Understanding Learning and the Components of the Learning Process in Medical Education: A Review of the Literature

Abstract

Active learning can be described as any evidence-based strategy that seeks to engage the students during their learning process by deliberately involving them in participating in some form of meaningful activities, upon which they are subsequently tasked to think about what they have just done. It is learner-centred in its approach, thereby fostering deeper learning on the part of the student. The understanding of how people learn has developed substantially over the decades with different theories and approaches to learning haven been described by various authors in the literature. The importance of this is that all these postulated theories have offered greater insight into the learning process in particular. The current paper aims to describe the learning process and its components with a view towards providing a better understanding of the learning process, exploring some of the theoretical background that underpinned the learning and the learning process.