General Knowledge

Learning Theories  

Links to learning more theory/theorist videos .Click  below: 

What is instructional design, and why is understanding learning theory foundational to instructional design? Consider these real-world examples: a professor of geography needs to convert his face-to-face lecture course to a course delivered fully online.  A company wants to ensure all employees are adhering to IT security practices as they relate to phishing emails.  A state agency wants to develop a program that helps individuals with interview skills, with the hope of reducing unemployment rates. While all of these scenarios are slightly different, they share a common problem that is solved with formal instruction or training.

That’s where understanding learning theory becomes important.  Let’s think about the entire instructional design process.  We begin by fully understanding the problem and needs of the situation.  Then we develop and implement training or instruction to address the needs. Finally we evaluate and modify the training/instruction.  It isn’t always that systematic, but, when considering this process, understanding learning theory gives us a strong foundation to use when designing our instructional solution.

Just as an architect develops blueprints before a house is built, instructional designers must understand and fully document the problem before building an instructional solution. How might learning fix or improve this situation?  Is it possible there's some other solution that's not learning?  If it's learning, what kind of learning is it people need?  To change their attitudes? To learn new skills?  Do they need to understand different concepts?  And you might have to do a bunch of work to understand this problem.  You might need to interview people and even observe them going about their work.  You might need to collect and organize information and even visualize it so you can communicate it clearly with stakeholders. You might need to consult research on the topic to find out if scientists have studied something close to what you're dealing with.

Once you understand the problem, you then look to what learning science can tell us about how to best develop the instructional solution.  This is the point at which this course begins.  We will cover topics such as: What makes people learn? How does learning actually work? What makes learning more likely to happen, more enjoyable, and more meaningful?  Understanding learning theory is all about recognizing the research and theories in the field and applying this to your specific context.

Principles of learning

What are some guiding principles of constructivist thinking that we must keep in mind when we consider our role as educators? Some ideas, all predicated on the belief that learning consists of individuals' constructed meanings and then indicate how they influence museum education.

1. Learning is an active process in which the learner uses sensory input and constructs meaning out of it. The more traditional formulation of this idea involves the terminology of the active learner (Dewey's term) stressing that the learner needs to do something; that learning is not the passive acceptance of knowledge which exists "out there" but that learning involves the learner s engaging with the world. 1

2. People learn to learn as they learn: learning consists both of constructing meaning and constructing systems of meaning. For example, if we learn the chronology of dates of a series of historical events, we are simultaneously learning the meaning of a chronology. Each meaning we construct makes us better able to give meaning to other sensations which can fit a similar pattern. 2

3. The crucial action of constructing meaning is mental: it happens in the mind. Physical actions, hands-on experience may be necessary for learning, especially for children, but it is not sufficient; we need to provide activities which engage the mind as well as the hands.3 (Dewey called this reflective activity.)

4. Learning involves language: the language we use influences learning. On the empirical level. researchers have noted that people talk to themselves as they learn. On a more general level. there is a collection of arguments, presented most forcefully by Vigotsky, that language and learning are inextricably intertwined. 4 This point was clearly emphasized in Elaine Gurain's reference to the need to honor native language in developing North American exhibits. The desire to have material and programs in their own language was an important request by many members of various Native American communities.

5. Learning is a social activity: our learning is intimately associated with our connection with other human beings, our teachers, our peers, our family as well as casual acquaintances, including the people before us or next to us at the exhibit. We are more likely to be successful in our efforts to educate if we recognize this principle rather than try to avoid it. Much of traditional education, as Dewey pointed out, is directed towards isolating the learner from all social interaction, and towards seeing education as a one-on-one relationship between the learner and the objective material to be learned. In contrast, progressive education (to continue to use Dewey's formulation) recognizes the social aspect of learning and uses conversation, interaction with others, and the application of knowledge as an integral aspect of learning. 5

6. Learning is contextual: we do not learn isolated facts and theories in some abstract ethereal land of the mind separate from the rest of our lives: we learn in relationship to what else we know, what we believe, our prejudices and our fears. 6 On reflection, it becomes clear that this point is actually a corollary of the idea that learning is active and social. We cannot divorce our learning from our lives. 7

7. One needs knowledge to learn: it is not possible to assimilate new knowledge without having some structure developed from previous knowledge to build on. 8 The more we know, the more we can learn. Therefore any effort to teach must be connected to the state of the learner, must provide a path into the subject for the learner based on that learner's previous knowledge. 9

8. It takes time to learn: learning is not instantaneous. For significant learning we need to revisit ideas, ponder them try them out, play with them and use them. This cannot happen in the 5-10 minutes usually spent in a gallery (and certainly not in the few seconds usually spent contemplating a single museum object.) If you reflect on anything you have learned, you soon realize that it is the product of repeated exposure and thought. Even, or especially, moments of profound insight, can be traced back to longer periods of preparation.

9. Motivation is a key component in learning. Not only is it the case that motivation helps learning, it is essential for learning. This ideas of motivation as described here is broadly conceived to include an understanding of ways in which the knowledge can be used. Unless we know "the reasons why", we may not be very involved in using the knowledge that may be instilled in us. even by the most severe and direct teaching. 10

Reference.

1 "Study is effectual in the degree in which the pupil realizes the place of the numerical truth he is dealing with in carrying to fruition activities in which he is concerned. This connection of an object and a topic with the promotion of an activity having a purpose is the first and last word of a genuine theory of interest in education." J. Dewey. Democracy and Education. MacMillan, 1916.

2 "The most important message modern research on the nature of thinking is that the kinds of activities traditionally associated with thinking are not limited to advanced levels of development. Instead these activities are an intimate part of even elementary levels of reading, mathematics and other branches of learning." L.B. Resnick . Learning to Think. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press.

3 ''The object enters into dialog with the learner only after being transformed by him or her. In fact, it is the set of significant units organized by the learner and the relationships that he or she constructs between them that constitutes the cognitive object that, in turn, constitutes knowledge." A Henriques. "Experiments in Teaching," in E. Duckworth, J. Easley, D. Hawkins and A Henriques. Science Education: A Minds On Approach to the Elementary Years. Erlbaum, 1990.

4 "The relationship between thought and word is not a thing but a process. a continual movement back and forth from thought to word and from word to thought: .... thought is not merely expressed in words; it comes into existence through them." L.V. Vigotsky. Thought and Language. Cambridge, MA. MIT Press, 1962.

5 "Vigotsky was proposing that children's understanding is shaped not only through adaptive encounters with the physical world but through interactions between people in relation to the world---a world not merely physical and apprehended by the senses, but cultural, meaningful and significant, and made so primarily by language. Human knowledge and thought are themselves therefore fundamentally cultural, deriving their distinctive properties form the nature social activity, of language, discourse and other cultural forms." D. Edwards and N. Mercer. Common Knowledge: The Development of Understanding in the Classroom. London: Methuen, 1987.

6 As Mooly Broog stated in the discussion group "When you say Jerusalem, what is the visitor's concept? Each visitor, from a different community, has a totally different idea of what the city is."

7 "A fundamental way of changing the requirements for success on a particular task is to recontextualize the text presented to, and understood by, the learner. In all sample cases, the subject is initially presented with the activity---the whole task---embedded in, contextualized as part of some larger activity. For the subjects themselves, the recontextualization involves familiar scripts and human intentions." M. Cole and P. Griffin. Contextual Factors in Education. Madison, WI: Wisconsin Center for Educational Research, 1987.

8 Maria Baretto referred to this point when she stated that "we cannot identify and recognize what we don't already know ."

9 "We can learn most easily when we already know enough to have organizing schemas in L.B. Resnick and L.E Klopfer, editors. Towards the Thinking Curriculum: Current Cognitive Research. 1989 ASCD Yearbook. Alexandria, VA: American Association for Curriculum Development, 1989.

10 "Research... confirmed that acquiring skills and strategies, no matter how good one became at them, would not make one into a competent reader, writer, problem solver or thinker... The habit or disposition to use the skill and strategies, and the knowledge of when they are applied, needed to be developed as well." Resnick and Klopfer., op cit.