Learning about learning enhances performance

In the last few decades, understandings of learning have advanced significantly. In the 1960s and 1970s it was fashionable to model learning on computing processes, and to consider learners as “intelligent systems”. Since then other features of learning have been re-discovered. Studies of social aspects of learning have re-emphasised that understanding is a shared phenomenon, that learning can be usefully viewed as joining a knowledge community, and that much learning remains very specific to the social situation in which it was originally learned.1