When I define learning, I like to break it down into stages: learning new ideas, building on top of existing knowledge, forming and internalizing concepts, and building habits. The world of learning and education is so huge, yet, we try to understand how it happens at the micro level: the cognition.
When a baby is born, he starts to interact with the world around him and create new experiences. He then begins to develop skills to understand his surroundings, and keep developing these learning skills as he grows older. In psychological theory, Jean Paiget, the well known psychologist, explains four levels of human cognition development and the progression from one level to the other as a series of intellectual growth (Piaget, 1964).
Humans are amazing at how they store and organize knowledge. The intelligence of matching patterns and recognizing schemes is what makes the human race rules planet earth. We interact with information all the time, and as we do, we try to reason this info based on what we already know. However, when we are faced with concepts that do not resonate with our theories, we start to expand our internal ideas to form new schemes to allow us to rationalize with the new information. Cognitive Schema Theory helps us understand how humans can adopt new information as a confirmation of existing beliefs or as new models of knowledge (Bormanaki & Khoshhal, 2017).
When a nation encounters a new phenomenon, experts in the field are the ones entrusted to help the community “understand” what is happening. Although a lot of people would have access to the same set of data, yet experts are the ones to extract the reality of the situation. This is because they have built well rounded schemas and models of their profession that allow them to interact with information of a given problem in unique ways that novices cannot (Bransford et. al., 2000, p. 47). Relating to how people may learn from experts, a form of apprenticeship can take place. For example, students who go for Graduate Studies get paired with an instructor in a very specialized area to guide them. Before schools became a norm, people used to rely on Apprenticeship as the main path to starting a career. Psychology calls this form of learning as the Observation Theory, where people learn through mimicking another person’s actions (Bandura, 1977).
Learning a new skill to achieve a habitual change is an essential form of learning. The power of building habits is perhaps the most important form of learning that anyone would ever need. Our repeated actions determine our lifestyle, health, social life, and even our very personality. In psychology, Behaviourism theory (Skinner, 1976) breaks down the habits into phases to help us master our habit change engineering, namely: a stimulus that causes an action, the action to perform, and a reward for this accomplishment. Some Behaviourist states that learning is in fact strengthening the connection between a stimulus to the right response (Berkeley Graduate Division). This type of learning can cover a wide range of areas that we continuously try to improve, such as the way a learner solves math problems, a sick person needing to change dietary habits, or even an emerging athlete trying to implement a new exercise habit.
Learning about how we learn is surely an important and interesting area, as it helps us understand ourselves, our children, and to continuously improve our educational practices.
Bibliography
Piaget, J. (1964). Cognitive development in children: Piaget. Journal of research in science teaching, 2(3), 176-186.
Berkeley Graduate Division. (n.d.). Behaviorism. Graduate Student Instructor Teaching Resource Center. https://gsi.berkeley.edu/gsi-guide-contents/learning-theory-research/behaviorism/
Bransford, J. L., Brown, A. L., & Cocking, R. R. (2000). How people learn: Brain, mind, experience, and school. (Expanded Edition). National Academy Press.
Bormanaki, H. B., & Khoshhal, Y. (2017). The Role of Equilibration in Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development and Its Implication for Receptive Skills: A Theoretical Study. Journal of Language Teaching & Research, 8(5).
Skinner, B. F. (1976). About Behaviorism. New York: Vintage Books.
Hanan Alshikh 