Learning is a Mental Process

Chapter 2 discusses a wide variety of traditional learning theories including Behaviorism, Humanism, Cognitivism, Social Cognitive, and Constructivism, all of which lay the foundation to our understanding of adult learning.

Each of them can be linked to the materials that this course will cover throughout the semester.

Of all of the theories presented in this chapter, the one that I
am most familiar with (and hence blogging about) is the Cognitive Learning Theory which centers around how the brain processes information. Check out the video below for an overview of Teaching and Learning Approaches, including Behaviorism, Cognitivism and Social Constructivism.It is this information processing theory that is at the foundation of both Gagne's Instructional Design Theory and Bloom's Taxonomy of Cognitive Outcomes.

For the purpose of this assignment, I will be focusing on Gagne's Instructional Design Theory including his Nine Events of Instruction.

Background:

Robert Gagne (1916–2002) was an educational psychologist and helped develop the science of instruction in the 1940s. In his book "The Conditions of Learning," which was first published in 1965, he identified the mental conditions that are needed for an individual to be an effective learner. Gagne created a nine-step process that gives explicit instruction on what is required for effective learning. The model (pictured below) can be used for many different learning environments.

Benefits of Gagne's Model:

Gagne's Nine Events of Learning model gives trainers and educators a checklist to use before engaging in teaching or training activities. Each step highlights a form of communication that aids the learning process. When each step is completed in turn, learners are much more likely to be engaged and to retain the information or skills that they're being taught. If this approach is used before any type of training session or presentation, instructors will be able to structure the best possible learning experiences for their learners [1]

How the Steps Work:

Level 1: Gaining Attention (Reception)
Start the learning experience by gaining the attention of your students. This change in stimulus alerts the students that learning will soon take place. Application: For example, gain your students attention by raising the volume of your voice, using hand gestures and positive body language, showing a short video on the topic of instruction, or using an event that lets the students know the lesson is about to begin.

Level 2: Informing Learners of the Objective (Expectancy)
Next, you must ensure that your students know what they are expected to learn, and that they understand why this new information is important.
Application: Explain to your students what they will know at the end of the lesson. Then, explain how this information will be of value to them in the future. For example, you might explain why it is important for your students to understand percentages. Once they understand how percentages can affect everyday life, they will know why they need to learn the information.

Level 3: Stimulating Recall of Prior Learning (Retrieval)
When your students learn something new, integrate that information with related information they have already learned.
Application: Review previous topics that your students have learned and integrate it with what they are learning now. Show your students how the topics are connected.
Level 4: Presenting the Stimulus (Selective Perception)
Use strategies to present and cue lesson content to provide more effective, efficient instruction. Organize and chunk content in a meaningful way. Provide explanations after demonstrations. Application: Present vocabulary that is vital to content. Instruction is presented in multiple versions of the same content i.e.video, demonstration, lecture, podcast, group work.

Level 5 : Provide learning guidance (Practice)

This level is less about teaching and more about guiding and directing. Application: Model varied learning strategies. Also, guide learners using examples and non examples and provide case studies, analogies, visual images and metaphors.

Level 6 : Eliciting Performance (Responding)
At this stage, you need to ensure that your people can demonstrate their knowledge of what you've taught them. The way that they show this depends on what they're learning.
Application: Ask learners to demonstrate the new content learned. This can done in various ways, role playing being one of them. Learners can use apps like go animate.com or they can do physical role playing.

Level 7: Providing Feedback (Reinforcement)
Once demonstration of knowledge has been presented, provide immediate feedback of students’ performance to assess and facilitate learning. Application: Your feedback should be in the form of constructive criticism. Every tip given should be to better the learner. Different types of feedback are confirmatory feedback, corrective and remedial feedback, informative feedback, and analytical feedback.

Level 8: Assessing Performance (Retrieval)
The learner should be able to individually complete a test, or other measurement tool, to show that they've learned the material or skill effectively. Application: Tests, short questionnaires, or even essays can be good ways of testing your team's new knowledge.

Level 9: Enhancing Retention and Transfer (Generalization)
In this last stage, learners show that they've retained information by transferring their new knowledge or skill to situations that are different from the ones you've trained them on.
Application: Repeated practice is the best way to ensure that people retain information and use it effectively and enough opportunity to practice their learning on a regular basis. Schedule "practice runs" if you've been training on a new process, or have a follow-up session to review information or skills. As people become more proficient, schedule in variants of the practice runs and expose people to different situations, so that they become comfortable generalizing [2].

Check out these videos for a more information on Gagne's steps and how can be applied.