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Behaviorism can be dated back to the early 1900s. John B. Watson proposed this theory, and his experiment with the mouse is still famous today. Later, behaviorism was applied to instruction by Skinner and other psychologists.
Now, behaviorism refers to the process of stimuli, reinforcement, and behavior as a theory for instruction. -
Zone of Proximal Development was proposed in the 1920s by Lev Vygotsky. He believed that learners can achieve something with guidance and help. The distance between what learners can do and what learners can do with guidance and help is called the ZPD. In the learning process, the ZPD will get smaller gradually and finally disappear. It is one of the most classic cognitive theories in education. -
In the 1920s, Lev Vygotsky proposed the sociocultural theory. He mentioned that children will learn more with more knowledgeable others. (MKO) By interacting with those groups of people, learning will occur. This theory, along with ZPD, is the most famous theory by Vygotsky -
Jean Piaget proposed Schema Theory in 1923. Schema is the mental representation of our knowledge. It helps us categorize knowledge and makes us interact with the world easily. It is the basis of cognitive development theory and working memory -
Piaget's theory of cognitive development argued that every child should experience 4 stages, sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational. He believed that children learned from interaction with specific environments. His theory provides basic theory for working memory and implicit learning theory in the future. It also contributes to the cognitive constructivism. -
During WWII, psychologists used their knowledge to facilitate training in the military. After the war, those psychologists worked in some institutions to build a training system and developed creative analysis, testing, and evaluation methods. -
In 1946, Edgar Dale proposed the Cone of Experience. It clearly shows the experience that can facilitate learning from the most concrete ones at the bottom to the most abstract ones at the top. It tells instructors what methods the students can have a deeper understanding of the content. -
As programmed instruction became popular in the 1950s, in 1954, Skinner published an article called Science of learning and art of teaching in which he emphasized the significance of using instructional materials. He argued that effective instruction should include questions, immediate feedback, and letting students determine their learning pace. It paved the way for individualization. -
In 1956, Benjamin Bloom published the Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. It describes different types of learning outcomes in people's cognitive domains. Teaching objectives can be relatively classified differently. There is a hierarchical relationship between those objectives. Today, this taxonomy is still a popular theory of behaviorism. -
In 1962, Robert Mager wrote a book named Preparing Objectives for Programmed Instruction. It describes the process of preparing objectives with three sections which are the instructor's desired behaviors from the students, the situation where students have different behaviors, and the criteria for judging the behaviors. It is the basic theory for the Criterion-Referenced Testing later, and it is still popular today. -
In the past, most of the tests or assessments are Norm-Referenced Testing in which students are being compared with each other (Some did well, and some did poorly). However, the new Criterion-Referenced Testing is to see how well a person can perform a behavior without seeing what others did. Glaser (1963) was the first one to use the word Criterion-Referenced Measures. He claimed that the CRT can be used to assess students' entry-level and determine what to teach to the students. -
In 1965, Robert Gagne published the conditions of learning. In this book, he divided learning outcomes into five types, intellectual skills, verbal information, attitude, motor skills, and cognitive strategy. He also mentioned that different conditions will relatively facilitate different learning outcomes. This statement emphasizes the importance of teaching activities. -
In 1967, Michael Scriven pointed out that it is important to try out the learning materials with the learners and revise them before the final draft. This process of revising the materials was named formative/ Summative Evaluation. -
Fred Keller argued that the traditional teaching method is out-of-date. He thought education must be developed to provide information if education wanted to be improved. He suggested the PSI, which allows students to follow their own pace of learning. Teachers' lectures would only serve as a motivation for students to learn. Moreover, teachers should use proctors for providing feedbacks. -
During the 1970s, there was a growing interest in instructional design models. Not only militaries used design models to develop their training, but also instructors used instructional design models for improving their instructions with media. Meanwhile, some other countries like Korea also saw the advantages of applying instructional design model to improve the quality of class. -
During the 1980s, the instructional design model did not improve a lot. It has little impact on instructions in public schools. Some psychologists started to apply cognitive psychology to the instructional model design process. However, evidence showed that cognitive psychology's application in the instructional model design process is small. -
In the 1990s, there was an increasing interest in constructivism. Constructivism focuses on students' identity, problem-solving ability, and authentic learning tasks. It is an important theory because it makes the assessment and learning more related to daily lives, so that students can apply the knowledge they learned into their real lives. -
Knowledge management was a trend in the late 1990s. Knowledge management is a process of collecting, clarifying, identifying, and organizing knowledge according to Rossett (1999). It deals with explicit and tacit knowledge. It provides a way of learning. For example, when we collect some data and information, we would categorize and analyze them. After synthesizing the data, we can gain the knowledge. -
In 2009, Mayer proposed the cognitive theory of multimedia learning. This theory is a combination of working memory theory, dual coding theory, and cognitive load theory. It mentioned that when we see and hear something, our working memory will organize them, and the long-term memory, together with the working memory, codes the things we accepted, so the learning occurs. -
With Mayer's cognitive theory of multimedia learning, Baukal et al. updated the Cone of Experience by Dale. They combined the COE with Mayer's theory to propose the Multimedia Cone of Abstraction. This theory fits the development of technology because it adds VR into the COE which did not exist in the 1950s.