Learning Theories
Major theories of how humans and animals learn.
Major accounts of how people learn, from behaviorist conditioning through cognitive and constructivist theories to instructional models. Each entry gives the core claim in one line, which is enough to tell the theories apart and to pick the right one for a design or research question.
Use it when
- You are choosing a framework for instructional design, training or a literature review.
- You need to distinguish theories that are often blurred, such as behaviorism and cognitivism.
Watch out for
- Theories answer different questions: some explain acquiring behavior, others explain acquiring concepts, others describe how to structure instruction.
- Several are better supported for some kinds of learning than others; none is a complete theory of learning.
The data
17 rows
| Theory | Description |
|---|---|
| Classical Conditioning | Learning through association of stimuli. |
| Operant Conditioning | Learning through reinforcement and punishment. |
| Observational Learning | Learning by watching and imitating others. |
| Constructivism | Learners actively construct knowledge from experience. |
| Cognitive Load Theory | Working memory capacity limits learning and instruction. |
| Behaviorism | Learning understood as observable behavior change shaped by stimuli, reinforcement and the environment, without reference to internal mental states. |
| Cognitivism | Learning as the processing, storage and retrieval of information in memory, with attention to mental structures such as schemas. |
| Social Learning Theory | Bandura's account that people learn by observing models, with attention, retention, reproduction and motivation shaping what is imitated. |
| Social Constructivism | Vygotsky's view that learning happens through social interaction and language, supported within the zone of proximal development. |
| Zone of Proximal Development | The gap between what a learner can do alone and what they can do with skilled guidance. |
| Scaffolding | Temporary, adjustable support from a teacher or peer that is withdrawn as the learner becomes competent. |
| Experiential Learning | Kolb's cycle in which concrete experience, reflection, abstract conceptualization and active experimentation feed one another. |
| Information Processing Theory | A model of learning based on sensory, working and long-term memory, with limited capacity at each stage. |
| Spacing Effect | Material is retained longer when study is spread over time than when it is massed into one session. |
| Mastery Learning | Bloom's approach of requiring mastery of one unit before moving to the next, with feedback and corrective instruction. |
| Andragogy | Knowles's set of assumptions about adult learners: self-directed, experience-rich, problem-centered and internally motivated. |
| Connectivism | A proposal that learning in networked environments consists of building and traversing connections between nodes of information. |
Fields
The shape of this dataset, read from the data itself: every column, its type and a real value. Agents can use this to plan a query without fetching the whole document.
| Section | Field | Type | Example |
|---|---|---|---|
| data | theory | string | Classical Conditioning |
| data | description | string | Learning through association of stimuli. |
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