learning


Also found in: Dictionary, Thesaurus, Medical, Legal, Idioms, Wikipedia.

learning

Psychol any relatively permanent change in behaviour that occurs as a direct result of experience
Collins Discovery Encyclopedia, 1st edition © HarperCollins Publishers 2005

learning

[′lər·niŋ]
(psychology)
The gathering, processing, storage, and recall of information received through the senses.
McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Scientific & Technical Terms, 6E, Copyright © 2003 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Learning

 

the acquisition of knowledge, abilities, and habits. In contrast to the pedagogical concepts of training, education, and upbringing, the term “learning” is used primarily in the psychology of behavior and embraces a broad range of the processes that make up individual experience. Among the phenomena classified as learning are habituation, imprinting, the development of the simplest conditioned reflexes and complex motor and speech skills, reactions in sensory discrimination, and intelligent learning (in humans).

Like “instinctive behavior,” “learning” is a fundamental concept of ethology that refers to the adaptation of an animal to its environment by changes in its innate behavior. There are two basic forms of learning: obligatory learning (mainly imprinting), which is characteristic of all individuals of a given species; and facultative learning (chiefly habit, and, to some degree, imitation), which is characteristic of the behavior of some individuals and depends on the specific conditions of their lives.

An enormous number of experiments, many of them conducted on animals in the USA within the framework of behaviorism, have been devoted to the processes of learning. Attention has been focused on elucidating the influence of various factors on learning, including the number and distribution of repetitions, reinforcement (the law of effect), the type of conditioning of responses, and dependency on the state of need. More complex are the problems of the transfer of the results of learning to conditions that differ from those in the original learning situation, latent learning, and the formation of sensorimotor structures and sensory syntheses that function as the internal variables of behavior, or its psychological links.

Most research on learning, which is usually defined as adaptation to the conditions created in the experiment, has concentrated on the simplest, “passive” forms of acquiring habits, including sensory and mental ones. Therefore, the results of this research cannot be extended to forms of learning that are specific to humans. The historical experience of mankind is transmitted to certain persons by means of education, one of society’s most important functions, which is entrusted specifically to schools and other pedagogical institutions.

REFERENCES

Eksperimental’naia psikhologiia, issue 4. Edited by P. Fraisse and J. Piaget. Moscow, 1973.
Thorndike, E. L. The Psychology of Learning. New York, 1921.
Hilgard, E. R. , and D. G. Marquis. Conditioning and Learning. New York-London, 1940.
Skinner, B. F. Verbal Behavior. New York, 1957.
Thorpe, W. H. Learning and Instinct in Animals. London, 1963.

A. N. LEONT’EV

The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 3rd Edition (1970-1979). © 2010 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
Mentioned in ?
References in periodicals archive ?
It also provides a platform for just-in-time learning--the ability to select a course or learning objective from a large catalog when it is required to meet a specific learning need.
eLearning a better chalkboard: online learning has come a long way in recent years, and as an established part of most corporations' training infrastructures, it's poised for greater importance in the future
Self-regulation of learning is cyclically initiated when learners set valuable academic goals, select learning strategies, and assess the feelings and motivational beliefs they need to attain the goals.
Self-regulation of Learning
A small district with only about 22 students per grade level, Hull says the students are interested to know how their personalities and learning styles affect their ability to perform in class.
Learning styles: want to have teachers reach every student? Think seeing, feeling, touching
And the degree and depth of the knowledge attained is directly related to the development and application of the skills of learning.
Process education: a humanistic response to fundamentalism
Higher education has shifted from teaching to learning, from discipline-specific learning to integrative learning with an emphasis on liberal learning, and from a small select student body to one that includes 75% of high school graduates; see Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U), Greater Expectations: A New Vision for Learning as a Nation Goes to College (2002) (Greater Expectations), p.
Rising expectations in business education
In recent years, faculty members in psychology and other university disciplines have begun to focus increased attention on incorporating service-learning activities into their course curricula that allow students to practice what they are learning in the classroom in applied settings (Anderson, 2002; O' Byrne, 2001 ; Tuber, et al., 1999).
Teaching and learning operant principles in animal shelters: perspectives from faculty, students, and shelter staff
The task of learning requires that we first exhume and scrutinize our mental models because "they influence everything we do, sometimes without us even knowing it." (5) Only then can we challenge the premises upon which we base them.
A prescription for systemic learning management
With active learning, data learned at an early stage can limit the diversity of a system, thus new types of compounds are often not discovered, representing another major issue of the random screening method.
NEC Verifies Effectiveness of New Drug Screening System Utilizing Active Learning
Of the schools responding, only 40 percent offered distance learning with no need for any physical attendance at the school whatsoever, and of that group only 32 percent gave full credit for all their e-learning offerings, while an almost equal percentage (28 percent) gave no credit at all for theirs.
University e-learning: government support and demographics bode well for virtual classrooms in Japan
Learning disability is an umbrella term providing a common language for a wide range of professionals, including teachers and counselors (Thomas & Woods, 2003).
Assisting students with learning disabilities transitioning to college: what school counselors should know
The concepts of Knowledge Management (KM) and knowledge communities have matured over the past decade and are being recognized as major enablers for personal learning and job performance in achieving organizational business objectives.
Knowledge sharing, communities of practice, and Learning Asset Integration--Dau's major initiatives

Encyclopedia browser ?
Full browser ?