Learning vs. Performance: A Distinction Every Educator Should Know
You’re teaching a concept in class, working through examples and explaining the steps. You have your students do some practice problems and they seem to be getting it! After a while, the bell rings, you dismiss your class, and you leave for home feeling satisfied with your students’ progress and your teaching methods. The next day, you assess how well your students retained the material. Alas, it’s as if you never taught the concept the day before!
Sound familiar? If you’re a teacher, I’m sure it does.
It’s a fascinating paradox in education: Students can be wildly successful on tasks in class but learn virtually nothing; conversely, students can do relatively poorly on those same tasks but learn quite a lot.
These scenarios illustrate one of the most important distinctions in all the literature on human learning and memory — namely, the difference between learning and performance. Learning refers to relatively permanent changes in knowledge or behavior. It is — or at least should be — the goal of education. Performance, on the other hand, refers to temporary fluctuations in knowledge or behavior that can be measured or observed during (or shortly after) instruction.
Simply put, performance is short-term, whereas learning is long-term. What this means is…
