• How has your essential question changed throughout the 6 weeks?

My initial essential question was, “How can learning through different mediums, like hands-on settings with others or individualized learning done online, lead to more productive learning?” I designed my project to unearth and discover what learning style suited me best so that in the future I may be able to maximize my learning. Although, soon after I started my senior project I realized my thinking for my initial senior project was flawed.  I expected that I would discover over the course of my senior project that I was an “X” type of learner – maybe I was strictly a visual learner or auditory learner, maybe even kinesthetic. But soon after some research, I realized that while people can absolutely have preferences for learning, there isn’t going to be one way or medium in which we learn during our lives. I may like learning kinesthetically, but that doesn’t mean that for the rest of my life I will strictly learn this way, for some topics learning through visual aids may be better than kinesthetic, and that’s okay. My essential question then evolved into a more broad set of subquestions that would help me tease out the many complexities of what it truly means to learn something. In order to understand what makes up learning, I would need to dive into cognitive neuroscience, psychology, memory, behavioral science, and experience learning in a classroom. Over the course of reading “How We Learn”, watching many psychology professors lecture about their studies on learning, reading many  PubMed articles, and spending 6 weeks in an experiential classroom observing and teaching students, my essential questions morphed into as follows:

“What does it mean to learn?” “Can one maximize their learning potential? How?” “Do different mediums/experiences alter the effectiveness of learning?”

• What did you expect to learn and how does that compare to what you did learn?

I expected to learn about styles of learning through Howard Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences Theory. Initially, after learning about MI theory I understandably misunderstood the concept, which then led me to frame my senior project on a flawed understanding of a concept. Many people misunderstand the Multiple intelligence theory to mean that there are 8 intelligences and that by doing a little bit of self-discovery, you can figure out which intelligence you have and therefore unlock your learning potential. I anticipated that I would spend my time discovering what defined the 8 intelligences and narrow down which one fits best with me; however, I only spent a week to two weeks learning about MI theory. There isn’t only one way that we will absorb information and learn content for the rest of our lives – I thought I could use MI theory as an ultimate “life hack” to learning. I was wrong. But that was okay because the curiosity to better understand the complexities of learning content, recalling that content at a future date, and potentially maximizing the learning process inspired me to dive even deeper into my senior project.

• How do you anticipate this experience changing you or affecting you going forward?

I know that I will employ my learnings from lectures, readings, and experiences into my learning method each day. I know the importance of varying environmental contexts of learning, I know the importance of metacognition in learning, Multiple Intelligences theory, theory of disuse, the forgetting curve, and I know the optimal timing of recalling learned information over a course of a year so that we may be able to recall that content for the rest of our lives.

• What do you most want others to know about your SP Experience?

I anticipated that this project would unearth the ultimate lifehack of learning – I was wrong. There is no ultimate way to “cheat” the process of learning so that we may never forget any information studied. Simply put, there is no amount of study tips or life hacks that will make you a genius in your field of interest (without years of dedicated study). But what each of us can and should do is spend dedicated time learning about what it means to actually learn content, what it means to learn through different styles, what it means to convey information to others so that they can retain that information. Learning is a skill that is practiced universally, regardless of culture, language, nationality, economic status, etc., and can be used to connect and bridge peoples regardless of their experiences. Collective learning allows for progress that would be unattainable individually, so naturally, it makes sense for us all to have dedicated time in our lives to learn about the very skill that we will practice each and every day for the rest of our lives. A common motto in many cultures is, “practice makes perfect.” and despite how popularized and widespread this saying is, I don’t think I’ve ever heard a more stupidly incorrect statement. There is a stark difference between practicing something the correct way and practicing something the wrong way, where the adverse effects can be harmful. We say that we go to school to practice learning every day so that we can “enable our children to become lifelong learners”, yet we never learn about the complexities of learning (the cognitive neuroscience, the psychology, the behavioral science.) Let’s start practicing the right way and teach children what it means to actually learn and recall content, that way we actually set up future generations for lifelong success in their lifelong journey of learning.