A person’s level of understanding may rest within his/her mental frameworks, sometimes called schemas, which are thought to represent, and provide structure for knowledge, including affective and conceptual knowledge, residing in personal memory. According to schema theory, we are each born with a relatively small number of undeveloped mental schemas, which, throughout our lives, branch into many more specialized and intricate schemas. As these multidimensional schemas become increasingly complex and interconnected, we move from novices to experts within knowledge domains (NRC, 1999).
Acquiring knowledge, that is, ‘learning‘, can be described as the act of constructing personal idiosyncratic multidimensional schemas. The act of intentional learning involves the mindful and critical focusing on external stimuli that we perceive through our senses. The more authentic the mental exploration of the stimuli (e.g., testing, questioning, observing and making mental notes), the more previously constructed schemas are retrieved from memory into the conscious mind and the more complex the schemas in the brain become (Dole and Sinatra, 1998). Depending on the so-called ‘temperature’ of the knowledge within each schema, schema retrieval, construction or reconstruction will involve the recall of feelings. Similarly, beliefs and attitudes will be recalled if this affective knowledge has been embedded within the ‘old’ (i.e. previously constructed) schema. This conscious and intentional form of learning is controlled by the brain’s executive function. Neuroscience imagery has successfully mapped this functioning and has identified schemas as dendritic structures that grow and/or shrink according to an individual’s mental habits.
One of the most important outcomes resulting from understanding how people learn is that meta- cognition and self-regulated learning activities (i.e., higher-order thinking) such as intentional knowledge organization and intentional knowledge integration, enhance learning (Volet, 1991; Pintrich, 2002; Pintrich, 2004). The more we attentively test, question, self-explain, and critique our knowledge, the more entrenched in memory our knowledge becomes (Dole and Sinatra, 1998).
Motivation is crucial to the depth at which a student attends to learning a concept. Psychologists suggest that motivation to learn is dependent on a combination of four factors: dissatisfaction with existing ideas, personal relevance of information, the learner’s need for cognition, and social influences (Dole and Sinatra, 1998). It may be that the latter two factors are most significant within the minds of engineering students. An important role played by the educator is to trigger the motivation of the student.
Knowledge can be acquired by mechanisms other than intentional learning. For example, behaviour learned by fear conditioning is mediated by a non-conscious mechanism (Ledoux, 1994). Also, Mezirow (1996) and others contend that learning is influenced by “contemporary culture and social forces” manifested in expectations and presuppositions via communication norms such as those found in language.