Learning 

Meaning and Nature:

Learning is a key process in human behavior. All living is learning. If we compare the simple, crude ways in which a child feels and behaves, with the complex modes of adult behavior, his skills, habits, thoughts, sentiments and the like- we will know what difference learning has made to the individual.

The individual is constantly interacting with and influenced by the environment. This experience makes him change or modify his behavior to deal effectively with it. Therefore, learning is a change in behavior, influenced by previous behavior. As stated above the skills, knowledge, habits, attitudes, interests and other personality characteristics are all the result of learning.

Learning is defined as “any relatively permanent change in behavior that occurs as a result of practice and experience”. This definition has three important elements.

a. Learning is a change in behavior—better or worse.

b. It is a change that takes place through practice or experience, but changes due to growth or maturation are not learning.

c. This change in behavior must be relatively permanent, and it must last a fairly long time.

All learning involves activities. These activities involve either physical or mental activities. They may be simple mental activities or complex, involving various muscles, bones, etc. So also the mental activities may be very simple involving one or two activities of mind or complex which involve higher mental activities.

What activities are learned by the individual refer to types of learning? For example, habits, skills, facts, etc. There are different types of learning. Some of the important and common learning activities are explained here.

Types of Learning:

1. Motor learning:

Most of our activities in our day-to-day life refer to motor activities. The individual has to learn them to maintain his regular life, for example walking, running, skating, driving, climbing, etc. All these activities involve muscular coordination.

2. Verbal learning:

This type of learning involves the language we speak, the communication devices we use. Signs, pictures, symbols, words, figures, sounds, etc, are the tools used in such activities. We use words for communication.

3. Concept learning:

It is the form of learning which requires higher-order mental processes like thinking, reasoning, intelligence, etc. we learn different concepts from childhood. For example, when we see a dog and attach the term ‘dog’, we learn that the word dog refers to a particular animal. Concept learning involves two processes, viz. abstraction and generalization. This learning is very useful in recognizing, identifying things.

4. Discrimination learning:

Learning to differentiate between stimuli and showing an appropriate response to these stimuli is called discrimination learning. For example, sound horns of different vehicles like bus, car, ambulance, etc.

5. Learning of principles:

Individuals learn certain principles related to science, mathematics, grammar, etc. to manage their work effectively. These principles always show the relationship between two or more concepts. Example: formulae, laws, associations, correlations, etc.

6. Problem-solving:

This is a higher-order learning process. This learning requires the use of cognitive abilities such as thinking, reasoning, observation, imagination, generalization, etc. This is very useful to overcome difficult problems encountered by the people.

7. Attitude learning:

Attitude is a predisposition that determines and directs our behavior. We develop different attitudes from our childhood about the people, objects and everything we know. Our behavior may be positive or negative depending upon our attitudes. Example: attitudes of a nurse towards her profession, patients, etc.

Behaviorist approach

The Behaviourist approach to learning studied changes in behavior that are caused by a person’s direct experience of their environment, using the principles of classical and operant conditioning to explain them.

The Behaviourist approach made a deliberate effort to be scientific and therefore refused to discuss mental processes that might be involved in learning because they are not observable and could not be studied objectively.

For this reason, Behaviourist explanations are sometimes called Stimulus-Response (S-R) explanations, because they only refer to observable stimuli and responses and ignore everything else.

While Behaviourism was the main approach in Psychology:

• The definition of psychology became: “… that division of Natural Science which takes human behavior — the doings and sayings, both learned and unlearned — as its subject matter” (Watson, 1919)

• All behavior was explained using classical and operant conditioning.

• Almost all research involving laboratory experiments on animal behavior and introspection were rejected as a tool.

 Cognitive Approach

Cognitive psychology is the scientific study of the mind as an information processor.

Cognitive psychologists try to build up cognitive models of the information processing that goes on inside people’s minds, including perception, attention, language, memory, thinking, and consciousness.

Cognitive psychology became of great importance in the mid-1950s. Several factors were important in this:

1. Disatisfaction with the behaviorist approach in its simple emphasis on external behavior rather than internal processes.
2. The development of better experimental methods.
3. Comparison between human and computer processing of information.

The emphasis of psychology shifted away from the study of conditioned behavior and psychoanalytical notions about the study of the mind, towards the understanding of human information processing, using strict and rigorous laboratory investigation.