The Four Types of Learning: Part 2
A Newsletter from Jake Tuber
In Part 1, I spoke about Illeris’ framework of four types of learning: mechanical, assimilative, accommodative, and transformative. Here in Part 2, I want to put this theory to work for us in real world professional contexts. To do this, I’m going to try to do three things:
Provide a quick recap of the concepts.
Explain how this framework is important for learning in professional settings.
Propose a (rather straightforward) theory of why some learning experiences are seen as better than others.
Quick Recap:
Mechanical Learning: Imagine learning Aramaic having only ever learned modern English. Your brain would have to start from scratch. Mechanical learning occurs when our brain does not have existing schemes through which it can process new information. As a result, it’s primarily associated with learning in infants and young children. However, it is still present in adults in examples such as learning a completely different language.
Assimilative Learning: This is when new ideas find a home in our existing cognitive architecture. When something we learn can be easily categorized into an existing scheme, we call that assimilation. Suppose you were to learn of an impressionist painter that you’d never heard of before – your mind would be able to assimilate this new information easily.
Accommodative Learning: Accommodative learning is akin to a cognitive renovation, where we expand and reconfigure our existing cognitive structures to accommodate new, previously unaccounted-for ideas. Rather than fitting new information into an existing category in your mind (assimilation), your mind has no choice but to reshape its existing categories to account for new information. Suppose you had been told at a young age – as many of us were – that mammals don’t lay eggs. Then, one day, you learn about Monotremes! Your mind must accommodate the very real existence of the platypus and echidnas, forcing you to reconstruct your conception of mammalia. (And if you had not heard the word Monotreme until now and you just Googled it, you’re likely assimilating that concept into your larger understanding of the animal world!).
Transformative Learning: This is the seismic shift that we experience, on rare occasions, when foundational or multiple schemes are shattered and we must construct new ones. If we’re lucky, these disorienting dilemmas we encounter can give way to processes that alter our worldviews, reshape our identities, and fundamentally change the way we perceive the world.
How is this framework useful in professional settings?
Different content requires different learning types.
Mechanical Learning at Work
The usefulness of mechanical learning in professional settings is relatively minimal given that we are rarely seeking out situations in which a) the participants have minimal or no existing schemes to assimilate or accommodate toward, and b) we expressly don’t care much about fostering a deep, critical understanding of a topic and instead just want a basic accrual of information. Memorizing compliance procedures, safety checklists, and otherwise-retrievable information is ripe for mechanical learning activities such as teaching mnemonic devices, rote memorization games, basic testing and quizzing, etc.
Assimilative and Accommodative Learning at Work
The majority of professional, formal learning experiences leverage assimilative and accommodative learning. Workshops that teach new skills and help individuals develop new competencies are generally adding to our existing mental models of the world or expanding them to include new information. A class that teaches new computer programming skills, a management training on conducting performance reviews, an e-learning on advanced HR analytics… these are likely experiences that assimilate and accommodate new knowledge.
Given this, there are certain types of learning activities that are particularly useful modalities that cater to these two types of learning:
Case Studies: Case studies are great tools for both assimilative and accommodative learning as they involve the analysis and interpretation of a real-life scenario. They allow learners to apply their existing knowledge and to revise or create new mental models in response to new information.
Problem-based Learning (PBL): PBL tasks prompt learners to use their existing knowledge base to find a solution to a complex problem. This not only enhances their capacity to assimilate new information but also helps them accommodate their understanding as they may have to adjust their mental models to solve the problem effectively.
Discussion Forums: In asynchronous online courses, discussion forums can be powerful tools for assimilative and accommodative learning. They foster social learning and allow for the exchange of ideas and perspectives. These discussions can lead to the assimilation of new viewpoints and, potentially, the accommodation of existing mental models.
Simulations and Role-plays: Simulations and role-plays provide experiential learning opportunities that can be highly effective in facilitating assimilative and accommodative learning. These methods immerse learners in a realistic context, prompting them to apply, test, and adjust their knowledge and understanding.
Concept Mapping: Creating visual representations of knowledge, such as concept maps, can help learners identify the connections between ideas and concepts, facilitating assimilation. Additionally, these maps can highlight gaps or inconsistencies in their understanding, prompting accommodative learning.
Reflection Activities: Journaling, self-assessments, and guided reflections can help learners internalize new information (assimilation) and reconsider their preconceived ideas (accommodation).
The effectiveness of these activities often depends on how well they're facilitated and how engaged the learners are. Good facilitation involves clearly communicating the purpose of each activity, providing appropriate guidance and feedback, and fostering an inclusive and supportive learning environment.
Transformative Learning at Work
Occasionally, professional learning experiences seek to be transformative. I should note that nearly every learning experience out there likes to bill itself as transformative, but it is rare that these experiences radically shift someone’s underlying paradigms in a way that changes how they show up. These experiences are typically reserved for leadership development, but not necessarily so.
Engineering transformative learning is hard. Learners are often resistant to transformative change, which means that it takes time and a hard-to-perfect cocktail of learning design elements. You cannot guarantee transformative learning will occur the same way you can essentially guarantee someone can assimilate new information if presented coherently. If your goal is transformation, there are several things you can be mindful of:
Modify the setting. By definition, transformative learning is uncomfortable, so there can be value in putting individuals in contexts that are less-known. This is partially why having leadership development experiences at novel, often remote locations can have a powerful effect. Taking people out of their physical comfort zone may – if moderated correctly as discussed in #2 – help lay the groundwork for transformative learning.
Create a proper holding environment. For transformative learning to occur, the learner needs to believe that they are fundamentally supported by their environment such that it is psychologically safe for them to self-explore. This often goes beyond establishing group norms and expectations in a formal way as one would at the outset of a workshop. Facilitators must prove that an environment is psychologically safe, often by progressively introducing activities that induce differing levels of vulnerability, albeit slightly increasing over time.
This is especially true if you’re opting into an unfamiliar physical setting as discussed above. In these circumstances, it is common for participants to “bond” to their facilitator. Participants seek special rapport and yearn for a more personal relationship with their facilitator to help navigate this unfamiliar physical and social environment. A talented facilitator will know this and deliberately use this tendency to their advantage in how they show up throughout a learning experience.Have a talented facilitator. This goes beyond the charisma to present information in an engaging way or deep knowledge of the subject matter. A facilitator talented enough to create a transformative learning experience will understand and use the relevant psychological phenomena in two main ways: First, they’ll personalize their approach for each individual. This is tricky in a group setting where most interaction is one-to-all, however a talented facilitator can find ways to quickly modify and personalize activities that cater to each participant’s particular journey. Second, a talented facilitator will adjust their posture over the course of a learning experience. Transformative learning emphasizes learner autonomy, so a facilitator must vary their posture throughout the learning process. Utilizing something akin to the Situational-Leadership II framework and applying it to facilitation can help facilitators make these adjustments over time.
A Theory of Learning Quality Based on the Four Types of Learning
My theory is rather simple: All things being equal, the more a learning experience engenders the “higher” types of learning, the more participants will report finding it valuable. Assuming we hold things constant such as the quality of the facilitators, accuracy and relevance of the content, etc., learners will tend to review accommodative or transformative learning experiences as better than those which simply enable mechanical or assimilative learning. The more cognitive schemes a learning experience reorganizes the more learners are likely to find it beneficial.
The one exception here is when the goal of the learning experience is explicitly known to participants as targeting a lower-rung type of learning (e.g. mechanical). For example, when learning a physical skill, participants will gladly embrace a highly rote, repetition-based training because they intuitively know such activities to be among the best learning modalities for acquiring physical skills. Nobody taking a class on truck driving will object to a course that focuses entirely on practice driving a truck simulator and criticize it for not being transformative.
I suspect this is why in-person, facilitated, social learning experiences tend to generally be rated higher than asynchronous online self-paced learning courses: an in-person workshop has a much greater opportunity to include activities, conversations, and experiences facilitating accommodative or even transformative learning. Online, asynchronous learning is just limited in what sorts of activities it can offer and therefore what types of learning it can easily create. If you’re just learning new PowerPoint skills, an online asynchronous course might be perfect, as most of the learning is assimilative (if not mechanical) in nature. But if you want to radically shift someone’s approach to management or help them rethink how they are showing up as a leader, it’s extremely unlikely that an online, self-paced course can harbor the experiences needed for those types of accommodative and transformative learning. I further suspect that this is why poorly-run in-person experiences are often so frustrating: When an in-person learning experience relies on lecture-based, fact-memorization, and basic discussion formats, it feels wasteful. Those are modalities that could easily be done just as well in virtual, often asynchronous settings. Let’s not waste our valuable in-person time on the types of learning that can easily be achieved in more convenient settings.
When the learning does not need to really alter our existing schemes, I am all for using asynchronous, virtual, self-paced, and other more convenient but less powerful modalities. Where organizations lose significant ROI is when they try to take learning that is meant to be transformational (e.g. senior leadership development) and file them into formats that are far better suited to mechanical or assimilative learning. When you’re trying to shift paradigms the learning needs to occur in settings that can actually shift paradigms.