Learning Science is a buzzword that you may have heard flying around the learning and development community lately. But what is learning science, and why does it matter?
What is Learning Science?
Learning Science is a growing field that focuses on how people learn and how to improve and track their learning outcomes. More specifically, this field expands scientific and theoretical knowledge of how learning works at its core. It helps to create the teaching methods teachers use, evaluate new ways of teaching, and discover how new resources and variables in the world can impact learning and retention.
What Does That Mean?
At its core, Learning Science is the study to see how the human brain learns and how it can improve in the future. It is a field that considers the current ways people learn and teach. Learning Scientists want to understand how learning works in every aspect. And there are many aspects to consider. Cognitive neuroscience looks at how brains function and achieve performance. Data science refers to how humans extract value from data and is applicable in many fields, such as statistics, data analysis, scientific methods, and more. Another important facet is behavioral economics, which is a combination of psychology and economics. Behavioral economics is used to examine what people “should” do and what they actually do.
After breaking down “the way things are taught,” Learning Science works to build it back up again in a bigger and better way. Instead of just accepting that a particular form of teaching produces a specific result, learning scientists work to mold and add to the teaching method to see what kind of response it will generate. Is retention better? Is understanding/comprehension more accurate?
At its core, Learning Science is the study to see how the human brain learns and how it can improve in the future. This research is usually done in real-life settings, where learning scientists can gather information through research questions, studies, and more. This research is usually done in real-life settings, where learning scientists can gather information through research questions, studies, and more.
Why Does Learning Science Matter?
Without learning science, people would have to just hope that how they are teaching is effective. Knowing how different teaching methods help people to learn or keep them from learning to their potential, can provide valuable feedback for learning platforms across the board.
For example, there has been talk of students having lower scores in their classes because of virtual learning due to the pandemic. While some people may say that virtual schooling does not make a difference in whether or not kids retain information, Learning Science gives us the facts to show that it is not as effective as the classroom.
Bigger Brains has respect for learning science, especially since it helped produce some of the foundational parts of our company! When Chip Reaves, President of Bigger Brains, was looking for training material, he realized that most training available on the market is really boring! Because of this, he dove straight into the learning science pool and sought out how to make eLearning more engaging. This is how Bigger Brains ended up with our two-person teaching method you find in all our courses!
After working to make eLearning more engaging, Chip set out on another mission – how to remember the information you learn from a course. What he found was that most people remember information from a course in their short-term memory, usually to pass a test at the end of the course. Unfortunately, this knowledge did not translate to long-term memory. Because of this, Chip put learning science to use again, and the result was BrainBot!
BrainBot is an intelligent chatbot that sends short, periodic interactions, or “boosters,” to help the learner retain knowledge. Select Bigger Brains courses utilize it. An organization can also create boosters for their other non-Bigger Brains courses. BrainBot works by utilizing what learning scientists discovered – the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve – to help information move from short-term to long-term memory!
Understanding whether specific methods can aid retention of different topics, more easily teach specific subjects, or improve overall learning is important. Learning science will help improve the quality of your training programs and the schooling of the next generation of workers, be they in a traditional in-person schoolroom or learning virtually. Knowing the subject is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to teaching!
