Robert Gagnè
In 1962 when Robert Gagnè published Military Training and Principles of Learning he demonstrated a concern for the different levels of learning. His differentiation of psychomotor skills, verbal information, intellectual skills, cognitive strategies, and attitudes provides a companion to Bloom's Taxonomy. In 1965, his book, The Conditions of Learning and the Theory of Instruction, extended his thinking to include nine instructional events that detail the conditions necessary for learning to occur. These events are still important for the basis for the design of instruction and the selection of appropriate media:
- Gain attention
- Tell learners the learning objective
- Stimulate recall
- Present the stimulus, content
- Provide guidance, relevance, and organization
- Elicit the learning by demonstrating it
- Provide feedback on performance
- Assess performance, give feedback and reinforcement
- Enhance retention and transfer to other contexts
Gagnè also distinguished eight different classes of situations in which human beings learn:
- Signal Learning - The individual learns to make a general, diffuse response to a signal. Such was the classical conditioned response of Pavlov.
- Stimulus-Response Learning - The learner acquires a precise response to a discriminated stimulus.
- Chaining - A chain of two or more stimulus-response connections is acquired.
- Verbal Association - The learning of chains that are verbal.
- Discrimination Learning - The individual learns to make different identifying responses to many different stimuli which may resemble each other in physical appearance.
- Concept Learning - The learner acquires a capability of making a common response to a class of stimuli.
- Rule Learning - A rule is a chain of two or more concepts.
- Problem Solving - A kind of learning that requires the internal events usually called thinking.
For more information, see Robert Gagnè's Nine Steps of Instruction.