2.2 Memorising, understanding and doing

You are now likely to be aware of various ways in which learning is diverse – as a process and in terms of its outcomes. In this final section is a very simple scheme for discriminating between the demands made on you, the learner, by different kinds of learning goals and the processes entailed in achieving those goals.

Theorists of learning have different ways of categorising the diversity of both outcome and process in learning. The scheme we are going to work with here uses three distinct kinds of learning: memorising, understanding and doing (Downs, 1993, 1995). This creates the memorable acronym 'MUD', and all three kinds of learning are required in this course. You can use MUD as a reminder to ask yourself whether you are studying in the most effective way for the achievement of the task in hand. The next three subsections provide brief discussions of each kind of learning.