LEARNING THEORIES AND

INTEGRATION MODELS

Skinners Behaviorist Theories

of Learning : Building on the
S-R Connection

Basic Teachings
Internal processes involved in learning could
not be seen directly.
Concentrated on cause and effect
relationships that could be established by
observation.
Human behavior could be shaped by
contingencies of reinforcement or
situations in which reinforcement for a
learner is made contingent on a desired

THREE kinds of situations

that can shape behavior
Positive Reinforcement
Negative Reinforcement
Punishment

Implications for Education

Teaching is a process of arranging
contingencies of reinforcement effectively to
bring about learning
High level of capabilities as critical thinking
and creativity could be taught by
reinforcement
Learning is simply a matter of establishing
chains of behavior through principles of
reinforcement

Basic Teachings
Modern instructional design models and
methods have their roots in Gagne.
One component of a systematic instructional
design process was the use of learning
hierarchies to develop curriculum maps.

Implications for
Technology Integration
Most drill and practice softwares were based
on Skinners reinforcement principles.
Tutorial software usually is based on the
idea of programmed instruction.
The idea behind drill software is to increase
the frequency of correct answering in
response to stimuli, these packages often
are used to help students memorize
important basic information, while tutorial
software gives students an efficient path
through concepts they want to learn.

The Information-Processing
Theorists: The Mind as
Computer

Basic Teachings
The mind as computer
Based on a model of memory and storage
The brain contains certain structures that
process information much like a computer
The human mind has three kinds of
memories or stores

THREE kinds of memories

or stores
Sensory Register
Short-Term Memory (STM)
Long-Term Memory (LTM)

Implications for Education

Become the basis for many common
classroom practices. (for example, teachers
ask interesting questions and display eyecatching materials to increase the likelihood
that students will pay attention to the new
topic)
While presenting information they give
instruction that emphasizes important
points and characteristics in the new
material and suggests methods of encoding
or remembering them by linking them to

Implications for Education

Teachers also give students practice
exercise to help ensure the transfer of
information from short-term memory to
long-term memory.
The use of Gagnes Bottom-up approach
students learn lower skills first.
Ausubels Top-down approach teachers
provide advance organizer or overviews of
the way information will be presented to
help students develop mental frameworks
on which to hang new information.

Implications for
Technology Integration
Information Processing Theories have
guided the development of Artificial
Intelligence (AI) applications an attempt to
develop computer software that can
stimulate the thinking and learning
behaviors of humans.
Many of the drill and practice softwares
available are designed to help students
encode and store newly learned information
into long-term memory.

Gagnes Principles: Providing

Tools for the Teachers

Basic Teachings
Gagne built on the work of behavioral and
information processing theories by
translating principles from their learning
theories into practical instructional
strategies that teachers could employ with
directed instruction.
Gagne is best known for his events of
instruction, Types of learning, and
learning hierarchies.

9 Events of Instruction
1. Gaining Attention
2. Informing the learner of the objective
3. Stimulating recall of pre-requisite
knowledge
4. Presenting new material
5. Providing learning guidance
6. Eliciting performance
7. Providing feedback about correctness
8. Assessing performance

Types of Learning
1. Intellectual skills
Problem solving
Higher order rules
Defined concepts
Concrete concepts
Discriminations

2. Cognitive Strategies
3. Verbal information
4. Motor skills
5. Attitudes

Learning Hierarchies
The development of intelelctual skills
requires learning that amounts to a building
process.
Lower level skills provide a necessary
foundation for higher level ones.
To teach a skill, a teacher must first identify
its prerequisite skills and make sure the
students possess them.
The list of building block skills is called
learning hierarchies.

Implications for Education

The events of instruction and learning
hierarchies have been widely used to
develop systematic instructional design
principles.
Many school curriculum development
projects still use a learning hierarchy
approach to sequencing skills.

Implications for
Technology Integration
Gagnes events of instruction could be used
to plan lessons using each kind of
instructional software (drill, tutorial,
simulation)
Only tutorial could stand by itself and
accomplish all the necessary events of
instruction.
The other kinds of software require teacherled activities to accomplish events before
and after software use.

Systems Approaches and the

Design of Instruction: Managing
the Complexity of Teaching

Basic Teachings
Modern instructional design models and
methods have their roots in Gagne.
One component of a systematic instructional
design process was the use of learning
hierarchies to develop curriculum maps.

Implications for Education

Systems approaches to designing instruction
had great influence on training programs.
Performance objectives and sequences for
instructional activities still are widely used.

Implications for
Technology Integration
Most directed models for using technology
resources are based on systems approaches,
that is, teachers set objectives for a lesson,
then develop a sequence of activities.
A software package or an internet activity is
selected to carry out part of the instructional
sequence. (For example, the teacher may
introduce a principle of genetics, then allow
students to experiement with a simulation
package to breed cats in order to see the
principle in action.

John Dewey: Educational

Reform as Social Activism

Basic Teachings
Curriculum should arise from students
interests.
Curriculum topics should be integrated,
rather than isolated from each other.
Education is growth, rather than an end in
itself.
Education occurs through its connection
with life, rather than through participation in
curriculum.
Learning should be hands-on and

Implications for Education

Deweys philosophy directly caused some of
the trends in current educational practice
like interdisciplinary curriculum, hands-on,
experience based curriculum.

Implications for
Technology Integration
Dewey would likely have approved of
technologies like the internet being used to
help students communicate with each other
and learn about their society.
Deweys emphasis on the need for
cooperative learning would mesh well with
technologies used for developing group
projects and presentations.

The Contributions of Lev

Vygotsky: Building a Scaffold to
Learning

Basic Teachings
Cognitive development is directly related to
and based on social development.
What children learn and how they think are
derived directly from the culture around
them.
The social world is the source of all
concepts, ideas, facts, skills, and attitudes.

Zone of Proximal
Development

ZPD refers to the difference between the

levels of cognitive functioning of an adult
expert and child-novice.
Teachers could provide good instruction by
finding out where each child was in his or
her development and building on the childs
experiences.
This building process is called Scaffolding.
Teachers promote students cognitive
development by presenting some classroom
tasks that they can complete only with

Implications for Education

Education is intended to develop childrens
personalities.
Human personality is linked to its creative
potential.
Teaching and learning assume that students
master their inner values through some
personal activity.
The most valuable methods for student
learning are those that correspond to their
individual developmental stages and needs,
and therefore, can not be uniform across

Implications for
Technology Integration
Many constructivists models of technology
use the concepts of scaffolding and
developing each individuals potential.
Many of the visual tools are used under the
assumption that they can help bring the
student up from their level of understanding
to a higher level by showing graphic
examples and by giving them real-life
experiences relevant to their individual
neds.

Jean Piagets Theories:

Cognitive Development in
Children

Basic Teachings
Sensorimotor stage (birth to 2)
Pre-Operational Stage ( 2 to 7)
Concrete Operational Stage (7 to 11)
Formal Operational Stage (12 to 15)

Sensorimotor Stage (birth

to 2)
Children explore the world around them
through their senses and motor activities
Children can not differentiate between
themselves and their environment
Children begin to have some perceptions of
cause and effects.
Children develop the ability to follow
something with their eyes.

Pre-operational Stage (2
to 7)
They develop greater abilities to
communicate through speech and engage in
symbolic activities such as drawing objects
and playing by pretending and imagining.
Develop numerical abilities such as the skill
of assigning a number to each object in a
group as it is counted.
Unable to do conservation task (task that
call for recognizing that a substance remains
the same even though its appearance
changes)

Concrete Operational
Stage
(7 to 11)
Children increase in abstract reasoning
ability.
Develop ability to generalize from concrete
experiences.
Can perform conservation task.

Formal Operations Stage

(12 to 15)
They can form and test hypotheses
They can organize information
They can reason scientifically
They can show results of abstract thinking in
the form of symbolic materials

Implications for Education

There is a need for concrete examples and
experiences when teaching abstract
concepts to young children who may not
have reached a formal operations stage.

Implications for
Technology Integration
Many technology using teachers feel that
using visual resources such as simulations
can help raise childrens developmental
levels more quickly than they would have
occured through maturation.
Other educators feel that young children
should experience things in the real world
before seeing them represented in the more
abstract ways they are shown in software.
(e.g. Computer simulations)

The Contributions of Jerome

Brunner: Learning as Discovery

Three Stages of
Development
Enactive Stage (birth to 3)
Iconic Stage ( 3 to 8)
Symbolic Stage (8 and above)

Enactive Stage (birth to 3)

Children perceive the environment solely
through actions they initiate.
They describe and explain objects solely in
terms of what a child can do with them.
Showing and modeling have more learning
value than telling for children at this stage.

Iconic Stage (3 to 8)
Children can remember and use information
through imagery (mental pictures or icons).
Visual memory increases and children can
imagine or think about actions without
actually experiencing them.
Decisions are made on the basis of
perceptions, rather than language.

Symbolic Stage (8 and

above)
Children begin to use symbols (words or
drawn pictures) to represent people,
activities, and things.
They have the ability to think and talk about
things in abstract terms.
They can better understand mathematical
principles and the use of symbolic idioms.

Implications for Education

Discovery learning is an approach to
instruction through which students interact
with their environment by exploring and
manipulating objects, wrestling with
questions and controversies or performing
experiments.
Students were more likely to understand
and remember concepts they had
discovered in the course of their own
exploration.
Teachers have found that discovery learning
is most successful when students have

Implications for
Technology Integration
Radical reconstructivist uses of technology
employ a discovery learning approach.
Use of technology as guided discovery
learning approach.

Seymour Papert

Basic Teachings
One of the first to raise national
consciousness about the potential role of
technology in creating alternatives to what
he percieved as inadequate and harmful
educational methods.
He popularized the use of LOGO (a high
level programming language originally
designed as an AI language but later
popularized by Papert as an environment to
allow children to learn problem solving
behaviors and skills.

Implications for Education

Children should be allowed to teach
themselves with LOGO.
In a LOGO environment, new ideas are often
acquired as a means of satisfying a personal
need to do something one could not do
before.
Papert feel that children need great
flexibility to develop their own powerful
ideas or insights about new concepts.

Implications for
Technology Integration
Papert perceived Logo as a resource with
ideal properties for encouraging learning.
LOGO is graphics oriented, it allows children
to see cause and effect relationships
between the logic of programming
commands and the pictures that result.
This logical, cause and effect quality of logo
activities makes possible microworlds, or
self-contained environments where all
actions are orderly and rule governed.

Implications for
Technology Integration
He called these microworlds, incubators for
knowledge where children could pose and
test out hypotheses.
After LOGO, technology resources began to
be evalauted according to how they could
be used as microworlds and incubators
for knowledge in which learners could
generate their own knowledge.

The Cognition and Technology

Group at Vanderbilt (CTGV):
Tying Technology to
Constructivism

Basic Teachings
Preventing Inert knowledge
The nature of situated cognition and the
need for anchored instruction
Building knowledge through generative
activities

Implications for Education

& Technology Integration
The CTGV proposed that the best way of
providing instruction that would meet all the
required criteria was to present it as
videodisc based scenarios posing interesting
but difficult problems for students to solve.

Gardners Theory of Multiple

Intelligences

Basic Teachings
Gardner is the only one to define the role of
intelligence in learning
Gardners theory is that at least 8 different
and relatively independent types of
intelligence exist.
Linguistic
Musical
Logico-Mathematical
Spatial
Bodily-kinesthetic
Intrapersonal
Interpersonal

Implications for Education

If Gardners theory is correct, then IQ tests
(which tend to stress linguistic and logical
mathematical abilities) may not be the best
way to judge a given students ability to
learn, and traditional academic tasks may
not be the best reflection of ability.
Teachers should try to determine which type
or types of intelligence each student has
and direct the student to learning activities
that capitalize on these innate abilities.
Distributed intelligence may be considered
where each student makes a different, but

Implications for
Technology Integration
Gardners theory meshes well with the trend
toward using technology to support group
work.
When educators assign students to groups
to develop a multimedia product, they can
assign students roles based on their type of
intelligence.