Learning, not Performance
Jonathan Firth's Memory & Metacognition Updates #89
Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been sharing a few ideas which I hope will make it easier to think about exactly what we mean by learning, how it connects to memory, and what it looks like in the classroom.
Last time, I raised the issue of performance. Material may go into a student’s memory. Perhaps they can discuss ideas with a classmate, answer questions during and at the end of class, and even do their homework on the topic. But all of this doesn’t really count as learning if nothing is retained over the longer term.
And that is what we educators are aiming for. A longer post today, as I dive into this issue!
How researchers see the issue
In a key paper on the subject (link below), researchers Nick Soderstrom and Robert Bjork (2015) explain that we can separate what a learner can do (currently), and what they have learned. For example, it has been known over decades of animal research that learning is not always accompanied by an immediate change in behaviour.
The researchers argue that to count as learning, we must see two key things:
Relatively permanent retention of material
The ability to use or transfer that material
It’s not enough to be able to show what you know today, or even after a few days. A student getting the answers right at the end of class, in homework, or in a test soon after – these don’t demonstrate that something has been learned.
The researchers put it this way:
The primary goal of instruction should be to facilitate long-term learning—that is, to create relatively permanent changes in comprehension, understanding, and skills of the types that will support long-term retention and transfer. During the instruction or training process, however, what we can observe and measure is performance, which is often an unreliable index of whether the relatively long-term changes that constitute learning have taken place (Soderstrom & Bjork, 2015, p. 176).
This insight has major implications for teaching situations. It shows that much of what students do in their classes – their answers, the quality of the work, their subjective understanding – simply can’t be relied upon as evidence of learning.
These things are performance, and don’t show us what (if anything) has been learned.
Transfer
Learning, as defined above, also being able to do something with the new memory. At the very least, the learner should be able to retrieve it in relevant situations. Again, we could hardly call it ‘learning’ if that didn’t happen.
Researchers have actually been discussing this for a long time. Whitehead (1929) discussed the risk of schooling leading to ‘inert ideas’, and later, David Perkins and Gavriel Salomon wrote extensively about students’ ability to transfer what they have learned from the classroom to other situations (e.g. Perkins & Salomon, 1992).
More on how to support transfer in another post, but for now, it may be reassuring to know that a lot of desirable difficulties (see update #10), such as varied practice, help with this.
The Positives
It may feel alarming to consider that what we observe in classrooms is performance, not learning. However, there is a major positive to focusing on the right thing. If we fail to consider the performance vs. learning issue, we (and our students) could be deluding ourselves into thinking that learning is taking place.
In short, we need to know when things are not having the desired effect.
Secondly, there are things that we can do to help ensure that material is well stored in memory, and therefore, to facilitate learning. If we understand the distinction between performance and learning, it helps to bring the focus on some of these strategies and techniques.
Both evidence and solution
So, what are the strategies that help to boost learning, rather than performance? As a reader of these updates, engaged with the evidence on memory, perhaps you are already doing many of the right things!
As Soderstrom and Bjork (2015, p. 176) say, “the conditions that produce the most errors during acquisition are often the very conditions that produce the most learning.”
In other words, things that make learning more difficult can harm performance but boost learning.
This, in a nutshell, is the idea of desirable difficulties. And interestingly, these form both evidence for the concept, and a classroom solution, too:
Desirable difficulties provide evidence for the learning vs. performance distinction because difficulties such as spacing out practice make performance worse, and make learning better.
They also present solutions to the problem of temporary performance. Desirable difficulties are, compared to other teaching/study strategies, focused more on permanent learning This is one of the main reasons for using them!
Here is the link to the paper that I have referred to several times:
Soderstrom, N. C., & Bjork, R. A. (2015). Learning versus performance: An integrative review. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 10(2), 176–199.
(I may have shared the same one in the past, but it’s worth another look).
Next time: if what happens during instruction is an ‘unreliable index of learning’, what are the implications for lesson observations?
Jonathan
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