The Three Learning Phases
Learning is more than just sitting down and starting to study. Learning has three phases that repeat themselves and can even intertwine. These three phases are priming, studying, and practising.
priming
The goal of priming is to get an abstract idea about a topic. No details. You skim, explore and try to understand the connection of concepts inside your learning unit. You just worry about the big picture and ignore all the details. The details will come later in the studying phase.
Priming is like the beginning of a puzzle. You don’t jump right into all the small puzzle pieces. In the beginning, they have no meaning. The first thing you do is to look at the picture you want to puzzle. You get a rough idea of what is where and which colors are used in which section. Only by getting a big-picture view will all the small puzzle pieces become meaningful, and puzzling will get easier.
The same is true for learning. You don’t jump into all the details. Prime first. Get an abstract idea of important concepts and how they are connected together. This will give meaning to all the details to come.
studying
After priming, comes studying. Studying means diving into the details and understanding them. But be careful, avoid shallow studying. While studying we tend to drift towards just transcribing notes and trying to memorize them. We run into the risk of not thinking about anything which makes learning shallow.
However, studying only results in learning if we stop, think and engage in higher-order learning. Higher-order learning happens according to Bloom’s taxonomy when we start analyzing, evaluating and creating based on what we learn (Bloom’s taxonomy from low to higher order learning is: remember, understand, apply, analyse, evaluate, create).
This means you can analyse and evaluate by comparing, contrasting and connecting ideas together. You try to understand, explain it to yourself and map it out. Always iterate and adjust your mental model if needed.
If you engage in higher-order learning such as analyzing and evaluating, you automatically also engage in lower-order learning like understanding and remembering.
practising
Finally, the last phase of learning is to practice. Practising what you studied helps you tap into the highest order of learning: create. Creating something and practising allows you to build experience.
How you practice depends on what you are trying to learn. If you are learning a skill, you can practice by using what you learned in your own project. If you are learning something more information-heavy, you can practice by testing and interleaved recall (a combination of interleaving and active recall). This helps you tackle questions and problems from different perspectives and find your own way to an answer.
All of these phases don’t happen only once but they rather repeat. You first prime and get an abstract idea. This will trigger your curiosity and open up some questions. Then you start studying. Get a bit more detail, look for answers and add another layer to your primed understanding. After that, you can practice what you learnt. Both studying and practising will reveal gaps in your understanding and open up new questions which you then can follow. Follow them by first priming, then studying and then practising. After that, it repeats itself over and over again.
If you have multiple lectures to learn from, you can first prime, covering a big picture for all lectures. After that, you can do the priming, studying and practising for each lecture separately.
This constant iteration and following open questions is why learning is recursive and excursive.
