Learning
Learning is the process of acquiring new understanding, knowledge, behaviors, skills, values, attitudes, and preferences.
Ability
The ability to learn is possessed by humans, animals, and some machines; and in certain plants. Some l. is immediate, induced by a single event (e.g. being burned by a hot stove), but much skill and knowledge accumulate from repeated experiences.
The changes induced by it often last a lifetime, and hard to distinguish learned material that seems to be “lost” from that which cannot be retrieved.
Human learning
It starts at birth and continues until death as a consequence of ongoing interactions between people and their environment. The nature and processes involved in it studied in many established fields. For example: educational psychology, neuropsychology, experimental psychology, cognitive sciences, and pedagogy.
As well as emerging fields of knowledge (e.g. learning from safety events such as incidents/accidents, or in collaboration: health systems).
Types
It may occur as a result of habituation, or classical conditioning, operant conditioning or as a result of more complex activities such as play, seen only in relatively intelligent animals. May occur consciously or without conscious awareness.
The condition learned helplessness caused by an aversive event, which can’t be avoided or escaped.
Play
It has been approached by several theorists as a form of learning. Children experiment with the world, learn rules, and to interact through play.
Lev Vygotsky agrees that play is pivotal for children’s development, since they make meaning of their environment through playing educational games. For Vygotsky. However, play is the first form of learning language & communication, and the stage where a child begins to understand rules and symbols.
This led to a view that l. in organisms always related to semiosis. It is a form of activity, conduct, or process that involves signs. Including the production of meaning, and often associated with representational systems/activity.
Learning Styles
Non-associative
- Habituation,
- Sensitization.
Active
- Associative,
- Conditioning: operant, classical, observational,
- Imprinting,
- Play,
- Enculturation,
- Associative, episodic, multimedia, e-learning and augmented learning, rote, evidence-based, formal nonformal, informal, nonformal and combined approaches, tangential, dialogic, incidental.