Redefining Learning: A Neurocognitive Approach

Abstract

How learners, teachers, learning designers, instructional supervisors, education policy makers, and others involved with education institutions and educational enterprises define learning affects understandings about how and what is learned and to what extent learning is accomplished. Such understandings also have broad ramifications for fundamental operations, such as how schools are conceived, from their physical architecture to the organization of learners, classes, subject matter, and so forth, and how learning accomplishments as well as learners and their teachers are evaluated. The purpose of this work is to explore -- and to encourage others to explore -- a new definition of learning, a neurocognitive definition, and its ramifications. In the use of neurocognitive, the authors link existing theories of cognition to new research emerging from neuroscience. When cognitivism was proposed in the 1950s, study of the brain was in its infancy. Now, however, scientific understanding of the brain is growing exponentially. Therefore, it is reasonable to explore the link between our growing knowledge of neuroscience and our understanding of cognition.