The Four Types of Learning: Part 1

A Newsletter from Jake Tuber

My daughter Charlotte believes she can read. In a primitive sense, she's right. She identifies specific patterns of symbols – letters making up words – and has memorized them. She recognizes her name on a custom coffee mug or in a book. "Look, daddy, it says Charlotte!" she exclaims. Her brain sees ink splotches on a page, interprets them as concepts in her native tongue, and interacts with those concepts. But she isn't reading yet, not by any meaningful definition of the word, as she can't create new words or sentences or derive meaning from symbols. The letters on the page might as well be hieroglyphics.

Her three-year-old brain is starting to recognize how symbols transfer between words. She knows her name starts with the letter C, which appears in other words with typical sounds. When she sees the letter C at the start of a new word, her brain relates it to other words that it already knows. She can guess how the word will begin in sound. She may think all c-words are people’s names, as is hers. 

She’s able to accommodate new aspects of the English language alongside what she already knows. Her initial understanding of the letter C was that it made a "kuh" sound, as in "car”. Soon after she expanded that understanding to allow for C to also sound like "shhh" when it precedes an "H", like in her name. Her brain now gets that letters can be flexible depending on their context.

Without ever knowing it, her brain is building a framework – of the English language and its grammatical structure – which amounts to a paradigm that contextualizes everything she encounters in life, invisible glasses that filter her experiences.

Eventually, she may learn to perceive the English language as a construct no more valid or necessary than any other language or meaning-making apparatus. She might remove those glasses and inevitably make meaning differently, which could reshape many of her more surface-level views of the world. 

Why am I sharing this story? (No, it is not to assure you that my wife and I are responsibly nurturing our child – jury’s still out). Watching a child learn language – and the world through it – is a great illustration of the four primary types of learning (Illeris, 2009). 

In the first of this two-part newsletter, I’ll walk through a famous framework from Illeris that reviews the four main types of learning: mechanical learning, assimilation, accommodation, and transformative learning. Simply understanding and utilizing this framework for thinking about learning is useful! 

In part two of this edition, I'll take it further and explore applying this "hierarchy" of learning to workshops, courses, and formal experiences in the professional world. Hint: By understanding these four types of learnings, we can better select the learning experiences in professional settings. Even more so, I suspect this "hierarchy" also reveals why we find certain learning experiences – workshops, classes, simulations, books, even conversations – more impactful than others. 

Schemes

The brain groups related ideas together in patterns, often referred to as schemes (Illeris, 2009). These schemes are what allow us to quickly access the information stored away in our brains. A potentially confusing aspect of this is that schemes don’t have a physical structure or reside in a specific location of the brain – it’s not like the brain is a physical archive and we can pinpoint the actual location of information as if it were a book on a shelf in a library. Instead, these schemes are rather like engrams, which are traces of brain activity that can be reactivated. In his own words, schemes are “traces of circuits between some of the billions of neurons that have been active at earlier occasions and therefore are likely to be revived.”

Our brain is a pattern-formation machine. The creation, expansion, and reshaping of the schemes – patterns of related ideas – are essentially what we refer to as learning. Drawing heavily on Piaget (1952) as well as from Flavell (1963), Illeris offers four main ways that people learn. 

Mechanical Learning

When there is no existing scheme to reference our experiences against, the brain must build one. This is when rote, mechanical learning occurs and our brain formulates some basic schemes. To do this, the brain cumulatively adds ideas together (that is why this type of learning is sometimes called “cumulative learning”) into fundamental patterns that can become deeply ingrained. This mechanical learning is most common early on in life when our brain lacks existing schemes and needs to create them to understand and navigate what it encounters in the world. It can occur later in life – when the brain has no useful context or background for what it encounters and must build a new scheme to function – but this is less common. 

Assimilative Learning

What is more common is the second type of learning which Illeris pulls directly from Piaget and calls assimilative learning. This is when the brain encounters something and can add it into an existing scheme. For example, you see a National Geographic special about a rare insect in the Amazon and your brain can place this new creature into its scheme for insects (or jungle animals, etc.). When my daughter meets a new cousin, she can understand that she has some special relationship to them because she can fit them within her scheme of “family”.

Accommodative Learning

Occasionally, we learn something that can’t be easily assimilated into an existing scheme. Our brain may discard this new information, but if it finds it interesting or important it can also lead our brains to adjust existing schemes to incorporate this new, different information. This expansion of our existing schemes to accommodate this new information is unsurprisingly called  accommodative, or transcendent, learning. An obvious example of accommodative learning is the acceptance of new scientific discoveries: sometimes new information forces us to update our scientific frameworks. 

If you had learned that our solar system had nine planets but later discoveries led to Pluto’s reclassification, you'd have to adjust your understanding of the solar system. This requires much more mental energy than simply assimilating something into an existing scheme, especially when that scheme is something very hard-wired or ties closely to our sense of identity. For example, changing your perspective on a controversial issue: if you've held a certain viewpoint on a political topic and encounter new information that challenges that viewpoint, you may need to reevaluate your beliefs and adjust your perspective accordingly. Accommodating new information can be painful if it threatens a core sense of identity.

Transformative Learning

Last, and most certainly not least, is what is typically referred to as transformative learning. By definition a very rare process, transformative learning is when the brain has to reorganize multiple schemes in a significant way that drastically alters our views about all of the information these schemes are built upon. It is the shifting of underlying paradigms. Typically precipitated by a crisis or “disorienting dilemma” that it can’t quite square, the brain reorganizes multiple (or foundational) schemes in a way that inadvertently shifts our outlook. In a way, it’s almost as if you're accommodating existing schemes so greatly that they burst. This can manifest in what amounts to a noticeable change in personality. 

Becoming a parent for the first time or overcoming addiction might be transformative learning experiences. Mandela’s time in prison was undoubtedly transformative. I imagine the average person’s first encounter with electricity was transformative as it reshaped how they fundamentally viewed the world’s physical properties and what could be done. The secular conversion of former Westboro Baptist Church spokesperson Megan Phelps-Roper after encountering irreconcilable ideas via Twitter is a famous example of transformative learning. (Fun Fact: I had initially focused my doctoral dissertation on studying the transformative learning experiences of people who left religious cults). The heart and soul of many famous films is the chronicling of a character’s transformative learning journey. Think of Luke Skywalker discovering The Force or any M. Night Shyamalan movie as characters uncover a paradigm-shifting realization. These experiences are rare, may take time, and can be exceptionally painful given the amount of “rewiring” that is occuring. You can imagine why it makes for good theatrical viewing when well-written. 

You can hopefully see the throughline across these four types of learning. Understanding the different types of learning can help us design better learning environments, facilitate better experiences, and individualize learning in ways that move people forward. In part two, I’ll apply these four types to the world of work – specifically learning and development – and discuss how we can both use these four types of learning in constructing and deconstructing learning experiences.