Gagne's Learning Theory

SCI 1 - Teaching Science in the Elementary Grades: Science and Some Learning Theories

• The lesson aims to know science, compare learning theories of psychologists, explain learning theories, relate learning theories to teaching, and construct learning theory models.

Topics for Discussion

• Meaning of science, including "What is Science?", scientific attitudes, and basic science skills are discussed
• Contemporary psychologists and their learning theories will be presented
  • This includes Bruner’s discovery learning, Gagne’s learning hierarchy, and Piaget’s cognitive development theory

What is Science?

• Science involves knowledge pursuit and application to understand the natural and social world using a systematic, evidence-based approach
• The word "science" comes from the Latin "Scientia," meaning "knowledge."
• Science is the intellectual and practical activity involving systematic study of the physical and natural world's structure and behavior through observation and experiment.

What is Scientific Attitude?

• Scientific attitude involves the desire to know and understand, questioning statements, searching for data and meaning, verification, and considering consequences
• It involves a way of thinking, feeling, acting, and a disposition towards science
• Important: Curiosity, Humility, Open-Mindedness, Intellectual Honesty, Perseverance, Skepticism, Creativity, Rationality, Objectivity, and Innovation

Basic Science Process Skills

• Observing
• Classifying
• Communicating
• Measuring
• Predicting
• Inferring

Branches of Science

• Life Science encompasses biology (life) and zoology (animals)
• Earth Science includes geology (earth changes) and meteorology (weather)
• Physical Science covers chemistry (matter) and physics (energy)

Chemistry

• Chemistry is the study of the properties, composition, structure of substances (elements and compounds), their transformations, and energy release/absorption during these processes

Biology

• Biology is the study of living things and their vital processes.
• This field deals with the physicochemical aspects of life.

Contemporary Psychologists and Their Learning Theories

Jerome Bruner (1915-2016)

• He was an American psychologist known for significant contributions to human cognitive psychology and cognitive learning theory in educational psychology

Discovery Learning Theory

• Enactive Stage (0 - 1 year): Memory is action-based.
• This mode corresponds to Piaget's sensorimotor stage.
• Thinking relies on physical actions; infants learn by doing.
• Example: muscle memory of shaking a rattle.
• This mode continues through physical activities like bike riding.
• Adults perform motor tasks that are hard to describe in picture or symbolic form.
• Iconic Stage (1-6 years): Information is stored as sensory (usually visual) images or icons.
• Some individuals experience this consciously; others do not.
• Diagrams/illustrations are helpful when learning new subjects.
• Also relies on mental images (icons) using hearing, smell, or touch.
• Symbolic Stage (7 years onwards): The final stage is where information is stored as a code or symbol, like language.
• Symbolic mode emerges around age six or seven.
• Primarily stores knowledge as mathematical symbols/words/music.
• Symbols' flexibility allows for manipulation, ordering, classification, unconstrained by actions/images.

The Importance of Language

• Language increases the ability to deal with abstract concepts.
• Language codes stimuli and frees individuals from constraints of only dealing with appearances, for complex cognition.
• Words aid concept development and overcome "here & now" limitations.
• Bruner believes infants are intelligent problem-solvers with similar intellectual abilities over age

Educational Implications

• Education should aim for autonomous learners (learning to learn).
• The goal of education, according to Bruner (1961), is to facilitate one's thinking and problem-solving skills to allow transfer to other situations, not to impart knowledge.
• Education must develop symbolic thinking in children

The Process of Education (1960)

• Bruner believes active learners construct their own knowledge

Readiness

• Bruner (1960) opposed Piaget's readiness notion.
• Matching subject complexity to the cognitive stage is considered a waste of time
• Students being held back due to perceived difficulty and taught upon reaching cognitive maturity is a result

Spiral Curriculum

• Bruner (1960) believes a child of any age can understand complex information.
• Bruner (1960) outlines the concept of the spiral curriculum, where complex ideas are taught simply first, then revisited with more complexity later.
• Subjects are taught with gradually increasing difficulty.
• Teaching in this way should result in children being able to solve problems themselves.

Discovery Learning

• Bruner (1961) suggests learners construct their own knowledge by systemizing information using a coding system.
• Discovering a coding system is the most effective approach, not being explicitly taught by a teacher.
• Discovery learning implies a constructivist approach where students construct knowledge for themselves.
• A teacher should facilitate the learning process instead of teaching information through rote learning.
• An effective teacher designs lessons so that students can discover the relationship between the bits of information.
• To do that the student must be given information, but without being told how to process it
• The process of discovery learning can be aided by using the spiral curriculum

Bruner and Vygotsky

• Both emphasize a child's social environment, more than Piaget.
• They agree that adults should support the child's learning.
• Like Vygotsky, Bruner said that other people should help a child develop skills through the process of scaffolding.
• Scaffolding reduces the degrees of freedom in carrying out some tasks so that the child can concentrate on acquiring the difficult skill she is in the process of acquiring.
• He was particularly interested in the characteristics of achieving individuals.

Scaffolding

• The term first appeared when Wood, Bruner, and Ross described how tutors interacted with a preschooler to help them solve a block reconstruction problem (1976)
• Scaffolding is very similar to Vygotsky's zone of proximal development and is often used interchangeably.
• Helpful, structured interaction between adult and child with the goal of helping the child achieve a specific goal.
• The purpose of the support is to allow the child to achieve higher levels of development by:
  • Simplifying the task or idea.
  • Motivating and encouraging the child.
  • Highlighting important task elements or errors.
  • Giving models that can be imitated.

Bruner and Piaget

• Bruner agrees with Piaget
  • Children are are innately predisposed to learning and have natural curiosity, also, children's cognitive structures develop over time, children are active in the learning process, cognitive development includes symbol acquisition
• Bruner disagrees with Piaget
  • In Bruner's theory social factors, primarily language, are important for cognitive growth, this is the basis of scaffolding You can accelerate cognitive development, not be held back by defined stages.
• The role of adults and knowledgable peers makes a big difference.
  • Bruner says that instruction and right explantations give intellectial development to children, in a was that is appropriate.
    • This includes presentations and explaining until the concept is clear.
    • That symbolic representation is key for cognitive development and the importance of language determines the results

Robert Gagne (1916-2002)

• He was an American educational psychologist known for his Conditions of Learning.
• Gagne pioneered the science of instruction during World War II, working with the Army Air Corps training pilots.
• He created a series of simplified studies and explained what people considered good instruction
• Also involved applying instructional theory to the design of computer-based training and multimedia-based learning.

Learning Hierarchy

• Gagne's theory says that there are different levels and types of learning.
• Each type requires instruction tailored to the pupil's needs.
• The main focus in the intellectual hone and retention
• Theory is used in all design instructions and original formula special attention was given to military training.
• The specific skill set to be learned require different methods to allow the focus
• Learning to Gagne is what is instruction
  • Nine events of instruction
    • They both are ongoing continuously and build on knowledge with prior knowledge.
• Human development that is intellectually based are on their physical capacity to do what is required

What is learning to Gagne?

• It is through ongoing learning that a human becomes a valuable member of society.
• Even with the same input, the output varies.
• Human behavior not only relies on what surrounds them, but the process that comes inherently.
• Learning needs assistance and instruction from the teacher to be differentiated and various .

Gagne's Ideas, Specific Assumptions

• Student addresses prior complexities of knowledge and knowledge and provides the method.
• To be able to create various learning strategies there needs to be a lot of consideration into learning goals
  • The internal and external stimuli that the learner is surrounded with can affect conditions
• Classroom conditions should be able to support the process just as the abilities the students process.
• Order of knowledge or instruction and knowing the skills you should learn is a outline and a hierarchy.

Learning Hierarchy - Important:

• Intellectual Skills: Outlines how to follow procedures to get things done.
• Cognitive Strategies includes outlining metacognitive strategiesto follow:
  • These strategies help students control their everyday stress, manage their time effectively, and focus their attention on the activity at hand.
• Verbal Information: The third category that is in the domain requires use of imagery and various mnemonic strategies that creates a easy recall
  • Often verbal knowledge has a lot of data and places and you need to create learning environments but organizing, elaborating, and rehearsing.
• Motor Skills: Actions such as skiing, dancing, or even writing with a pencil are examples of motor or psychomotor skills the main factor.
• Attitudes can be observed in choices and actions, although are internal.
  • Reinforcements and conditioning help aid in the desire

Steps to Learning Hierarchy

• Outlines how to follow procedures to get things done
• There are five different levels of learning within the intellectual skills category:

1. Discrimination: To classify objects by their traits with consistent patterns of information given.
2. Concrete Concept: To Identify specific ideas, shapes, one or more characteristics of it.
3. Defined Concept: Demonstrate understating of abstract events but requires showing the understanding more than textbook explanations would.
4. Rule: To make connection to connect a certain objective to objects.
5. Problem solving: Integrate various rules to come to a solution

Cognitive Strategies

• The cognitive strategy that is secondary is the most prevalent in meta cognitive learning
  • This entails few strategic examples to follow as a way to learn through means of reading outloud and underling
  • Or elaborating and answer questions, ideas, and summarizing
  • Concept maps can be used to create organizations

Steps to design Learning

• Gaining attention (reception)
• Informing learners of the objective (expectancy)
• Stimulating recall of prior learning (retrieval)
• Presenting the stimulus (selective perception)
• Providing learning guidance (semantic encoding)
• Eliciting performance (responding)
• Providing feedback (reinforcement)
• Assessing performance (retrieval)
• Enhancing retention and transfer (generalization).

Principles of the Learning Hierarchy

• Different learning outcomes require different instruction.
• Events of learning affect the learner, forming the conditions of learning.
• Instructional event operations differ for each learning outcome.
• Learning hierarchies determine what intellectual skills should be learned in and what sequence

Jean Piaget (1896-1980)

• He was a Swiss child psychologist known for his work on Child Development
• Piaget put an emphasis on child education
• His theory of child development is studied in pre-service education programs

Cognitive Development

• Intellectual changes as kids get older
• The the child develops and constructs a mindset
• Also innate capacity increases together, creating stages

Stages of Development

• Sensory Stage: 0-2 years;
• Preoperational Stage: 2 to 7 years;
• Operational Stage: 7 to 11 years;
• Formal Operational Stage: 12 years and up

Piaget's stages in order

• Steps have to progress in a natural order for everyone.

How Piaget's Theory Developed

• Piaget was an employee at Binet Institute to create questions
• His intrigued was to see the reasoning of the various results that children gave out and applied logical reasoning
• He found that the thinking of children and adults had many differences
• He made his assumptions from his research, and here is the theory:
  • Quality and Quantity: quality has much that is the focus rather than just how much
  • The child does not see the world as well like adults and do not think like them
  • Children build up a world for themselves, with knowledge
  • Passive creatures must have a head full fo the ability to know
  • To consider various reasonings is based on seeing the worlds from their perspective
• Concepts like justice also were studied from all sides with his infants

Main characteristics of each stage

• Sensorimotor Stage: This is related to children at 8months and learning the objects and if they exist from their field of view and is a development stage.
• Toddlers in 7 years use mental linguistic imaging together
• They express symbolically
  • However children only can say what is, is
• The Concrete Years that is between 7-11 years show that logic is able to apply as well as revers

Last development

• the final development stage shows the concrete operations
• The ages of the children fall from 12years and up

The conclusion is the abstract

• adolescents can be understood and make sense of it all