At the Time of Learning: The Encoding Process

Abstract

How can there be doing without learning? This was the riddle we posed in Chap. 1. How is it that a student can give every major, outward indication of learning in the moment without – as we later realize – really retaining the material? How, for example, can students be listening and attending without assimilating to any significant degree what they’re attending to? How can students successfully complete assignments and tasks designed to teach certain concepts without actually learning from their work? In other words, how can students so clearly seem to be learning at the time, but without the new information being later accessible to memory and without it being able to serve as the foundation for learning in the future?