Principles of Learning

Landa (1983) states that "prescriptive instructional theories cannot be automatically derived from descriptive instructional theories." He gives an example to illustrate why this isn't so: "Suppose we have a descriptive proposition: 'If a student repeats a statement many times, he or she memorizes it better." This is a 100 percent true proposition. Let us convert it into a prescriptive proposition: 'In order to memorize a statement better, one has to repeat it many times.' This proposition is not as true as the first one because the state of 'memorized' is determined by many factors, not just repetition. For example, for a particular student to memorize a statement, it may be more important to understand it rather than just mechanically repeat it. Some students, due to the specific characteristics of their memory, the personal significance of the proposition for them, and some other factors, may not need to repeat it at all." [p. 60] He ...

Aspects of learning that vary from one learner to another: - the instructional strategy used (learners learn through different types of presentation) - the content (some learners will know things others do not); the initial state of the learner is an important basis for prescription of content as well as strategy

"the 'learner control' metatheory (Merill, 1975, 1979, 1980; Reigeluth, 1979)...emphasizes training the learning to make the decisions about which strategy components to student when and for how long...For example, rather than presenting 'visual' instruction to some students and 'verbal' instruction to others, learner control prescribes making both representations available to all students, along with some brief training about what to pick and choose when, rather than studying everything." (Reigeluth, 1983, p. 33)

"A useful distinction in the discussion of student characteristics is trait versus state. Traits are student characteristics that are relatively constant over time...whereas states are student characteristics that tend to vary during individual learning experiences, such as level of content-specific knowledge." (Reigeluth, 1983, p. 32) Reigeluth also states that "many strategy components have been shown to help students with all kinds of traits to learn" [p. 32]. My position is that we do not know a priori which aspects of our instructional strategies, learning environment, motivator, etc... will generalize across many or all students. However, with a localized learning theory we can learn over time which do and which do not. At the same time, we will likely find ways of grouping students that we never would have before imagined.

"Crowder (1960, 1962) helped make considerable advances in the programmed instruction model of instruction by simultaneously relaxing its errorless-learning requirement and introducing branching sequences in the instruction. Thus, student errors provided the basis for individualizing the instruction. " (Reigeluth, 1983, p. 29)