This will probably be a bit rambly, but I’m fairly sure it’s a GQ.
What I am wanting to know is if there has been any research done (or do wikipedia articles exist) on two learning methods that I will call:
Learning/Teaching the Concept
Learning/Teaching the Process
I know what I am referring to in my mind when I say this, but it might be difficult to explain. I’ll try to give an example.
Let’s say you are teaching someone how to start a car, and prepare it for a reverse. I propose you could do it two ways. One, focus on the process. Two, focus on the concept.
Process:
Lift the handle of the car, swing the door open, and shift your body in to the vehicle. Swing the door closed.
Press the slidey thing next to the seat.
Press the left pedal down (or right pedal, for you Americans) all the way, then move the stick so that it can freely move left to right. Lift your foot.
Insert the key in to the key slot near the steering wheel, and turn it.
Depress the same pedal as before, and move the stick to the R position
Concept:
Get in to the car.
Adjust your seat so that you are sitting a comfortable distance away from the steering wheel and pedals.
Make sure the engine is in neutral
Start the engine
Put the car in reverse
I have noticed that some teachers/technical authors/trainers etc, are more “teach the process” types of people. Others are more “teach the concept” type people.
What I have noticed about myself is, when I am learning something from a teacher, I learn far, far better the closer the teacher is to “teaching the concept” as opposed to “teaching the process”.
What I’d really like to know is, are these teaching styles well known and established? Is it well documented that some people learn better when being taught one style as opposed to the other? Do some people learn better with an even mix of the two?
Apologies for not being able to articulate this any clearer. I am just discovering some new things about myself in terms of how I best learn new things, and I just want to know if anything I have written here resonates with anyone/anything.
If I need to understand the subject being taught, I really need “teach the concept” and do not do well at all with a teacher who is hand-feeding me a procedural recipe.
In some cases I actually don’t care about understanding how it works, I just want enough of a grasp of the procedure to do one minor thing and then perhaps never touch that environment again. In those cases I can get impatient with “teach the concept”.
Example A: I had a statistics teacher who strictly taught process. All throughout that class I’m jamming my hand in the air to ask “wait, WHY are we squaring the difference? why don’t we just take the absolute value of the difference?” And the instructor would just say “well, that’s what you do. And then you…” I was given homework assignments and I’d get the right value for gamma or standard deeve or chi square and yet I would not have been able to tell you what any of it meant. Highly frustrating.
Example B: Back when MacOS X 10.1 was the current release, I had reason to want to enable sendmail: I was often on assignment to different offices and it was quite convenient to be able to send my own email from my own computer. The message board where I asked for instructions was populated by lots of old-school Unix geeks and every other sentence seemed to be “if you don’t know how to grep the tail of the log for the answer, you shouldn’t be asking that question yet” or something to that effect. Yeesh, I’m happy to spend most of my time confined to the Aqua baby-world and leave the command lines to you folks, but I need this, there’s nothing nonstandard, just tell me what to type and what options to put and quit grilling me on whether I understand the ownership of the file I just wrote out to /etc …
I pretty much bury the needle in “Sequential” style whenever I take evaluations on this topic. When I understand how to do something it is normally obvious (to me) what the underlying why is. I guess that makes me about the opposite of AHunter3 in learning style.
You could start by looking at the Wiki on the Theory of Multiple Intelligences.
Your question approaches the subject initially from the ‘learning’ perspective, something that will vary with the person, and the subject. You then address the ‘teaching’ aspect, which is going to be inefficient for any teacher who can only take one approach. There are aspects of language processing involved in the difference between these two techniques. To me, terminology can be annoying. Technical terms are often arbitrary names that I don’t like to waste time memorizing, so concepts are my preference. For others, the one-to-one relationship between terms and definititions are preferred. There are techniques to consider as well: learning by doing, learning by watching, etc… Sounds like you are heading in the right direction for getting to the next level, ‘meta-learning’. I noticed long ago that traditional educational techniques rarely address concepts like ‘how to think’ or ‘how to learn’.
Just realized that your subject matter is very close to the debate about ‘new math’ vs. ‘old math’. Old Math was very process oriented, while New Math concentrated on the concepts. I haven’t noticed New Math leading to better math skills in people myself, maybe there are studies that claim to see a difference in results. When looking at the subject of math in particular, I can see cases where people were very good at the process, but the concept would not be understood. This may have an effect on people’s ability to apply the skills they have learned, you know, the old ‘word problem’ thing on tests, and real life.
My wife used to teach mentally handicapped students. Some of them were incapable of taking the information they learned for one thing and applying it to something else. The only way they could function (say, working at a fast food restaurant – fast food is great at breaking things down into individual steps) is by detailed instruction and repetition.
Really, it’s not that different from learning multiplication by memorizing the times tables first, then being introduced to the concept that three groups of three items will equal nine items, and not having to count out three groups of three every time to make sure you have nine.
Sometimes learning by concept isn’t enough. My brother in law was an Air Force pilot for 20 years. During that time he flew thousands of missions and learned to deal with every possible contingency. When he got a job with a commercial airline, he had to go through rigorous training again becuase the process of flying a Boeing 737 is different from the process of flying a C-130. That’s why even experienced pilots still use a checklist on takeoffs and landings – if you forget one step in the process you’ll end up with a broken airplane.
Given the terminology used in “teaching the process”, I can understand why you would consider the other a much easier method of learning.
Even though I have been driving for over 30 years, I’m not sure that I could even understand what the directions above are trying to convey, if you hadn’t said before that it was to teach someone to start a car and put it in reverse.
FYI for our drive-on-the-left-side-of-the-road OP …
Cars in the drive-on-the-right-side-of-the-road part of the world have the clutch on the left, brake in the middle and gas on the right. Same as in the drive-on-the-left-side-of-the-road part of the world.
Cars in the drive-on-the-right-side-of-the-road part of the world have the turn signal control on the left side of the steering colum, with a column shift lever or other miscellaneous control stalk (typically windshield wipers / washers) on the right side. I’m not recalling how these are arranged in the drive-on-the-right-side-of-the-road part of the world.
Other way around. Because you can’t mount a column shift next to the door if you want to be able to open the door, and you can’t mount a floor shift outside the vehicle. So the gear stick is always located in the centre of the cab, no matter what side you drive on.
Other people have mentioned some specific examples/approaches to this, but I’d add that this is one of those concepts which is intuitively quite persuasive, but actually difficult to demonstrate with evidence. The APS actually did a meta-review of learning methods/styles research last year and found that very few tested their theories with enough rigour to support their claims. It’s not that we can claim these differences in preference don’t exist, or indeed don’t influence how well an adult will learn, just that it’s a persuasive idea we can say is supported by our own observation, but it’s difficult to back that up with data.
There are a lot of really good and also a lot of really bad ways of implementing either method.
I’ve experienced some “teach the concept” attempts that would be better be described as “teach the CODESPEAK”. The above-mentioned “New Math” was a spectacularly good example of that. Not being congenitally stupid, I had noticed from experience doing sums that it did not make any difference what order you listed the numbers to be added, 5 + 3 was the same as 3 + 5. They had already taught that concept, albeit indirectly and without pointing it out as such, in the Old Math. Along comes New Math and we have to memorize and spit out the phrase “Commutative Property of Addition”. That’s jargon-worship.
Method teaching can annoy me when I have no idea what I’ve done after any given step — you know, one of those “OK now type fink list | grep -e ‘^ i’ and press return” sort of things — but the worst method-teaching experiences I’ve had have been with scatter-minded people who know what they are talking about but have no clue what their stream-of-thought patter is like for the unfortunate person trying to follow along. For this, I cite my statistics teaching in graduate school Sociology:
“OK now the nice thing about chi square is you have to remember that the hum chalk is missing, why don’t they ever put chalk over here on this blackboard? Dependencies can exist, if you read the chapter seven, did everyone read chapter seven? Mark Ewling did that study, he was an associate of a friend of mine, actually, did you know you could get grants from Dept of Health and Human Services for studies like that? Anyway, on this axis, if you… reconsider your grant proposals if you haven’t applied to public, oh here’s the chalk, DIVIDE this, I know I did assign chapter seven, please students, read what has been assigned before coming to class, OK see how ::draws equation in chalk on board:: … and that tells you it’s statistically relevant. Yes, AHunter3, you have a question?”