Education-Key elements of the learning process

Its always been quite a mystery to me how we manage not to produce world beating talent from our schools depsite the fact that the curriculum is probably one of the toughest in the world. Is it possible that we may have got our priorities wrong-far too much focus on the content than on the process of learning

My own educational journey through school and college has been nothing short of truamatic as it must be for most others in our country. I am sure most people would agree that the content of our course curricula is far too voluminous to allow any meaningful learning to take place in such a short time. The focus is an excessive focus on memorizing and then reproducing the content in the examination process. As a result a small minority of students manage to do well but a vast majority neither achieve success nor manage to retain the curiosity and passion, two emotions badly needed to retain a lifelong love for learning. I have had the good fortune to belong to the small minority. And that fact has always worried me. It has worried me that our education process can not help the vasr majority achieve what id does for an exalted few. And that perhaps is the reason that we have not succeeded as a country to achieve the objective of universal education. There are far too many children who turn away from education in our country. The system itself has to accept some blame for it

But I am sure this is not the first time these issue are being raised. So on a more constrcutive note, I would like to talk about what can be done to correct the situation. I would like to suggest a learning methodology that I have used with a fair amount of success till now in my own educational pursuits. As students we are often required to understand abstract concepts as part of our education. we often do not have any means of relating these concepts do our life experiences and it is this that makes learning about these concepts difficult for a child. To understand why this is so I have tried to outline the process that I suspect most of us consciously or subsconsciously follow to internalize these concepts. I hope to demonstrate that memorizing alone is not the only key element of this process. It certainly is an important one but our current examination process is so poorly structured that memorization alone has come to be highly overrated. There are other key elements of this learning process which if given due recognition will help in making the entire process a much easier and pleasant experience

As I see it, the learning of a concept starts with comprehension as the first step and by this I mean purely literal understanding of the text that is attempting to explain the concept. Simple vocabulary and an easy to follow structure goes a long way in promoting comprehension.This is followed by visualization ie seeing the concept play itself out in my mind's eye. Good examples that mimic real life expereiences and if possible audio visual aids are very helpful. To ensure that the student fully understands the concept it is important to help him verbalize this new concept that he has learnt. The next step is then, obviously, verbalization. Having to explain to his friends or to his tutors what he has understood in his own words will be very useful in helping him understand where there are still gaps in his understanding of the concetp. Not just explain the concept, but be able to reply to field queries as well.

Memorization is the next step of the learning process so that the new concept can now be committed to long term memory. The first three steps have already played a useful part in facilitating memorization. But often further reinforcement is often needed to help commit the learning to long term memory. Obviosuly the exam oriented process incentivizes short term memorization only so its a hardsell convincing anyone that long term memorization serves a useful purpose.
The next step and probably the hardest to explain, is integration. That is the process of making the new concept a part of my existing knowledge base. My knowledge base is a repository of ideas and thoughts about how the world works. Its a body of knowledge that I have accumulated from my education and life experiences accumulated so far. This new concept needs to be appropriately placed in this knowledge base structure to esnure that it fits in there. If there is a clash with any of the other pre-existing ideas then either one of the pre-existing concepts needs to be rejected or the new idea needs to be rejected. In fact, the attempt at long term memorization will not be successful unless any clash with my existing knowledge base is not adequately addressed.

In brief, this is the underlying philosophy of my own learning process. I have developed this methodology gradually over the last fifteen to twenty years to try and make my own learning experience as efficient and interesting as possible. There have been instances where I have not fully succeeded. Rightly or wrongly, I attribute those failures to an education system that is so exam oriented that it does not allow for a sufficient amount of time for this learning process to be used properly. My current observations of the education system in England has further strengthened my beliefs in this direction. Recently I have observed that the primary school curriculum in the UK has been moving towards what is being called 'Theme based ' learning which I interpret to be the same as concepts based learning. I strongly believe that the learning model that needs to be adopted for this kind of education has to be based on a multiple step process based in comprehension, visualization,verbalization, memorization and integration.

The five step learning methodology that I suggested needs to explained further with emphasis on the methods that can be used in the classroom to promote this methodology and ultimately to make its use second nature for all students . Students need to be made aware of how it works and to gradually adopt the process in all their learning experiences. Once students take this process on board it and habitually start using it I am convinced it will guarantee them success in all their future endeavours. It will also make the governments effort in the direction of achieving universal education a self sustaining one. Obviously the current mindset needs to change from one that favours volume of learning in favour of quality of learning. More of this discussion in my next post..