Education Commons^™

Learning Theories And Higher Education, Francis Ashworth, Gabriel Brennan, Kathy Egan, Ron Hamilton, Olalla Sáenz

Level 3

This paper offers a number of materials and resources which may be used as teaching aids for introduction-level courses in learning theories, especially those in higher education. The materials were developed during our participation in a postgraduate diploma module on the psychology of learning and learning theories in 2004, as part of the diploma in third-level learning and teaching at the DIT Learning and Teaching Centre.

The materials include:

• three timeline diagrams illustrating the development of learning theories which locate key thinkers and key ideas in their historic and socio-political contexts
• three summary diagrams of behaviourist, humanist and social learning …

Situated Learning, Distributed Cognition: Do Academics Really Need To Know?, Anne Murphy

Level 3

The dominant approach to the study of learning throughout most of the twentieth century was to view learning as cognitive only, as if it were a process contained in the mind of the learner, decontextualised from the lived-in world. There is now, however, a growing interest in the study of learning as situated in a specific time, place and social activity – as ‘situated learning’ – and to view the locus of learning not as in the brain of the single individual (person-solo) but as ‘distributed’ among person, language, artefacts, activities and environment (person-plus) (see Lave and Wenger, 1999; …