The difference between ‘learning’ and ‘performance‘

Ofsted used to talk about the desirability of students making ‘rapid and sustained progress’, and when inspectors would observe teaching, they would look for ‘evidence’ for this rapid and sustained progress in individual lessons. Thankfully, the penny dropped for Ofsted in 2019, because the 2019 inspection framework says that individual lessons are not graded, and nor can I find any reference to students making progress that is both rapid and sustained in the 2019 Handbook. I think that’s a good thing and I’ll explain why below.

‘Learning’ and ‘performance’ are often not the same thing. Learning involves a relatively permanent change in our long-term memory, so that in three months/six months/a year’s time, we are still able to do the thing that we can do now; and we still know the thing that we know now. But ‘performance’ can happen in the moment and often it is not sustained – it doesn’t become learning. Look at these two definitions:

Learning: A relatively permanent change in our long-term memory; we know more, we can do more in the long term.

Performance: The action or process of performing a task or function (this is a typical dictionary definition).

Imagine that I am teaching you some French and I tell you the meaning of a French phrase that you didn’t know before – say, the phrase ‘Je me débrouille’’ – which can be roughly translated as ‘I get by’. To help you remember it, I say it to you several times and you repeat it – ‘Je me débrouille, Je me débrouille, Je me débrouille…’ Then I cover up the phrase ‘Je me débrouille’ so you can’t see it, and say to you, ‘So how do you say ‘I get by’ in French?’ Being keen students, you shout back, ‘JE ME DEBROUILLE!’, and we all feel good! THAT is performance. You can do it NOW, in the moment, and it’s easy to measure. We might even do a few more things, such as me giving you a passage of French in which the phrase comes up, and you having to write it down as part of a quiz; those are good things, but in the very short term, they are still measures of performance rather than learning – because learning is a change in long-term memory, and we can only accurately measure it over time.

This matters firstly because it highlights the importance of the activities that teachers and students must undertake, over time, to help make learning stick; it highlights, in other words, the absolutely crucial importance of retrieval practice. It also matters because it’s easy for us to be fooled into equating short-term performance with learning; the fact that students get it in the moment in the lesson, with all the practice and support being provided by the teacher, is absolutely no guarantee that it will stick long-term.

Returning to Ofsted’s historic call for ‘rapid and sustained progress’: it’s not the illusion of rapid progress that we need – pleasing as that no doubt is – it’s sustained progress, and performance that demonstrates sustained progress. If in a test a year after I taught you the phrase, ‘Je me débrouille’, you choose to use it in a piece of writing, that is both performance and learning. We have nailed it!

Take-aways

1. Learning’ can differ from ‘performance’ because whilst performance in lessons is often in the moment, learning is about the long term

2. There’s nothing wrong with short-term performance – it can be a step on the path to learning – it’s just important not to confuse that one step with long-term learning

3. Learning is a change in our long-term memory; when we learn something new, we are adding something to our long-term memory

4. The key activity in teaching is providing opportunities for students to do retrieval practice – going back over what we have previously ‘learned’, again and again; and it is also the key activity for us as learners. Because…

5. ‘Making it stick’ is what it’s all about, and retrieval practice makes learning stick.

Mark Patterson