A Learners’ View (ALV) Is Of Choices On The Shortest And Fastest Path To Learning, The Oxygen Of Social Life.

A Learners’ View (ALV) is to teaching as a scale of notes is to music.

Theme: Definition of learning from a learners’ view.

Generic Definition of Learning: a. A three stage social process of making choices from among 15 sets of options that result in meeting an accepted standard of social action. b. Sequential random trial-and-error social action until adopting, adapting, and maintaining a new social patterns that others call appropriate for the conditions. c. Social transactions (exchanges) that result in one or more changed social patterns for managing a problem. d. A social survival mechanism; solving a problem in a way in society.

Operational Definition of Learning: a. Exchanges of time, effort, and other personal resources to adopt, adapt, and manage social patterns that resolve social problems. b. Changes of observed social patterns of people. No way exists to observe learning other than to identify changes in a social pattern.

Comment: People use the word learning to mean many things, ranging from inferences about cognition and thinking to breaking social codes that manage behavior patterns in ways that other people accept. Classic education gives priority to the definition that learning means to increasingly manage personal behavior patterns in ways described in traditions and legacies that the most informed people throughout history have left behind. They have indicated how they describe decisions and made choices to solve problems and conditions they faced. In so doing, classic education provides an informed base for others to create novel and other changes in civilization unexpected by people with different backgrounds.

In this sense, learning occurs as a series of exchanges (transactions) that alter observable social patterns. Each learner gives time and other personal resources to “pay” attention, make choices and in other ways use (manage) elements of the learning process to solve a problem.

In their simplist form, these transactions occur in three stages each with one optional social pattern to choose, one that does not result in solving a problem in a way valued in society. Some options lead to meeting that criterion for learning faster than others.

A Learners’ View (ALV), also named Learning Efficiency Analysis Paradigm (aLEAP), identifies these stages, options, and relationships to each other as described by results of empirical experimental behavioral studies reported over more than century.

This description of what people do to show that learning has occurred is all that remains after removing everything except what is common among these research results, philosophies, and theories about learning.

As far as anyone knows, learning has always occurred in this generic way.

Learning happens for everyone everyday in wherever they are. It’s another word for life.

Depictions of this view of learning appear in art, legends, literature, science, personal experience and wherever someone tells another something novel.

Without learning, people do not live, they cease to breath and their bodies stop working until their heart stops working for them forever. That is, until people do not adopt, adapt, and manage themselves to do that which they must do to survive wherever they are at the moment. Of this people know through personal experience as well as through science.

Classic education has captured and offered this generic view of learning for eons to those who want to know what others know. Of this, people also know or at least can know that such education exists.

What is less known is how people learn. EduClassics.com describes common elements of learning that people can see, hear, smell, touch, and use other senses to know that learning is occurring or has occurred for themselves as well as for others.

Introduction to Learning

Related Reading

Related Resources