Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever. ~ Mahatma Gandhi
While I was doing my RT2 assignments, I found an interesting education paper about holistic view of learning1. In this paper, 6 concepts of learning were explained:
- Learning to increase one’s knowledge.
- Learning as memorising and reproducing.
- Learning as applying.
- Learning as understanding.
- Learning as an interpretive process aimed at understanding reality.
- Learning as changing a person.
A relationship exists between a learner’s concept of learning and the learning approach they are likely to use. Students who perceive learning as #1 or #2 will tend to adopt a surface approach (where the motive of learning is to meet the requirements minimally, usually for a short-term target) and students who perceive learning as #3, #4, #5 will tend to do deep approach (where the motive of learning is intrinsic interest to discover meaning and acquiring competence).
Looking back through my education history - spending about 14 years in Indonesian education system and about 4 years Australian until now - most of the learning approach I have used is surface approach.
Indonesian education system was terrible. I actually did not remember learning something if not for the sake of tests and exams. Maybe it is the fact that I was in K-12 level (maybe university level in Indo is a lot better?), I don’t know. All I know was that if I wanted to be somewhat recognised as the top-students, I would have to be an all rounder, getting high marks in ridiculously 13 subjects2. I remember my gleaming pride after a full two nighters memorising two Biology books for the final exam, in total the books were almost 3 cm and I could reproduce every single diagram in them. Can I draw one of the diagram now? No way.
Even on the assignment that I am doing in this current session, I cannot stress how reliant I am to a marking guideline. I need to make sure that what I am producing is inline to what the marker wants to see. The marks have spoken themselves to say how successful I am in doing so, but I wonder what is it that I am learning. Being in uni for about 3 years, doing approximately 8 subjects a year, I can count with my fingers how many subjects support deep learning approach. These subjects are excellent and useful, the knowledge I gain is for my life, but unfortunately they are so hard to find. There are not many of great lecturers to conduct subjects like those3.
To be called an effective teacher, one will have to be able to measure the knowledge gained by the students objectively. This is by default inconsistent with concept #6: learning as changing a person. It takes too much time and it is extremely complicated to measure changes in students’ life individually and then compare each of them to each other. Those changes may not be able to be measured then, and one can’t even put any time frame of when it can be measured because each student is different. Great teachers with students’ achieving low marks in knowledge reproducing activities may be seen as incompetent teachers where as in fact they have changed the students’ view in life through their teaching. Sad eh?
I will be interested to hear what you think about your own concepts of learning and also your view of the education systems you have gone through. Have you learned useful knowledge for your life through the system or was it all just about exams?
- Willis D, 1993. Learning and Assessment: Exposing the Inconsistencies of Theory and Practice [↩]
- Religion, Civics, Mathematics, Indonesian, English, Sociology, Economy, Geography, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Computer, Physical Education [↩]
- To name almost everyone at the time I was at university: Richard Buckland from Computer Science and Engineering, Bruce Gordon from Business Law and Dubravka Cecez-Kecmanovic from Information System. [↩]
At 66 I can look back to 30 yrs of working with children’s education that grew me out of the useless, time-wasting, universal kind (text books, syllabi, timetable, classroom, homework, test & exams, competition, compulsion) to freedom in learning, where the facilitator is a learner as well.
Natural learning, self-directed learning, autonomy in learning, learning to know, learning to be, cooperative learning, learning from nature, are only a few of the many phrases that come to mind. Today, familiarity with the MI, 12 Learning Principles, etc has only further endorsed my old gut-feel that schools are anti-children, anti-learning places. And that there must be something radically different in its place for Real/Right learning.
With the kind of “education” prevalent across the world it is no wonder at all that societies everywhere are overwhelmed with deterioration, violence, injustice, misery, etc. The root issue for world change is right education. All other attempts at social change can only be fragmentary, peripheral, partial. Set the learner free, be-friend him/her, help the learner discover the self-autonomy of true learning. As “teachers” our brief is to aid the learning process.
Comment by boru — 26 September 2007 @ 5:27 pm
I have pretty much adhered to concepts #3 and #4 throughout my education life (so-far). I believe it is important to spend time thinking how your brain works before you can direct yourself on how to learn. Also how you use your knowledge plays an important part on which learning is suitable, or IMO right/wrong for the certain purpose.
Personally I cannot surface learn, and this was evident to me very early in my life. In primary school, ranking was usually based on final exams, and we had final exams in 4 consecutive days, 2 exams per day (the examable subjects were chinese I & II, english, maths, science, society and culture, health, bible study)… I just couldn’t remember anything from the text book (and I didn’t read textbook during the year anyways)… and so I failed miserably in most subjects… from grade 1 to grade 4
The biggest change thou was when I was in year 5 where my teacher had this weekly MC test (she would pick one paper of the two, each had 80 Qs) and whoever got less than 77/80 would need to write out the entire paper 5 times. Of course i never got above 60% and I spent around 4 hrs per night (from 10pm up till 2am) writing lines….. Chain reaction followed: not enough sleep -> no time to study -> write more lines > not enough sleep etc etc. I tried memoryise the MC answer the night before (e.g. B-D-D-A-C-D … you know the rest) but it didn’t work. :(
Getting-100%-on-MC type of education system really annoyed me, and after writing lines for about two months my mum sat down and had a serious talk with me. It was then I realised I needed to spend time UNDERSTANDING the material and look into them more detail if I wanted to remember them for good… and the nerdish “glam” was born - after a few weeks I no longer needed to write lines… In fact I topped my class that very year and the ex-first in my class got very pissed :D
So for me I had chosen deep learning because that was how my brain worked and following it would get me out of horrible chain reaction and allowed me to understand things more. “Great teachers with students’ achieving low marks in knowledge reproducing activities … have changed the students’ view in life through their teaching.” Certainly holds in my case - low marks in MC -> change in study pattern -> get out of trouble in life.
I must say, surface learn is NOT BAD… Like my close uni cohorts cannot deep learn… they just don’t remember things too long ago. However they have the ability to pick things up pretty fast so that even thou they surface learn, it is not not learning for life, but rather learn adaptively. So yeah pick one that suits you, and the point I want to make is whatever you learn stays with you. Even if you don’t remember every diagram in a biology textbook, but if you come back to it I bet it will take you less time to understand the diagram as oppose to at your first glace, right?
P.S. I think my comment is longer than the original post… hehe ^_^”
Comment by glam — 26 September 2007 @ 11:14 pm
HAhaha I don’t know why, but when you mention about your study in Indo, I remember how funny it was when we competing each other in solving math problems, I guess it was about finding volume or area of a cube or a box. Hahaha and I think we were one of the top students in math in that class hahaha. I started to think about Ronald, Rene, Louise, Ine hoooooo I’m getting out of topic, but that’s what on my mind right now hohoho
Comment by Jeff — 27 September 2007 @ 5:33 am
@boru: I very much agree with you that the right education will solve most of the world issues we are facing today, but seems like people are extremely impatient to invest on it and see the seed grows steadily. Once people are more aware of it, hopefully things will get better. Maybe education need more campaigning, just like we have all the climate change campaign at present :)
@glam: Yes, if surface learning is not that bad after all because to be able to correlate knowledge, you do need to remember some facts and that s where the quantitative knowledge gained from surface learning is useful. However, I felt quite shocked when I was at the beginning of uni and the assignments that I got asked me to think… :( I wouldn’t have felt that if I did deep learning.
@jeff: Those were the days hey… :D
Comment by marty — 27 September 2007 @ 8:20 am
hey marty!
great post :) and i agree, surface learning just doesn’t work - deep learning is the way to go. All throughout primary and till about grade 8 I learnt for marks, i was more interested if my marks were higher/lower than my friends etc.(possibly with the exception for maths, where i actually took the effort to understand the derivation of formulas etc)
But for some reason or another in gr9 I didn’t care about marks so much, I more so learnt to understand - kept asking “Why?” (and annoyed my teachers!) and well, I actually did much better! (it might also be because we were able to choose our subjects so i was more interested in what I was learning)
However, it’s a sad thing that school/uni seem to encourage “surface” learning - learning for marks. Even though I much prefer trying to fully understand concepts etc and actually learn something, assignments/exams are often set out so they force you to do it just for marks (otherwise you’ll probably fail and have to redo the subject!)
As you mentioned there are a few rare lecturers that encourage deep learning and set assignments that allow you to do so. But I think it takes much more effort, time and energy to set such great assignments, so unfortunately we mostly get surface learning assignments :(
Comment by pyko — 27 September 2007 @ 12:03 pm
Hey guys.
I find surface learning harder and harder actually as our memory gets worse lol.
Comment by Ray — 19 October 2007 @ 5:37 pm
we are getting old after all lols
Comment by marty — 19 October 2007 @ 6:55 pm