Formal Learning: Anxiety

The affective context model explains the way in which people learn, everyday – but it is also interesting to consider how it is used in artificial circumstances to bring about learning.

You can picture our evolutionary ancestors moving around an environment, learning as they go. Learning is inherently context-sensitive, because the mind is designed to interpret the world in terms of its affective significance (e.g. ‘is this person a threat or a friend?’) and to subsequently encode experiences with affective metadata intact.

This is very different from school: at school students generally sit in a single place, subjected to a stream of data that is largely decontextualized, often with little or no affective context (whether in a classroom or doing e-learning). Once in a while something of personal relevance may crop up (i.e. something which has affective context for the student) – for example a student may be related to a historical figure or have a friend who is suffering from depression – but by and large the information has few affective features. Good teachers, will intuitively sense that providing affective context improves learning and will do so in a variety of ways – by making the content personally relevant to students in some way, by engaging the students in activities, by challenging students, by staging exciting demonstrations, by demonstrating their passion for the topic or care for the student etc. On the whole, though, formal educational experience lacks affective context and it is this that accounts for the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve.

So in what sense does formal education work at all? Anxiety. By and large school works by harnessing one significant dimension of affective context – namely, anxiety. Students remember very little from their classes, however they do tend to take notes. They do this because it is a norm, but also because they are anticipating an exam of some kind.

As the exam approaches anxiety-levels rise, and students begin to ‘cram’ information. The sense of urgency transfers to the information ‘Sir, will this be in the test?’ or ‘I must remember this stuff – it’s going to be in the exam, I know it!’ and provides sufficient affective context for memorisation. Most learning takes place in preparation for the exam. Unsurprisingly the more anxious students are the better they tend do in the tests. Teachers tend to over-estimate the significance of their lessons: too often the lesson is not a place of learning, the lesson is a place to take notes. Taking notes is not a terribly good way to learn. My hypothesis is that students who sit through two years of such lessons before taking an exam do not do much better than students who merely spend two months cramming in preparation for the exam. Of course this line of argument works best with ‘chalk&talk’ lessons and I am aware that where lessons are challenging & exploratory a different use of the affective context model is in play.

In this fashion formal education can prove to be a dangerous abuse of our learning mechanisms: the information is lost soon after the tests (unless it is actually put to use), but more importantly it creates an association between learning and anxiety together with large numbers of people who see learning as inherently linked to anxiety.

At the risk of stating the obvious: learning is usually effortful but not inherently anxiety-laden. A more natural example of learning (which we have come to refer to as ‘informal learning’) might be the adaptation that takes place when one moves to another country. There can be elements of anxiety, but it can be an exciting and rewarding experience overall. 

So what is the answer? The sorts of things that are inherently interesting to young people – relationships, status, self-presentation – are not linked in an obvious way to the formal curriculum. In fact, one might argue, that these are the real subjects of learning at school. There are two productive lines of thought however: we must either respond to an affective context (pull) or introduce one (push). In the former case education seeks to adapt the subject matter to the interests and aptitudes of students. This is pretty much the line Sir Ken Robinson takes. 

In the latter case, we introduce affective context – for example by ‘flipping’ the classroom. Flipping the classroom works because it makes the face-to-face encounter into a challenge. Even a conversation can be a challenge when one is amongst one’s peer group. And challenges are, almost by definition, affective. There are many ways of adding affective context. We instinctively recognise good teachers as being those who bring enthusiasm, excitement and care into their teaching, providing students with a rich participative and challenging set of experiences. The problem is that this kind of learning is not engineered into the learning experience. Because we don’t understand learning. Because, at worst, we hire somebody who knows some stuff and put them in a room with some people who don’t and say ‘off you go’.