- [Instructor] Welcome to the theory primer.
Theories give us perspective.
Theories are like windows in a house
where you can look though multiple windows
into the same room
and get a different view point from each window.
We talk about learning instruction,
we have three different perspectives.
The first is behaviorism.
Behaviorism views the mind as black box.
According to behaviorism,
learning is regular, expected responses.
We know learning has occurred
when we receive regular, expected responses.
Instruction, according to behaviorism,
is repetition and reinforcement,
and that is how we help people learn and develop.
The second perspective is cognitivism,
and it views the mind as a computer.
According to cognitivism,
learning is recall of stored information.
If we can recall stored information,
we know that learning has occurred.
Instruction, according to cognitivism, is helping
to grab someone's attention
and then help make sense of information
and store it for later recall.
The third perspective is of constructivism.
And constructivism views the mind as a rhizome.
That is, all the different skills and knowledge
are nodules that are interconnected
to be drawn off of as needed.
According to constructivism,
learning is building knowledge by doing.
Instruction, according to constructivism,
is guiding problem solving.
We're responsible for guiding our learners
solving new and ill-defined problems.
Now based on those perspectives,
we come up two different types of theories.
We have what is called descriptive theory,
and descriptive theory in education
helps us to answer the question, what is learning?
Learning theory, which is the outcome of that,
attempts to describe what learning is.
The second type of theory
that we have is prescriptive theory,
which answers the question, how do we help people learn?
The outcome of that is instructional theory,
which give us methods for how to foster learning.
In summary, we have three different perspectives,
behaviorism, cognitivism, and constructivism.
From those perspective we have two theory types,
descriptive theories,
which are learning theories which try to explain
what learning is and how it happens,
and prescriptive theories,
instructional theories which try to prescribe ways
to help people learn and develop.