How Do People Learn? Some New Ideas for e-Learning Designers

Two e-Learning designers had an argument about the nature of meaning and learning. To settle the matter, they went to a Very Wise Person for arbitration. They drew straws to see who would go first.

The one who drew the short straw made her case. She was very eloquent and persuasive in her reasoning. Meaning, she said, exists in the world separate from personal experience. We know that learning has taken place when we can measure recognizable changes in behavior. Mastery must be demonstrated through individual tests and performances. The role of the e-Learning application or the online instructor is to present material in an effective way, and to judge whether the learner has complete understanding of it. The role of the learner is to receive the presentations, absorb them, and to perform in ways that indicate attainment of the instructional goals.

When she finished, the Very Wise Person nodded in approval and said, “That’s right, that’s right.” On hearing this, the other designer jumped up and said, “Now wait a minute, Very Wise Person, you haven’t heard my side yet.” So the Very Wise Person told him to state his case.

He, too, was very persuasive and eloquent. Learners, he said, impose meaning on the world, and construct their own understanding. The goal of learning is that people will be able to think or solve problems differently, but process and interaction are more important than the specific objectives for a particular lesson. In fact, assessment should be integrated into the whole of the curriculum, not just at the end. The role of the designer is to construct a learning environment and to help students as they explore it in collaboration with others. The role of the learner is to explore the learning environment, to work together with others, to construct meaning from the experience, and to apply the new knowledge in personally meaningful contexts.

When he finished, the Very Wise Person said, “That’s right, that’s right.”

When the designers heard this, the two of them jumped up and said, “But Very Wise Person, we both can’t be right.” The Very Wise Person looked at them and said, “That’s right, that’s right.”

Variations of that story have been around for a thousand years, but in learning design, this is our essential quandary. When we ask the question, “How do people learn?” we quickly find out that some people agree with the first instructional designer in the story, others agree with the second, and both groups have research to back up their claims.

Not only that, but even proponents within the same school of thought don’t seem to agree about the details. For example, multimedia is very important to us in e-Learning. Organizations spend hundreds of millions of dollars every year on technology to deliver instruction in various media combinations. Ruth Clark and Richard Mayer have presented substantial research-based information about how to use media effectively, and they are very persuasive experts with all the credentials you could ask for. At the same time, Richard Clark, a highly respected professor at the University of Southern California, tells us that after reviewing decades of research he has found instructional media, “... are mere vehicles that deliver instruction but do not influence student achievement any more than the truck that delivers our groceries causes changes in our nutrition.”

Meanwhile, practitioners — designers, developers, and managers of e-Learning — must make sense out of the theories and resolve the differences between them in order to create products that have specific desired effects on skill, knowledge, and performance. If you’ve been around for a while, you could easily agree with the argument the first designer in the story made. In e-Learning, many practitioners believe that our job is to create technology-mediated presentations that accurately transfer expert skills and knowledge to individual learners, to verify that the transfer took place, and to document this fact. Some of the specifics differ from one designer to the next — for example, one designer’s view is that learning is a change in knowledge stored in memory, while another designer looks for changes in behavior as evidence of learning — but the common ground is a firm conviction that we are in the business of transmitting knowledge from one head into another, and that this will result in a measurable change when we are successful.

There is another view of learning, probably not very familiar to e-Learning practitioners as a group. This view is relatively new, and it is probably better known in the academic community than in the corporate or governmental spheres. In this article, I present an outline of this more recent answer to the “how do people learn” question, compare it briefly to the ideas that seem to be behind much of our thinking in e-Learning and that are embedded in our tools, and discuss some of the effects that it has on instructional design. As you will see in this overview, the first in a series of articles on postmodern approaches to learning, there is more than one correct answer to the question, and it is important for us as designers to understand how each of the answers is correct and to have a plan for dealing with the differences.

How do people learn?

If you search on the Web for answers to the question of how people learn, the amount of information is staggering. For example, a Google search for “learning theories” brings back links to over six and a half million related Web pages.

Martin Ryder, at the University of Colorado at Denver’s School of Education, compiled a list at http://carbon.cudenver.edu/~mryder/itc_data/idmodels.html that contains dozens of links to Web pages explaining learning theories and related instructional design models. These pages describe learning, and methods to facilitate learning, for humans from early childhood to old age.

For a simpler view, in a recent book on using technology in education, David Jonassen and his co-authors listed thirteen different theories to explain learning. (See Sidebar, Resources, on page 7.) The bottom line on learning theories seems to be that all of them are somewhat right, some are better supported by research than others, and none of them can explain everything.

However, all of the learning theories seem to fall into one or another of three basic perspectives that have been articulated since early in the early 20th century and continuing up to today. (See Table 1 for a summary of these perspectives.) Two of these, behaviorism and cognitivism, are very well-known, and in fact these two are the foundation for most of the e-Learning applications and tools in use today. The third perspective, constructivism, is newer, not often used by e-Learning designers (although this is changing), and it differs in important respects from the first two. I’ll review behaviorism and cognitivism briefly, and spend the rest of this article considering constructivism and what it means to e-Learning designers.

Behaviorism

Behaviorism, as a learning theory, is an outgrowth of behavioral approaches to psychology as they developed beginning in the mid-twentieth century. It is important to understand that under behaviorism, “psychology” refers to the science of behavior, not the science of mind. Behaviorism is all about human and non-human animal behavior, the sources of which are held to be in the external environment, not in the mind. It is not necessary, in behaviorism, to refer to internal mental processes in order to describe and explain behavior.

Much of the instruction created under the behaviorist model is based on B. F. Skinner’s work, and especially on his ideas about “schedules of reinforcement.” The basic idea is to build an association between making a particular response to a stimulus and receiving a reward, or reinforcement. The positive and negative reinforcement techniques are effective for teaching particular kinds of behaviors.

Behaviorism has had a long and enduring influence and even though the behaviorist view is no longer dominant, it still affects the instructional design process. For example, before we called them “learning objectives,” the desired outcomes of instruction were known as “behavioral objectives.” Objectives were further sub-divided into cognitive (knowledge), affective (attitude or preference), and psychomotor (involving muscle movement) categories. The key to writing an acceptable objective was to make it measurable, meaning to make it specify an observable behavior. Any behavior that was unobservable (mental) was referred to as a “covert” behavior. Behaviors that were not measurable (generally the affective ones) were referred to as “warm fuzzies” or “goals.” A major step in becoming an instructional designer (until the late twentieth century) was learning how to write an acceptable behavioral objective. Objectives continue to be important to the design of quality e-Learning, with covert and less-easily measured behaviors becoming more accepted as valid outcomes.

Here is another example of the continuing influence of behaviorism. Most designers are familiar with the ADDIE model (Analysis — Design — Development Implementation — Evaluation). This is a design model with behaviorist roots. Within ADDIE, needs assessment, task analysis, and audience analysis all have their origin in behaviorism. So does the emphasis on determination of performance objectives and criterion testing, development of instructional strategy, and evaluation of the design and results of instruction.

Cognitivism

Behaviorism’s major weakness is that it ignores mental activities and so cannot explain or facilitate all kinds of learning. In the middle 1950’s, researchers began to publish their findings on a number of problem areas that were not adequately addressed by behaviorism, including attention, memory, and problem-solving. These studies, over time, developed into cognitive psychology and Information Processing Theory — the roots of the learning perspective known as cognitivism. Cognitivism is currently the dominant influence in instructional design. Here are some examples of essentially cognitivist ideas that have been built into e-Learning applications:

• Advance organizers providing a context of general concepts into which the student can incorporate progressively differentiated details
• Multimedia designed to make efficient use of working memory
• Content written to align with learning styles (different approaches or ways of learning)
• Mental models applied as representations of reality that people use to understand specific phenomena
• Information mapping (structured text)
• An emphasis on development of expertise

The fundamental difference between cognitivism and behaviorism is that cognitivism emphasizes the role of mental processes in determining the objectively observable responses made to stimuli. Notice that in cognitivism, there is still an emphasis on “objectively observable responses.” The mental processes are inferred from what can be observed. This makes cognitivism more complex than behaviorism, and a number of design theories have been proposed that seek to exploit the different mental processes in ways that could enhance learning. Each of these theories prescribes particular solutions that designers can incorporate into e-Learning applications, and some of these solutions are also embedded in various authoring tools. Robert Gagné, Dave Merrill, Richard Mayer, and Ruth Clark are probably the best-known exponents of cognitivism.

Constructivism

Both behaviorism and cognitivism view the learner as a receptacle of knowledge and meaning from the outside world. The teacher or instructional system is the authority prescribing a methodology from which learners receive “correct” information and guidance. This notion is the basis for much of teaching, e-Learning, and guidance. It shapes the way designers create drill-and-practice applications, tutorials, help systems, electronic performance support, and online references, as well as instructor-led programs.

Progress in learning theory seems to come as practitioners react to whatever the dominant view of the day may be. Behaviorism came about partly as a reaction to mentalistic (mental-states-in-the-head) views that dominated psychology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Cognitivism came about as a reaction to the restrictions of behaviorism. Predictably, some of the experts who study human learning eventually came to feel that cognitivism was missing something.

What seemed to be missing from cognitivism was, among other things, a sense that learners might be responsible for their own learning and for making their own meaning. Beginning in the early 1990s, writers in education and instructional design began referring to “constructivism” as a response to this deficiency. Constructivism is a term with a long history in epistomology (the study of the nature, sources, and limits of knowledge) and art, and in some ways this new use of the term is only an extension of earlier ideas.

What is constructivism?

Specifically, when instructional designers use the term, constructivism is more a philosophy about learning, rather than a theory like cognitivism or a dogma like behaviorism. Constructivism is differentiated from other perspectives on learning by the fundamental belief that learners construct their own meanings and knowledge out of their experience, through a process of reflective abstraction. This experience especially and specifically includes a learner’s social contact with other people. Each learner has cognitive structures that facilitate the process of learning, and these cognitive structures are in a constant process of development.

An important consequence of this philosophy is that constructivism is not a pedagogy — that is, it is not about teaching. In fact, a key tenet of constructivism is that it is not possible to transfer knowledge or skill from an expert, a teacher, or a peer to a learner. It is possible (and necessary) to model knowledge and skills, but the learner finds his or her own meaning from the modeling and ties the experience into knowledge they already have. The focus of constructivism is learning.

To state it another way, the constructivist view is that learning is an active process of constructing knowledge, where the learners are doing the construction. Learning is not acquisition of knowledge. Learning is a change in meaning, ideas, or concepts, constructed from prior knowledge and experience. The instructor’s job is not to instruct as such, but to support the construction process, mainly by creating an environment in which the construction can take place. Technology, especially computer technology and the Web, offers many resources that have proven successful over the last two decades as supplements to constructivist practices in the classroom, in adult education, and in distance learning. However, many of the ways in which constructivists use technology stand at least some previous e-Learning practice on its head. For example, one practice is to have the learners create hypermedia or even multimedia presentations as a way to facilitate their learning. That is, the learners — not the instructor — create the PowerPoint, the Flash, or the Web site.

Because constructivism is a philosophy and not a technology or a dogmatic approach, it can be a little bit hard to pin down a definition as we would for a pedagogy. However, there are some values that are regarded as the framework for constructivism, and these show up in many learning applications. In an article originally published in 1993, David Lebow lists these as:

• Collaboration (Testing ideas against alternative views held by others)
• Personal autonomy (Developing ownership of a task or problem)
• Generativity (Demonstrating understanding by anchoring to a larger task or problem)
• Reflectivity (Self-regulation or planning, leading to independent thought)
• Active engagement (Dealing with challenges to the learner’s thinking)
• Personal relevance (Engaging in scientific discourse and problem-solving)
• Pluralism (Willingness to consider different ways of doing a task, different ideas, different issues) There are a number of influential writers and thinkers who have developed constructivist approaches to supporting learning, using technology in addition to (or in support of) collaborative social interaction and individual inquiry. Among the methods and approaches are these:
• Case-based reasoning: A theory of memory and learning that places cases (stories) as the central concept in constructing knowledge — basically, people learn through stories that they hear from others.
• Cognitive apprenticeship: A method for developing cognitive skills and expertise through access to a community of practice, whereby the apprentice (the learner) begins to assume responsibilities with support, but with little or no direct teaching.
• Constructivist Learning Environments (CLEs): A means of engaging people in meaningful learning by providing them with a carefully designed environment and a problem, question, or project as the focus of that environment; by providing an ill-structured or ill-defined problem, the goal is to help the learner think like a member of that practice community.

Other constructivist approaches include problem-based learning, goal-based scenarios, situated learning and scaffolding.

When would constructivism be appropriate?

As you would expect, there are research results that demonstrate that something effective happens when these approaches are applied. Exactly what that “something” might be isn’t always clear, and it is important to remember that constructivism, as applied to learning design, is still in its very early stages.

Much of the work in applying constructivism has been done in primary, secondary, and higher education, and designers whose target audience consists of adults in the workplace may feel that constructivism has nothing to offer in their setting. However, I believe that constructivism offers relevant answers to difficult problems in adult education. For example, we are faced with more than our share of hard, ill-defined, problems these days, problems to which there are no “pat” answers. Many professionals (and others) face the need to devise some kind of life-long learning plan for themselves. And we frequently face adult learners who don’t want to take an e-Learning “course” or who, if forced to sign up, will drop out at the first opportunity. All of these are the kinds of educational challenges that constructivist approaches seem to be very effective in overcoming.

e-Learning design and constructivism

How does constructivism affect instructional design? This is a question that many practitioners are trying to answer. The challenge is that constructivism is a broad, somewhat theoretical, framework and it subsumes no particular model of design. Constructivism is also a philosophy that tends to encourage more than one perspective on every practice. This leaves designers looking for a bridge to actual practice, and many of the practical questions are not answered — yet.

The one thing that we can be sure of is that constructivist design will never involve simple recipes or cookie-cutter approaches. However, there is no reason why, within constructivism as a philosophy, that constructivists couldn’t modify the ADDIE model (for example) to suit their needs.

Looking forward

Lately, there seems to have been a lot of articles in which the author speculates (wonders, questions) on the future of e-Learning. Is it evolving? Is it disappearing? Is it converging into some yet-to-be-named marketing concept along with knowledge management, content management, electronic performance support, and on-the-job-training?

Considering the evolution of technology in the service of learning (see Table 2), I sometimes wonder if the future isn’t already here. We are just filling in the empty spots on the chart, and constructivism is handling the last of these.

In the spirit of that thought, over the next several months Learning Solutions Magazine will be publishing a series of articles on constructivism and other “postmodern” approaches to learning. In the next article in this series, I will outline some ways in which constructivism is showing up in e-Learning designs. In the meantime, if you have an experience with constructivism, I’d like to hear about it and to publish it.

The Moral of the tale at the beginning of this article? Truth is all around you. What matters is where you place your focus. That’s what I think. What did you learn from it?

References

Jonassen, David H.; Howland, Jane; Moore, Joi; and Marra, Rose M. Learning to Solve Problems with Technology: A Constructivist Perspective. Merrill Prentice Hall, 2003. ISBN 0130484032.

Lebow, David. Constructivist values for instructional systems design: five principles toward a new mindset. In Barbara Seels (Ed.) Instructional Design Fundamentals: A Reconsideration. Educational Technology Publications, 1995. ISBN 0877782849.

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