How Do People Learn?

I was recently getting a much-needed haircut with a new stylist, and in our small talk, he asked me what I do for a living.

I explained that I teach current and future teachers how people learn and do research on that topic. He responded, “What do you mean? If people want to learn things, they learn those things.”

His belief is not an uncommon one, and while motivation or a person’s “want” to learn does matter, how people learn is such a complex process that there is no one thing that explains the way it works.

Learning results from the interaction of multiple variables both inside and outside of us. In this blog series, I will help you build on your current understanding of how people learn, connect you with research on strategies to help you learn better, and tell you about my research and teaching experiences related to being the best learner you can be.

So how do people learn?

Most people have a general understanding of how learning happens; whether through formal education or informal life settings, we are all learners throughout our lives. However, most people do not have a nuanced understanding of the complexity of learning and underestimate the number of factors that influence how, what, and how well we learn.

To answer the question of how people learn, we must back up and define what we mean by learning. Most experts, myself included, explain that learning is a relatively permanent change in knowledge or behavior based on experience. So, let’s break that down…

• Relatively permanent: When you learn something, it should be available to you for a long time. Learning is not the same as memorizing because memorizing is short-term, but learning is long-term. For example, I learned how to read music over 35 years ago, and I can pick up a piece of music and identify what notes are represented in the piece, though I rarely play music these days.
• Change: When you learn something, there is a change. Change may be the central idea of learning, for what is learning if not a change in what we know or do? For example, I am currently learning how to speak Spanish. One year ago, I could speak and understand about 25 words in Spanish, but this year, I can speak and understand about 150 words in Spanish. That is clearly a change!
• Knowledge or behavior: When you learn something, it can be something you know, or it can be something you do. We must learn the things we know and the things we know how to do. Pieces of information (for example, red and yellow mixed make orange), aspects of our culture (for example, sharing food is a sign of respect in my culture), how to do things (for example, riding a bicycle requires both balance and pedaling) all require learning.
• Experience: Learning does not happen without the influence of experience. You can watch a video, take a class, use an app, or read a book… but you have to have some kind of experience that causes the change in knowledge or behavior to happen. For example, I was privileged to have the experience of obtaining a Ph.D. in educational psychology, and that experience is what has helped me learn about this information, how to conduct research on this information, and how to share this information with others.

Are there better or worse ways to learn things?

There is a lot, and I mean a lot, of research explaining how learning happens (like this study), what kinds of things can make it better, and what kinds of things can make it worse. Some of these things you may already know.

If someone tells you a bunch of information in a very chaotic and disorganized way, you probably know you are not going to learn it. Or if you are bored and do not understand why you are supposed to learn the information, you probably know you are not going to learn it.

Or if you got yelled at by someone while you were trying to learn how to do something, you probably know you are not going to learn how to do it. Those experiences are accurate and align with research on learning. But there is so much more to learning because of the complexity of humans.