: LEARNING THEORIES Overview of Learning Theories 1. Over the past century, educational psychologists and researchers have posited many theories to explain how individuals acquire, organize and deploy skills and knowledge. To help readers organize and apply this extensive body of literature, various authors have classified these theories in different ways. For this summary, learning theories are grouped into three basic categories: • Behaviorist learning theories • Cognitive-information theories • Cognitive-constructivist learning theories processing learning The summary ends with a brief discussion of epistemological perspectives that serve as foundations for the various theories. Only a brief overview of extensive literature is provided to help you make informed decisions about your personal educational philosophy. If you have good working knowledge of one or more areas underlined above, feel free to scan over those sections and concentrate your attention on the areas you feel less certain. For further detail, readers are also encouraged to search for the corresponding topics in literature. As you look over the information contained in this document, keep in mind the purpose of your reading. The immediate purpose is to generate an educational philosophy statement (that is, stating what you believe in terms of how and why people learn and what educators should do to facilitate such learning). Your goal is to define a set of quality design standards. As such, you should note concepts and statements that you believe are important for promoting learning and for designing and delivering effective instruction. _____________________________________ 1.1 Behaviorist Learning Theories The origins of behaviorist learning theories may be traced backed to the late 1800s and early 1900s with the formulation of associationistic principles of learning. The general goal was to derive elementary laws of learning and behavior that may then be extended to explain more complex situations. Inferences were tied closely to observed behavior in lower organisms with the belief that the laws of learning were universal and that work with laboratory animals could be extrapolated to humans. It was believed that a fundamental set of principles derived from the The use of nonsense syllables and individual words to study the association of ideas 2. The use of animals to study the association between sensations and impulses 3. The use of animals to study association and reflexology 1.2 Cognitive-Constructivist Learning Theories Since space limitations prevent an extensive discussion of constructivism, in addition to those cited in the following paragraphs, interested readers are referred to the works of von Glasersfeld (1989, 1981), Jonassen (1991), Marra and Jonassen (1993) and Rorty (1991). In brief, there is no single constructivist theory. Constructivist approaches to teaching and learning is grounded in several research traditions (Perkins, 1991; Paris & Byrnes, 1989). The roots of constructivism may be traced back to a little known Latin treatise, De antiquissima Italorum sapientia, written in 1710 by Giambattista Vico (as cited in von Glasersfeld, 1991). Vico suggested that knowledge is knowing what parts something is made of, as well as knowing how they are related. Objective, ontological reality, therefore, may be known to God, who constructed it, but not to a human being 1.3Cognitive-Information Processing Theories No single point in time signaled the end to the associationistic or behavioral era, and the beginning of the cognitive revolution. Early on, the cognitive revolution was a quiet one. However, as psychologists became increasingly frustrated with the limitations of behavioral theory and methods, and persuasive arguments against radical behaviorist theories were being put forth by linguists studying language development, the time was right for the emergence of cognitivism. Another prominent factor was the development of computers (Baars, 1986), which provided both a credible metaphor for human information processing, and a significant tool for modeling and exploring human cognitive processes. One major group of cognitive theories may be classified as cognitive-information processing learning theories. According to the cognitive information processing (CIP) view, the human learner is conceived to be a processor of inform- ation, in much the same way a computer is. When learning occurs, information is input from the environment, processed and stored in memory, and output in the form of a learned capability. Proponents of the CIP model, like behaviorists, seek to explain how the environment modifies human behavior. However, unlike behaviorists, they assume an intervening variable between the environment and behavior. That variable is the information processing system of the learner.
Posted on: Sun, 02 Feb 2014 05:49:38 +0000
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