CourseDirectorTest_support: Education Design: Learning Theory: Levels of Learning

Education Design: Learning Theory

Robert Gagne identified several different levels of learning and proposed nine instructional events to facilitate learning based on these types. The five major types of learning he proposed are verbal information, intellectual skills, cognitive strategies, motor skills, and attitudes . Fundamentally, Gagne’s theory recognizes that different instruction is required to facilitate different learning outcomes, and the achievement of learning outcomes is significantly affected by the conditions in which the learning occurs. His instructional events that satisfy each condition, or pre-condition, for learning, and the corresponding cognitive process are⁸:

1.	gaining attention	reception
2.	informing learners of the objective	expectancy
3.	simulating recall of prior learning	retrieval
4.	presenting the stimulus	selective perception
5.	providing learner guidance	semantic encoding
6.	eliciting performance	responding
7.	providing feedback	reinforcement
8.	assessing performance	retrieval
9.	enhancing retention and transfer	generalization

Gagne’s events provide a learning hierarchy within which instruction can be formatted. In working backwards from an educational objective, we can define the information and skills needed to achieve the objective and develop the instruction to follow this path to achievement.

Numerous researchers and authors have looked at this from disciplinary perspectives and come to much the same conclusions as those of Knowles, Kolb, and Gagne. Here's some concrete principles to balance all of this theorizing.