Learning to adapt to things we don’t have to evolve to address is perhaps our most important differentiator as humans. We can learn from others, whether through courses, books, and more. Yet, learning isn’t always easy. In fact, for many things, it’s quite complex. Our cognitive architecture has evolved to learn certain things quite well, but other things we to work hard to learn. What differentiates between them, and what does it take?

David Geary talks about biologically primary versus biologically secondary learning. What this means is that certain things - like speaking and listening - are things our brains evolved to learn easily. However, other things - reading and writing, for instance - were not evolutionarily necessary, and so we’re not designed to learn. 

What we’ve subsequently understood is what it takes to become fluent at things we aren’t pre-disposed to require. The rather sad outcome is that much of what’s done in the name of instruction fails at meeting the requirements! There are a host of external reasons, so can’t automatically fault anyone, but what we can do is work to make it easy to get it right. 

One of the most important, and least seen, actions is putting the knowledge into practice, repeatedly, over time. That’s in some ways understandable, because it’s been hard to do. However, the use of technology provides us a new avenue. We can ask learners to continue to apply the knowledge, first to sample problems, and then to their tasks. 

When you extend the learning experience to account for the need for practice, you increase the likelihood of actually achieving and impact. That’s what we do: we package up short and small practice prompts into what we can LIFTs, (Learning Interventions Fueling Transformation). 

This is the next in a series of posts that reflect the Liftology videos we also did on this topic. This post itself is a prompt, and the series of posts are a course in learning science. We invite you to follow along as we go through the background of effective learning experiences.