A Prolific Learning Principle: Learn in Context

Learning in Context Empowers Long Term Mastery

For long term learning, it is best to learn new things in their bigger context. Continued exposure to the full context of what we are learning helps our brain place all the individual details in their proper place.

Most of the prolific learning principles are for the most part intuitive and fit our common sense and experience. However, this one runs counter to what we feel and think. For various reasons, we have a strong inclination to break things up into small bite-size chunks to master the individual details. This gives us a sense of accomplishment as we deal with topic after topic in a successful manner. We feel like we are constantly making progress as we do this. However, it turns out that this is NOT the best method for long term prolific learning.

In practice, breaking things into small parts is one of the best methods for meeting deadlines and hurrying to learn something according to a schedule. It’s usually easy to learn a small topic in isolation. If we are tested on it fairly soon afterwards, we’ll remember much of it. We have intuitively come to learn how to do this on a regular basis. It is an effective way to carry out learning if we are working toward a deadline and a set of goals. However, this does not foster long term internalization in our brains. Much of what we learn in this manner is quickly forgotten unless we constantly review it. Most of us can point to classes we’ve taken that we honestly cannot remember much from. How many thousands upon thousands of dollars have been spent on our education that we cannot even remember today?

A growing body of research (backed by anecdotal evidence I’ve seen among successful language learners) is that learning new things in their complete context provides the best basis for long term learning and mastery of something. The initial progress is slower. However, that is because our brain is slowly building a large complete picture of what we are learning. As we keep moving forward, our brain starts to internalize more and more details into the big picture. In the long run, this means that the things we are learning are becoming part of a big skill set rather than easily forgotten isolated facts.

A good example of this is my lost decades of language learning. On a day by day basis, I was successful. I was successfully memorizing vocabulary lists. I was successfully memorizing verb tables. I was successfully understanding various grammatical topics. On any given day, I was fairly successful at what I was doing. I could drill myself and remember much of the material I was memorizing. However, in hindsight, what was happening is that my brain had no context to use all of this information. It was remembering this information in the context I was learning it. Verb forms were simply things that appeared next to other verb forms in tables. Various vocabulary words were those that appeared next to other words. In practice, I was spending the vast majority of my time thinking in English about the language I was learning. My brain was not being exposed to the language I was learning. It was when I started spending most of my time listening and reading the language that my skills started to rapidly improve. My brain was for the first time being exposed to the complete sounds and rhythms and patterns of the language. As the new patterns became more and more familiar, I found myself naturally knowing and remembering things. Words no longer were part of tables and lists but part of sentence that I comprehended.

It is often challenging to find learning materials which present something in its complete context. Most courses are built around the idea of breaking a topic into many small and easily learned details (which are then more easily tested). It’s hard to find courses based on a big picture approach. One of my plans for this web site and these materials is to slowly build a reference library of examples of various subjects and how to approach them in this way. I’m hoping that as more and more people learn these prolific learning principles and start to apply them that they will start writing tutorials and teaching materials based on these principles.