My Bookmarks to Articles on Theories of Learning

You have probably heard of Behaviourism and Constructivism, and possibly even Cognitivism – but that is barely the tip of the iceberg. They are seminal theories, but getting a bit dated. Behaviourism was a cutting edge idea back in the 1920s, when eugenics was socially acceptable, the sun had not yet set on the British Empire, class structures were rigid and few women, people of colour, or members of the” working class” had any chance of a tertiary education. Even the theories developed between the 1940’s and the 1960’s should not be accepted unquestioningly. If the lab rats participants in the research were all white, male, students at Ivy League universities, can the results justifiably be applied to older people, women, or people of colour, people in other countries?

Don’t mistake these comments as criticisms of the theorists. They can’t control how other people interpret, develop or apply their theories. A quick search of Pinterest or Google Images shows that Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs seems to have grown extra levels over the years. Bloom’s Taxonomy of Learning Objectives in the Cognitive Domain, seems to have morphed into learning design model where students are expected to progress through the levels, first memorising, then understanding, then applying etc. (This is one of the most frustrating misconceptions I encountered when teaching maths and physics. There are a lot of more or less effective ways of learning maths, but rote-learning meaningless facts is not one of them

So I decided to investigate more recent advances in educational theories. Not surprisingly, the thousands of researchers in the field have discovered a lot of effects, and generated a lot of theories, principals, models, and taxonomies. Below are are some of the links I have found. While I don’t necessarily agree with the viewpoints in these articles, I do think they are worth considering. The articles are designed for a range of audiences: teachers, university lecturers, trainers in vocational education, instructional designers working with adult learners in the corporate sector.