Learning Process

The AIH gives several equivalent definitions (AIH ch. 3):

• A change in behavior as a result of experience — physical and overt, or intellectual or attitudinal
• The process by which experience brings about a relatively permanent change in behavior
• Gaining knowledge or skills, or developing a behavior, through study, instruction, or experience
• A relatively permanent change in cognition resulting from experience and directly influencing behavior

The behavioral definition matters for a practical reason: if learning is a change in behavior, it is measurable, and therefore assessable.

Behaviorism explains behavior entirely in terms of observable, measurable responses to stimuli. All behavior is conditioned by events in the environment, so it can be predicted from past rewards and punishments — the "carrot and stick." In modern education it survives as positive reinforcement of a particular behavior by someone other than the learner; in aviation training, the instructor provides the reinforcement. Its popularity has waned; it is now used more to break unwanted behaviors than to teach (AIH ch. 3).

Cognitive theory focuses on what goes on inside the mind — knowing, perceiving, problem-solving, decision-making, awareness. Learning is not just a change in behavior but a change in how the learner thinks, understands, or feels. Dewey (reflective thought), Piaget (assimilation and accommodation), Bruner (known to unknown, the spiral curriculum), and Bloom (the taxonomy) are its principal figures.

Most modern aviation instruction is cognitive, with constructivism — learners actively build knowledge from experience — underpinning scenario-based training.

All learning comes from perception — stimuli reaching the brain through the five senses, plus the meaning the person gives those sensations. Learning occurs most rapidly when information arrives through more than one sense; sight and hearing together account for about 88 percent of all perception (AIH ch. 3).

Five factors affect perception:

• Physical organism — the perceptual apparatus itself
• Goals and values — every sensation is colored by the learner's beliefs
• Self-concept — a powerful determinant; a negative self-image introduces psychological barriers
• Time and opportunity — proper sequence and enough time to relate new perceptions to old
• Element of threat — fear narrows the perceptual field; a frightened learner fixates

Insight is the grouping of perceptions into meaningful wholes — understanding how power, attitude, airspeed, and rpm all relate. Creating insight is one of the instructor's major responsibilities.

Knowledge is information a learner is consciously aware of and can articulate. It arrives in three phases (AIH ch. 3):

• Memorization — facts and procedural steps. It gets the learner moving fast, but breaks the moment you ask a question the memorized facts don't cover. Your job: give clean, correct steps and don't mistake fluent recitation for understanding
• Understanding — the learner notices similarities and associations and organizes facts into a mental model of how the thing works. Your job: ask “why,” require self-explanation, and connect the new item to something already understood
• Concept learning — the learner generalizes across cases into categories and schemas that describe many things at once, and revises them when something doesn't fit. Your job: supply varied examples and non-examples so the category has edges

Teaching test: a memorizing student tells you the altimeter knob sets barometric pressure. An understanding student tells you which way to err in mountainous terrain, and why.

Thorndike's original three plus three added later (AIH ch. 3):

• Readiness — the learner must want to learn and have the requisite knowledge and skill; basic needs must be satisfied first
• Exercise — connections are strengthened with practice and weakened without it ("use it or lose it")
• Effect — behaviors leading to satisfying outcomes are repeated; those leading to undesired outcomes are not. Create situations designed to promote success
• Primacy — what is learned first creates a strong, almost unshakable impression. Teach it right the first time
• Intensity — immediate, exciting, or dramatic learning tied to a real situation teaches more than a routine or boring experience
• Recency — things most recently learned are best remembered; hence the lesson summary and the postflight critique

Readiness also carries the teachable moment — a moment of educational opportunity when the learner is particularly responsive, because they can clearly see how the information applies in the real world. The handbook's example: deer cross the runway on final, and the instructor uses the moment to stress always being ready to go around. Recognizing and capitalizing on teachable moments is one of the most important skills to develop.

Bloom's domains (AIH ch. 3):

• Cognitive (thinking) — six levels: knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, evaluation. The top three are the higher order thinking skills (HOTS)
• Affective (feeling) — five levels: awareness, response, value, organizing, integration. Attitudes, beliefs, values, motivation — including whether the learner values safety and risk mitigation
• Psychomotor (doing) — practical instructional levels: observation, imitation, practice, habit

The affective domain is the hardest to measure but is where a learner's attitude toward safety actually lives.

Rote, understanding, application, correlation (AIH ch. 3):

• Rote — repeating what was taught without understanding or being able to apply it. Verbs: define, identify, label
• Understanding — putting two or more concepts together. Verbs: describe, estimate, explain
• Application — putting concepts together to form something new; performing the maneuver. Verbs: determine, develop, solve
• Correlation — associating what was taught with other segments or blocks of learning, past or future

Correlation should be the objective of aviation instruction. Stopping at application — the learner can fly a consistent turn entry but never connects it to the traffic pattern — is piecemeal instruction, and it is inefficient.

• Learning is purposeful — each learner sees the situation from their own viewpoint and learns from activities that further their goals
• Learning is a result of experience — you cannot learn for the learner; a person's knowledge is the product of personal experience
• Learning is multifaceted — verbal, conceptual, perceptual, emotional, and problem-solving elements happen at once, plus incidental learning of attitudes about aviation
• Learning is an active process — learners do not soak up knowledge like a sponge; they must react and respond

(AIH ch. 3)

• Cognitive stage — the learner memorizes steps, is often unaware of progress, may fixate, and needs all available attention; distractions cause performance to deteriorate or stop
• Associative stage — practice links steps to outcomes; the learner assesses progress and makes adjustments, still needs deliberate attention but handles distraction better; verbal instruction becomes more meaningful
• Automatic response stage (automaticity) — performance is rapid and smooth, requires much less deliberate attention, and the learner can converse or perform other tasks. The learner may no longer be able to explain the individual steps

(AIH ch. 3)

Knowledge of results is making certain learners are aware of their progress — a critical instructor function, since in simple skills learners find their own errors but in flight maneuvers mistakes often aren't apparent to them; a learner may know something is wrong and have no idea how to fix it (AIH ch. 3).

Three rules the AIH states directly:

• Tell them as soon after the performance as possible — feedback delayed to the post-flight debrief has lost most of its value
• Never let a learner practice a mistake — it is harder to unlearn a mistake and then learn the skill correctly than to learn it correctly the first time, which is exactly why you intervene on the second bad landing, not the sixth
• Knowing when they're right matters too — silence reads as disapproval, and a learner who can't tell a good one from a bad one can't self-assess

One good technique: repeat the demonstration and show them the standard their performance should ultimately meet.

A learning plateau is a period when progress levels off and may stay level for a while, following the power law of practice — fast early improvement, then a slowdown. It is normal and should be expected after an initial period of rapid improvement in motor-skill learning (AIH ch. 3).

A plateau may mean the learner has reached a capability limit, is consolidating skill, has lost interest, or needs a more efficient method — but apparent lack of progress does not mean learning has ceased.

Instructor actions:

• Prepare the learner in advance that plateaus are normal and temporary
• Move to a different place in the curriculum and give the current task a break
• Re-explain the lesson, the reason for it, and how it applies

And know that you can cause a plateau by over-practice.

• Deliberate practice — aimed at a specific goal, with specific feedback that points out discrepancies between actual and desired performance. Avoid distractions during deliberate practice; feedback should be brief and explicit
• Blocked practice — the same drill over and over. Better short-term performance, poorer long-term learning; it fools learner and instructor alike
• Random practice — mixes up skills throughout the session. Better retention, because the learner recognizes similarities and differences and retrieves steps from long-term memory

Blocked practice scores better during the session; random practice scores better on a test the next day (AIH ch. 3). Well-written scenario-based training naturally encourages random practice.

Alongside practice sits the evaluation versus critique distinction. In the initial stages of skill acquisition, practical suggestions are more valuable to the learner than a grade.

• Evaluation early in training is largely teacher-oriented — it checks your teaching effectiveness, predicts learner outcomes, and locates problem areas
• Critique is the constructive feedback drawn from those observations; it identifies strengths and weaknesses and tells the learner how to improve

Both matter, but the sequence is: observe, critique constructively while the learner practices, and let the graded evaluation follow. Letting the learner critique their own performance enhances learner-centered training. (Assessment mechanics live in Task I.D.)

• A slip occurs when a person plans to do one thing but inadvertently does something else — an error of action. Neglecting to do something, confusing two similar things, performing a routine procedure in a slightly different way (assigned runway 12 after days of runway 30), or working under time pressure — the speed-accuracy tradeoff
• A mistake occurs when a person plans to do the wrong thing and succeeds — an error of thought, usually from gaps or misconceptions in understanding. Experts are not immune; they arise when a familiar solution is applied to a case that was categorized incorrectly

To believe people can eliminate errors from their performance is to commit the biggest error of all (AIH ch. 3).

Six ways to reduce error:

• Learning and practicing
• Taking time
• Checking for errors
• Using reminders (checklists, heading bugs, notepads)
• Developing routines
• Raising awareness in conditions where errors are known to happen — changes in routine, time pressure, fatigue, lack of recent practice

To learn from error, ask the learner to consider why it happened and what could be done differently — while being aware of the universal tendency to "explain away" errors as one-time events. And never let the learner practice doing the wrong thing.

• Sensory memory — receives initial stimuli, discards the extraneous within seconds, and passes relevant information to short-term memory. The selection process is called precoding (a fire alarm gets through no matter what else is happening)
• Short-term memory (STM) — stores information roughly 30 seconds; capacity about seven bits or chunks. It takes 5 to 10 seconds to properly code information, and if coding is interrupted, the information is easily lost. Retention aids: rehearsal/repetition and coding or chunking. Its three operations are iconic (visual), acoustic (sound), and working memory
• Long-term memory (LTM) — relatively permanent storage of unlimited information, organized into schemas. Information reaches LTM through significance, repetition, or attachment to something significant. LTM is a reconstruction, not a pure recall — subject to time, bias, and personal inaccuracy

(AIH ch. 3)

Retrieval depends primarily on how often the knowledge has been used and how recently (AIH ch. 3):

• Frequency and recency — used much in the past and still used now. Retrieved easily and quickly; the ideal state
• Frequency only — used much in the past, not recently. Vulnerable; retrieved slowly or not at all, and needs recent rehearsal
• Recency only — recently acquired but no history of use. Particularly vulnerable, because nothing distinguishes it from throw-away knowledge like an hourly weather broadcast. It needs a program of regular rehearsal to build frequency

This is the argument for spaced study over cramming, and it's why a newly certificated pilot's knowledge decays between flight reviews.

The four theories of forgetting explain the failures:

• Retrieval failure — the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon; also failure to store, where information never reached LTM
• Fading (decay) — information not used for an extended period fades away
• Interference — a later experience overshadows the memory. Similar material interferes more than dissimilar material, and material not well learned suffers most
• Repression or suppression — a memory pushed out of reach because the person does not want the associated feelings. Repression is unconscious; suppression is conscious

In every theory, forgotten information is not gone — it is unavailable for recall.

Teach thoroughly and with meaning — material thoroughly learned is highly resistant to forgetting, and rote learning is superficial and not easily retained. Then (AIH ch. 3):

1. Praise stimulates remembering — responses with a pleasurable return are repeated
2. Recall is promoted by association — disassociated facts get forgotten
3. Favorable attitudes aid retention — without motivation there is little chance of recall
4. Learning with all senses is most effective
5. Meaningful repetition aids recall — but mere repetition doesn't guarantee retention, and research suggests three or four repetitions provide the maximum effect, after which the payoff falls off rapidly

Retention data worth knowing: after the first 10 to 15 minutes of a lecture, retention drops significantly until the last 5 to 10 minutes. Learners passively listening to a lecture retain roughly 5 percent over 24 hours; actively engaged learners retain far more.

Transfer of learning is the ability to apply knowledge or procedures learned in one context to new contexts (AIH ch. 3).

• Positive transfer — learning skill A helps learn skill B; practicing slow flight helps short-field landings
• Negative transfer — learning skill A hinders skill B; airplane approach technique hindering helicopter approaches
• Near transfer — to closely related settings
• Far transfer — to different settings and novel problems sharing a common structure
• Generativity — the learner produces novel solutions on their own

All new learning is based on previous experience, so some degree of transfer is in every lesson. This is why you need to know a learner's background: negative transfer may hinder one learner while positive transfer helps another of equal ability.

Educational psychologists' recommendations (AIH ch. 3):

• Plan for transfer as a primary objective — deliberately
• Ensure learners understand information applies to other situations, and prepare them to seek those applications
• Maintain high-order learning standards; overlearning may be appropriate
• Avoid unnecessary rote learning — it does not foster transfer
• Provide meaningful experiences that build confidence in their ability to transfer
• Use instructional material that forms valid concepts and generalizations and makes relationships clear

In syllabus and lesson development, organize material in a meaningful sequence so each phase helps the learner understand what follows.

Habit formation is the same idea running the other direction. Correct habit patterns from the beginning are essential to further learning and to correct performance after training — primacy applied. It is the instructor's responsibility to insist on correct techniques and procedures from the outset, because building proper habits is far easier than correcting faulty ones. Aviation training follows a building block concept for the same reason: new learning rests on a solid foundation of old learning, and the base expands as knowledge and skill increase.

• A distraction is an unexpected event that momentarily diverts attention; the learner decides whether it warrants action, then returns to the task or acts on it
• An interruption is an unexpected event for which the learner voluntarily suspends one task to complete another. Interruptions are a significant source of errors — the classic case is picking a checklist back up at a later point and omitting steps
• Fixation — absorption in one task to the exclusion of others; often a sign the task has not received enough practice in isolation
• Inattention — failing to attend to an important task. Often a by-product of fixation, but it also happens when learners are not busy, and humans perform poorly as passive monitors — the more reliable the automation, the worse the monitoring

To spot them, follow the learner's eyes: a long dwell on one instrument suggests fixation; a gaze never directed at the engine instruments suggests inattention. The technique has limits — looking in a direction is not the same as seeing (AIH ch. 3).

As for when to start introducing distractions: before learners are asked to perform several tasks at once, ensure the individual tasks can be performed reasonably well in isolation. Inexperience with one task hinders combining it with others — a learner struggling with unfamiliar chart symbols will drift off altitude, and nothing about flying the airplane teaches chart symbols. Note the distinction the handbook draws: avoid conversation and distraction during deliberate practice of an individual skill, but deliberately use distraction later to teach attention management across skills already partly mastered. Confusing the two is a common new-instructor error. Specific distraction techniques and the stall/spin statistics behind them are covered under Task I.F.

SBT is a training system that uses a structured script of real-world scenarios to address training objectives in an operational environment. It presents tasks in an operational context, correlates new information with previous knowledge, and enables teaching to the application and correlation levels and the HOTS that underlie ADM (AIH ch. 3, ch. 5).

A good scenario:

• Is not a test
• Will not have a single correct answer, and does not offer an obvious one
• Engages all three learning domains and is interactive
• Should not promote errors
• Should promote situational awareness and opportunities for decision-making
• Requires time-pressured decisions

It also has a clear set of objectives, is tailored to the needs of the individual learner, and capitalizes on the nuances of the local environment. There is no list of canned scenarios that works for every learner.

Overlearning is continued study after initial proficiency has been achieved — practice beyond the point where the act can be performed to the required standard (AIH ch. 3).

Upside: application of knowledge becomes streamlined and efficient. Downside: automated routines can decouple from the thinking they were meant to trigger — a checklist recited so fluently that no item is actually considered.

The cautionary study: learner pilots and instructors solved weight and balance problems well using charts from the airplane they flew daily, but scored surprisingly low with an unfamiliar single-engine airplane's charts. They had automated a procedure tuned to familiar charts while their grasp of the underlying concepts diminished. Keep checking that a learner's actions are still accompanied by the underlying knowledge.