Learning is change

Regarding experience, learning is the change brought on by experience in response to environmental factors, not heredity. However, the distinction between nature and nurture is not entirely clear. Schunk [2] provided an example of how humans naturally develop the capacity to speak. Still, environmental factors provide the actual language that the individual learns. Similarly, when children develop normally, they naturally learn to crawl and walk. However, environmental factors may encourage or inhibit these abilities.

Merriam, Caffarella, and Baumgartner [4] defined learning as a process “that brings together cognitive, emotional, and environmental influences and experiences for acquiring, enhancing, or making changes in one’s knowledge, skills, values, and worldviews” [4, p. 277]. In short, learning is a process that changes an individual. Merriam et al. said that focusing on learning as a process helps to understand what happens as learning occurs. The purpose of learning theory is to explain what happens in this process. Neurology starts to show how this learning process occurs by providing pictures of how experience becomes encoded in a series of neurons as learning occurs [5].