Learning a task!

Any individual does not truly learn a task if someone is telling him what to do in a rote fashion.  To truly learn, one needs to be an active participant in the  process.  Picture the difference in how you learn to navigate a route.  If you are driving, you are more likely to remember how you arrived at the location.  On the other hand, if you are the passenger and not engaged in the process then you will probably not remember the route.  The more you are thinking about the content, the more likely you are to learn it.  If a child is taken by the hand to walk from one location to another, most often his head is back and he is not focused.  On the other hand, if the child is engaged in a patterned walk and has an active role, he will be looking and thinking and will learn the route.  If a child is told exactly what to do to make a sandwich, he will need lots of repetition and programming of changes to learn how to make the sandwich.  However, if he is engaged in problem solving through the use of declarative language, he will learn how to make a sandwich in general as opposed to the specific sandwich!