What is Taught and what is Learned

6:01 PM |

What is Taught and what is Learned

It is a simple point that what is taught is not the same as what the students learn, but it does have a number of implications.

In the figure above, it is clear that some of what we teach is wasted effort: but the diagram is a representation of only one learner’s learning. It may be that within a class as a whole, everything we teach is learned, by someone. The shape representing the teaching is smaller than that for learning, because students are also learning from other sources, including colleagues and the sheer experience of being in the educational system, as well as more conventional other resources such as books.

It is an open question in any given case as to whether what they learn apart from what they are taught is a "good" thing or not. It includes the “hidden curriculum”, which is a phrase used by Snyder (1971) to describe what students learn by default in educational settings. His original observations at MIT in the late 'fifties were about how students with an over-loaded curriculum acquired survival tactics to get through their courses, such as mugging up only the parts which were likely to come up in the exams, and thus losing the point of much of the teaching. This selective learning is one of the characteristics of what is now called "surface learning", although that tends to be seen as an attribute of the learner — Snyder saw it as a problem of the institution.

From a sociological (Marxist) rather than primarily educational perspective, Bowles and Gintis (1976) suggested that all US schooling has a hidden curriculum dictated by the demands of a capitalist economy. More recently, critical theorists have sought to expose the hidden assumptions behind curricula (see, for example, Collins (1991) — see also Cultural Considerations). Some of the work seems marginal and academically political, but there is no denying that teachers' strategies, such as labelling, can have a profound effect on a student's experience. Claxton (1996) has convincingly argued that adult learning is profoundly influenced by “implicit theories of learning” acquired at school, and that teachers tend to reproduce their implicit models in the ways in which they themselves go on to teach.

There is an overview and comparison of different theories of the hidden curriculum in this article (Kentli, 2009); note, however, that they relate to schooling rather than the college experience, which is why I have taken Snyder as my starting-point, although the term was coined by Jackson (1968) (Full citations in the article [pdf])

Another good overview (albeit from a wiki, so it may not always be reliable). And here is a more detailed poster/paper by me (2005).

Reasons why people learn the "wrong" things, and why they stick: