The Invisible Practices That Shape Learning
- Tim Bower
- 2 days ago
- 7 min read
Part of B Optimal’s series on learning practice:
Making Learning Practices Visible, Developable, and Actionable
A recent study of sixth-grade readers produced a surprising finding. In her recent Minding the Gap article, "A (Relatively) Easy Way to Boost Reading Comprehension," Natalie Wexler discusses a 2025 study by Nielsen, Christensen, and Poulsen showing that students' understanding of complex sentence structure predicted reading comprehension more strongly than vocabulary.
At first glance, that sounds like a story about reading instruction.
It is.
But it is also a story about something much larger.
Many students understood the individual words they were reading. What they struggled with was connecting those words into meaningful ideas. The obstacle was not the information itself. It was an underlying cognitive process that can be easy to overlook when attention is focused primarily on vocabulary and content.
The study illustrates a broader principle: once an essential learning process becomes visible, educators can begin to teach and develop it intentionally.
Across higher education, students are routinely expected to perform complex learning practices that have never been made visible, discussed explicitly, or intentionally developed.
We ask them to plan, monitor their progress, adjust strategies, evaluate their work, learn from feedback, transfer knowledge across contexts, and reflect on experience. Yet these practices often remain hidden beneath the surface of assignments, projects, discussions, and assessments.
When students succeed, we assume they have developed these practices.
When they struggle, we often attribute the difficulty to motivation, preparation, or effort.
The reality is frequently more complicated.
Learning Practices Are Often Assumed Rather Than Designed
The research on syntax illustrates an important principle. It also reflects a central idea from Flavell's work on metacognition: learners become better positioned to regulate their learning when they become aware of the cognitive processes they use while learning. The syntax study provides a contemporary example of that principle in practice.
Students do not automatically develop important learning practices simply because they encounter situations that require them. Some students infer those practices from experience while others do not. The difference is not always intelligence. More often, it is visibility. If learners cannot recognize the practice they are expected to use, they have little opportunity to improve it intentionally. Visibility, however, is only the starting point. Development also requires clear language, explicit guidance, repeated practice, feedback, and opportunities to apply the practice across different situations.
The same pattern appears throughout higher education. Students receive feedback to "think more critically," "reflect more deeply," "manage your time better," or "be more strategic." These comments point toward important learning practices, but they rarely make those practices visible enough for students to understand what they actually need to do differently.
The expectation exists.
The practice remains invisible.
Exposure Is Not Instruction
For many years, educators assumed that students would naturally become stronger readers simply by reading more. The syntax research challenges that assumption. Exposure certainly matters, but many students also benefit from explicit guidance that helps them understand how complex sentences work.
The same principle applies to learning more broadly. Students become better planners by practicing planning. They become better at monitoring their thinking by learning how to monitor it. They become better at reflection by engaging in structured reflection. Students become better at transferring learning by practicing transfer across authentic situations.
Research by Perkins and Salomon reinforces this point, demonstrating that transfer rarely occurs automatically. Learners become more successful when they recognize opportunities to apply what they know in new situations and adapt that knowledge to the demands of the new context.
Experience creates opportunities for development.
Experience alone does not guarantee it.
Kolb's work on experiential learning helps explain why. Experience creates opportunities for learning, but those opportunities become developmental when learners interpret, reflect upon, and transform those experiences into future action. Participation alone is rarely enough. Development depends on what learners do with their experiences.
Designing for What Students Cannot See
This shifts an important design question.
Instead of asking only, What content should students learn?, we should also ask, What learning practices are required for students to succeed, and how visible are those practices?
Many educational experiences successfully teach disciplinary knowledge while leaving the underlying learning practices implicit. Students complete the assignment. Faculty evaluate the product. What often remains hidden is the process that produced the outcome.
When those processes remain invisible, meaningful improvement becomes more difficult. A student may know that an assignment did not go well without understanding which part of their approach contributed to the difficulty. Students may repeat similar challenges across courses because the learning practices involved have never become clear enough to examine and improve intentionally.
Seen through this lens, educational experiences become more powerful when the practices required for success become visible. Once learners can recognize a practice, they can discuss it, practice it, receive feedback on it, refine it, and apply it across increasingly diverse situations.
How Colleges Can Begin
Colleges do not need to redesign every course or create entirely new support programs to make learning practices more visible. They can begin by examining one familiar student experience and asking what practice students are expected to use in order to learn from it.
Consider a course that requires students to complete a substantial project, internship, presentation, service-learning activity, or other experiential assignment. Students may be asked afterward to reflect on what they learned, explain the skills they developed, or connect the experience to future academic or career situations. Yet they often receive little support for examining what happened, identifying the decisions they made, recognizing the capabilities they used, or determining how that learning might transfer to a new context.
The responses they receive may be well intended but disconnected. An instructor asks them to “reflect more deeply.” An advisor encourages them to think about what they gained from the experience. A career professional asks them to explain the skills they developed. Each person is pointing toward reflection and transfer, but the underlying practice has not been clearly defined or intentionally developed.
An honest examination may reveal that students are repeatedly asked to learn from experience without being taught how to interpret experience. They are held responsible for producing meaningful reflections, identifying capabilities, and communicating what they learned, yet they encounter no shared process for doing that work. Students who already know how to examine an experience may produce strong insights. Others summarize what happened without gaining a practice they can use independently.
That is the kind of gap colleges can begin to identify. The central question is whether students encounter a visible, usable practice that is supported across settings or a series of disconnected prompts, expectations, and individual workarounds. Addressing that gap requires shared language that makes the practice understandable, practical tools that help students use it, and consistent support from the faculty, advisors, tutors, coaches, and other practitioners who shape the student experience.
Building on these ideas, we developed Learning Practice Infrastructure (LPI) to describe the institution-wide capacity that makes essential learning practices visible, learnable, usable, and transferable. It is the broader architecture through which colleges create shared language, reinforce practices across settings, equip practitioners to support them consistently, and give students practical ways to use them independently.
Our Learning Practice Programs (LPPs) are one way colleges build that infrastructure. Each program focuses on a defined area of learning practice and provides the frameworks, learner-facing tools, implementation resources, and professional learning needed to strengthen that practice across courses, programs, and student services.
Rather than adding another disconnected initiative, Learning Practice Programs help colleges create greater coherence around practices that students are already expected to use. A structured reflection practice such as STARR+ can be introduced in a course, reinforced through advising or coaching, used to examine an experiential learning opportunity, and revisited when students prepare to communicate what they learned. The settings remain distinct, but students encounter a consistent process for interpreting experience, recognizing the capabilities they developed, and applying that learning in new contexts.
Colleges already invest heavily in the experiences through which students are expected to learn. The next opportunity is to design the practices that enable students to learn from those experiences more intentionally, independently, and effectively.
References
This article is intended as a thought piece rather than a comprehensive review of the literature. The references below include the primary works that informed the ideas discussed.
Bjork, R. A., Dunlosky, J., & Kornell, N. (2013). Self-regulated learning: Beliefs, techniques, and illusions. Annual Review of Psychology, 64, 417–444. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-113011-143823
Flavell, J. H. (1979). Metacognition and cognitive monitoring: A new area of cognitive–developmental inquiry. American Psychologist, 34(10), 906–911. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.34.10.906
Kolb, D. A. (1984). Experiential learning: Experience as the source of learning and development. Prentice Hall.
Kolb, D. A. (2015). Experiential learning: Experience as the source of learning and development (2nd ed.). Pearson Education.
Nielsen, J. L., Christensen, R. V., & Poulsen, M. (2025). Syntactic comprehension—A separate source of individual variance in middle-school children’s reading comprehension. Reading Research Quarterly, 60, e70003. https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.70003
Perkins, D. N., & Salomon, G. (1992). Transfer of learning. In T. Husén & T. N. Postlethwaite (Eds.), The international encyclopedia of education (2nd ed., pp. 425–441). Pergamon Press. (PDF) Transfer Of Learning
Pintrich, P. R. (2002). The role of metacognitive knowledge in learning, teaching, and assessing. Theory Into Practice, 41(4), 219–225. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15430421tip4104_3
Wexler, N. (2026, July 11). A (relatively) easy way to boost reading comprehension. Minding the Gap. A (Relatively) Easy Way to Boost Reading Comprehension
Author’s Note
The Metacognitive Moves System, Learning Practice Infrastructure, and Learning Practice Programs were developed by B Optimal Consulting to help colleges make learning practices more visible, actionable, and transferable across educational environments. While this article builds on established scholarship in metacognition, experiential learning, self-regulated learning, organizational learning, and learning transfer, these concepts represent B Optimal’s contribution to advancing how learning practice is understood, supported, and developed in higher education.