What is learning mental models?

Example: Two engineers join the same company on the same day. One believes learning is about absorbing information from experts — she waits for onboarding sessions, reads documentation passively, and feels frustrated when answers aren't spelled out. The other believes learning is about constructing understanding through experimentation — he spins up the codebase on day one, breaks things, reads error messages, asks targeted questions. Same environment, same resources. Radically different learning trajectories. The difference isn't intelligence or motivation. It's their schema for how learning works.

This concept is part of Meta-Schemas in the How to Think curriculum.