The Synergistic Learning Of Implicit And Explicit: A Development Study

Implicit learning is an unconscious process that acquires the complex knowledge in stimulating environment. Although individual dose not realized or is unable to state the rules that control their behavior during the process, but actually they can learn from these rules. The synergistic learning of implicit and explicit is the pattern that the mutual promotion is generated when implicit and explicit learning are coordinated, demonstrating the synergistic effect that the performance was significantly higher than any single learning.Any separation of implicit and explicit learning is not consistent with realistic learning. So we should consider that implicit learning, explicit learning and synergistic learning of Implicit and explicit are combined together. Through discussing about the influencing factors, age differences and individual differences, it could more objectively show the characteristics of implicit learning and representational mechanism. Meanwhile, it could further clarify the relationship between implicit learning and learning efficiency, and deepen the study of learning nature.This study selected subjects from students of grade four, grade five, grade six of primary school, grade one in junior high school and grade one in senior high school. From the aspect of material difficulty, it selected definite-state artificial grammar in which rules were more difficult and biconditional artificial grammar as lower. From the aspect of materials nature, this study selected real materials and artificial grammar materials. Used a much stronger implicit-explicit manipulation program, researcher divided learning style into the match task, the edit task, the match/editing task and alternate task, which were equivalent of implicit learning, explicit learning, first implicit learning and then explicit learning, alternate learning to inspect the developmental characteristics and rules of implicit learning as well as the synergistic learning of implicit and explicit.This paper consists of five experiments: Experiment 1 was to explore the generation of the synergistic learning of implicit and explicit, the influence from difficulty level of materials to implicit learning and synergistic learning of implicit and explicit. It further revealed the relationship between the implicit learning and explicit learning, the transfer of implicit knowledge and its representational mechanism.Experiment 2 randomly selected 480 students including four aging groups, which are from grade five and grade six of elementary school, grade one of junior high school and grade one of senior high school, to investigate the grades difference of implicit learning and the synergistic learning of implicit and explicit from the developmental view.Experiment 3 selected rigorously 120 students good at study and 120 students with learning difficulties to explore the implicit learning, the synergistic learning of implicit and explicit from the perspective of individual differences.Experiment 4 selected 240 subjects through cluster sampling from each grade, which are grade four, grade five, grade six of elementary school and grade one of junior high school, mainly chose the real material with English lexical dual writing rules, to compare with the same rules in strings generated by an artificial grammar to study implicit learning of real materials, the developmental rules and characteristics of the synergistic learning of implicit and explicit.Experiment 5 randomly selected 90 students from each grade of grade four, five, six of primary school and grade one of junior high school, using the paradigm of instruction separation, to explore the implicit learning and the synergistic learning of implicit and explicit of meaningful real materials, and further clarify the role of consciousness in the implicit learning and the synergistic learning of implicit and explicit.The results showed as follows:(1) In process of artificial grammar materials learning at two difficulty levels, showed a significant effect of the synergistic learning of implicit and explicit. The best performance occurred in the synergistic learning of implicit and explicit groups; demonstrating the advantages of this learning mode. The performance in same letter sets learning of the synergistic learning of implicit and explicit groups was significantly higher than that in different letter sets, suggesting that the rules of implicit learning can be transferred, while the transfer was affected by the surface characteristics of stimulus.(2) Difference between implicit groups and explicit groups is not significant in grade five and grade six of primary schools, grade one of junior high school and grade one of senior high school. Performance of the synergistic learning of implicit and explicit groups (first implicit then explicit and alternation) increased significantly since grade one of junior high school. Performance of students in grade one of senior high school is robustly higher than that of the other three grades.(3) There is no significant difference in implicit learning performance between students good at study and students with learning difficulties. Performance of students good at study in explicit learning, the synergistic learning of implicit and explicit and the alternate learning was significantly better than that of students with learning difficulties. Performance of students good at study in explicit learning, the synergistic learning of implicit and explicit was significantly higher than that in implicit learning. There are no significant differences between the performances of students with learning difficulties among four learning styles. These results suggested that role of consciousness in learning process is more important for students good at study than that for students with learning difficulties.(4) Performance of real material synergistic learning of implicit and explicit groups was significantly better than that of the implicit or explicit learning groups. Under the same learning conditions, real materials groups performed significantly better than artificial grammar letter strings groups.(5) On real learning materials task, performance of the implicit learning groups in grade four, five and six of elementary school and grade one of junior high school showed no significant differences. Performance of the synergistic learning of implicit groups and explicit groups gradually improved from low-grade to high-grade. The performance of students in grade six, grade one of junior high school was significantly higher than that of students in other grades, which indicated the developmental trend. The significant difference on artificial materials task with the synergistic learning of implicit and explicit didn't appear in groups from grade one of junior high school. Based on above results, the abstract representation view concerning implicit knowledge is suitable to account for the characteristics and changes of the synergistic learning of implicit and explicit. The rules resulted from implicit learning can be transferred, but dually influenced by the rule structure and the total characteristics of stimulus. From the higher elementary grades to grade one of senior high school, synergistic learning of implicit and explicit effect is developmental and different individually on artificial grammar and real materials learning task. Consciousness plays a more important role in real materials learning task. Implicit learning mainly coordinates with explicit learning to influence learning efficiency.