What can schools, teachers and learners learn from implicit learning research?

Implicit learning research has shown us that we learn all the time, that we learn even when we have no intention to learn, no awareness of the fact that we are learning or no awareness of what we are learning (Reber, 1967; Cleeremans, Destrebecqz, & Boyer, 1998; Reuter, 2013). However in schools and in school-oriented formal learning settings, we are supposed to build up a different type of knowledge that we can explicitly (most often verbally) remember and apply to new situations (Bloom, 1956). This distinction between implicit and explicit knowledge may however not be so clear-cut, for theoretical, methodological and empirical reasons, and, more importantly, it may not be very useful when applying basic cognitive science to educational practices. On the contrary, we want to invite teachers (and learners) to rather think of learning as a set of complex processes, where so-called implicit and explicit learning processes, more often than not, interactively work together to construct personal knowledge in our brains. Therefore we recommend using teaching strategies that foster both types of knowledge bases, so that explicit learning can efficiently build upon the results of implicit learning processes.