From Repetition to Discernment: How Variation Theory Unlocks Deeper Understanding
7 November, 2025
Author Dr Will Zoppellini
You know the scene. You’ve explained the concept, modelled a method, and handed out practice questions. On test day, most students deliver the right answer, as long as the questions look exactly like the ones they rehearsed.
But change the context, the representation, or the constraint, and understanding starts to crumble. In the world of education, our exams haven’t failed to measure learning, they’ve succeeded in measuring one narrow way of seeing it. We’ve taught children to recognise a pattern rather than discern an idea, to memorise a route rather than read the map.
School can have a way of shrinking big ideas to fit a small keyhole. We drill the version that will appear on the paper, then check whether students can push that version back through the same keyhole. But understanding isn’t a single doorway, it’s a room with many windows. When assessment only rewards one window view, we teach toward that view and call it mastery. The cost is depth, structure, and the flexible sight that transfers to new situations.
In this post I’ll look at how learning deepens when we design for discernment, and when we vary the right things, at the right time, on purpose. I’ll bring together studies using Variation Theory from around the globe including Hong Kong, South Africa, Sweden, and beyond. These represent different cultures, languages, subjects, and ages from kindergarten to university. By the end, you’ll see how small shifts in design can turn “I’ve seen this before” into “I can see what’s going on.”
It’s time to grab your coffee, find that comfortable spot, and deepen your understanding of Variation Theory.
Table of Contents
Why one version of understanding isn’t enough
When teaching , we often assume our children know what they’re supposed to be learning. Yet many lessons, coaching and tutor sessions are built around tasks that don’t make it clear. We ask students to solve, to write, to perform, but not to discern what the real object of learning is.
Ference Marton explained that the object of learning1, is the “something” a learner must be able to see, understand, or handle in a new way by the end of a lesson. But generally, every learning task has two objects:
The direct object
is the content, the immediate focus of the activity. It might be calculating area, conjugating verbs, or performing a defensive press.
The indirect object
is the deeper capability that grows through it, reasoning spatially, understanding structure, making decisions under pressure.
When teaching or assessment focuses only on the direct object, students master the procedure but not the principle2. They know how to get it right in one version of the task, but not why it works or how it might look different next time. This is what Variation Theory helps us to see. That learning depends not on the number of repetitions, but on the range of ways something can be experienced1.
Think of students learning about evaporation. If they only ever see it as water disappearing from a beaker, they’ll associate it with that single image. But when they encounter wet clothes drying, puddles vanishing, or breath fogging on a window, they begin to grasp the principle that temperature, surface area, and air movement all play roles. They’ve moved from knowing what happens to understanding why it happens.
To achieve this, Marton and his colleagues argued2,3, learners must experience systematic variation, that is to change one aspect of a phenomenon while others stay constant. This deliberate pattern allows the brain to notice what truly matters.
- If everything varies, there’s no anchor for meaning.
- If nothing varies, there’s nothing to notice.
- Learning happens in the space between when one dimension changes against a background of stability.
Learning isn’t built through repetition alone it grows through contrast. When one feature changes against a stable background, the structure of the idea begins to reveal itself. That’s what Variation Theory offers all educators, a way to design experiences where learners don’t just practise, but notice. Let’s begin to look at research from around the world that illustrates this within different contexts of education.
Using Variation to Strengthen Learning in Engineering
At the University of Cape Town, a research team4 led by Dr Fraser, examined a familiar problem in a third-year chemical-engineering course. Students were using a computer simulation on distillation, yet their understanding remained shallow. They could follow the steps, adjust variables, and submit their results, but few could explain why the changes mattered. The simulation was producing activity, not discernment.
In an attempt to deepen understanding the research team implemented Variation Theory to redesign the experience. Instead of asking students to change six parameters at once, they simplified the task by varying just one or two critical features while keeping the rest constant. This deliberate focus helped students see the effect of each change. The exercise shifted from “run the model” to “notice what happens when only X changes.”
After the redesign, students re-engaged in the process and the results revealed a striking difference. Students spoke about the system in new ways, such as recognising “dead zones” where efficiency dropped, connecting theory to practice, and explaining how variables interacted. Many described the session as a chance to “play around” with ideas rather than simply follow instructions. By narrowing the object of learning and introducing purposeful variation, the research team had widened students’ understanding.
What made this redesign powerful wasn’t the technology, but the thinking behind it. By deliberately shaping what students could and couldn’t change, the researchers created affordances for discernment, which are opportunities to notice relationships that were previously hidden. As students began to explore and test their ideas, learning shifted from something done to them to something done with them. That sense of agency in noticing, questioning, and making meaning for themselves is exactly what Variation Theory seeks to awaken.
This study showed that in highly technical fields, learning improves when we control what varies and what stays constant. Let’s see how similar principles helped Kindergarten children in Hong Kong make sense of the written world around them.
Learning to See in New Ways: Insights from Hong Kong Classrooms
In Hong Kong, research led by my colleague in Variation Theory, Dr Ho Cheong Lam, explored how purposeful variation can help young learners understand Chinese characters5. Working with 375 children across five kindergartens, he used the approach to design lessons that made the structure of characters visible. In the video below, he explains how Variation Theory was applied and the benefits it brought to children’s learning:
*Shared with permission from author
The study showed remarkable success. When children experienced lessons designed around variation where some elements of a character stayed constant while others changed, they began to recognise structural patterns, make distinctions in sound and meaning, and apply that knowledge. It’s a powerful reminder that very young learners can develop deep understanding when teaching is designed to help them see difference and understand the structure of concepts.
Cultivating Critical Thinking: Lessons from Sweden
In Sweden, researcher Kristoffer Larsson6 used Variation Theory to tackle the long-standing problem in education of how to teach and evaluate critical thinking in a way that is both rigorous and practical. Decades of research have described what critical thinking is, but few have shown teachers how to design for it.
Larsson’s study analysed sixty student essays on ethical dilemmas, using them as a base for a “thought experiment” in lesson design. Instead of treating critical thinking as a single, abstract skill, he identified the features that make one argument more sophisticated than another, such as recognising assumptions, weighing perspectives, and justifying conclusions. Lessons were then planned so that each of these features varied in turn, allowing learners to see what distinguishes a superficial response from a reasoned one.
This approach did more than refine theory, it provided a blueprint for teaching and assessment. By linking Variation Theory’s “what” (the aspects of learning that must vary for discernment to occur) with the “how” (the teacher’s deliberate pattern of variation), the study offered a complete framework for designing critical thinking instruction. It showed that critical thinking can be made visible, learnable, and tailored to specific groups of students.
Importantly, the study also pointed to the value of using students’ own responses as feedback loops for both teaching and evaluation. By analysing their writing, teachers could identify the dimensions of variation that mattered most and redesign lessons to target them directly. In this sense, critical thinking became less a mystery and more a process.
Larsson concluded that while this approach needs further testing and examination, it offers a theory-driven, evidence-based tool that connects teaching design and student thinking. As with the other studies, the message is clear that when we vary what learners experience with purpose, we give them the chance to think better.
Final Thoughts
For too long, schooling has measured understanding through a single lens, one way of seeing, one correct answer, one version of knowing. In doing so, we’ve often sacrificed depth for certainty. Learners learn to recognise the pattern that will earn the mark, but not to see the structure beneath it.
From South Africa’s engineering labs to Hong Kong’s kindergartens and Sweden’s exploration of critical thinking, research in Variation Theory has shown that understanding doesn’t grow from repetition, but from discerning the various ways of understanding a concept. Whether the learner is tracing a new character, analysing a system, or forming an argument, progress begins the moment they can see a difference that matters.
For all educators, teachers, coaches, and parents, this represents a fundamental shift. It asks us to move from planning what learners will do to designing what they will notice. By changing and varying a concept deliberately, we give learners different ways of experiencing it, that slowly deepens the structure of their understanding and helps them build more flexible, connected knowledge7.
Perhaps the real art of teaching lies in crafting experiences that lets learners see more than they did before. When we vary with purpose, we don’t just change the task but the way our learners see the world. When this happens, children do more than succeed in school, they gain the power to understand, adapt, and shape the world around them.
Until next time, stay curious
Dr Will Zoppellini
References
- Marton, F., 2014. Necessary conditions of learning. Routledge
- Lo, M.L. and Marton, F., 2011. Towards a science of the art of teaching: Using variation theory as a guiding principle of pedagogical design.International journal for lesson and learning studies, 1(1), pp.7-22.
- Pang, M.F. and Marton, F., 2003. Beyond“lesson study”: Comparing two ways of facilitating the grasp of some economic concepts.Instructional Science, 31(3), pp.175-194.
- Fraser D, Allison S, Coombes H, Case J, Linder C. 2006. Using variation to enhance learning in engineering.International Journal of Engineering Education, 22(1), p.102.
- Lam, H.C., 2025. What examples to use in instruction? An intervention study to test variation theory.International Journal for Lesson & Learning Studies, pp.1-15.
- Larsson, K., 2021. Using essay responses as a basis for teaching critical thinking–A variation theory approach.Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research, 65(1), pp.21-35
- Kullberg, A., Ingerman, Å. and Marton, F., 2024.Planning and analyzing teaching: Using the variation theory of learning (p. 122). Taylor & Francis.