Somebody needs to quietly break the news to this year’s crop of high school grads. “Learning? It hasn’t even started yet, so get good at it — you’ll need to be an effective learner for the rest of your life.”
I can offer that advice with confidence because for the 60 or so years since my own high school graduation, it has been a matter of learning one new thing after another.
There seems to be no end to learning new stuff, no matter how inconsequential. (I, for example, spent an hour recently learning how to remove selected songs and photos from my iPad to free up some space.)
That’s short-term learning and we’ll get to the difference between long-term and short term learning momentarily.
According to a study by University of California Riverside psychologist Rachel Wu, there is no reason to think there should be an end to learning as we age.
In fact, Wu found that one important way of staving off cognitive decline is by learning new skills as a child would.
“The natural learning experience from infancy to emerging adulthood mandates learning many real-world skills simultaneously,” Wu’s research team writes in a paper recently published in The Journals of Gerontology, Series B: Psychological Sciences.
According to this research, learning several new things at once — learning to play a musical instrument, learning the basics of a new language — increases cognitive abilities in older adults.
After just 1.5 months learning multiple tasks in Wu’s study, participants age 60 and older increased their cognitive abilities to levels similar to those of middle-aged adults, 30 years younger.
Much of the research into learning agrees that, for students still in school, the best time to understand the keys to becoming a better learner is now.
Learning is a process that involves effort and perseverance, and according to Dr. John Webster of the University of Washington, it’s critically important that we come to terms with ourselves as learners as early as possible.
“As human beings, learning is one of our primary activities — it’s up there with foraging, mating, playing, and working. We start learning at birth (some suggest we’re doing it even before we leave the womb), we learn at fantastic rates through our early years, and we keep on doing it as adults pretty much up until the end.”
Psychologists tell us that we actually have two kinds of memory that contribute to learning: working memory and long-term memory.
Working memory is a kind of notepad in the brain — its contents are of relatively short duration, sometimes as short as a few seconds, i.e. “what was I looking for in the fridge?”
Most things that enter working memory are not sent to long-term memory, but some things our working memory decides may have some value later on are transferred to our long-term memory, where they reside until we need them to accomplish one sort of task or another.
Apparently among the most neglected of all methods of increasing the working memory’s capacity for dealing with new ideas and concepts is writing stuff down.
That’s why our kitchen island is home to a series of post-it notes.
We have learned from experience that although we thought we had committed something to memory, what we thought we had learned about an appointment or phone number is no longer available.
Long-term memory, as the name suggests, is what we mean when we say we have “memorized” something. That is closer to having “learned’ something and retained it for future use.
Understanding all this is part of becoming a better learner and is called “metacognition,” or learning about learning.
Engaging in metacognition, learning about ways in which we learn, especially as applicable to different topics and circumstances, is one of the most valuable learning strategies any student can develop.
That insight will last into later life, when being an effective learner is, as Dr. Webster says, “a primary activity.”
In fact, metacognitive awareness can help students and adults well on into life in a number of ways. Strong metacognitive insights into our own ways of learning can greatly help develop the ability to transfer learning from one context to another and from short-term memory to long-term memory, especially for those of us still learning in our later years.
As basketball coach John Wooden advised: “It’s what you learn after you know it all that counts.”
Geoff Johnson is a former superintendent of schools.
