4.1.1 Learning: nature, factors, curves, memory and transfer

Explained

1. What counts as learning. A child who touches a hot stove and then keeps away has learnt (experience changed behaviour). A child who starts walking at 12 months has matured, not learnt. A tired worker who slows down shows fatigue, not learning. Learning can be good or bad: a habit of copying homework is also learnt.

• "All living is learning": a person's skills, habits, knowledge, attitudes and interests are all products of learning.
• Habituation: slowly ceasing to respond to a harmless stimulus that keeps repeating; the simplest form of learning, seen even in the foetus (by about 32 weeks).
• Learned helplessness (Martin Seligman): learning that an unpleasant event can be neither avoided nor escaped, so the learner stops trying; repeated failure and harsh punishment in school can produce it.
• Active vs passive learning: in active learning the learner controls the experience (student-centred teaching); passive learning and direct instruction mark teacher-centred teaching.
• Laws of association (Aristotle): ideas are linked by contiguity, similarity (and contrast) and frequency (repetition); the later S-R theories grew from them.

2. Learning, maturation and readiness

Teaching before maturation is wasteful (Gesell's twin stair-climbing study); readiness = maturation + motivation + previous learning. Thorndike made readiness his first law (see EDU-LR-02).

3. Factors in the classroom

For a hostel welfare officer the environmental list matters: regular food, sleep, study time and safety in the hostel are learning factors.

• Material: meaningful material is learnt fastest and kept longest; pictures are remembered better than words.
• Method: the whole method (learn it all at once) suits meaningful material, lasting memory and older learners; the part method (section by section) suits long, difficult material, immediate memory and children below about 12.

3a. The communication model of classroom learning. Teaching can be seen as communication: the teacher is the source, the lesson the message, speech, print or aids the channel, and the learner the receiver.

Processes that happen inside the learner (perception, retention and recall) are receiver variables (APPSC 2019).

3b. Verbal learning. Learning, keeping and recalling words and verbal material; it is unique to human beings. It may be intentional or incidental; learning time grows with the length of the material. Three laboratory methods: paired-associate learning (a stimulus word with its response word: foreign word and meaning), serial learning (a list in fixed order) and free recall (any order).

4. Reading a learning curve

• Initial spurt: fast early gain (novelty, easy parts first, high interest).
• Gradual rise: progress slows as harder parts come.
• Plateau: a level stretch; the learner seems stuck.
• Final spurt / limit: a rise again, and finally the physiological limit.
• If errors or time per trial are plotted instead of scores, the curve falls as learning improves.
• Trial and error (Thorndike's cats) gives a gradual curve; insight (Köhler's apes) gives a sudden drop in errors.

5. Plateau: causes and remedies

A plateau is a temporary halt, not the end of learning.

6. Kinds of memory

• Rote (mechanical) memory: repeating without meaning; quick to fade.
• Logical (meaningful) memory: learning with understanding; lasts longer.
• Long-term memory types (Endel Tulving, 1972, and later work): episodic (personal events: my first day at school), semantic (facts and meanings: Delhi is the capital), procedural (how to do things: cycling, typing). Episodic + semantic = declarative (explicit); procedural = non-declarative (implicit).
• Working memory (Baddeley and Hitch, 1974): the active "desk" of STM where information is held and used. Parts: phonological loop, visuospatial sketchpad, central executive; Baddeley added the episodic buffer in 2000.
• Encoding can be acoustic, visual, tactile or semantic. Elaboration (linking new information to what is already known) improves encoding.
• Sensory memory: large capacity, very short life; visual = iconic, auditory = echoic.
• Chunking: grouping items into familiar units (12 digits remembered as 3 years) so that more fits into STM.
• Rehearsal: maintenance rehearsal (rote repeating, as with a phone number until dialled) keeps information in STM briefly; elaborative rehearsal (relating it to what one knows) moves it into LTM.
• Atkinson and Shiffrin's three-store model is also called the modal or multi-store model; this information-processing view compares the mind to a digital computer (input → processing → output).
• Hippocampus: helps sort new experiences and pass them into LTM. Engram (memory trace): the assumed physical or chemical change in brain neurons that holds a memory.
• Flashbulb memory: a vivid "snapshot" of where one was on hearing shocking news; held with confidence but often inaccurate. Autobiographical memory: one's own life story, part of episodic memory.
• Marks of a good memory: rapid learning, long retention, quick recall, correct recognition, and being useful at the right time.

7. Measuring retention

• Savings example: a list learnt in 16 trials is relearnt in 12 → (16 − 12) ÷ 16 × 100 = 25% savings.
• Recognition gets harder when the wrong options are very similar to the right one and when there are more options.
• Context effect: recall is best when the testing place and mood match those of learning.

8. Forgetting explained

• Decay: what is not used fades (the law of disuse).
• Proactive interference (inhibition): an old phone number gets in the way of the new one.
• Retroactive interference (inhibition): studying history right after civics makes the civics (earlier) harder to recall. Jenkins and Dallenbach (1924): people who slept after learning forgot less than those who stayed awake, because there was less interference.
• Repression (Freud): unpleasant experiences are pushed out of awareness. Forgetting because we want to forget = repression (motivated forgetting); its conscious form is suppression.
• Encoding failure: most people cannot draw a coin they handle daily, because its details were never encoded.
• Decay fits loss from STM but fails for well-practised skills (swimming, cycling), which last without use.
• Interference is greatest when the two tasks are similar.

• Amnesia: retrograde = loss of memories from before an injury; anterograde = cannot form new memories after it (the main problem in Alzheimer's disease). Infantile amnesia: hardly anyone recalls events before about age 3.
• Karl Lashley (rat-maze lesion studies, 1929–1950): a memory is spread across the cortex, not stored in one spot.
• Retrieval failure: the memory is there, but the cue is missing (the "tip of the tongue" feeling).
• Forgetting is normal and useful: it clears unneeded details.

9. Ways to improve memory and reduce forgetting

• Understand first (logical learning beats rote).
• Spaced (distributed) practice beats massed (cramming).
• Overlearning: practise past the point of first mastery (about 50% extra practice helps retention); the best assurance for remembering material for an exam.
• Expanding retrieval practice (Landauer and Bjork, 1978): test yourself with gradually longer gaps; even better than equal spacing.
• Deep processing (levels of processing, Craik and Lockhart, 1972): thinking about meaning gives stronger memory than attention to sound or look.
• Whole method for short, meaningful material; part method for long or difficult material.
• Recitation (self-testing) while learning; regular revision soon after learning, since loss is fastest early.
• Association and mnemonics: acronym (VIBGYOR for the colours of the rainbow), acrostic ("Every Good Boy Does Fine"), method of loci (items placed along a familiar route), peg-word system, keyword method, interactive images, grouping by category.
• SQ3R study method (Francis P. Robinson, Effective Study, 1946): Survey, Question, Read, Recite, Review. PQ4R (Thomas and Robinson): Preview, Question, Read, Reflect, Recite, Review (the first R is Read).
• Rest and sleep after study; good health and freedom from anxiety.

10. Serial position and incomplete tasks

• Serial position effect: in a list, the first items (primacy) and last items (recency) are remembered best; the middle is forgotten most.
• Zeigarnik effect (Bluma Zeigarnik, 1927): unfinished tasks are remembered better than finished ones.

11. Transfer: comparing the theories

12. Transfer in the BRAOU texts. Thorndike and R.S. Woodworth (1901) first spoke of "transfer of practice"; Bigge (1967) defined transfer as learning in one situation influencing learning or performance in another. Examples: badminton → tennis (positive); left-hand-drive habit → right-hand-drive car (negative); history → driving (zero). Mindful learning (Ellen Langer) has five principles: openness to novelty, alertness to distinction, sensitivity to context, awareness of multiple perspectives, orientation in the present.

13. Teaching for transfer. Show links between subjects and life; teach general principles with many examples; give practice in varied situations; build meaningful understanding; make the learner aware of what can be transferred; avoid habits that will later cause negative transfer.