Behaviorism, Cognitivism, Constructivism & Learning and Instructional Theory

A brief overview of theoretical perspectives, learning theory, and instructional theory.

- [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.