So what is Learning?
A fairly standard consensual definition is "a relatively
permanent change in behavior (sic.; it's American of course)
that results from practice." (Atkinson
et al 1993). This is of course arguable, particularly the
"practice" criterion. We are indeed becoming more
confused: evidence from genetics, evolutionary psychology and
neuroscience is arguing ever more strongly for predispositions
for our behavior. Hume’s tabula rasa is getting dirtier
by the minute: this is one of those areas for which Mark Twain’s
(attributed) comment might have been coined:
“Many researchers have already cast much darkness
upon this subject, and it is probable that if they
continue, that we shall soon know nothing at all
about it”
Even if psychologists ever agree about what learning
is, in practice educationalists won't, because education
introduces prescriptive notions about specifying
what
ought to be learnt, and there is considerable dispute
about whether this ought only to be what the teacher wants
the learner to learn (implicit in
behavioral
models), or what the learner wants to learn (as in
humanistic
models).
What is Taught and what is Learned
It is a simple point that what is taught is not the same
as what the students learn, but it does have a number of
implications.
In the figure above, it is clear that some of what we teach
is wasted effort: but the diagram is a representation of
only one learner’s learning. It may be that within a class
as a whole, everything we teach is learned, by someone. The
shape representing the teaching is smaller than that for
learning, because students are also learning from other
sources, including colleagues and the sheer experience of
being in the educational system, as well as more
conventional other resources such as books.
It is an open question in any given case as to whether what
they learn apart from what they are taught is a "good" thing
or not. It includes the “hidden curriculum”, which is a
phrase used by
Snyder (1971) to describe what students learn by default
in educational settings. His original observations at MIT in
the late 'fifties were about how students with an
over-loaded curriculum acquired survival tactics to get
through their courses, such as mugging up only the parts
which were likely to come up in the exams, and thus losing
the point of much of the teaching. This selective learning
is one of the characteristics of what is now called " surface
learning", although that tends to be seen as an
attribute of the learner — Snyder saw it as a problem of the
institution. From a sociological (Marxist) rather than primarily
educational perspective, Bowles and Gintis (1976) suggested that
all US schooling has a hidden curriculum dictated by the demands
of a capitalist economy. More recently, critical theorists have
sought to expose the hidden assumptions behind curricula (see,
for example,
Collins (1991) — see also
Cultural
Considerations). Some of the work seems marginal and
academically political, but there is no denying that teachers'
strategies, such as labeling, can have a profound effect on a
student's experience.
Claxton (1996) has convincingly argued that adult learning
is profoundly influenced by “implicit theories of learning”
acquired at school, and that teachers tend to reproduce their
implicit models in the ways in which they themselves go on to
teach.
Reasons why people learn the "wrong" things, and why they
stick:
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www.learningandteaching.info/learning/
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