What is generative learning?

Many of the recommendations I make for classroom and even nonschool-affiliated learning strategies are based in my understanding of generative learning. I have described a specific activity as generative in previous things I have written, but I don’t think I have ever made the effort to provide what I mean by generative. I decided I would give this background now both to explain what the term implies to me and to have something I can refer to in the future.

My applied work in educational psychology is based in cognitive psychology. Cognition is just a way of understanding thinking. Unless someone is really interested in digging into the field, I think it helps if I make an effort to translate some of the core ideas. There is always a danger making the complex simple is a bad idea and my efforts at simplification are off target, but I do it anyway. Think of thinking in terms of mental actions. Assume that learners have at their disposal mental actions they can use to accomplish the thinking and learning tasks they encounter. Learners may differ in which actions are selected to tackle a given task, how skillfully the tools are applied, and how effectively they evaluate the outcome of tool application to determine whether or not more needs to be done.  

Here are four actions with a description of the task to which each would  typically be applied:  

• Attend – maintain certain ideas in consciousness (also called working memory)
• Find and retrieve – locate what is already stored (also known as long-term memory) and attend to this content
• Link – establish connections between information units stored in long-term memory  or that content active in working memory
• Elaborate – create or discover new knowledge from the logical and  purposeful combination of active and stored memory components  
• Evaluate – determine whether a cognitive task has been completed  successfully 

We can often take control and apply these activities without assistance, but motivation or lack of awareness of what activities might be useful can result in important activities not happening. Generative activities (Wittrock, 1974, 1990) are external to the internal mental activities of the learner but can make predictable internal activities more likely to occur. Questions about something a student is trying to learn make a good example. A question is external to the thinking of a learner. However, if I ask a question and you cannot answer, attempting to answer this question should have required you to evaluate your understanding. In attempting to answer my question, you have also probably made the effort to find and retrieve information. One related thing to consider – generative activities may encourage activities that are redundant with activities a learner have initiated on her own. This probably does no harm, but it also might be described as busy work. Cognitive activity is always the mental work of the learner with others only able to manipulate such behaviors indirectly and with less precision than a competent and motivated learner could do for themself.

What are some examples of generative activities? Fiorella and Mayer (2016) have identified a list of eight general categories most educators can probably turn into specific tasks. These categories include:

• Summarizing
• Mapping
• Drawing
• Imagining
• Self-Testing
• Self-Explaining
• Teaching
• Enacting

Summarizing – To summarize, students think about what they have just learned and then rephrase the most important information in their own words.

Mapping – Mapping is the process of converting words into a visual representation. Mind maps, tables, diagrams, and graphs are all common examples. 

Drawing – Drawing is a great way to help your students learn more deeply about the material you are teaching. When students draw, they have to think about what information to include, what to leave out, and how to best represent it visually. 

Imagining – Forming a mental representation of new information is surprisingly beneficial for learning. An example is tasking your students to imagine the process of digestion by creating mental pictures of each step.

Self-testing – Self-testing is a highly effective learning method. Educators likely recognize that retrieval practice (self-testing) is presently receiving a lot of attention. Some examples of self-testing include using flashcards and quizzes.

Self-explaining – Self-explaining requires students to recall new information and explain it in their own words. This helps students to understand the material better and to avoid simply repeating back what they have read or heard.

Teaching – Peer teaching is another active strategy requiring the recall and translation of what has been learned to present to others. Teaching involves preparation, delivery, and interaction related to the content to be learned. Most educators intuitively appreciate the unique requirements of teaching and recognize that learning for the self and to inform others involve different activities. 

Enacting – I think demonstrating is an acceptable way to explain what the researchers meant by enacting. 

Generative learning is a powerful approach to education that encourages learners to actively engage with the material, creating new knowledge and connections. This method, grounded in the work of Fiorella and Mayer (2016), and Brod (2021), among others, is centered around the idea that learning is not a passive process, but an active one that involves the learner in the creation of their own understanding.

The strategies I have listed require learners to select and organize relevant information, elaborate on the material based on personal knowledge, and integrate new information with existing knowledge.

Summarization, for instance, involves concisely stating the main ideas from a lesson in one’s own words. This goes beyond copying words or phrases verbatim from the lesson; rather, it involves selecting the most relevant information from the lesson, organizing it into a coherent structure such as an outline, and integrating it with students’ prior knowledge.

Teaching involves selecting the most relevant information to include in one’s explanation, organizing the material into a coherent structure that can be understood by others, and elaborating on the material by incorporating one’s existing knowledge.

Generative learning is not just about the creation of new content. Brod (2021) emphasizes that generative learning requires the production of a meaningful product that goes beyond the information that is an input. This means that activities like highlighting, which do not result in new content, are not considered generative.

Generative learning strategies are not just for students. They can be used by anyone looking to deepen their understanding of a topic. For example, if you’re reading a book or article, try summarizing the main points in your own words, or explaining the concepts to someone else. You might be surprised at how much more you understand the material!

Fiorella and Mayer (2016) offer one additional observation related to these eight types of activity. Four strategies (summarizing, mapping, drawing, and imagining) involve changing the input into a different form of representation.

The other four strategies (self-testing, self-explaining, teaching, and answering practice questions) require additional elaboration. This distinction contrasts ”knowledge-building” and ” knowledge-telling” (e.g., Roscoe and Chi, 2007). Knowledge telling is regarded as the weak form involving a restatement of what is known with limited activation of other existing knowledge (e.g., attempts to generate examples from personal experience) and less extensive monitoring of understanding. In knowledge-building, the strong form, the learner adds to core ideas from existing personal knowledge and in doing to reflects on the core ideas in greater depth resulting in more effective comprehension monitoring.

One additional comment about the eight categories is that the categories were explained by the scholars identifying this category system in terms what the learner could do. While learners could certainly decide to do these things without guidance, it is probably more likely that these external tasks are recommended or assigned by an educator. 

What I have described to this point is how I would likely cover this topic in an educational setting. This approach would be designed to be true to what I believe to be the origins of the ideas and learners can then apply what they find useful. Given this background, my own research and practice have both focused on a subset of this list of activities and have taken the general idea of using external tasks to encourage desirable mental activities to recommend activities that share characteristics with the tasks mentioned. I have focused on questions, summarization, teaching, and self-explaining and proposed applications that have included peer tutoring and collaborative notetaking, writing across the curriculum, computer-enabled study environments that involve testing associated with accuracy prediction and data collection that feeds the identification of specific areas needed more work back to students, and the technology-based collection and exploration of notes over extended periods of time to improve personal productivity (smart notes and personal knowledge management). Thinking of external activities that efficiently encourage important cognitive activities has proven a productive way to both think about learning and what tasks may be helpful in helping students learn.

References:

Brod, G. (2021). Generative learning: Which strategies for what age? Educational Psychology Review, 33(4), 1295-1318.

Fiorella, L., & Mayer, R. E. (2016). Eight ways to promote generative learning. Educational Psychology Review, 28(4), 717-741.

Roscoe, R. D. & Chi, M.T. (2007). Understanding tutor learning: Knowledge-building and knowledge-telling in peer tutors’ explanations and questions. Review of Educational Research, 77, 534-574.

Wittrock, M.C. (1974). Learning as a generative process. Educational Psychologist, 11, 87-95.

Wittrock, M.C. (1990). Generative processes of comprehension. Educational Psychologist, 24, 345-376.