Learning Theory

To begin, I would like to introduce the quote with which Char Booth opens the fourth chapter of her wonderfully insightful book Reflective Teaching/Effective Learning: Instructional Literacy for Library Educators:

Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some

control over how and what you think.  It means being conscious and

aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose

how you construct meaning from experience.

–David Foster Wallace, commencement speech Kenyon College, 2005

Of course, this quote applies to all learning and instruction, not merely in the context of the library.  Yet, since there is so much discussion regarding just what thinking is, I think it is prudent to express some of the current views. 

• Booth sums up DFW’s quote as meaning that “learning is translating information and experience into meaningful knowledge, a process over which individuals exert a great deal of metacognitive control.” (Booth, 2001)
• According to everyone’s favorite, Wikipedia, learning is acquiring new or modifying existing knowledge, behaviors, skills, values, or preferences and may involve synthesizing different types of information.  However, after this definition there are 16 separate categories of learning with several subsets within these categories.

It may be helpful to understand that there exist many types of learning and to think of the change in one’s own perception through individual learning experiences.  And it is useful for teachers, as well as students, to have an understanding of what learning is, especially if one offers instruction to help others actually do it (that is, to learn).  What follows is a short summation of three of the schools of thought which have produced the learning theories which most greatly influence our society.

Behaviorism	Cognitivism	Constructivism
Behavioral theorists believe we should examine only what can be directly observed and measured and that development is observable behavior learned through experience with the environment. (Santrock, 2001)Example:Ivan Pavlov’s experiments in classical conditioning (the process whereby a neutral stimulus becomes associated with a meaningful stimulus and acquires the capacity to elicit a similar response) the most famous of which was his conditioning of dogs to salivate when hearing a bell that they “associated” with food. (Santrock, 2001)	Cognitivists “believe that we ‘experience the world in meaningful patterns or organized wholes’ and that by organizing information and processing prior knowledge we make the intellectual connections that underpin higher-order thinking.” (Booth, 2011)Example:Jean Piaget’sCognitive Development Theory which states “that children actively construct their understanding of the world and go through four stages of cognitive development:” sensorimotor stagepreoperational stageconcrete operational stageformal operational stage (Santrock, 2001)	Constructivism, sometimes known as constructionism, holds as its central idea that “both the individual and the social context exert a profound influence on the learning process, and that learners create meaning from their environments by interpreting them through personal attributes, values and perceptions.” (Booth, 2001)Example:Lev Vygotsky’s view “that knowledge is situated and collaborative.” (Santrock, 2001)Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Cognitive Theory informs the contructivist view which states “that perception is a cognitive construction based on sensory input plus information retrieved from memory,” and asserts that cognitive skills are (1) mediated by language  and (2) have their origins in social relations and culture. (Santrock,2001)