What learning is

This chapter is about how we learn, so it is worth starting with what learning is not. Repeating a definition again and again until you can say it is memorising. Learning is something deeper.

Learning is any relatively permanent change in behaviour, or in behavioural potential (what a person is able to do), produced by experience or practice. A child who could not ride a bicycle practises for a week and can now ride: that is learning.

Features of learning:

• It always involves some kind of experience. It may follow repeated experience (practising scales on a keyboard) or a single one (touching a hot iron once is enough to be careful forever).
• The change is relatively permanent: not guaranteed forever, but lasting. Someone who learnt to swim as a child can usually still swim years later, though a skill left unused for very long may fade.
• It involves a sequence of psychological events: we notice and attend to the information, process it, store it (acquisition), and later recall it. In a study, psychologists first check what the learner already knows, then present the material, then test recall.
• It is an inferred process, different from performance. Learning happens inside and cannot be seen directly; we judge it from what a person does. If you say you can play the flute, others know it only when you play.

Changes that are NOT learning:

• Changes due to fatigue, illness or drugs: they are temporary and disappear when the cause goes.
• Changes due to maturation (growing up), such as a baby being able to stand.
• Habituation: the weakening of our natural responses to a stimulus that goes on and on. You stop noticing the ticking of a wall clock after a while; this is not learning.