Learning Theories: Challenges, Experiences, and Concepts
Learning is difficult because changing someone else’s mind is difficult, and learning is changing someone’s mind. People learn by encountering an idea, comparing it to existing knowledge, and integrating the idea.
Our learning motivations frequently fall into three categories: necessity, enjoyment, and curiosity. Learning is a natural—and unavoidable, however difficult it may be—part of the human experience.
The first step to improve my learning with theory is to understand the strategies that best facilitate my learning. Greater awareness around learning theories will allow me to lean into natural tendencies when possible and adjust expectations in less than ideal learning situations.
One idea I disagree with is the list of motivational categories and its implication. There are times where a learner is faced with knowledge that is completely uninteresting or they do not realize its importance. I believe that it is a failure on the part of the reading not to include a discussion of external motivations and externally motivated learners.
The concept three fundamentally different learning theories was difficult for me to understand. Although they use different terminology, I observed significant overlap. Diagramming the learning theories allowed me to visualize the nuances of each without defaulting to the opinion that they are all fundamentally the same because they have the same goal learning.
Many of my learning challenges have come in the course of STEM education because underlying principles are unintuitive. I have observed how the world works, formulated my own explanations, and confirmed my biases through further observation. I overcame this process by starting at the beginning and rebuilding my knowledge systems from the ground up instead of integrating new knowledge into my flawed understanding.
My best learning experiences have involved learning new skills because they often hold more than one reward at the end of the process. Learning productive and practical skills provides motivation in the form of mastering the skill, as well as the opportunity to utilize this skill for personal or monetary gain.
A behaviorist would design the class around prompts change such as causes and effects of climate change while providing feedback when students recall these facts or make connections between them. A cognitivist would connect climate change with learners’ existing knowledge, their reasoning why it has occurred, and what can be done to solve the problem. A constructivist would have learners reflect on experiences such as extreme weather and natural disaster frequency over the course of their lifetime.
I have most frequently been taught using behaviorism for math and other subjects that involved significant rote memorization, cognitivism for the humanities that are usually more abstract and open-ended, and constructivism with the natural sciences that can be taught through demonstration.
I would consider my instruction style more behavioralist, simply due to the fact it is easy to default to. Prompts often require less preparation, and reinforcement and feedback in the moment are more flexible than extensive plans that can be more easily derailed by (for better or worse) unpredictable or uncooperative learners.
Thank you for your post. Learning theories is wide idea, just like you say:” the purpose of learning is studying how to solve the problem in our daily.” I really agree with this opinion.
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