How Big is Your Snowball? The Way We Gain Knowledge!

The way we gain knowledge is similar to the way a snowball grows as it rolls down a snow-covered hill. We search for meaning in the information we gather, which helps us remember it better. We learn best if we experience things firsthand, rather than just gathering facts.

Knowledge

Is all what we have learned about the world around us and how can we live in it. When we learn new information we store it in our memory, that information we have stored and can be remembered is what we can call KNOWLEDGE!

For a long time, it was thought that knowledge consisted of nothing but facts, and traditional teaching methods focused on getting students to memorize those facts, often through constant repetition. But as psychology emerged as a science in the 20th century, ideas of knowledge began to change. The way we learn, and the way we remember things, became major branches of study for psychologists, challenging the notion that knowledge is simply remembering facts, and giving a new perspective on the role of the learner and the teacher in acquiring knowledge. Psychologists realized that learning is not just a question of collecting and storing knowledge from the outside world, the learner also has a part to play, by actively exploring his environment and learning by experience.

We build up our knowledge step by step, going over ideas in more and more detail, making connections and associations with other ideas. This involves actively and continually experiencing things, rather than getting knowledge secondhand, so simply being told or shown something by a teacher may not always be the best way to learn. Knowledge is more likely to stick if we’re encouraged to participate in the learning process—for example, by making a cake, rather than just reading a recipe—and then to make sense of the information we discover.

Learning is not just what we do to gain knowledge; it is also a mental process, in which we find meaning in the information gathered and connect it to other knowledge. And because learning is a continuous process, our knowledge is continually changing.