Chunks

Cells are the basic unit of life.
They are made up of smaller parts called organelles.
Organelles have specific functions including keeping cells alive.

With students, create a combined sentence:

Cells, which are the basic unit of life, are made up of smaller parts called organelles. These have specific functions to keep cells alive.

In addition to curriculum texts, many websites, including CommonLit and ReadWorks , offer grade-level passages in all content areas that teachers can use to identify sentences that align to students’ interests and passions. These include passages that relate to Hispanic Heritage Month, Black History, art and music, among many others. Teachers can identify an interesting, complex sentence and reduce it to three choppy sentences so students can combine them and use referents to construct a more robust and sophisticated sentence. Instruction that builds students’ syntactic knowledge can be a 10-minute segment of class, a few times per week. This is a perfect activity to promote partner conversation.

3. Sentence Imitation . Students can also practice and deepen their syntactic knowledge by crafting their own version of a mentor sentence. Mimicking a writer’s style requires students to attend to the structure of the sentence and make meaning of it before composing a similar version.

Author Anne Lamott (1980) reminds us that we naturally take on someone else’s writing style, using it as a prop as we find our own voices. Working in pairs, students could first determine the meaning of a sentence by discussing and agreeing on the most important word. Then they could start drafting their own version of the sentence by mimicking the author’s style. Here’s an example from Sunrise Over Fallujah :

Sample sentence: “While they waited for the order to attack, the soldiers huddled together in the shadows, their faces grim and determined.”

Student-created version: As they waited to attack, the soldiers huddled in the shadows, their faces set in grim determination.

Using a mentor sentence for reading and writing causes students to slow down and really grapple with the meaning as well as the semantic features used by the author. For additional ideas that foster the reading-writing connection, the National Council of Teachers of English offers several tips and examples.

Conclusion:

Mentor sentences work especially well to build students’ syntactic knowledge, and comprehension, through the analysis of sentence structure. Importantly, students must gain and apply these skills using authentic sources. While there are mountains of grammar-focused worksheets available, these resources often fall short because of their “drill-and-kill” nature. Instead, identify a few mentor sentences in an upcoming unit of study that will provide students with meaningful opportunities to decompose, analyze, and combine sentences in ways that will transfer to other courses and settings in their lives.

Thanks to Douglas, Diane, and Toni for contributing their thoughts!

Consider contributing a question to be answered in a future post. You can send one to me at [email protected] . When you send it in, let me know if I can use your real name if it’s selected or if you’d prefer remaining anonymous and have a pseudonym in mind.

You can also contact me on Twitter at @Larryferlazzo .

Education Week has published a collection of posts from this blog, along with new material, in an e-book form. It’s titled Classroom Management Q&As: Expert Strategies for Teaching .

Just a reminder; you can subscribe and receive updates from this blog via email . And if you missed any of the highlights from the first 11 years of this blog, you can see a categorized list below.

It Was Another Busy School Year. What Resonated for You?
How to Best Address Race and Racism in the Classroom
Schools Just Let Out, But What Are the Best Ways to Begin the Coming Year?
Classroom Management Starts With Student Engagement
Teacher Takeaways From the Pandemic: What’s Worked? What Hasn’t?
The School Year Has Ended. What Are Some Lessons to Close Out Next Year?
Student Motivation and Social-Emotional Learning Present Challenges. Here’s How to Help
How to Challenge Normative Gender Culture to Support All Students
What Students Like (and Don’t Like) About School
Technology Is the Tool, Not the Teacher
How to Make Parent Engagement Meaningful
Teaching Social Studies Isn’t for the Faint of Heart
Differentiated Instruction Doesn’t Need to Be a Heavy Lift
How to Help Students Embrace Reading. Educators Weigh In
10 Strategies for Reaching English-Learners
10 Ways to Include Teachers in Important Policy Decisions
10 Teacher-Proofed Strategies for Improving Math Instruction
Give Students a Role in Their Education
Are There Better Ways Than Standardized Tests to Assess Students? Educators Think So
How to Meet the Challenges of Teaching Science
If I’d Only Known. Veteran Teachers Offer Advice for Beginners
Writing Well Means Rewriting, Rewriting, Rewriting
Christopher Emdin, Gholdy Muhammad, and More Education Authors Offer Insights to the Field
How to Build Inclusive Classrooms
What Science Can Teach Us About Learning
The Best Ways for Administrators to Demonstrate Leadership
Listen Up: Give Teachers a Voice in What Happens in Their Schools
10 Ways to Build a Healthier Classroom
Educators Weigh In on Implementing the Common Core, Even Now
What’s the Best Professional-Development Advice? Teachers and Students Have Their Say
Plenty of Instructional Strategies Are Out There. Here’s What Works Best for Your Students
How to Avoid Making Mistakes in the Classroom
Looking for Ways to Organize Your Classroom? Try Out These Tips
Want Insight Into Schooling? Here’s Advice From Some Top Experts

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The future of learning: How AI is revolutionizing education 4.0

A boy writes in a notebook at a school desk: Education 4.0 is about enhancing not replacing teaching with artificial intelligence.

Education 4.0 is about enhancing not replacing teaching with artificial intelligence. Image: Unsplash/Santi Vedrí

.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo{-webkit-transition:all 0.15s ease-out;transition:all 0.15s ease-out;cursor:pointer;-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;outline:none;color:inherit;}.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo:hover,.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo[data-hover]{-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;}.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo:focus,.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo[data-focus]{box-shadow:0 0 0 3px rgba(168,203,251,0.5);} Tanya Milberg

.chakra .wef-9dduvl{margin-top:16px;margin-bottom:16px;line-height:1.388;font-size:1.25rem;}@media screen and (min-width:56.5rem){.chakra .wef-9dduvl{font-size:1.125rem;}} Explore and monitor how .chakra .wef-15eoq1r{margin-top:16px;margin-bottom:16px;line-height:1.388;font-size:1.25rem;color:#F7DB5E;}@media screen and (min-width:56.5rem){.chakra .wef-15eoq1r{font-size:1.125rem;}} Education is affecting economies, industries and global issues

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Stay up to date:, horizon scan: nita farahany.

Artificial intelligence (AI) can support education by automating administrative tasks, freeing teachers to focus more on teaching and personalized interactions with students, enhancing rather than replacing human-led teaching.
AI applications in education must be designed collaboratively and with equity in focus, addressing disparities across various demographics and ensuring accessibility for all students.
Beyond using AI tools for educational purposes, it is crucial to educate students about AI itself, including how to develop AI technologies and understand their potential risks.

In today’s rapidly evolving technological landscape, the intersection of artificial intelligence (AI) and education is not just a future possibility; it is imminent.

Imagine a future where all students receive personalized support and inclusive learning opportunities, build stronger connections with teachers for enhanced guidance and receive apt recognition and evaluation of their achievements.

While the promise of AI in education is compelling, only through responsible and informed adoption can AI truly fulfil its potential and ensure equitable access to quality education for all.

In 2020, the World Economic Forum identified eight pivotal transformations needed to enhance education quality in the age of the Fourth Industrial Revolution – Education 4.0 Framework . As AI emerges as the defining technology of this era, we can accelerate the adoption of Education 4.0 by using this technology and ensuring learners are equipped to thrive with it.

Have you read?

Education 4.0: here are 3 skills that students will need for the jobs of the future, how we can prepare for the future with foundational policy ideas for ai in education, ai and education: kids need ai guidance in school. but who guides the schools, achieving success with ai in education.

With increasing interest in AI and education, the Education 4.0 Alliance sought to understand the current state and future promises of the technology for education. The latest report – Shaping the Future of Learning: The Role of AI in Education 4.0 – shows four key promises that have emerged for AI to enable Education 4.0:

1. Supporting teachers’ roles through augmentation and automation

The global teacher shortage poses a formidable challenge to improving educational outcomes, with the demand for educators projected to surge in the coming years. Integrating AI into education can streamline administrative tasks, giving teachers more time for meaningful student engagement.

By automating routine duties and emphasizing human-centric teaching, we can create an environment where educators can thrive, creating a richer learning experience. However, teaching involves more than imparting information – AI should augment, not replace teachers’ role.

2. Refining assessment and analytics in education

The integration of AI in education holds promise in revolutionizing the assessment and analytics landscape. AI-enabled assessments offer educators invaluable insights, from pinpointing learning trends to supporting the evaluation of non-standardized tests.

By leveraging AI capabilities, educators can expedite the assessment process, offering timely feedback to learners and facilitating more focused engagement. Through real-time analysis, educators can identify strengths and weaknesses in student performance, allowing for targeted instructional strategies.

Schools of the Future: Defining New Models of Education for the Fourth Industrial Revolution

3. Supporting AI and digital literacy

Many education systems struggle to address the growing digital skills gap, crucial for students' employability and ethical tech use. Bridging this gap is imperative to cultivate an AI-ready workforce.

AI presents an avenue through which students can improve digital literacy, critical thinking, problem-solving and creativity, preparing learners for future job demands. Integrating AI into education, through traditional or innovative methods, is key to shaping tomorrow’s workforce.

4. Personalizing learning content and experience

Extensive research confirms that individual tutoring significantly boosts learning outcomes, with tutored students consistently outperforming 98% of their peers in traditional classroom settings. However, providing personalized tutoring for every student poses a major economic challenge.

AI offers a solution to this hurdle. By harnessing AI, we can now tailor the learning experience to the individual, enhancing academic performance while seamlessly catering to diverse learning needs. Customizable interfaces emerge as invaluable assets, particularly benefiting neurodiverse students and those with diverse physical abilities.

The World Economic Forum education 4.0 framework.

Delivering on AI in education

As we build on the lessons learned, it’s clear that new developments in AI may provide much-needed innovation in education. To make sure that new technologies fulfil their potential to enhance Education 4.0 and lifelong learning, we need to deploy them strategically and safely, taking into account the following factors:

1. Design for equity

Recognizing AI’s potential to exacerbate current education gaps, AI-enabled educational innovations must prioritize equity in their design. That means addressing disparities between genders, public and private schools, as well as catering to children with diverse abilities and learning styles, while removing language and access barriers.

2. Enhance human-led pedagogy

AI will never replace high-quality, human-led pedagogy. To that end, most examples focus on enhancing human-led teaching by providing the right AI tools that automate clerical tasks and alleviate teachers’ time to focus on their craft or by providing relevant training about AI skills that help them better deliver lessons on AI.

3. Co-design and implement with supporting stakeholders

AI-enabled innovations in education should acknowledge the critical roles played by teachers, parents and educational institutions in adopting this emerging technology. Successful instances of AI integration in education underscore the importance of collaboratively designed educational solutions with input from students, teachers and experts.

This collaborative, multi-stakeholder approach ensures that solutions meet the practical demands of the classroom, align with national curricula, remain abreast of industry trends and implement safeguards to protect student data.

4. Teaching about AI is equally crucial to teaching with AI

AI tools e.g. those that provide data analytics and gamified learning – have long been part of the educational landscape. While developments in generative AI offer new opportunities to leverage AI tools, it becomes increasingly evident that teaching about AI in schools is vital.

This education should prioritize imparting skills related to AI development and understanding its potential risks. These skills are critical for shaping future talent capable of ethically designing and developing AI tools that benefit economies and societies.

5. Economic viability and access

Ensuring economic viability and access to AI-learning opportunities for all learners, is essential to prevent deepening the existing digital divide and avoid creating new disparities in education. The realization of AI promise in education requires substantial investment, not only in the products themselves but also in supporting infrastructure, training and data protection.

By addressing these critical aspects, we can unlock the full transformative potential of AI to improve educational outcomes for learners worldwide.

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Oedipus Complex Meaning and Overview

This essay about the Oedipus complex explores the controversial theory first proposed by Sigmund Freud, which suggests that children experience deep, subconscious desires for their opposite-sex parent during early developmental stages. It outlines how these unresolved feelings are thought to influence adult behavior and relationships. Criticisms of Freud’s theory are discussed, particularly regarding its focus on sexual development and the assumptions it makes about gender and sexual norms. Despite the critiques, the essay highlights the theory’s lasting impact on both academic thought and popular culture, underscoring its role in discussions about human emotional and psychological development. The essay also reflects on the narrative quality of Freud’s theory, suggesting that it offers a framework through which to understand our internal conflicts and desires.

How it works

Sigmund Freud’s Oedipus complex is one of those theories that, whether you love it or loathe it, is impossible to ignore in a discussion about human psychology. Coined after the infamous character from Sophocles’ ancient tragedy, the Oedipus complex digs deep into the darker, more uncomfortable corners of our psychological development. This is where childhood innocence meets primitive desire, creating ripples across our adult lives, often without us even realizing.

Freud first introduced the idea as part of his psychoanalytic theory, suggesting that between the ages of three and six, children enter a phase where their affection becomes particularly concentrated on the opposite-sex parent.

Boys, he argued, develop a sexual longing for their mothers and an antagonistic rivalry toward their fathers, driven by fear of punishment encapsulated in the famous notion of castration anxiety. Girls, on the other hand, were said to experience penis envy, directing their affections towards their fathers while resenting their mothers. Carl Jung later expanded on this with the term Electra complex for girls, though this never gained as much traction as Freud’s original concept.

What Freud suggested was that these feelings, if unresolved, could echo into adulthood, influencing relationships and behavior. The only way out? Identifying with the same-sex parent, subsuming their characteristics into one’s identity, which in turn leads to the development of the superego—the aspect of personality tasked with moral policing.

The audacity of Freud’s theory made it a magnet for controversy. His critics, both contemporary and modern, have challenged almost every facet of his argument. The primary bone of contention remains its overt focus on sexual development and the assumptions it makes about normative gender and sexual developments. These critiques argue that Freud’s theory pays inadequate attention to the varied dynamics of family life and the different models of attachment that exist, reducing the rich tapestry of human relationships to mere sexual jealousy and fear.

Moreover, as our understanding of gender and sexuality has evolved, so too have our critiques of Freud’s more traditionalist views. Modern psychology suggests a more nuanced understanding of human development that includes a broader range of influences such as culture, social learning, and non-normative family structures that Freud’s early 20th-century perspective could not anticipate.

Despite these substantial criticisms, the concept of the Oedipus complex has permeated both academic thought and popular culture, underscoring Freud’s lasting influence. It’s discussed in psychology classes, sure, but you’ll also find it in films, books, and TV shows—anywhere where complex human relationships are explored. This staying power speaks to the theory’s compelling nature: it addresses fundamental questions about the origins of desire, jealousy, and identity formation.

Engaging with the Oedipus complex also invites a broader conversation about the role of narrative in our lives. Just as the ancient Greeks found meaning in the tragic fate of Oedipus, Freud’s theory offers a narrative framework for understanding our own internal dramas. It’s a testament to the storytelling nature of human beings; we seek to find stories and meanings even in the clinical aspects of our lives.

This narrative aspect of Freud’s theory is perhaps why it remains a subject of fascination despite its problematic elements. It forces us to confront the idea that our earliest relationships might shape our desires and conflicts in profound ways. The Oedipus complex encourages us to look at these relationships through a lens that, while not always comfortable, is often illuminating. It asks us to consider how love and rivalry can become entangled, how our adult selves are built on the foundations laid in early childhood, and how understanding these connections might help us navigate our paths through the world.

In summing up, the Oedipus complex, for all its controversy and critique, continues to be a cornerstone of psychoanalytic theory, serving as a provocative tool for understanding human behavior. It challenges us to delve into the subconscious motivations that drive us, and while modern psychology may offer more nuanced perspectives, Freud’s narrative opens up essential dialogues about the nature of human emotion and development. It’s a complex piece of the human puzzle, one that continues to inspire debate, study, and introspection. Whether one views it as a literal phenomenon or a metaphorical tool, it enriches our understanding of the human condition, proving that Freud’s legacy is both enduring and deeply influential.

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Guest Essay

Trump’s Trial Can Right a Wrong From 50 Years Ago

Nine black-and-white images of Richard Nixon speaking on TV arranged in a filmstrip grid. One is circled in red.

By Kevin Boyle

Mr. Boyle is the author of “The Shattering: America in the 1960s.”

Of the four criminal cases that Donald Trump is facing, the one unfolding in Manhattan is generally considered the weakest. Its legal foundation is complex. Its key witness is a felon. Its details are the sort of stuff that the tabloids splash across their front pages.

Worst of all, it doesn’t speak to Mr. Trump’s actions as president, as the other cases do. But as the Supreme Court oral arguments on immunity last week made clear, it is likely to be the only one the country will see resolved before Election Day.

As a historian who has written about the wrenching events of the 1960s and early 1970s, I can’t help seeing Mr. Trump’s legal troubles through the lens of an earlier Republican president, Richard Nixon. He spent more than two years, from the summer of 1972 to the summer of ’74, trying to prevent investigators from uncovering the tangle of crimes that made up the Watergate affair. But unlike Mr. Trump, Mr. Nixon never faced criminal charges. For that, justice suffered, and the nation suffered, too.

So here we are, watching unfold in Justice Juan Merchan’s utilitarian courtroom the narrow, tawdry version of the trials the nation ought to have had this year and the trial the nation should have had 50 years ago.

Mr. Nixon won the presidency in 1968 promising to be tough on crime. And he was. From 1961 to 1968 the nation’s prison population fell by 15 percent. By the time Mr. Nixon left office in 1974, it was almost back to where it was in 1962 — the start of a spiral fueled by the furious politics of law and order that his administration had helped to unleash.

The punitive turn struck poorer people and communities of color with particular force, an outcome that a majority of Americans didn’t seem to mind. But when the Watergate investigation exposed Mr. Nixon’s own potential criminality, they thought that the law ought to apply to him, too. As the crisis reached its peak in the summer of 1974, that belief hardened: By almost two to one, Americans wanted the House of Representatives to impeach the president, the Senate to try him and prosecutors to secure his indictment, so that his case could move into open court.

None of that happened. In early July 1974, Mr. Nixon’s lawyer presented to the Supreme Court his client’s claim of presidential immunity. The justices took just two weeks to issue their ruling against the president’s position, by a vote of 8 to 0 .

In light of the Supreme Court’s conduct this year, it’s worth underlining that timing: The case was argued on July 8. The justices issued a decision on July 24.

Between July 27 and 30, the House Judiciary Committee approved articles of impeachment. Mr. Nixon resigned nine days later, with the articles pending. President Gerald Ford waited a month and then gave his predecessor “ a full, free and absolute pardon ” for the crimes he had yet to be charged with committing. And something started to shift for Americans.

In April 1974, the month the Watergate cover-up started to unravel, 71 percent of Americans had at least a fair amount of confidence in the legal system. In the weeks after Mr. Nixon’s pardon, the share of people who felt that way fell to 67 percent. A year later it was down to 64 percent. That growing sense of disillusionment can’t be explained purely by the failure to bring Mr. Nixon to trial. But a revealing set of long-forgotten surveys suggests that it played a part.

In 1971 the Roper Organization, then one of the nation’s leading pollsters, asked a randomly selected sample of adults to say which groups the courts treated too leniently. Respondents put “dope peddlers” at the top of the list, followed by “heroin users,” “marijuana users” and “revolutionists, anarchists, agitators” — almost precisely the people Mr. Nixon had promised to bring to justice by restoring law and order. Roper asked the same question two years after he was pardoned. “Dope peddlers” came in first again. “Government officials” was second.

Americans’ view of the Nixon pardon gradually softened, while their underlying distrust of the legal system solidified, a dynamic undoubtedly driven by the nation’s rapidly rising levels of economic inequality. When Roper revived its question in 1987, government officials still ranked right behind drug dealers as the group most likely to get special treatment in court. This time, “top business executives” finished fourth (tied with “marijuana users” and “frequent offenders”), barely below “heroin users.” There the public’s perception remained, as the wealth gap widened and the apparently endless war on crime locked up a greater and greater share of the nation’s poor.

By 2001, as indicated in a poll from Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research/American Viewpoint, 62 percent of Americans had come to believe that there were two justice systems in the United States: one for the rich and powerful and another for everyone else. By 2019, in a similarly worded question from a Willow poll, that figure had reached 70 percent, just a point below the proportion of people who had confidence in the courts in the spring of 1974.

Since then, the cracks that run through the system have been torn wide open by the 2020 protests against police brutality and the fierce law-and-order response that the Trump administration mounted against them — combat-ready federal agents on the streets of Portland, Ore., tear gas in Lafayette Square in Washington. Add to that pile of tinder Mr. Trump’s manic subversion of the electoral process and the peaceful and effective transfer of power, which has led to three of the four criminal cases he’s facing.

Mr. Trump has met the charges against him with a blatant display of the privileges that wealth and power create. Over the past two years, he has spent about $76 million of other people’s money on legal fees, much of it to pay for motions and appeals that have stalled the three most damning cases from coming to trial. He persuaded the Supreme Court to treat his immunity claim — far more sweeping than Mr. Nixon’s — with a deference, at least in oral arguments, greatly out of step with the precedents the lower courts followed.

Perhaps most striking, Mr. Trump repeatedly ignored the gag orders that prohibit him from publicly attacking judges, clerks, prosecutors and witnesses — as well as their families — because he seems to believe he can do whatever he wants without fear of consequences. (On Tuesday he was held in contempt of court by Justice Merchan on nine counts and fined $9,000.) All the while, he’s marched toward the Republican nomination with a campaign infused with yet another version of law-and-order politics, this one focused on undocumented immigrants and asylum seekers rather than dope peddlers and drug addicts.

Now he’s spending his days at the defendant’s table, glowering at the judge whose daughter he endangered, as prosecutors working for the district attorney whom he has called an “animal” and a “criminal” lay out the lurid case against him. However the trial unfolds, it’s unlikely to change many people’s opinions of Mr. Trump — or of the legal system.

In polling, almost half of registered voters said they thought the charges Mr. Trump faces were politically motivated, and over two-thirds said that the outcome wouldn’t change their votes or that they would be more likely to vote for him if he was convicted.

No verdict in the Manhattan Trump case can undo the disillusionment with the system of justice that followed Mr. Ford’s pardon of Mr. Nixon. But the trial can, in its imperfect way, right the wrong of half a century ago, when the system last had its chance to prove that even the most powerful man in America is subject to its laws — especially when that man is so eager to take advantage of the politics of law and order. And there is a measure of justice in that.

What questions do you have about Trump’s Manhattan criminal trial so far?

Please submit them below. Our trial experts will respond to a selection of readers in a future piece.

Kevin Boyle, a history professor at Northwestern University, is the author, most recently, of “ The Shattering : America in the 1960s.”

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook , Instagram , TikTok , WhatsApp , X and Threads .

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What Is Learning? Essay about Learning Importance

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