The two types of learning
What is learning anyway?
After my previous discussion on tests I will now continue to explore how we learn.
Learning is a very ambiguous term. With learning we refer to either of two types of learning: memorization and understanding.
Memorization: the act of committing knowledge to memory, such as labels, words, , definitions, locations, etc
Understanding: knowing how all the pieces of a concept fit together.
Let’s say you are studying the workings of the combustion engine in a car.
On one hand you have to understand the system: how does the engine actually work?
The system is fairly easy to understand: gas is compressed in a chamber, than ignited with a spark causing a small explosion, which causes an axis to rotate. For this understanding you need to have hardly any knowledge of the parts, their names or their locations.
However, if you want to communicate about your car engine with another human being you will have to know which parts are involved, where in the process they are applicable, their shape and what they are called. Those are things that will need to memorized.
For example: the spark for the explosion is generated by the ‘spark plug’ (an easy name to remember). It is a small cylindrically shaped object with threads at the bottom. They are plugged in at the top of the combustion chamber.
Both understanding and memorization have their importance and their place. Depending on the topic the importance of understanding and memorization can vary. When you start to learn a language then understanding plays only a small part, it is mostly about memorization. But when you are studying math understanding is practically everything while memorization is only reserved for very specific formulas (e.g. the circumference of circle is 2*pi*r) for easy retrieval later on.
There are different methods to accomplish each type of learning (also depending on the type of material being studied). We will not go into the methods in this post, that is for a later post.
Disclaimer: these are all opinions (based on various materials I’ve read, but opinions nonetheless).