To learn, it helps to know what learning feels like

Being a student again is teaching me a lot about learning

Photo of me working through physics homework problems on my office whiteboard. Working through problems really helps me learn!

This semester I’m enrolled in a physics course at the community college where I normally teach biology. Being a student again is teaching me a lot about teaching and learning in the science classroom, and I’m sharing those insights here.

This week I’m preparing for my second physics exam. While I have a PhD in genetics, I have never taken a physics course. Most of the concepts are completely new to me, so I get to experience what it’s like to learn something totally new. As I watch myself learn, I’ve made two notable observations:

• I have to actively work with new concepts to understand them

• I know what learning feels like and I self-direct to behaviors that help me learn

Neither are surprising observations, but it’s powerful to experience them firsthand in a classroom setting, and they both have practical implications for teaching.

What does learning feel like? It feels like a struggle

While I know almost nothing about physics, I do have a PhD, which kind of makes me a professional learner. As I sit in class, or explain concepts to someone else, or when I’m studying for the exam, I have a pretty good sense of what I understand and what I don’t.

For example, in class we recently learned about the buoyancy force, but when I later tried to explain it to a friend, I couldn’t. I knew there was some relationship between the displaced fluid and the buoyancy force, but I couldn’t explain what that relationship was. That’s how I knew I didn’t understand it. My friend knows more about physics than me, so when I stumbled through trying to explain the buoyancy force, he tried to correct me but I said, “Don’t interrupt, let me work this out.” I knew that to understand it, I needed to work on the ideas with my own brain, not just hear someone else explain it.

Likewise, when I’m in class listening to my professor lecture, the concepts make sense in a vague sort of way. She works through problems on the whiteboard and I can follow all of her reasoning. But I know I’m barely learning - the concepts feel “slippery” in my mind. When we’re in class, I want to have the chance to work on problems on my own. I know I need to struggle to learn: I need to figure out which formula to use, I need to try to explain a concept to someone else, I need to figure out which numbers in a word problem equate with which variables in a formula, etc. Often when I try to do those things, I can’t. I fumble around. Sometimes I get stuck, and then I reach out for help - from the textbook, the instructor, or ChatGPT - to help me figure out how to get started, then I take it from there. Engaging in those struggles is where the real learning happens.

We know this is how students learn - it is the basis for encouraging instructors to use Active Learning principles in the classroom. In an active learning classroom, lecture is regularly interrupted with activities like problem solving, discussion, and other opportunities for students to practice using new concepts and skills. The idea is that, by building these opportunities into the classroom, all students benefit from them, not just the ones who already know to engage in those behaviors at home. Additionally, struggling with concepts in the classroom means students can ask questions, get support from peers, and get immediate feedback directly from the instructor, which can help bridge the gap when they are stuck. Unsurprisingly, courses in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) that regularly employ active learning activities significantly improve student learning.

Knowing what learning feels like makes students better learners

I’m not surprised that when I’m learning new concepts, I need to actively engage my brain in problems that help me build my understanding. But I am a little surprised at how obvious it is to me when I understand something and when I don’t. The ability to know when I don’t understand something a skill in itself — it’s called metacognition — and I’m very good at it, which is unsurprising because I’ve spent a lot of years being a student.

However, as an instructor, I know that many students are not skilled in metacognition. Students often overestimate what they understand, which means they can easily waste time “studying” using methods that don’t actually build their understanding, then they come unprepared for assessments. This is the basis for when a student comes to me and says, “But I spent so much time studying, how could I have failed the exam?” And when I ask how they studied, they say, “I re-read my notes and the powerpoint slides.” Listening and reading are about the least effective ways to build understanding; effective studying requires using concepts and skills in novel contexts. Re-reading notes just doesn’t do that.

This has me wondering: how I can build my students’ metacognitive skills, and in so doing, build their ability to self-regulate their learning?

I’m not the first person to think about improving students’ metacognitive skills — it is an entire subdiscipline in education research. In fact, my home academic society, the Society for the Advancement of Biology Education Research, is hosting a panel discussion later this month (March 21, 2025) about fostering metacognition in students. You bet I’ll be there.

But while there are various assignments designed to build students’ metacognitive skills (I’ve used some in my classroom!), I do wonder about this: do metacognition-supporting interventions help students if the students don’t care?

Here’s what I mean. As I study for my next physics exam, I notice that I want to learn and therefore I engage actively in activities that help me learn, like explaining concepts to others and working hard to understand how to get the right the answer on the homework, not just trying to get the right answer. I want to help students engage in learning like this, by noticing what really helps them learn and actively engaging in those activities, not just “going through the motions.” I want to help students see that going through the motions is often a waste of time - they need to struggle with the content (really wrestle with it in their minds!) to learn it well.

So it becomes a chicken and egg problem. I want to help students transition from “going through the motions” to engaging in the hard work of learning. But if I assign one or more metacognition-related assignments, how do I get the students to engage in the work meaningfully, so they develop the metacognitive skills that will ultimately lead to meaningful engagement with other course content?

I guess this is the “you can lead a horse to water but not make it drink” problem that is inherent in education. I can only help students learn if they want to learn. But for those students who do want to learn, assignments that help build metacognition could help improve their ability to self-regulate their learning, and, powerfully, give them skills to succeed in my course and all those that come after.

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Before enrolling in a physics course as a student, I knew that active learning activities helped students learn more in the classroom, and I knew that activities that build metacognition helped students improve their studying and overall learning. But being a student again has made the importance of these processes come into stark relief. While I already employ active learning activities throughout my courses, I’m pondering how I can meaningfully help my students build their metacognitive skills, and how to motivate them to take it seriously.

Not everything you read on the internet was written by a human. For full transparency, here is how I used AI to help me write this post:

I did not use AI in any capacity to write this post.