Acts of Learning

 

Psychological foundations of learning practices

 

(The case for this text.  Link to 2.5K  Word file)  

 

This document proposes a book introducing the psychology underpinning learning practices. Learning practices comprise the things we do that lead to changes in what we understand. The topic is of general interest but of particular concern to students and teachers within the education and training professions. The text uses ‘acts of learning’ as a vehicle for explaining psychological research and theory that addresses the theme of human learning.

 

(1) Learning about learning

 

Learning: the scholarship

 

The natural home for a principled science of learning is within the discipline of Psychology. In fact, for a long
period, ‘learning theory’ was what academic Psychology was mainly about. However, that situation changed in the 1960s with the ascendency of ‘cognitive psychology’. This was an approach focussed on the mind (rather than behaviour) and on a computational metaphor of mentality (i.e., the flow of information) rather than the prevailing associationist one (i.e., the interactions of stimuli, responses, and reinforcement). Yet there are few accessible reviews of learning in these terms. Most promise lies within a recently emerging sub-discipline of cognitive psychology, namely ‘learning sciences’ (plural, because it cultivates multi-disciplinarity). The learning sciences have created a renaissance of research around learning. Nevertheless, its insights are still not sufficiently visible in either the popular or the professional literatures. They are insights that will be recruited in the present text.

 

          Learning: audiences and appetites

 

There are four potential audiences for a text introducing contemporary ideas from the psychology of learning.

 

(1) The intelligent layperson. The topic of learning may have lasting popular appeal because, apart from our own status as learners, many of us hold informal responsibilities for the learning of others – notably as parents. 
(2) Students: most prominently, those for whom the topic forms part of some social science curriculum. In particular, Psychology, Education, and Business Studies. For them also the presentation can be introductory, and yet provide resources for deeper study.
(3) Professionals: practitioners within education and training. They will value a presentation that foregrounds their working circumstances, and in a manner that offers them fresh ways to think about practice and creative intervention within it. (The possibility of ‘learnification’ critiques from some commentators (e.g., Biesta, 2022) may seem a risk. However, if the text engages with education theory it is more in relation to ‘subjectification’  than socialisation.)
(4) Those that might be termed meta-professionals: that is, individuals who guide and instruct the professionals. Staff engaged with teacher training are particularly poorly resourced for texts that support their work. A text of the present kind is particularly urgent at a time when government policy suggests an anxiety to see psychological research adopted in the interests of educational innovation. The text proposed here has all these audiences in view.

 

Learning: ways to explain it

 

Some accounts of learning lead from offering overarching theories. Unfortunately there are a daunting number of these (see one list here). An alternative approach entails elaborating a psychological architecture of learning. This also requires communicating a large volume of separate items. Psychology is presented as partitioning the human actor into component social and cognitive functions relevant to learning. For example: the various systems of memory, attention, reasoning, motivation, personality etc. This breadth of separate topics may feel overwhelming – and may resist attempts at extracting a sense of integrated functioning. Therefore, traditional approaches for texts in this area experience significant challenges around reader engagement.  In part this is a matter of controlling content volume and fragmentation. But it is also because the starting points for explanation are too abstract: in the sense of too decoupled from the human activity that readers need help understanding

 

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(2) Acts of Learning: a novel approach 

 

If the aim is to direct insights from psychology into the management of human learning, then the approaches summarised above are ‘top-down’ approaches. They start with the abstract (i.e., psychological concepts) and build towards the concrete (i.e., educational practices). The alternative proposed here aims to work in the opposite direction. The logic of this is described below

 

Learning: traditionally top-down approaches

 

There is long-standing concern that learning theory and research makes limited impact on educational practice. The area of psychology thought most likely to contribute is cognitive science (Muller and Cook, 2024). For example, in the UK, the Educational Endowment Foundation makes explicit the particular topics that need to penetrate practice. They identify ‘core concepts’: spaced learning, interleaving, retrieval practice, schema, multimedia learning and embodied learning. While two other important concepts lie “under the surface”: namely, memory processes (working, long term, retrieval, encoding) and cognitive load. Certainly, these are concepts central to how humans learn and, therefore, they should be mobilised to influence educational practice. The challenge is one of drawing practitioners (and learners) to embrace them. It is suggested here that their status as abstract and decoupled from familiar practice is an obstacle to that challenge. The present text addresses that obstacle.  

 

Learning: an alternative, bottom-up approach

 

The default approach to articulating a psychology of learning is top down. But what does it mean to explain learning through a bottom-up approach? It would start from matters already known and familiar to the reader. It starts from what learners do. Of course, in the realm of the familiar (rather than the abstracted), learners do not do a single thing. They engage in a range of actions – that they hope will achieve their ambitions for knowledge building. They engage in acts of learning. So, the learner who reflects on their competence (or the teacher prompting that reflection) is well served by bringing into sharper focus something they already know about: namely, a personal assembly of learning acts. Some are familiar because they are widely shared – having a long history of cultural evolution. Other are more the by-products of growing up in a culture of literacy.

 

Some acts of learning (and implicit chapter headings)

 

0: introduction
1: Collaborating
2: Tutoring
3: Exposition
4: Participating
5: Performing
6: Practicing
7: Making
8: Decomposing
9: Representing
10: Browsing

 

This list is not definitive. The aim is to identify a repertoire, rather than create a final taxonomy. Moreover it is a worldly and familiar repertoire. These acts are known to us before we enter any context of formal education or training. Systems of education and training recruit these familiar practices, giving them a greater tightness of structure: thereby making goals explicit and defining trajectories sharpened towards achieving those goals. The following list summarises their properties.

 

    • They are what people do. They get things done.
    • They are ‘cultural practices’: i.e., familiar activities, grounded in shared social and cultural history
    • Education creates opportunities for their structuring and rehearsal
    • Education populates them with new content
    • Education creates opportunities to integrate acts of learning into ‘projects’
    • Effective education equips the learner with awareness of owning a portfolio of such acts
    • An effective graduate of education strategically recruits from that portfolio in later life
    • Acts manifest a developmental trajectory: evolving from formats cultivated in early life

 

(3) Acts of learning as text

 

This would be an academic text – in the sense that is develops theoretical perspectives and grounds its arguments in peer-reviewed research. Yet it articulates approaches to learning that are familiar, reviewing how these approaches work. It will therefore build a vocabulary for recognising and managing the processes of learning. None of this should imply a ‘study skills’ handbook. Although, for learners, reflecting on psychological processes beneath the surface of common sense may make them more strategic about their learning. But it does not deal in such matters as “timetable your learning” or “keep and review notes”.

 

While, for teachers, mobilising the systematising vocabulary behind acts of learning may foster invention in how learning is orchestrated in the classroom. Such a text cannot be comprehensive and final about its subject matter but it can furnish a foothold onto a framework promising deeper understanding of human learning. Although that vocabulary will often draw from the mainstream of cognitive psychology (the mental world of the student), by approaching learning as a cultural practice, theorising will acknowledge the ways in which it exists within social relationships, is mediated by the cultural resources of technology, and is situated within place and ritual.

 

The approach to elaborating key theoretical concepts will also be gradual.  Concepts such as ‘generative strategy’, ‘intersubjectivity’, ‘load’, distributed cognition’ will be introduced early and gradually elaborated as they reappear in successive chapters.

 

The exposition must be accessible. It should be of interest to college-level students of Psychology, Education and Educational Psychology and perhaps Business Studies. It should also be of interest to some practicing teachers.  But it is likely to be of special value to those who prepare students for future teaching. In the UK current government policy stresses the importance of inserting more socio-cognitive psychological material into the preparation of teachers. They are currently poorly represented in the text book market. That should not imply the text will be parochial: it should work internationally.

 

How that audience is currently served

 

It is not well served.Practices of teaching get discussed and debated more than principles of learning. Yet such principles do exist; they are just not very prominent in the educational conversation. For example, consider a recent report of how six strategies derived from learning research were represented in text books for intending teachers. The authors commented: “Looking for the six strategies in these textbooks is akin to looking for six needles in a haystack. Even a sentence dedicated to one of the research-based strategies is infrequent.” (Pomerance, Greenberg and Walsh, 2016, p.6). To which the sceptic may counter: “… because your strategies are not very helpful!”. However, if there is such scepticism, it may not reflect the research findings themselves, more the challenge of communicating them effectively. The present book seeks to confront that challenge.

 

The following books are the closest in terms of a shared purpose (providing a deeper understanding of human learning – with special attention to the professional needs of practitioners)

 

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Unresolved issues

 

  • There could be a case for ‘further reading’. Suitable references might be placed as a list at the end of each chapter
  • A website associated with the book. I appreciate the way in which website are not maintained longterm could be a problem – despite an intention on my part at this point to do so. The URL is inexpensive and I own it.  It could also be a ‘further reading’ space
  • There are few graphics in the text. In particular, no graphs, diagrams or tables. This is not intentional. It merely seemed that if any were included then perhaps all should be.  And that would be space consuming. It might also make the book too much of a monograph and not a text book. But this could be done

References

 

Biesta, G. (2020). Risking ourselves in education: Qualification, socialization, and subjectification revisited. Educational theory, 70(1), 89-104.

 

Müller, L. M., & Cook, V. (2024). Setting research priorities for applied cognitive sciences—What do teachers want from research? British Educational Research Journal.

 

Pomerance, L., Greenberg, J., & Walsh, K. (2016). Learning about Learning: What Every New Teacher Needs to Know. National Council on Teacher Quality.