Discontinuities and continuities in the experience of learning: An interview study of high-school students in Hong Kong

An interview study was carried out with 43 high-school students with the dual aim of: (a) exploring the dimensionality of learning; and (b) investigating the nature of the relationship between memorisation and understanding as experienced by Chinese learners. The different ways of experiencing learning found in the group participating in the investigation are described within a two-dimensional outcome space. There is a temporal dimension of variation, comprised of “acquiring”, “knowing” and “making use of”. The other dimension is that of depth, ranging over seeing learning as “committing words to memory”, “committing meaning to memory”, “understanding meaning” and “understanding phenomena”. Concerning the second question this study sets out to illuminate some of our findings point to the possibility of the experience of understanding being developmentally preceded by, and differentiated from, the experience of committing to memory. In the context of similar studies carried out in other cultures, this investigation contributes to our understanding of an evolving culturally distributed universal structure of conceptions of learning grounded in overlapping and complementary views.