Research definition of informal learning: Informal learning is defined as “learning from experience that takes place outside formally structured, institutionally sponsored, class-room based activities” (Macià & García, 2016).
Informal learning applies to the process of acquiring knowledge, skills and attitudes outside of formal, structured education or training programmes. It can happen in any setting, such as at work, at home, or during leisure activities, and can be intentional or unintentional.
Informal learning is different from formal learning, which tends to takes place in a structured setting such as a classroom, with a designated teacher, coach or trainer and a defined curriculum or set of defined outcomes. Informal learning is often self-directed, meaning that individuals choose what they want to learn and how they want to learn it, without a specific syllabus or set of learning objectives.
Examples of informal learning include reading books or articles, watching videos or tutorials, participating in online communities or discussion forums, attending conferences or seminars, and learning through trial and error or hands-on experience or just talking with friends for example. Informal learning can be just as valuable as formal learning, as it enables individuals to develop skills and knowledge that may not be covered by formal education or training.
Organisations can also benefit from informal learning by providing opportunities for employees to learn from each other, through mentoring, coaching, or job shadowing programmes. This can help to foster a culture of continuous learning and development within the workplace.
https://doi.org/10.1002/wcs.143
The study of learning is a fundamental component of research in cognitive science, yet it has been conceptualized in very different ways depending on the particular theoretical approach, subdiscipline, and historical time frame of the work. For example, learning has been conceptualized quite differently by behaviorist, cognitive, developmental, and educational theorists. Similarly, distinctions between formal and informal, as well as related notions such as implicit–explicit and incidental–deliberate, often figure prominently in many taxonomies of types of learning.1 However, depending on the overall conceptualization of learning, the phrase ‘informal learning’ varies in its meaning. Typically, ‘informal learning’ implies a contrast with ‘formal’ or didactic learning, suggesting an important distinction between these two processes.
Although the notion of informal learning is ubiquitous, defining the term is challenging and somewhat contentious. The term’s implied contrast with formal school-based learning has suggested to some that the important distinction is the location where learning occurs.2 However, children spend much of their time outside school environments, and research on informal learning clearly shows that learning happens not just in schools and not just in school-aged children.3 Indeed, children learn a great deal at home and in their communities prior to entering school, and adults continue to learn both in everyday activities and in their workplace.4 Thus, informal learning differs from formal learning on a number of crucial dimensions and location is not the most important factor.2, 5
Attention to learning in informal settings highlights the importance of considering learning not just as an individual process, but also as a social and cultural process.6, 7 When the focus is on school learning, it is sometimes easy to forget that the classroom is a cultural community of its own and that children come to school with a variety of different repertoires for learning that may or may not be easily related to the classroom context.8 As we discuss definitions of and examples of informal learning, it will be clear that informal learning occurs in many varieties across multiple communities of practice.9 Furthermore, when we find links between cultural variation in informal learning settings and children’s understanding of the relevant domain, these findings add credibility to the claim that children are learning through their experiences rather than through maturational processes alone.
Like Resnick, many scholars have proposed potential factors to characterize the distinction between informal and formal learning.
These include the role of choice to participate in activities,
23 the structure of social participation,
22 and the role of organization or curriculum2,
24 Ellenbogen24 noted that most definitions of informal learning have a common focus on the role of structure.
In general, it is described as voluntary, open-ended and flexible, and lacking an organized curriculum and structure.
Recent theoretical and empirical work points to a number of reasons to question the simple formal–informal dichotomy. In our review, we begin by addressing the variety of definitions that have been considered for the elusive concept of informal learning. Moving beyond the focus on the places where learning occurs, we will argue that informal learning is distinctive in being crucially linked to learners’ interest and initiative, rather than resulting from demands or requirements imposed from outside. In particular, we present five dimensions that are emphasized in the informal learning literature:
(1) the extent to which learning is the result of didactic teaching,
(2) the extent to which learning is socially collaborative,
(3) its embeddedness in meaningful activity,
(4) whether it is initiated by the learner’s interest or choice, and
(5) the relative presence or absence of external assessment with important consequences.
Next, we consider these five dimensions in the context of four sample domains: learning a first language, learning about the mind and emotions in families and communities, learning about science in museum settings, and learning in workplaces. Finally, we conclude by considering how these five dimensions could be used to characterize effective learning and reduce the need for the informal–formal distinction, and we suggest areas where future research is likely to be most valuable.
Discussions of informal learning in educational and psychological theory date back to at least the beginning of the 20th century. Dewey, in his book Democracy and Education, warned: ‘There is the standing danger that the material of formal instruction will be merely the subject matter of the schools, isolated from the subject matter of life-experience’10 (p. 8). Vygotsky, whose book Thought and Language was published in 1934, formulated a distinction between everyday and scientific concepts and argued that ‘scientific concepts’ are more systematic and are explicitly taught through formal education, whereas ‘everyday concepts’ are learned spontaneously through everyday activity.11 He saw the two as mutually dependent—with everyday concepts setting up the learning path for scientific concepts and scientific concepts allowing the learner to develop new everyday concepts.12
In a now classic article, Scribner and Cole2 explicated a distinction between informal and formal education that mirrored the everyday versus scientific distinction of Vygotsky. Informal education, according to Scribner and Cole, includes a focus on the person, ties learning to specific ‘real-life’ activities, and has no goal of generalizing the information learned. In contrast, formal education includes a focus on abstracting away from the current activity to develop a more general rule. Scribner and Cole concluded their paper with recommendations for the field, including a call to bring informal topics into schools as well as to bring school-like goals into informal learning.
We have provided only a sampling of examples of literatures that investigate informal learning, but hopefully they illustrate the variety of settings in which learning occurs outside school environments. We have neglected numerous other settings, each with their own unique features, including (but not limited to) after-school programs, athletic teams, adults learning about medical information through web-based search, young people sharing new technologies, learning within religious institutions, and informal learning that occurs within school environments. As we have noted, location does not determine whether learning is informal; formal learning sometimes happens at home or in a museum and informal learning occurs in classrooms. Going beyond the dichotomy between formal and informal learning, we suggest that the focus of the field should be on the more difficult goal of investigating the conditions under which effective learning occurs, regardless of whether it is formal or informal.
Recent research on informal learning suggests, then, that the age-old dichotomy with formal learning is likely to be less informative than analysis of the multiple dimensions on which learning activities vary. Rather than focusing on the place where learning occurs and rather than contrasting informal with formal, learning contemporary researchers frame their questions in terms of identifying the distinctiveness of effective informal learning as embodied in many dimensions. Five major dimensions can be drawn from the literature described above:
(1) whether or not the focus of the activity is on deliberate teaching and learning,
(2) how socially collaborative the activity is (including scaffolding by others who are more expert in the domain),
(3) how much the activity is embedded in meaningful tasks with tools available, rather than abstract tasks designed for teaching,
(4) how much initiative the learner has in choosing what and how to learn, and
(5) whether there is assessment of the learning that has important consequences for the learner.
Considering these dimensions one can quickly see that some out-of-school learning can be quite formal and some in-school learning can be very informal. These five dimensions might arguably provide a better framework within which to capture patterns in the effectiveness of different types of learning.
Callanan, M., Cervantes, C., & Loomis, M. (2011). Informal learning. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science, 2(6), 646-655. https://doi.org/10.1002/wcs.143