Table of Content
ToggleDifferent Ways Humans Learn
Prof David Geary of the University of Missouri, a cognitive developmental and evolutionary psychologist, first used the term “Biologically Primary Learning” to describe information humans have evolved to effortlessly learn without instruction, and “Biologically Secondary Learning” to describe information that humans need to learn for societal and cultural reasons but are unlikely to learn unless they are explicitly taught and make a conscious effort to learn.
For UNSW Professor John Sweller, the Founder of Cognitive Load Theory, the discrimination of Biologically Primary and Biologically Secondary Learning indicated the need for instruction to be directed at biologically secondary rather than primary information.
BiologicallyPrimary Learning
Language Acquisition:
Children learn to speak and understand their native language(s) without formal teaching. The ability to communicate orally is a fundamental biologically primary skill.
Walking and Running:
Babies learn to walk and eventually run without any formal lessons. The process involves trial and error, but it’s a skill we all develop.
Social Interaction:
Understanding social cues, empathy, and cooperation are essential skills that humans pick up through observation and interaction with others.
Recognizing Faces:
We can recognize familiar faces effortlessly, even without conscious effort. This skill is crucial for social bonding and survival.
Spatial Awareness:
Our brains naturally grasp spatial relationships, allowing us to navigate our environment, estimate distances, and avoid obstacles.
Imitating Movements:
We learn by observing others. Whether it’s talking, dancing, playing sports, or mimicking gestures, imitation is a powerful learning mechanism.
Fear Response:
Fear and danger detection are hardwired into our brains. We instinctively react to threats, such as jumping away from a sudden loud noise.
Object Permanence:
Babies learn that objects continue to exist even when they’re out of sight. This understanding is crucial for cognitive development.
Recognition of Objects and Shapes:
Humans and other primates have evolved to be able to almost instantly recognize complex shapes. For example, monkeys that have never seen a snake will react with fear to an image of a snake or other predator. This ability to recognize shapes of words in different fonts is a core skill that is employed in reading, discussed below.
Ability to be explicitly taught:
For humans to survive, they needed to pass onto their offspring their knowledge about how to survive. Humans have evolved to both teach and be taught. Humans have been able to teach other humans an astonishing amount of information. A core part of a child’s early knowledge acquisition is learning the names and functions of objects. Some names appear to be picked up as part of a child’s language acquisition, but over time, the names of objects need to be explicitly taught.
Problem solving:
Humans have evolved to solve problems by trying multiple scenarios (often mental scenarios) and seeing if one or more scenarios provides or is likely to provide the desired result.
Ability to Remember Things that Make Sense:
Humans have an ability to quickly and easily remember things that make sense. This process is closely related to learning or understanding. But a precondition is the acquisition of concepts and the ability to problem solve that allows a person to “make sense” of something new.
Ability to focus on a small number of relevant issues:
Humans have evolved the ability to learn what is relevant, and quickly prioritize and focus on the most relevant factors when needing to think about how to respond to a situation.
Ability to Protect our Long Term Memory from Irrelevant or Random Information:
Our long term memory is what humans need to navigate the world and our memory needs to operate quickly and accurately. So humans have evolved a filter mechanism where we don’t remember irrelevant or random information which could clog up our memories and slow them down. Information that does not make sense has a higher probability of being wrong, so it is not surprising that humans can better remember what makes sense that what does not make sense. Understanding these processes allows better educational design.
Improvement through Practicing:
Humans have evolved to be able to improve their performance in a wide range of physical and mental areas by practicing. Psychologist Anders Ericsson developed a structured way to improve performance that can be used to improve learning outcomes. Practice can change our brains by the development of new neural pathways that will allow e.g. fluent reading, accurate auditory discrimination of phonemes not in a student’s native language etc.
Ability to Cooperate in Large Groups:
Most humans live peacefully in groups that are larger and much more complex than any of our primate relations.
Trusting the familiar and fear of change:, A band of hominids in Africa is on the move and encounters new environments. At first everything is potentially dangerous. Repeated exposure to some things in new environments without negative consequences means that the hominids stop focusing on these things as imminent threats, and put their vigilance onto other things, which is a sensible strategy as focus is a limited resource. This describes an evolutionary understanding of how humans can be influenced by advertising and propaganda, and is one reason why humans often fear change..
There is no need to explicitly teach things that we have evolved to learn without teaching.
Biologically Secondary Learning
Anything that we need to learn but have not explicitly evolved to learn without instruction must be taught with instruction.
In particular, learning a second language and learning to read and write must be explicitly taught. Humans have evolved to learn to converse without explicit instruction, but mass reading has only happened in the last 2 centuries, and if reading confers a reproductive advantage, 200 years is far too short a time for any advantage to become apparent. Therefore, humans have not evolved to learn to read without instruction, and so reading must be explicitly taught.
Some teachers saw that students learned the highly complex task of conversation in their native language and thought that if students can learn to talk with little or no instruction, then they should be able to learn to read with little or no instruction. However, this is not the case as humans evolved to converse but did not evolve to read. Reading and adult second language learning need to be explicitly taught.
Cognitive Load Theory hypothesizes that acquiring biologically secondary information happens best under conditions that are aligned with human cognitive architecture.
For example, Cognitive Load Theory shows that explicitly teaching the information to be learned and then providing worked examples to study, is much faster than having a student trying to figure how to do what is being taught.
Acquiring novel information
Students can learn either by problem solving or by obtaining information from others. Problem solving is very slow and inefficient while obtaining information from others is fast and efficient. Take Fonetic English for example. A student can learn Fonetic English in a few minutes. Fonetic English could have been used 1000 years ago but it was not invented until recently, in part because it needed a lot of scientific developments to become known for the overall system to be understood.
Although Fonetic English took many years of development, it can be learned in just a few minutes. Clearly it is more efficient to have students learn an optimized system than having students try to develop it themselves.
Processing and storing information
Humans have two kinds of memory:
- Working memory, also called short-term memory that can only process 2, 3 or possibly 4 pieces of new information for as little as 20 seconds without the memory being refreshed.
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Long term memory which can hold enormous quantities of processed information from working memory for long periods of time.
- Working memory, also called short-term memory that can only process 2, 3 or possibly 4 pieces of new information for as little as 20 seconds without the memory being refreshed.
- Long term memory which can hold enormous quantities of processed information from working memory for long periods of time.