Human learning is a natural process that involves acquiring new knowledge, skills, and behaviors through experience, observation, and instruction. It starts at birth and continues until death.
Human learning involves the whole person, including their body and mind. It's a combination of processes that includes: curiosity, social interaction, emotion, authenticity, and failure. Human learning can occur through various methods, such as: observation, imitation, and communication. Psychologists have found that learning occurs most rapidly when information is received through more than one sense. Unlike machines, humans have the ability to reason, think critically, and adapt their knowledge to different contexts.
Human learning starts at birth (it might even start before in terms of an embryo's need for both interaction with, and freedom within its environment within the womb. and continues until death as a consequence of ongoing interactions between people and their environment.
The nature and processes involved in learning are studied in many established fields (including educational psychology, neuropsychology, experimental psychology, cognitive sciences, and pedagogy), as well as emerging fields of knowledge (e.g. with a shared interest in the topic of learning from safety events such as incidents/accidents, or in collaborative learning health systems.
Research in such fields has led to the identification of various sorts of learning. For example, learning may occur as a result of habituation, or classical conditioning, operant conditioning or as a result of more complex activities such as play, seen only in relatively intelligent animals.
Learning may occur consciously or without conscious awareness. Learning that an aversive event cannot be avoided or escaped may result in a condition called learned helplessness. There is evidence for human behavioral learning prenatally, in which habituation has been observed as early as 32 weeks into gestation, indicating that the central nervous system is sufficiently developed and primed for learning and memory to occur very early on in development.
Play has been approached by several theorists as a form of learning. Children experiment with the world, learn the rules, and learn to interact through play. Lev Vygotsky agrees that play is pivotal for children's development, since they make meaning of their environment through playing educational games. For Vygotsky, however, play is the first form of learning language and communication, and the stage where a child begins to understand rules and symbols. This has led to a view that learning in organisms is always related to semiosis, and is often associated with representational systems/activity.
Relatd Topic: Teaching
Join 4M+ learners. Unlock unlimited quizzes, wrong-answer tracking, flashcards + reminders, study guides, and 1-on-1 challenges.