Instrumental vs. Relational Learning

Instrumental learning to me was more of a "robotic" type learning. It was like a formula, you plug in an "x" object and out comes a "y" result. I realized that most, if not all, of my High School learning was instrumental. I learned the formulas and then applied it to my homework and it helped me to finish my homework fairly quickly, but not so much on the tests.
Relational learning to me was more of a "curious" kind of learning where one would put question marks after everything until he or she received a background understanding of the concept. I like the ven diagram from class where Instrumental learning was encompassed within relational learning because although they are different, they really are similar and they are complimentary to each other. By this I mean that, sometimes it takes accepting the facts up front and then receive understanding, the "why", later. So in that sense one would receive the formula and apply it and find out later what the formula is used to find and how it applies to more than just the copmutation problems in the homework. So they compliment each other.
Another way I saw a difference between the two as I read the article was that the learning curve for Relational learning seemed to be a linear function where you can achieve a page full of correct answers, as Skemp said it, in a shorter amount of time and be done with the homework. On the other hand, Relational learning was more of an exponential function. By this I mean that it takes longer to learn the background and the concept, but once it is learned you can apply it to more than just the assignment and you can eventually achieve more than by instrumental learning. So it takes more preparation, if I may say, with relational learning which may result in quicker achievement and more understanding, whereas with instrumental learning one may be able to accomplish an assignment with the formulas given, but that would be it. He or she would not be able to apply the formulas to much else, if not anything else.