Imagine putting all approaches to learning on a spectrum. One end is labelled ‘rote’, and the other is labelled ‘meaningful’. Your learning falls somewhere on this spectrum.
On the rote end, the emphasis is on memorization. Your primary goal is to remember information. This is usually done by some forms of repetition, like reading something over and over and memorizing procedures to do something. You are not too concerned whether you understand the content or the procedures as long as you remember them.
On the meaningful end, there is an additional emphasis on understanding; you need to understand the information on top of remembering them. You need to really know the ‘why’ of things but not only what they are on the surface. The things you’ve just learned should be integrated into your existing knowledge, instead of being stored separately as standalone facts. The level of understanding somewhat correlates with the feeling of intuition (though only to a limited extent). If you can see why something is true intuitively, you’ve probably acquired a basic level of understanding.
Your learning experience is very much affected by where you are on the spectrum. Reading a book many times certainly feels very different from reading it while thinking deeper about its content each time. There are many reasons why they feel so different. An obvious one is the level of stimulation: rote memorization is just doing the same thing over and over, so it’s not unexpected that it’s more tedious. Meaningful learning involves more thinking, which often takes monotony out of learning completely.
There is also the aspect of effectiveness. If you learn to solve certain problems by memorizing the procedures, you will have a hard time solving tweaked versions of the same thing. The lack of understanding on the steps makes it difficult for you to tweak the solution accordingly. To solve a broad range of problems, a rote learner will need to memorize large sets of procedures. Limitations like this adds frustration on top of the tedium.
It should be noted that rote learning does have it uses and we are not suggesting that it is a crime. The problem is that we rely on it too much, so much that we begin to see memorizing as a synonym to learning.
Most of us fall victim to this to a certain extent. For many people, the litmus test to whether they’ve learned something is if they can recall it. This very much resembles the idea of rote learning.
This is also reflected by what we do. Here’s an exercise. Take out some materials you are reading recently, then locate a sentence you think is important. Now look at it and ask yourself why it is true or why it may not be true. What’s the basis of the claim? How is it arrived? Are there other possibilities? Do not settle for a superficial answer, think about it until you find an intuitive answer that’s plausible.
As you are thinking, you may be surprised at how much deeper your understanding can be versus how it was on your first read. This also possibly show how rote your learning appraoch have been.
The problem of being too tied to rote learning is that it eventually takes over your idea of learning. You start to think learning is tedious and frustrating, and the only way to progress forward is more monotonous work. You may attribute this to natural talent, time spent studying, or even the nature of the learning, while the problem actually lies in the approach. But it’s unlikely that you will be aware of this when alternative approaches to learning are outside your radar. Consequently, you will try to get through the hard content only by investing more time. But this doesn’t get into the heart of the problem at all.
Learning is much more than rote learning. A meaningful approach improves your learning experience a lot in many scenarios. That’s in terms of both the progress and the outcome. Being aware of this is the first step to change, and the next to is to replace your rote learning habits bit by bit by meaningful ones.