Module 3: How Do People Learn?

We have reviewed some of the aspects of learning theory. To review:

You enter a room where a reception for new interns is being held. The residency director who is hosting the reception meets you at the door and introduces you to Doris Simmons, and tells you she is one of the interns. Next, you are introduced to Mark Goldstein and Jim McGaughey.

Who was the first intern you met? Did you have to go back and look? In the swirl of the social setting, you did not attend to taking the introduction (stimulus) to the short term memory to encode it as long term memory. As you were introduced to others, you may have neglected to encode Doris in your long term memory or you lost your filing system and could not recall Doris' name--forgetting.

Often, we link people with their profession, a geographic key, or some other characteristic you can use for filing and retrieval. Doris tells you she is from the University of Colorado. Now, you might file Doris under "intern from Colorado" and recall her name.

As you go about your daily activities, stop once in awhile and think about how you encode pieces of information and how you recall them. A part of teaching is to help learners encode by relating information to the learner's experiences or to otherwise place new information in a context. Problem-based learning is designed to teach by using clinical cases as the context.