Ted Marchese, of the American Association for Higher Education, has published a fascinating article summarizing what he calls "new conversations about learning" based on anthropology, cognitive science and workplace studies. These studies document that learning is a species characteristic, a fundamental adaptive capacity widely shared among humans, a way to make sense out of their experience of the world. This species characteristic is not always a virtue, since much of what is learned early, which develops as an individual's basic ideas of how things work, is difficult to change later.

Marchese offers several examples, including a video of Harvard graduates on commencement day answering the question of why it is warmer in summer than in winter. A remarkable proportion of these recent graduates gave the wrong answer despite their participation in college-level science courses. He cites a similar study published in the American Journal of Physics assessing the impact of college courses on student beliefs, which documents the persistence of Newtonian views of mechanics. In this instance, what students believed before the course is what they believed after, despite the right answers they gave during the course related to mechanics. And he mentions a neuroscience study of object perceptions which concluded that 80 percent of what winds up as the brain's image comes from information, ideas and feelings already in the brain, 20 percent from outside.

Marchese also describes European ethnographic studies of college students which show that surface learning-- cramming for facts rather than searching for meanings--dominates the educational system and that the predominance of surface learning increases as one moves through K-12 to higher education years. These studies report that surface learning also correlates with courses in which large amounts of material are included, coverage is a major preoccupation, learning environments are threatening and anxiety-laden, and students lack choices in what is to be studied and how. Positive correlations with deeper learning occur when students believe their own effort and control of the learning makes a difference in success.

In a similar vein, Marchese reports on a fifty-nation study of how students learn math and science. Differences among national profiles are traced to the clarity of learning goals, the number of topics covered, the opportunity to apply learning and to demonstrate understanding of concepts through problem-solving and verbalizing for meaning. For example, the average number of topics per year covered in a typical Japanese math course was found to be 6-10; the comparable number in U.S. math courses was 30-35. These anecdotal observations about learning studies suggest that knowledge of the learning process can and does make a difference.