Learning by Doing: The Most Effective Way to Master New Skills

“Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.” — Benjamin Franklin.

We love the amount of knowledge the interwebs has brought to our, literal, fingertips. It’s easy to go to Video Streaming University and get lost in a sea of how-to’s. As good as this is, humans haven’t yet learned how to download directly into our brains. It’s not enough to simply watch content to learn skills. We still learn best by doing. 

Learning is essential to succeeding in life. Looking to increase our own learning efficiencies, we found that learning by doing (or “Experiential Learning”) is a top way to retain knowledge. Students actually learned more when engaging in active-learning strategies within classrooms¹. Repeated studies showed that over half of participants agreed on the positive influence and usefulness of learning by doing². Students in these scenarios not only showed more interest, but also retained more after the sessions. Interaction with hands-on work is also effective in mixed-reality learning platforms such as VR and/or video games³ — news that should make all the gamers out there happy.

As beneficial as it is to learn by doing, you need to pair this with varying levels of instruction to be successful. If something is too hard, just practicing it will get you nowhere. Increased instruction is required for increased difficulty of tasks⁴. This makes sense because you wouldn’t want to jump in a plane with a pilot who only watched a single online tutorial. This doesn’t diminish the benefit of hands-on learning, as long as it’s coupled with the presence of an instructor. When an instructor was present to provide experiential learning, it continued to outperform learning from books alone.

Take the best of these worlds and put them into practice. As a student, enroll in classes which combine hands-on learning with lectures. When attacking DIY projects around the house, reach out to your handy friend. Have them instruct you on what to do, then you do the activity with their guidance (and obviously, thank them with food and beverages). All the applications for this approach can’t be listed here, but insert this into your thinking as you look to pick up that next skill.

Action: Pair with an instructor on your next new task but perform it yourself.

Further Reading:

1. Measuring actual learning versus feeling of learning in response to being actively engaged in the classroom
2. Evaluating the effectiveness of ‘learning by doing’ teaching strategy in a research methodology course, Hargeisa, Somaliland
3. New Research Shows Learning Is More Effective When Active
4. Why Minimal Guidance During Instruction Does Not Work: An Analysis of the Failure of Constructivist, Discovery, Problem-Based, Experiential, and Inquiry-Based Teaching