Learning – How?

We have all sat through at least one lecture or session on learning theory. I hope so anyway. I think it is very important. If you haven’t there are miles of good resources online that will help you and just about any recent text on educational psychology will assist as well. The interesting thing is that new information is appearing all the time which either supports what we already know or throws up questions to what we think we know. Brain plasticity is a fascinating area (watch video)which has changed how we see the brain and how the brain can change, adapt and morph over time. That’s great news for all of us who were told years ago that as we got older we just had to expect that our brains would basically deteriorate and fall apart at some point. Use it or lose it though appears to be the important factor here and why life long learning is critical. That’s not really true either. Life long learning is just a term. What it requires is life long interest and motivation to want to know new things, experience new things and learn new things. I can’t imagine why a person wouldn’t want to do that but I see it every day.

Here are some further studies though which may interest you. They have recently found that something which is learnt through books and reading and does not have a reasoning behind it is not learnt as well as material which has reasoning and is practiced many times. It appears that learning is stored in different places. Now that just supports learning theory that doing and practice are critical and that explaining why and how something works is very important. Where does elearning sit in this? Much of the elearning I look at requires the person to read something and then answer questions. Doesn’t sound very effective does it?

Then the recent research showing that information in, difficult to read fonts, was easier to retain and learn. What? Think about it though. It just infers that passive learning is not as effective as learning where the participant must be actively engaged, their brain that is. You have to stimulate the brain for it to absorb information. The interesting thing about this article is that it infers that by making the learning more difficult to absorb it will make it more likely to be learnt. I don’t think that is the point though. What I would infer is that if the mind is passive and isn’t stimulated in some way to learn the learning really doesn’t occur. It is more about short term memory and recall. We all know how that works. I would point to poor elearning again which is definitely the flavour of the month/year/decade.

So to confuse things we have research which is shedding new light on how we think and learn and then we have research which is helping us to understand old learning principles in new ways. What does it all mean? Summary. All trainers, educators and teachers need to keep up to date with new research in the fields of learning, thinking and teaching but don’t give up on the old, tried and tested principles. They worked years ago, they still work now and they should guide your learning design and teaching regardless of whether you are in the training room or online.