Definition of implicit learning
The term comes from psychology and mainly refers to regularities that people absorb through experience. The result is called implicit knowledge, and it shows in what someone can do: a student solves a task with confidence but cannot say which rule they are following.
Its counterpart is explicit learning, in which someone deliberately learns a rule and can explain it afterwards, such as a spelling rule or a method of calculation.
How implicit learning works
Implicit learning needs many encounters with examples that follow the same regularity. With each repetition, a sense of what fits together grows, even if nobody ever states the rule. Familiar examples:
- Children speak grammatically correct sentences in their first language long before they know any grammar rules.
- Many people notice at once that a sentence sounds wrong, even if they cannot name the grammatical mistake.
- When riding a bike, people keep their balance without being able to describe the movements involved.
This is why implicit knowledge is hard to test by asking. Asking for the rule easily underestimates what a student can do; how they solve tasks, and which mistakes they make along the way, reveals more.
Benefits for teaching and support
What students learn implicitly by practicing with many examples, they also apply to new tasks of the same kind.
During practice, teachers see which tasks a student gets stuck on and can tailor the next exercise to this without scheduling a separate test.
Limits and challenges
Mistakes are learned implicitly too. Anyone who repeats a wrong method often enough without feedback reinforces it. Practice should therefore tell students whether an answer is correct.
A single answer says little about implicit knowledge, because a mistake may come from a lapse in attention and a correct answer from luck. A reliable picture only emerges from many tasks.
Analyzing practice creates data about children, and both schools and parents should know who sees this data and what it is used for.
Building blocks in OhayoSchool
A student's learning profile comes from tasks they solve in OhayoSchool, for example in the learning terminal. Each task is tagged with the abilities it draws on, and Ohayo Stimulation Tomography calculates the profile from the answers to many of these tasks. OhayoSchool only creates a learning profile once the student's parents or guardians have given their consent.
Frequently asked questions
Is implicit learning better than explicit learning?
Neither is better in principle. In class they complement each other, for example when the teacher explains a rule and students then practice it on many tasks.
Is implicit learning the same as learning by heart?
No. When learning by heart, someone deliberately memorizes specific content, such as vocabulary or a poem, and can later reproduce it word for word. Learning by heart is therefore a form of explicit learning.
Is the learning profile a brain scan?
No. OhayoSchool does not measure anything that happens in the brain, and the learning profile is not a diagnosis.