Understanding the Space of Experiential Variation

Abstract

Learning and understanding are often differentiated and distinguished from each other in people’s experience and thinking, but they are necessarily related to each other. This relationship is visible in examples of how individuals express what they mean by learning. Starting from an observed similarity of expression, an idea is presented about how understanding may be appropriately described for pedagogy. Several examples of conceptual learning are highlighted and characterized in terms of the learners’ experiences of variation in critical dimensions of the learning task. However, systematic variation of the learners’ task has seldom been a primary theme in research except in the particular domains of perceptual and motor skills. By reconsidering the ways in which what is learned differs when skill practice conditions are systematically varied leads to a reorientation of our interpretation of what it is that is learned. It seems that it is something about the variation experienced that is learned. The resulting understanding can then be seen as the space of experiential variation.