4. How does the brain learn?

Memory is the faculty that enables us to learn, but we do not learn everything in the same way. There are different learning objects that involve different types of learning. For example, learning a skill is not the same as learning a concept. Research has shown that we have different types of memories that allow for different types of learning and different uses of information. That is, memory is not a single skill, but a set of skills that depend on different neural processes and structures. There is not one memory, but different memory systems that are the subject of study in educational research.

There is a lot of discussion about active learning, but it is sometimes confused with educational practices in which the learner does something (“learning by doing“). However, it is not about doing anything but about actively thinking about the object of learning, looking for meaning and contrasting it with their previous knowledge (“learning by thinking“).

Any active learning experience must include activities that ensure that the learner is reflecting on what he or she is learning. There is an important difference here between teaching and helping to learn, and this is a well-researched topic: better results are obtained if learning is guided by the teacher, who guides the students’ reasoning and reflection. When reflection is done in a group, giving the opportunity to share, contrast and discuss ideas with classmates and the teacher in a relaxed atmosphere, the effects on learning are very significant.

When learners have to learn a new concept, it is important to assume that it is impossible to teach concepts “by transmission“. Concepts are constructed in the learner’s mind from the knowledge available in their long-term memory, i.e. their prior knowledge. In order for the learner to learn, we need to promote changes in the way learners build relationships between their knowledge and perhaps provide some new connectors (new data) to guide them in the construction of concepts. This construction implies a modification of existing connections, a “rewiring” that is not simple: it requires time, multiple opportunities and motivation on the part of the learners.

According to the cognitive theory of multimedia learning, the procedure we follow to learn is as follows: information is presented to us in words and images and is perceived by our senses, passing momentarily through our sensory memory (Mayer, 2008). If we pay attention to what is in this memory, the information passes to our working memory for further processing. It is in working memory that we mentally organise words to form a verbal model and we organise images to form a visual model, and then we integrate both models together to give them coherence; we also draw on our previous knowledge to integrate, with them, both models, always seeking coherence. This search for coherence is about making sense of what we learn so that it can pass into our long-term memory (from which we have retrieved prior knowledge); this is what is known as meaningful learning.

Therefore, for learning to take place, the three cognitive processes must be executed: selecting the relevant words/images (paying attention to them), organising them to obtain coherent mental representations and integrating these mental representations with each other and with previous knowledge. When all three processes are performed, we speak of active learning. For active learning to be stimulated and sustained, motivation is needed and metacognitive strategies need to be used appropriately.

Motivation can be based on several aspects: our interest in the subject matter, our self-efficacy beliefs, the attributions we make for academic success/failure, the goals we set for ourselves, and the perceived social cooperation of the learning environment. Metacognition refers to the knowledge of how we learn and the control we exercise as learners over our own learning process. Self-regulated learners possess metacognitive knowledge and metacognitive control, so teachers must help our students to become self-regulated learners.

The transformation of mental schemas that leads to the learning of new concepts is what researchers in cognitive psychology call conceptual change (Sousa, 2010). There are many forms of conceptual change, which are differentiated according to their degree of depth and their difficulty in occurring. Unfortunately, we teachers are often unaware of these levels of difficulty and, therefore, we may not adequately modify our teaching methods when faced with different cases.

Teachers often use teaching contexts that are very different from the contexts in which learning is applied, and we expect that what they learn in the classroom will have an impact on their performance in related situations, but in different contexts: we expect the learning they do to be transferable. Unfortunately, the problem is that, in the light of more than a century of research, it has become clear that transfer of learning does not occur as spontaneously as we might believe; on the contrary, transferring learning from one context to another is actually complicated and therefore infrequent.