Learning

Learning

It is called learning the process of acquiring knowledge, skills, values and attitudes, made possible by studying, teaching or experience. This process can be understood from different positions, which implies that there are different theories linked to the fact of learning. Behavioral psychology, for example, describes learning according to the changes that can be observed in the behavior of a subject.

The fundamental process in learning is imitation (the repetition of an observed process, which involves time, space, skills and other resources). In this way, children learn the basic tasks necessary to survive and develop in a community.

Human learning is defined as the relatively invariable change in the behavior of a person based on the result of experience. This change is achieved after the establishment of an association between a stimulus and its corresponding response. The capacity is not exclusive of the human species, although in the human being the learning was constituted as a factor that surpasses the common skill of the branches of the most similar evolution. Thanks to the development of learning, humans have managed to achieve a certain independence from their ecological environment and can even change it according to their needs.

The pedagogy establishes different types of learning. Learning by discovery can be mentioned (the contents are not received passively, but are rearranged to adapt them to the cognition scheme), the receptive learning (the individual understands the content and reproduces it, but fails to discover something new), the significant learning (when the subject links their previous knowledge with the new ones and gives them coherence according to their cognitive structure) and repetitive learning (produced when the data is memorized without understanding them or linking them with previous knowledge).

Theories about learning

As Isabel García defines it, learning is all that knowledge that is acquired from the things that happen to us in daily life, in this way we acquire knowledge, skills, etc. This is achieved through three different methods, experience, instruction and observation.

According to Patricia Duce one of the things that significantly influences learning is the interaction with the environment, with other individuals, these elements modify our experience, and therefore our way of analyzing and appropriating information. Through learning an individual can adapt to the environment and respond to the changes and actions that take place around him, changing if this is necessary to survive.

There are many theories about why and how human beings have access to knowledge, such as that of Pavlov, who affirms that knowledge is acquired through reaction to simultaneous stimuli; or the theory of Albert Bandura in which it is said that each individual creates his own way of learning according to the primitive conditions he has had to imitate models. On the other hand, Piaget approaches it analyzing exclusively the cognitive development.

In the theories of learning, we try to explain the way in which meanings are structured and new concepts are learned. A concept serves to reduce learning to a point in order to decompile it and grasp it; they serve not only to identify people or objects, but also to order them and to pigeonhole reality, so that we can predict what will happen. At this point, we can say that there are two ways to form the concepts the empiricist (is done through a process of association, where the subject is passive and receives information through the senses) and European (is achieved by the reconstruction, the subject is active and is responsible for building learning with the tools available to him)

To conclude we will say that learning consists of one of the basic functions of the human mind, animal and artificial systems and is the acquisition of knowledge from a certain external information.

It should be noted that at the time we are born all human beings, except those born with some disability, we have the same intellect and that according to how the learning process is developed, this intellectual capacity will be used to a greater or lesser extent .

Learning is to acquire, analyze and understand information from outside and apply it to one's existence. When learning individuals we must forget the preconceptions and acquire a new behavior. Learning requires us to change behavior and reflect new knowledge in present and future experiences. To learn you need three essential acts: observe, study and practice .