Learning is an increasingly crucial pastime, with the pace of change in the working world requiring people to learn continuously in order to keep pace.  As such, there is an understandable focus on how best to learn, and new research from Dartmouth believes it may have found the answer.

The study builds on previous work that suggests we learn better when we see an object before then hearing its description.  The new study focuses its attention on how we learn in inconsistent environments, with various different teaching styles and distractions.

The researchers attempted to deliberately create a confusing learning environment to accurately replicate the real-world environments many of us learn in.  Participants were tasked with learning the names of a number of fictional characters via two distinct forms of learning.

Learning styles

The first of these, referred to as ‘object-label learning’, allows the student to see the object first before it’s then provided with a label.  The second approach flipped this around and showed the student the label first, then the object.

The volunteers were tasked with matching pictures with their names, and the information provided to them was intentionally misleading to test how well they coped with an inconsistent learning environment, and which of the learning approaches worked best under these conditions.

The results suggest that seeing the object first, then hearing its name allowed learners to operate more effectively in this uncertain environment.  The authors believe learners were able to perform ‘frequency boosting’, which enabled them to process noisy and inconsistent information.

“When trying to teach a child about colors, such as blue or red, not many people think about the best way to do it. People just say this is blue and point to an object. From this research, we can say that the order of presentation actually matters and that seeing the object first creates a stronger association to the name,” the authors explain.

While the results don’t seem to have many parallels with learning more complex tasks, the team are nonetheless bullish about the crossover learning.  They suggest that language programs could, for instance, deploy methods whereby students are shown images before they’re told the name of the object.  They also believe the approach could work for maths, science and a range of other subjects where similar associations are made.