LEARNING ACTIVITIES

LEARNING ACTIVITIES

Learning is the act of acquiring new, or modifying and reinforcing existing, knowledge, behaviors, skills, values, or preferences which may lead to a potential change in synthesizing information, depth of the knowledge, attitude or behavior relative to the type and range of experience. The ability to learn is possessed by humans, animals, plants and some machines. Progress over time tends to follow a learning curve. Learning does not happen all at once, but it builds upon and is shaped by previous knowledge. To that end, learning may be viewed as a process, rather than a collection of factual and procedural knowledge. Learning produces changes in the organism and the changes produced are relatively permanent.
Human learning may occur as part of education, personal development, schooling, or training. It may be goal-oriented and may be aided by motivation. The study of how learning occurs is part of educational psychology, neuropsychology, learning theory, and pedagogy. Learning may occur as a result of habituation or classical conditioning, seen in many animal species, or as a result of more complex activities such as play, seen only in relatively intelligent animals.^[4][5] Learning may occur consciously or without conscious awareness. Learning that an aversive event can't be avoided nor escaped is 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 the first 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.

Types of Learning Styles

Learning styles are often categorized and explained in the following way:

• Visual: You learn well when aided by images, pictures, and spatial organization of elements
• Auditory: You learn well when aided by music, sound, rhyme, rhythm, speaking or listening
• Reading/Writing: You learn well by reading or writing the material you want to learn
• Kinesthetic: You learn well when you can move your body, and/or use your hands and sense of touch. Writing or drawing diagrams are physical activities that can fall into this category as well.

These categories of learning styles were identified by Dr. Neil Fleming in the late ’80s, and represent The VARK model of learning styles. Other educators and researchers have identified additional learning styles, with some models showing as many as 70 different styles.

Techniques and benefits

There are many different conditions that influence transfer of learning in the classroom. These conditions include features of the task, features of the learner, features of the organization and social context of the activity. The features of the task include practicing through simulations, problem-based learning, and knowledge and skills for implementing new plans. The features of learners include their ability to reflect on past experiences, their ability to participate in group discussions, practice skills, and participate in written discussions. All of the unique features will contribute to a students ability to use transfer of learning. There are structural techniques that can aid learning transfer in the classroom. These structural strategies include hugging and bridging.
Hugging uses the technique of simulating an activity in order to encourage reflexive learning. An example of the hugging strategy is when a student practices teaching a lesson or when a student role plays with another student. These examples encourage critical thinking which will engage the student and help them understand what they are learning which is one of the goals of transfer of learning  as well as desirable difficulties.
Bridging is when instruction encourages thinking abstractly by helping to identify connections between ideas and to analyze those connections. An example is when a teacher lets the student analyze their past test results and the way in which they got those results. This includes amount of study time and study strategies. By looking at their past study strategies it can help them come up with strategies in the future in order to improve their performance. These are some of the ideas that are important to successful practices of hugging and bridging.
There are many benefits of transfer of learning in the classroom. One of the main benefits is the ability to quickly learn a new task. This has many real-life applications such as language and speech processing. Transfer of learning is also very useful in teaching students to use higher cognitive thinking by applying their background knowledge to new situations.