Week Six

The more we dig into the various theories of learning the muddier the water gets and the more I find myself unclear about where I stand! As with every other week I’ve left trying to figure out how to piece together the various theories and cherry-pick a bit because I simply don’t buy a one size fits all approach. One of my favorite young adult novels is the dystopian story The Giver by Lois Lowry. In the story, there are no real choices to be made. All children at age five are learning and doing the exact same things, and again at six and seven, and so forth. At the ripe age of twelve, they are assigned their role in the community. For the most part, everyone in the community thinks this way of life is great. Those who disagree are punished by being “released” but very few know what happens when someone is released. In the end, the main character realizes what he’s missing out on because of his assigned role in the community and decides the benefits of being the same as everyone else is not worth what he’s missing out on.

I thought about this book because the community takes the one size fits all approach to raising the children and living life. I know it’s just a fiction novel but it’s a picture of what we have the potential to become when we as educators lean toward only putting one of these theories into practice. We risk losing the benefits of other theories.

I found Gagne’s theory of instruction quite helpful for its three different components: a taxonomy of learning outcomes, learning conditions, and events of instruction. (Driscoll pp. 39-40) Applying those components and Gagne’s list of nine events of instruction, give a more well rounded picture of all the things that need to be accounted for to capture the learning process in the field of instructional design. 

Another helpful perceptive from Driscoll was the idea that information processing happens from the outside in, whereas the constructivist approach is the inside out. Both have value!


Driscoll, M. P. (2007). Psychological foundations of instructional design. In R. A. Reiser (Ed.), Trends and issues in instructional design and technology (2nd ed.) (pp. 36-44). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, Inc.

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