What the variation theory of learning is and isn’t. A brief introduction.
Variation theory isn’t a theory of how memories are stored. Nor is it a theory of how learning can be impeded (like cognitive load theory); it doesn’t tell you what to avoid doing. Crucially, it isn’t just an activity or technique you can sometimes add to a lesson.
Instead, it’s a theory of how we come to perceive something new. Sometimes, things can be sitting right in front of our eyes, yet we’re not aware of them. When students enter our classrooms, our role is to help them see and do something new; something distinct.
Notice how this puts the student in the driving seat of learning. Students aren’t passive receivers of information. Meaning can’t be transmitted between people, like putting a parcel into a cupboard. Instead, everyone must actively distinguish new things for themselves. Teachers, then, must do what they can to help them distinguish what we see.
Variation theory offers a mechanism to do just this.
Here’s the central tenet:
To see an aspect, you must notice a difference (change, or variation) in that aspect. Just defining an aspect for a student isn’t going to cut it. Look at these examples, meaning comes from variety:
Think about a school that only ever reports that students are “learning well”, compared to another that reports either “learning well”, “learning very well”, or “not learning well enough”. If two parents from different schools both receive a report saying “learning well” they both know that one is meaningful and the other isn’t. In other words, if something has never changed, never varied, why would you pay attention to it?
Imagine a very isolated settlement a thousand years ago. Maybe in the middle of Siberia, and they’ve been told that they speak Russian. But the people have never encountered—heard, or heard of—any other language. What is their concept of language? Language to them equates to the word Russian, and no matter how many times they hear Russian (hearing similarity), they don’t differentiate between language and Russian.
Yet one day, some nomads happen to explore new areas and meet the Russian-speaking people. They immediately perceive that they speak a different language, and the idea of language takes a new form and gains meaning: “Russian is a type of language”. To discern “language” as a concept and make it distinct from Russian, the aspect of language itself needed to vary.
There are two salient points here. Variation theory is about learning that changes a person’s awareness; rather than storage, it’s about perception. Only when you perceive a difference (change, or variation) does it gain any meaning because it’s at this moment that a person mentally separates an aspect from everything else. They distinguish it. That aspect then exists in the person’s world, and they can think with it.
In our lives, we have these conversations all the time when we ask, “Hold on! What’s the difference between X and Y?”. Someone is talking about something in a way you don’t quite understand. They see something you don’t, and to see like them, you ask them to share the distinction they’ve made.
So what about similarity? Similarity is really important, and it’s what helps us generalise. The people in the example above could come to see similarities in speaking a language with other things, such as sign language (non-oral) or computer code. This adds more meaning to the understanding of “language” as a concept.
The key to understanding variation theory is that it states that you first perceive a difference to understand something new and perceive similarity to generalise to other examples. In that order: Difference before similarity.
The problem that happens in many lessons is that a teacher begins with similarities. They try to help students learn something new by presenting many examples of the same thing.
It’s like presenting the concept of elegant dancing by only showing examples of elegant dancing. Yet, if you can’t see it in the first two examples, why would you see it in the next? Instead, you should show examples of varying elegance: more elegant and less elegant dancing.
Nevertheless, variation theory doesn’t impose that every lesson must show difference first followed by examples of similarity. It’s a theory of learning, not a theory of a lesson. If we are confident our students are already aware of a concept, we may use analogy (similarity) as our first resource. Sometimes a lesson’s objective is simply generalisation.
The idea that differences are what make the difference is much bigger than the development of variation theory. However, variation theory’s focus is on classroom teaching and learning.
In a nutshell, Ference Marton realised that if discerning (“telling apart” or “distinguishing”) was key to perceiving difference, then logically, you would try to make the difference obvious to students.
When perceiving new experiences or new examples, there’s so much to be aware of. When I want students to see the deep difference between a living organism and a dead one, I could show examples of both in photos. But different organisms and different environments represent so much noise that if I ask students what the difference is, they’ll point to all sorts of differences.
If I want them to perceive a particular difference, I should make everything else the same, except for the aspect I want them to perceive. For example, I can show a video of a cell, before and after it lyses (dies). The environment and composition of the cell are the same. The only difference between them is the organisation of the parts.
The key, then, is to show examples that vary only in the aspect you want students to perceive; keeping all other aspects the same (as best you can, of course). This important aspect is called the “critical aspect“. And is something that variation theory differentiates from the content of a lesson, such as the facts, vocabulary, and technical details.
Rather than just “teaching it as it is” and then “defining it” as if meaning could be transmitted to students. Variation theory invites us to think always from the perspective of the student and what they can perceive.
For a teacher, it isn’t that hard either. Often it’s simply asking “what if I change this one part and leave the rest the same, what difference does it make”.
What emerges is a middle way. If we want students to perceive what we perceive, we can’t just lecture. Having students repeat the “correct” answers is no guarantee that they have perceived and made meaning of anything.
Nor can we just give students activities to construct their own meaning because it’s unclear whether they will perceive what we want them to perceive. Instead, we must prompt students with varied examples and then converse to agree on a meaning. To see how this is enacted in the classroom, see my book, Teaching Meaning.
