Two theories will be tackled in here.

One is the Situated Learning Theory and the other is the

Sociocultural Theory. These theories will provide us ideas on how an individual can learn the lessons
best.

Situated Learning Theory, according to Jean Lave, is an unintentional learning process that occurs and
is embedded within an activity in a certain context and culture. Context, in this sense, is the situation
encountered by the learner in the process acquiring knowledge. This only means that learning takes
place when learners are able to construct meaning based on their own experience. And this often
happens when there’s a change in situation.

In school, we keep on feeding students with abstract knowledge and imagination of how the world
and reality works instead of letting them experience it. So as a result, students rely on rote
memorization where chances of retaining knowledge is low. Soon after, the students forget what
they’ve read without understanding and learning its real essence. With Social Learning theory, a
teacher can help motivate the students to learn by actual situations. For instance, instead of showing
picture books to students about the plants and their uses, it would be more effective if the class will
have a field trip in a greenhouse to actually see these plants in person and be able to identify which is
which since some plants can be quite similar to each other in most cases. Confusions and
misconceptions can be cleared with actual experience. This is, in fact, most applicable to laboratories
wherein students are told to perform some experiments and let them figure out the outcome of it.
After which, the students are told to make lab reports on their observation and conclusion. If the
expected outcome is not met, students will realize what mistakes they made and correct it.

The social Learning theory, on the other hand, suggests that human learning is largely a social
process. According to Lev Vygotsky, a Russian psychologist, the cognitive development of a person
advances through social interaction with other people. Vygotsky developed the concept of Zone of
Proximal Development (ZPD) or the learning process of the children. In this zone, children are
expected to perform the tasks given ‘almost’ independently, so they still need a bit of assistance from
the people who are more skilled than them, which he called More Knowledgeable Other (MKO), in
order to succeed and accomplish the given task. MKO could be teachers, parents, tutors and even
peers. This concept is closely related to scaffolding wherein temporary support is given to the child to
perform certain tasks until such time that the child can perform it independently. Through this,
Vygotsky believed that social learning comes before cognitive development.

One example for this in a classroom setting is real life applications. Still in an experiment, students are
not expected to be knowledgeable already in the field that they just begun to explore. So the
teacher’s role is to aid them in using the equipment and in conducting the experiment until such time
that they can do it on their own.

So it is understood in here that application is indeed important in learning lesson more effectively.
And by performing certain tasks actively and becoming more involved, the students learn and
understand the lessons and topic presented.