Alternative assignment for those students in ED 611 that may not be classroom teachers

Learning Theories Summary Table

One of the major goals of this class is to help us understand contemporary learning theory and how it helps us to think differently about teaching, learning, curriculum, motivation, and transfer. We've used three major perspectives from educational psychology including: (1) behaviorism; (2) cognitive psychology or schema theory, and; (3) the situative perspective or distributed learning. Each of these three perspectives says something very different and important about the work of teachers or those involved in teaching, learning, and schooling in general.

The assignment itself is pretty simple. It includes reading and studying some additional material and then drawing upon this new resource and all the other resources to build a summary table that has rows for the three theoretical perspectives and columns for how they answer each of the following questions:

• Knowledge: What does it mean to know? What is knowledge according to this perspective (stimulus-response bonds...)? Where is knowledge located (brain, in the world, between people...)?
• Learning: How do people go about learning? What does it mean to learn? What is the process of learning? What does it involve?
• Teaching: So what does teaching look like from this perspective? What is the role of the teacher?
• Curriculum: What is curriculum? How should it be structured to maximize learning? Also, what would assessment look like?
• Motivation: How do each of the perspectives think about motivation? What provides motivation to learn?
• Transfer: What does each perspective say about transfer - the ability to generalize learning to other situations or settings? How does transfer work?
• Schooling: What kind of school would we have if this perspective was dominant? What kind of society would we end up with?
• Buzzwords: What specific buzzwords or terminology are associated with this perspective that you need to remember?

The goal is to basically make a massive learning theory cheat sheet with all this content organized in ways that make sense to you. Now... keep in mind, part of this is about coming to understand theory but our real goal is to become aware that depending on what it is that needs to get learned, educators are wise to draw on different perspectives of learning (and motivation, and assessment, and curricular design, and instructional strategies...) to maximize those opportunties for learning.

Ok... so what is the additional resource that I want you to draw upon as you work through this assignment? It is the chapter from the Handbook of Research in Educational Psychology called Cognition and Learning. This chapter is the varsity reading... it is a bad, bad boy... very heavy duty. But... it is an amazing summary of these theoretical perspectives and if you are diligent in your efforts you will learn enormously by engaging with it. Give yourself time and space to interact with it deeply as it is a tough haul... but worth the effort. Ok... here it is.

Good luck!

Mark