An early exploration of undergraduate student definitions of learning, memorizing, studying, and understanding

Biology education research often utilizes the terms learning, memorizing, studying, and understanding without providing their specific definition. When definitions have been provided, they are often inconsistent across publications. As part of a larger research study, we interviewed 11 participants on 2 occasions while they were enrolled in a sequence of anatomy and physiology courses. Part of the interview protocol asked participants for their definitions of learning, memorizing, studying, and understanding. Definitions were isolated from the transcript, deidentified, and sorted by qualitative similarities. The research team developed code categories and assigned definitions to these groups after discussing coding differences. Multiple definition groups emerged for each term. Learning, memorizing, and studying definition groups highlighted processes, outcomes, or a combination of both a process and outcome. Understanding definition groups focused solely on an outcome. These findings highlight the need for communication between students and instructors with regard to term usage. In addition, future research in biology and physiology education should be careful to provide working definitions of these terms to ensure communicative and interpretive validity and to promote transferability and repeatability of findings.