Download UNIT 6 THE LEARNING PROCESS AND MEMORY

UNIT 7
THE LEARNING PROCESS AND MEMORY
DEFINING LEARNING

Learning refers to any permanent change in behaviour or knowledge, resulting
from experience
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Kruger et al (1996) defines training as relatively permanent changes that are the
result of experience, or processes underlying or causing these changes
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Learning something that a person did not know before, or doing something that
he/she did not do before
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Also regarded by some as a sequence. The sequence processes information in
three distinct stages:
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An active perception stage which gives attention to stimuli from the environment
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A second mentally active stage which make sense of the information
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Finally, a restructuring and storage phase
UNIT 6
THE LEARNING PROCESS AND MEMORY
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Kolb’s learning cycle:
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Concrete Experience stage: perception of the objective world
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Observational and reflective stage: beginning of internalisation
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Abstract Conceptualisation stage: step back from reality and draw
conclusions and generalisations
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Active Experimentation Stage: check out theories and hunches by testing in
new situations
UNIT 6
THE LEARNING PROCESS AND MEMORY
This theory provides insights into the nature of the cycle:
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Learners are not passive recipients but need to actively explore and test
the environment
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It demonstrates that there is no end to learning but only another turn of
the cycle
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It identifies the importance of reflection and internalisation
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It is a useful way of identifying problems in the learning process
LEARNING STYLES
4 learning styles according to Kolb:
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Accommodative: strong preference for concrete experiences and active
experiments (hands on)
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Divergent: preference for concrete experiences, but to reflect on these
from different perspectives
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Assimilative: prefers to swing between reflection and conceptualisation
and will use inductive reasoning to develop new theory

Convergent: prefers to apply ideas, will take an idea and test it in
practice
LEARNING STYLES
Honey and Mumford simplified Kolb’s learning
cycle in the following way that people can
either classify themselves as either:
 Activists: those who are open to new ideas and
normally very active
 Reflectors: Thinking before acting
 Theorists: The relationship between
phenomena
 Pragmatists: Practical application
IMPORTANT CHARACTERISTICS OF THE
LEARNING PROCESS

Learning is the name given to the process/processes that give rise to
perceivable (observable or noticeable) changes in behaviour in situations
involving practice, teaching and life experience

Changes in behaviour arise from both formal learning situations and life
experience

The amount of learning that takes place influences the achievement
IMPORTANT CHARACTERISTICS OF
THE LEARNING PROCESS

Learning involves capturing information of an academic or
scholastic nature, as well as moral codes, attitudes,
customs, habits and skills

All learning displayed by animals is usually considered to be
the result of conditioning

We can distinguish between verbal and non-verbal learning
according to what they help learners achieve
VARIOUS FORMS OF LEARNING

Learning can be classified based on the following
criteria:

How well a learner must understand what he/she must
learn, and

The level of consciousness at which learning takes
place.
VARIOUS FORMS OF LEARNING

We can distinguish between the following forms of
learning:

Associative learning i.e.,

Classical conditioning

Operant conditioning

Trial-and-error

Cognitive learning

Social and moral learning (modelling behaviour)
Various forms of learning

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
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Various forms of learning can be classified according to
a range of criteria, namely:
a) How well a learner must understand what he or she
must learn and,
b) The level of consciousness at which learning takes
place.
We can distinguish between the following forms of
learning:
Associative learning (i.e classical conditioning,
Operant conditioning and trial–and-error learning)
Cognitive learning and
Social and moral learning (i.e. modelling behaviour)
Various forms of learning
Associative Learning

According to this mode of learning, behavioural changes
are analysed in terms of stimuli and responses. There is
therefore a link between stimulus (S) and response (R) of
the organism (person or animal).
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There are three main forms of associative learning:
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a)Classical conditioning
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b)Operant Conditioning
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c)Trial and error learning
Classical Conditioning
Discovered by the Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov

This process of classical conditioning can be described in terms of the following
elements:
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During classical conditioning, the organism (a person or animal) plays mainly a
passive role i.e. the dogs did not actively participate in the process of
salivation initiated by the ringing of the bell.
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An unconditioned stimulus (such as the dog’s food) is presented and this results
in an unconditioned response (salivation).
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A new stimulus or neutral stimulus (the ringing of the bell) is presented
immediately before the natural stimulus or unconditioned stimulus (offering
food to the dogs).
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After the above pairing of stimuli was repeated 20 to 40 times, the dogs would
salivate in response to the neutral stimulus on its own, that is without the
presence of the food. In this way the neutral or new stimulus (the ringing of the
bell) is converted into a conditioned stimulus resulting in a conditioned
response (salivation).
Requirements for the process of Classical
Conditioning
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The conditioned stimulus must be strong enough and specific enough for
the learner to perceive it easily.
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The sequence or order in which the conditioned and unconditioned stimuli
are presented is important. Better results are obtained if the conditioned
stimulus (the ringing of the bell) is presented immediately before the
unconditioned stimulus (the food) is presented. If the stimulus were
presented together with the food, conditioning would be less effective.
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Another important condition is that the delay or period between
presenting the conditioned and unconditioned stimuli should not be too
long or too short.
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Conditioning does not happen after only a single presentation or
association.
The Characteristics of
conditioning processes
Generalisation

Certain situations, objects and stimuli can be so similar that an organism
responds to them all in the same way.
Discrimination
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In contrast to generalisation, the conditioned response can be limited by
differentiating between the types of stimuli
Extinction
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The question has been asked whether an organism will carry on displaying a
conditioned response indefinitely. Pavlov found that the conditioned response
will continue, provided the conditioned stimulus is presented from time to
time. When the unconditioned stimulus (food) is no longer presented,
however, the effect of the conditioned stimulus (sound of bell) on the
conditioned reflex or response (salivation) is reduced and the conditioned
response disappears completely after a time (Gouws 1988).
Spontaneous recovery

When giving your pet its food, note how the animal, bird or fish responds when
you perform the action.
Operant Conditioning
Nature of Operant Conditioning
Reward and Punishment
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Operant conditioning is a form of conditioning in which the organism
voluntarily displays a response (behaviour) that is either rewarded or
punished by an environmental event.
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In operant conditioning the emphasis is on the response and the
appropriate reinforcement of that response, while relatively little
attention is paid to cues (signals) and stimuli from the environment.
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Operant conditioning differs from classical conditioning where the
emphasis is on the conditioned stimulus (a bell) that elicits or results in a
conditioned response (salivation).
Reinforcement
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In the process of operant conditioning the response of the organism should
be repeated if learning is to take place. This is achieved by reinforcing the
response so that the response is more likely to recur or happen again.
Operant Conditioning
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Positive reinforcement and Negative reinforcement
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Positive reinforcement takes place when the presentation of the
reinforcer (reward) after the response results in an increase or
maintenance of the strength of the response (in other words, the response
is stronger or stays the same): i.e. if an employee receives a bonus
(reward) each time he/she performs well, he/she will continue to produce
good work.
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Negative reinforcement takes place when the removal of a negative
stimulus after the response results in an increase or maintenance of the
strength of the response, i.e. If an employee is penalised each time he/she
is absent by having his/her bonus taken away, the employer will put in a
better effort to be at work to avoid losing the bonus.
Obtaining the desired response under operant
conditioning
The following factors are important in obtaining the desired response
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Wait for the desired response. The most common method is to wait until
the organism displays the desired response, and then to reinforce it. The
disadvantage is that one sometimes has to wait a long time before the
response is displayed.
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Increased motivation. The use of increased motivation can increase the
probability of obtaining the desired response.
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Reduction of the number of potential responses.
Obtaining the desired response
under operant conditioning
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Verbal instructions. The person carrying out the experiment
can explain what response is required by means of verbal
instructions.
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Reinforcement of all responses. A very effective way of
obtaining the desired response is to reinforce smaller parts
of the desired behaviour or response.
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Physical role play (modelling). Demonstrating the desired
response is also very effective.
Trial-and-error learning
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In this case of trial-and-error, an organism plays an active role, in contrast
to the passive role it plays during the classical conditioning process.
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The process of trial and error learning takes place as follows:
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Before learning takes place, there must be a state of tension resulting
from biological urges or drives and physiological needs.
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The learner initially experiences a problem, as he/she does not know the
best way to satisfy his/her urges or needs.
Trial-and-error learning
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The motivation that the person experiences as a result
of the tension releases energy that can be used in a
variety of spontaneous reactions.
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The successful reactions or behaviour is now reinforced
through the satisfaction that is gained because the
stress has been reduced.
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We can conclude that the repetition of the effective
behaviour means that the effective response is
increasingly reinforced and ineffective activities are
gradually eliminated.
Cognitive learning
Cognitive learning can be described as learning that takes place by
means of conscious cognitive processes (such as the observation of a
model) rather than mechanical conditioning processes (Plug et al,
1987).
Forms of cognitive learning
Latent learning
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This is the form of learning that takes place when behaviour is
learned in a latent form i.e. without reinforcement.
Learning by insight
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This is the form of learning that involves the final, sudden and
spontaneous recognition of relations between given facts
Social and Moral Learning

Learning also refers to the imprinting of information that a person
receives and processes during the course of social interaction with other
people.
Modelling behaviour
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This form of learning is referred to as observational learning or learning
through imitation, i.e. if an employee observes that his/her supervisor
consistently neglects to wear a hard hat when entering a controlled area,
he/she may begin to imitate this behaviour and no longer wear his/her
hard hat in the controlled area.
Social and Moral Learning
Modelling consists of three processes of imitation:
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First people learn skills and social behaviour through their interaction with
and resulting imitation of other people.
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The second process involves the inhibition or loss of inhibition of learnt
responses. This means that a person who has already learnt to display a
response may learn whether or not to display it under certain
circumstances, by observing other people.
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The third process on which modelling is based is the eliciting of an already
learnt response.
Principles and Factors Involved in the
Learning Process
Goal-setting

Goal setting is based on the fact that the learning behaviour of
individuals is influenced by the conscious striving for goals.
Difficult goals motivate the learner more that easy ones, while
specific goals are pursued more easily than general ones (Kruger at
al 1996).
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According to the goal-setting theory, there are three important
requirements for leaner motivation:
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Goals must be clear and understandable
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Goals must be difficult enough to be regarded as a challenge, but
not too difficult that learners are discouraged.
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The ultimate goal must be divided into sub-goals (objectives)
during the course.
Principles and Factors Involved in the
Learning Process
Distribution of learning time
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According to Gouws (1988), learners master subject
matter learnt over a number of short periods or
sessions more effectively and remember it better than
material learnt in a single long session.
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According to McCormick & Ilngen (1985), the following
factors are important with regard to the distribution of
learning time:
Principles and learning factors continue…
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Distribution of learning time is more appropriate when motor skills are
being learnt than in the case of verbal subject matter or other complex
forms of learning.
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The less significant or meaningful, the more difficult and the greater the
scope of the subject matter, the more appropriate the distribution of
learning time will be.
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Subject matter learnt over distributed learning periods is remembered
longer than subject matter presented in concentrated units.
Principle of learning factors continue..
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Knowledge of results (feedback)
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Feedback or knowledge of results plays a vital part in the
learning process, and fulfils two functions (McCormick &
Ilngen, 1985):
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-The first is a directional function because knowledge of
behaviour is important if someone is to complete a task
successfully, i.e. A crane operator cannot learn how to
control the crane without knowing how the crane responds
each time a lever is manipulated.
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-The second is a motivating function because the feedback
of positive results reinforces the learner's motivation to
learn, i.e. if an employee attends a training course offered
by the organisation for which he/she works, knowledge of
his/her results has the following benefits:
Prinsiple of learning factors
continue..…
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He/she has an indication of his/her progress
and a standard for comparison (in other
words, he/she might realise that not enough
time is being devoted to studying, that
he/she is concentrating on the wrong aspects
of the work, and so on);
- Finally, it is important for the learner to
receive his/her results as soon as possible
after the test or examinations so that the
process of reinforcement can take place. If
there is a long delay, the results will be of no
value, since it will be difficult for
reinforcement to take place.
Principle of learning factors
continue…
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Meaningfulness of learning material
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People find it easier to learn meaningful learning
material than meaningless material, i.e. an employee
will find it relatively easy to learn instructions on how
to operate a piece of equipment if the instructions are
expressed in 200 words that form a meaningful whole.
However, it would be much more difficult to learn 200
separate words that do not form a meaningful whole.
Motivation and learning

The learner's motivation is very important. If someone's
learning task is meaningful for him/her, and his/her learning
is goal-directed or purposeful, the learning is easier than
when the person is not motivated, i.e. an employee knows
that if he/she successfully completes the course offered by
his/her employer, he/she will be promoted, and so he/she
studies hard.
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Receiving the results of his/her tests from time to time and
realising that he/she is doing well will also reinforce the
employee's motivation to continue to give of his/her best,
and successfully complete the course
Memory

The ability to remember or recall subject matter is an important
part of the learning process. A person must be able to repeat what
he or she has learnt; otherwise the learning process would have
been worthless.

3.1 The nature of memory
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Plug et al. (1987) describe memory as the reliving of an event from
the past, accompanied by the awareness that the event is being
relived.
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Memory is thus the ability of an organism to remember, in other
words, the characteristic of an organism that influences future
behaviour on the basis of what has already been experienced.

Memory is the ability to remember all experiences or only specific
experiences
The process of memory
The process of memory
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The storage and recall of information

The process of memory enables the individual to use what he/she has
learnt again. This process of remembering takes place on the following
levels:
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Sensory storage
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Short-term memory
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Long-term memory, and
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Retrieval of information
Short-term memory
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Limited duration (in other words, how long the information is
stored).

The retention of material/information lasts from two to 60
seconds. Short-term memory is more selective in nature (in other
words, one can remember more specific information, such as the
sequence of the results of a motor car race) and slightly more
permanent than sensory storage.
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Limited capacity (in other words, the amount of information
stored).
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Short-term memory capacity is more limited than that of sensory
storage. It is measured in terms of the number of items that a
person can recall faultlessly and in the correct sequence or order
after having read through them once. Most people have a memory
span of only five to nine items (Gouws, 1988).
Long-term Memory

According to Jordaan & Jordaan (1990), long-term memory
can be distinguished on the basis of the following two
aspects:
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- The ability to receive and store information during
observation.
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The ability to trace and recall information stored in longterm memory.
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Long-term memory can be described in terms of the
following characteristics (Gouws, 1988):
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Like sensory storage, long-term memory has a large capacity.
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Long-term memory is usually well organised; in other words,
the information stored can be remembered more easily
because it is stored in a logical sequence.
Long-term Memory

The information is sifted (unimportant elements are
removed), coded (classified in broad categories) and stored
(stored in the memory) and thus forms a component or part
of all experience that can be remembered.

Information is rearranged when new material is added.
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The process is not static, but dynamic.
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Information obtained through any of the senses can be
stored.
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New material can be arranged meaningfully together with
old material.
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Familiar material or information is easier to process or
arrange than unfamiliar material.
Retrieval of information

People are generally less able to retrieve information than to store it. It is
also not always possible to retrieve information immediately (Gouws, in
Kruger et al, 1988)
Other types of mental abilities:
Spatial memory

Spatial memory is a phrase used to refer to memory for
spatial information, such as the geographical layout of
a town or the interior of a friend's house.

This type of memory requires remembering the position
of items or learning how to navigate through a maze.

Additionally, some people naturally tend to process
information verbally, while others naturally tend to
process information spatially or visually (e.g. through
pictures).
Mental abilities continue..

An individual who tends to process
information verbally may score
relatively poorly on a test of spatial
memory, even though there is nothing
"wrong" with that person's memory.

When testing a person's memory, it is
better to consider both verbal and
visual memory to get a complete
understanding of that person's memory
abilities (Kohonen 1984).
Types of memories….
Span memory
 Span memory refers to the number of items, usually
words or numbers that a person can retain and recall.
 Memory span is a test of working memory (short-term
memory).
 In a typical test of memory span, an examiner reads a
list of random numbers aloud at about the rate of one
number per second.
 At the end of a sequence, the person being tested is
asked to recall the items in order.
 The average span for normal adults is 7 (Rosenblatt,
1962).
Visual memory

This is another form of memory, which requires the ability to isolate and
study a form of learning in which words make relatively little contribution
as mnemonic aids.

These demonstrations should allow you to appreciate how fragile visual
memory can be, and how easily memory for one item can be disrupted by
successive items.
Associative memory

This refers to the ability to store mappings of specific
input representations to specific output representations
i.e. a system that "associates" two patterns such that
when one is encountered subsequently, the other can
be reliably recalled.

In this case, the process of recalling takes place by
associating one item with the other.

Kohonen draws an analogy between associative memory
and an adaptive filter function.
Associative memory

The filter can be viewed as taking an ordered
set of input signals and transforming them into
another set of signals, the output of the filter.

It is the notion of adaptation, allowing its
internal structure to be altered by the
transmitted signals, which introduces the
concept of memory to the system (Kohonen
1984).
Inductive reasoning




Induction occurs when we gather bits of specific
information together and use our own knowledge and
experience in order to make an observation about what
must be true.
Inductive reasoning does not use syllogisms, but series
of observations, in order to reach a conclusion.
The reasoning process here is directly opposite to that
used in deductive syllogisms.
Rather than beginning with a general principle (People
who comb their hair wake up on time), the chain of
evidence begins with an observation and then combines
it with the strength of previous observations in order to
arrive at a conclusion (McConkey 1996).
Inductive reasoning scenario
Consider the following chains of observations:

Observation: John came to class late this morning.

Observation: John’s hair was uncombed.

Prior experience: John is very fussy about his hair.

Conclusion: John overslept.
Reasoning

The reasoning process here is directly opposite to that used in deductive
syllogisms.

Rather than beginning with a general principle (People who comb their
hair wake up on time), the chain of evidence begins with an observation
and then combines it with the strength of previous observations in order
to arrive at a conclusion (McConkey 1996).
Questions and Summary