Unit 1: Approaches to the study of learning
Readings
Instructor notes
Learning activities
Web resources
Readings
Driscoll, Chapter 1Optional: Gredler, Chapters 1 and 2
Instructor notes
Some fundamental questions about learning
What is learning? How does it occur? How do we know when someone has learned something? How can we influence learning in others?There are no simple answers to these questions. In this course, we'll examine several different theories or sets of theories that have attempted to address these questions. We're not looking for the "best" one. If the experts agreed on which was best, we would just study that one.
Many of you may remember some chemistry class in high school where you were supposed to hypothesize two competing outcomes for an experiment then test your hypothesis. One way was right and one was wrong. Unfortunately, science with humans isn't nearly as clear-cut. Two competing theories may be equally good at explaining the same learning or behavior outcome in a person and they'll likely explain them in entirely different ways. Which is "right"? There is not likely an absolute answer to that question.
The approach we'll take is that each of these theories illuminates a different aspect of the teaching/learning process, and each may be useful in understanding a particular situation.
Assumptions and contextual issues for P540
This course is concerned with scientific approaches to the study of learning and cognition. However, we recognize that there may be other legitimate ways of "knowing", including authority, tradition, expert opinion, and personal experience.No single learning theory is adequate to account for all aspects of learning. In fact, it is quite possible that learning is not a single entity at all, but an assortment of phenomena that we lump together. (Humans are good at inventing categories.)
A theory of learning does not automatically prescribe the best way to teach. As we'll see throughout this course, instructional principles are not always easily derived from learning theories. Some learning theories--behaviorism, for example--have had elaborate instructional theories developed in their wake; others--schema theory, for example--have had relatively little direct impact on teaching. One of our main tasks in this course will be to see whether we can, collectively or individually, determine useful educational applications for the theories we examine.
What people learn through formal instruction is only a very small subset of what they know. It's important to remember that, while our concern in this course is primarily on learning theories as they apply to instructional settings, most learning takes place in the "natural" world.
Some important definitions:
Learning: A relatively permanent change in the capacity of an organism to make a response, provided that the change cannot be explained on the basis of maturation or temporary states of the organism. (In other words, if I'm capable of doing something today that I couldn't do a year ago, you can infer that I've learned, so long as this can't be explained by something such as, I was 6 months old a year ago, and I'm 18 months old now, or I was sick a year ago, and I'm not now.)Cognition: Refers to all the processes by which sensory input is transformed, reduced, elaborated, stored, recovered, and used; includes such hypothetical stages or aspects as sensation, perception, imagery, retention, recall, problem-solving, and thinking. (I.e., how we receive information from the outside world through our senses; how we organize it and use it.)
Theory: A set of interrelated concepts or constructs, definitions, and propositions that present a systematic view of phenomena for the purpose of explaining, predicting, and controlling the phenomena. (For example, a set of concepts such as attention, perception, memory, motivation, development, and how they interact with one another, allowing us to understand and predict learning or behavior.)
Learning theory: A set of constructs linking observed changes in performance with what is thought to bring about those changes.
About theories:
Theories originate with questions: why does X occur? Why does the soft drink machine take some dollar bills and not others? Why won't the billing clerks in the department use the new software system we installed for them? Does taking notes in class increase learning, even if you never look at them again?Questions lead researchers to conduct systematic observations, on the basis of which plausible answers can be constructed. What sort of observations would you conduct, or what kind of data might you collect for each of the three questions above?
Systematic observations lead to theories, with the purpose of explaining, predicting, and controlling. A researcher's theory might be that there's a little man inside the coke machine, and if he likes the way you look, he accepts your dollar, and if not he rejects it. (I didn't say it was a good theory.) Or, a researcher's theory is that taking notes increases learning even if you never look at them again, because it contributes to actively organizing the material in your long-term memory.
Theories don't give us "the truth of the matter," only a conceptual framework for making sense of the data collected so far. This may seem like an odd statement. However, time and again, in both the natural and social sciences, a theory widely taken to be "true" is eventually replaced with another one judged to have greater explanatory power.
A particular theory stems from a particular perspective: thus, theories carry "worldviews." For example, a theory that says we can explain and control all human behavior in terms of stimuli and responses obviously embodies a very different view of the world than one that says we construct knowledge through negotiation and consensus with others.
Different disciplines approach phenomena with different assumptions and beliefs. For example, an anthropologist and a psychologist would likely take different approaches, even if apparently studying the same thing.
Two apparently competing theories may not even be directed at the same phenomena. What's important to one theory may not even be noticed in another.
Although theories are not built in a precise or predictable way, there are generally stages that can be discerned in the theory-building process. (See Driscoll, page 7.)
For example, suppose my question is, "How does note-taking affect learning in college classrooms?" Some of my initial assumptions and beliefs would include the idea that note-taking does have a positive affect on learning, that notes best facilitate learning when they are well-structured and when they are in the student's own words, rather than just copied by rote. If I were going to study note-taking in a particular class, my initial questions might be: What kinds of notes do students in this class take? Will I find variation in the way their notes are structured or organized? How do students use notes after they have taken them? How is note-taking related to student grades in this course?
- What kinds of assumptions and beliefs will you bring to the question?
- What specific questions would you start with?
- What sort of observations or data collection would you use?
- How would the results of your data collection help you in the next step of building your "theory"?
To actually begin such a study, assuming I had access to a very cooperative class, I might ask to randomly copy notes from a different group of students at each class session, so that I had samples from all students at various points throughout the semester. I would then find a way to categorize the notes according to how well they were organized. I would also have students complete a survey to tell me how they used their notes outside of class. At the end of the course, I would look to see if there was any relationship between how notes were organized, how students used them, and their performance in the course. If I believed that I did see such a relationship, I would have a more specific question to start with for my next study.
Classifying learning theories
In your text, Driscoll classifies learning theories according to their underlying epistemologies, or philosophies about how we come to know the world. She identifies these epistemologies as objectivism (reality is "out there" and our task is to know it as fully and accurately as we can); interpretivism (there is no single reality; we each construct our own); and pragmatism (reality is "out there", but our understanding of it is always an interpretation).In this course, we will use a slightly less esoteric way of organizing learning theories, according to three dominant paradigms, or research traditions, of learning psychology in the 20th century: behaviorism, cognitive information processing, and constructivism.
Behaviorism is a research tradition that focuses on observed behaviors, sometimes to the complete exclusion of mental events, and attempts to determine how reinforcements and punishments in the environment shape behaviors. We will classify Skinner and Gagne as essentially behaviorist (although he eventually converted to cognitive psychology and you see some of this reflected in his learning theory).
Cognitive information processing (CIP) attempts to understand how information that comes through the senses gets processed, stored, and used. In P540, the theories that follow this paradigm will include cognitive information processing, Ausubel, and schema theory.
Constructivism contends that knowledge is constructed uniquely by each individual (although often through a process of social negotiation) and that there is no single reality "out there"--or if there is, it is in principle unknowable and therefore we may as well behave as if there were not. For our purposes, cognitive development theories and constructivism belong in this category.
Learning activities
1.1 A personal theory of learning...
To be posted in the Oncourse discussion by Thursday, May 14.
The word theory can be used to refer to formal, scientific theories, but also to our everyday understanding of how something works. The purpose of this activity is to help you reflect on your personal "theory" of learning, as it exists now. Please write a paragraph or two describing your beliefs about the principal factors that contribute to learning. (The more you already know about learning theories, the more difficult this will be!) You may find it helpful to limit your response by specifying a particular setting or kind of learner (e.g., young children, or adult workers).
The point of this is simply to get you to think about your current beliefs and understanding of what contributes to human learning. This is not an academic exercise, it is a personal one.
When you've written your response, please post it on the oncourse discussion conference in the folder (under "In Touch") entitled "Learning Theories" I have created for that purpose.
1.2 Reflection on learning theories of peers
To be completed by Monday, May 19
Read through the responses your classmates have posted to this activity. Feel free to reply to any that provoke you. Then, write a couple of paragraphs summarizing your response to reading your classmates statements. (You might, for example, note any recurring themes you find, or simply comment on some things you found surprising or interesting.) Post your summary in the same folder in Oncourse.
Web resources
No particular Web Resources for this unit. However, you might like to check out the "Theory Into Practice Database". It's the first link on the Web Resources page. It will help you appreciate the variety of theories of human learning and instruction--and make you glad we're only going to look at a handful in this course!
Comments: joalexan@indiana.edu
