Learning means the act, process, or experience of gaining knowledge or skill for changing our behavior. It is the individual growth of the person as a result of cooperative interaction with others. The advancement of understanding enables the learner to function better in their environment, improve and adapt behaviors, create and maintain healthy relationships, and achieve personal success.
Learning is a process by which an individual can permanently change his/her behavior. The guidelines for learning are tried and tested by summarizing decades of learning research.
12 Guidelines for Learning
Readiness
Readiness implies a degree of concentration and eagerness.
Individuals learn best when they are physically and tangible, both mentally and emotionally ready to learn, and do not learn well if they see no reason for learning.
Though every person can learn from the environment, a human should learn things quickly, and they should learn things willingly without any force from others.
Recency
The principle of recency states that things most recently learned are best remembered.
Conversely, the longer a person is removed from a new factor of understanding, the more difficult it is to remember.
For example, it is fairly easy to recall an address which is noted a few minutes ago, but it is usually impossible to recall a new address that is noted last month.
Repetitiveness
The things which are repeated several times with the learner, he or she can easily capture these things. Learning involves the repetition of key ideas so that they can be recalled during a test.
When an employee does an activity repeatedly, then he /she can learn this thing perfectly, and there is a low chance of doing the wrong thing, and the employee can do the thing in a short period of time.
The human memory is fallible. The mind can rarely retain, evaluate, and apply new concepts or practices after a single exposure.
Every time practice occurs, learning continues. The instructor must repeat important items of the subject matter at reasonable intervals.
Reinforcement
It is another critical principle of learning. It means the recognition of activity. A learner can be positively or negatively reinforced.
When the learner is positively reinforced, they continue their behavior when they get financial rewards or non-financial incentives at the time of reaching a higher level of skill. When they are negatively reinforced, they stop their behavior when there is no evaluation of their learning.
There are four basic forms of reinforcement in organizations: positive reinforcement, avoidance, extinction, and punishment.
Relevance
Relevance means closely connected or appropriate to the matter at hand. Learning is helpful when the material is meaningful.
If the learner can know the overall purpose of a job before attending a learning session, this will allow them to see the relevance of each job.
A document or a piece of information must be relevant to the learning. Irrelevant information hampers proper learning.
Feedback
Learners get benefit from feedback on their performance in a learning task, but the timing of the feedback depends on the task.
Feedback about the performance will enable the learner to know where he stands and to initiate corrective action if any deviation from the expected goal has taken place.
There.are some tasks for which such feedback is virtually mandatory for learning.
A crane operator, for example, would have trouble learning to manipulate the controls “without knowing how the crane responded to control action.
Schedules of Learning
Probably one of the most well-established and well-documented learning principles is that distributed or spaced practice is superior to continuous or massed practice. This seems true for both simple and highly complex laboratory tasks.
Actually, schedules of learning can be manipulated in three different ways:
- Duration of the practice session,
- Duration of rest session, and
- The positioning of the rest session.
The evidence seems to support the motion of short practice periods and moderate rest periods. It is usually much more effective to have short, frequent rest periods than to have only one or two long rest periods and one or two long practice periods.
Whole vs. Part Learning
A great deal of work has been done in the psychology of learning to decide whether learning a Whole job is superior to breaking the job into parts and learning the parts.
In parts learning, the individual is not only required to learn each individual part but must be able to combine the separate parts so that the whole performance can be accomplished.
No overall conclusion, however, has been reached in this field.
Primacy
It means the state of first often creates a strong, almost unshakable impression.
Things learned first create a strong impression in the mind that is difficult to erase. In many ways, it is possible to exemplify the initial spurt with the aphorism “the first step is the best step.”
For the instructor, this means that what is taught must be right the first time. For the student, it means that learning must be right.
Boundary Less
The learner can learn anything at any place and anywhere. Learning should be boundary-less. It should not have any specific area or place.
Presentation Effect
We must develop IT and visual presentation facilities to improve the learning process. We should use multimedia to show different information or pictures for easy understanding.
Multiples Routes
There are multiple ways to make progress or move ahead. This allows learners to make choices and rely on their own strengths and learning and problem-solving styles while exploring alternative styles.
All of these are the guidelines or principles of learning. These are very important for learning anything effectively and efficiently.
Actually, it is the act of acquiring new or modifying and reinforcing existing knowledge, behaviors, skills, values, or preferences and may involve synthesizing different types of information.
Basically, the above list presents the basic principles that underlie effective learning.
These principles have been discovered, tested, and used in practical situations. They provide additional insight into what makes people learn most effectively.
