Learning is one of psychology's favourite topics. It is true that the world's top universities, like Oxford, the Sorbonne or Yale, and the secondary schools that feed into them, evolved largely without its help. Now, however, the field is justifiably more competitive and a broader spectrum of students needs to understand a more complex, shrinking and faster-changing world. Stagnant or provincial educational traditions are creaking under the pressure. Psychology, a relatively new discipline, may just be the ticket to help. Psychology confirms that it is relatively easy to teach facts such as dates, sequences and definitions. Great swathes of such material constitute the backbone of traditional education. What is harder, but infinitely more rewarding, is to inculcate deep understanding, and the ability to think in a structured and disciplined way, like a historian, artist, mathematician or scientist, for example. This is particularly important in today's world, where specific knowledge can be subject to revision, become quickly outdated or limited to one culture. A range of thinking skills, on the other hand, imparts confidence to cope with and manage change and diversity. A good example of how multi-disciplinary thinking is already happening at the highest levels is the work of Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist who won last year's Nobel Prize - in economic sciences. It is these forms of active, useable modes of understanding that is the way forward for education, according to psychologists such as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, author of Creativity and Being Adolescent. Some call it the difference between deep and surface learning. A group of teachers tried to incorporate the principles involved in deep learning in a five-year project with a team of researchers at Harvard University. One result was the book, Teaching for Understanding. In it, teachers describe exactly how they went about teaching and testing the sort of thinking skills many psychologists now promote. Taxonomy, to take one example, is still often taught virtually by rote and examined in what amounts to a memory test. History lessons often involve learning about clusters of events set in a series of stories, and students are tested by writing about units of historical cause and effect, frequently with an emphasis on sequence and accuracy. Deep learning, in contrast, encourages the active practice of 'take-home' thinking skills, or patterns characteristic of each subject domain, rather than the accumulation of inert knowledge. Take again taxonomy. One teacher cited in Teaching for Understanding describes how she dealt with this concept by asking her students to construct a classification system of their own. She suggested the sort of junk drawer most people have in their home, filled with things like pens, screws, old receipts, and so on. Students had to itemise the contents and put together a classification system that worked for those contents. The process helped them become more aware of classification as an exercise. It also showed the teacher how much they understood about classification. She then went on to highlight the purposes and challenges of any classification system, taxonomy included. Another teacher decided to uncover (rather than cover) one aspect of history by using biographies. Students chose biographies that reflected their own interests, of rock musicians or sports stars, for example. They were then encouraged to make informed guesses about the place and period in which the person lived, based on specific instances the biography recounted. Thus, students perceived links between one particular life and more general themes of context. They were then able to speculate about how single lives reflect universals of human behaviour and how individuals are, to some extent, products of their time and place. One worry about exchanging large amounts of superficial learning on the curriculum for smaller amounts studied in more depth is that much will be missed. How should material be selected? Proponents of deep learning suggest that each discipline needs to focus on key concepts that are recurrent in the field. The topics chosen need to be important to understanding the field as a whole. In order to engage interest and remain relevant, they need to be of natural interest to students and to relate to the present. At the moment they are introduced, they must be needed to get to the next level. And students should be able to engage in them at many different levels of complexity. A really useful and relevant education today is one in which students internalise learning so it can be applied in different situations beyond school. More than ever, good schooling should serve as a foundation for ongoing learning in life. Jean Nicol is a Hong Kong-based psychologist and writer everydaypsychologist@yahoo.com
