What is "Significant Learning"?

One of the first tasks teachers face when designing a course is deciding what they want students to learn or get out of their course. Students will always learn something, but good teachers want their students to learn something important or significant, rather than something relatively insignificant.

This leads to a question that is key to the whole teaching enterprise: What are the ways in which learning can be significant? If we have or can develop a language and a conceptual framework for identifying the multiple ways in which learning can be significant, then teachers can decide which of various kinds of significant learning they want to support and promote in a given course or learning experience.

It was with this thought in mind that Dee Fink worked on and eventually put together a new taxonomy of learning, one that is called a "Taxonomy of Significant Learning" (and which is described in more detail in Chapter 2 of Creating Significant Learning Experiences).

The following link contains a condensed description (8 pages) of this taxonomy: "Taxonomy of Significant Learning" .