A Primer on Learning Theories Shayan Doroudi School of Education University of California, Irvine
[email protected] What does it mean to learn? How does learning happen? How do we know when someone has learned something? And how do we use these insights to help people learn better–by improving teaching practices or creating technologies that help people learn? While many people, including philosophers and lay people, have pondered on these questions for centuries, they became more prominent with the advent of psychology, a field that can give us scientific insights into how people learn. A variety of learning theories have been proposed from the late nineteenth century (when the field of experimental psychology first formed) to the present day. A learning theory tries to explain how people learn, usually based on an accumulation of scientific evidence. (Technically, we could also develop theories about how animals or machines learn as well, and indeed these informed certain learning theories, as we discuss below.) Scientific experiments that study learning usually give us insights on how someone learns a specific thing in a specific time and place (e.g., how does a student learn when solving math problems in a classroom, or how does a person learn when given a puzzle to solve in a lab?). In reality, learning is a rich and complex phenomenon, and most, if not all, scientists would agree that there is no single kind of learning that can describe all the ways all people learn in all situations. Thus, in practice, what are often called learning theories are really worldviews for how to think about learning.