Mapping Learning Theories

Mapping Learning Theories:

Connection and Contiguity in Practice

Mary-Jane Radford Arrow

University of Liverpool
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Introduction: Concept Mapping Learning Theories

Brookfield (1998) argues that the critically reflective practitioner must view her practice

through the lens of theory in order to “‘name’ our practice” and provide “multiple perspectives

on familiar situations” (p.200). Understanding “the deep principles” of learning theory allows

educators to “extrapolate to the particulars” of learning situations and individual learners (Ertmer

& Newby,1993, p.45) Theory provides a framework based on scientific thought, grounded in

historical development across many disciplines and tested by research.

This paper provides an explication of a concept map of learning theories. Novak and

Cañas (2015) view concept mapping from a Constructivist perspective in that knowledge as it is

individually constructed is visualized ("What is", 1:06). Concept mapping can also be viewed

from a Cognitivist perspective. Hay and Kinchin (2008) describe the concept map as an

assessment tool by which the "quality of student learning can be made visible" (p. 173). They

emphasize that each concept map is individual to the learner and so functions as a kind of

cognitive mirror of his learning over time, citing Ausubel’s (2000) discussion of each "learner's

cognitive structure" as unique (Hay & Kinchin, 2008, p. 174), which is reflected in his unique

concept map.

The map (figure 1) was made using the Florida Institute for Human & Machine

Cognition’s CMapTools, a cloud-based mapping software kit developed with Novak and Cañas

(CMapTools, IHMC, Pensacola, FL). Its purpose is to “enable users to graphically express their

understanding of a domain of knowledge” and share their maps with a wide audience on the

Internet (Cañas, Hill, Carff, Suri, Lott, Gomez, Eskridge, Arroyo & Carvajal, 2004, p. 3). It is

organized using the five “learning orientations” defined by Merriam, Caffarella and Baumgartner

(2007): Humanism, Behaviorism, Cognitivism, Social Cognitivism, and Constructivism. The

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orientations are presented in the map as a mostly chronological development towards greater

complexity.

Figure 1: Concept map of Learning Theories

Reflecting the centrality of the researcher/theorist to the development of theory, each

orientation is linked to some of the major theorists associated with it, although by no means

comprehensively, with one major theorist chosen for each. The map also seeks to illustrate how

learning theory is situated in its historical and cultural context, and has been informed by other

scientific fields (marked in green) and philosophical frameworks (marked in purple). However,

influences and theorists are not always contemporary to a theoretical orientation’s development,

for example, Vygotsky’s powerful influence on Constructivism nearly a century after his death,

or the enduring impact of Dewey’s thinking on various learning theories over the past century-

and-a-half.

In this paper, each orientation is presented and briefly discussed with reference to the

concept map. Finally, communicative language teaching is briefly presented with reference to the
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theoretical orientations, the goal being to demonstrate both how a variety of learning theories

relate to teaching and the application of theory to the classroom.

Humanism

John Dewey (1859-1952) was chosen as the major theorist associated with Humanism,

which can be viewed as a philosophical orientation as much as a scientifically based theoretical

framework. Hammond, Austin, Orcutt and Rosso (2001) note that Dewey and Horace Mann

(1796-1859) before him believed that “education was the primary method of social progress and

reform” (p. 8). I placed it at the left in the chronological organization of the map, as it provides a

foundation for the development of learning theory within the context of the evolution of

Education as a science, at least in the United States. Furthermore, Humanism “consider(s)

learning from the perspective of the human potential for growth” (Merriam, et al., 2007, p. 281),

which is the implicit starting point of all thinking about learning.

Dewey’s ideas about education have been widely influential in the development of

learning theory, which is reflected in the pink lines connecting him to all five learning

orientations. In his day, when the science of psychology was in its infancy in America, Dewey

championed a “new education” in reaction to methods of teaching based on learner passivity

(Berliner, 1993, p. 12). Referring to Dewey as one of the “grand-uncles” of the field of

Educational Psychology, Berliner (1993) contends that his “holistic” views on education have

informed Constructivist notions about learning. Dewey’s “functionalist school of psychology” as

primarily “interested in the purpose of behavior or the function of the mind” (Berliner, p. 12) can

be viewed as influencing both Behaviorist and Cognitivist orientations to learning. He was also

among the first to “suggest that learning was a situated activity” (Hammond, Austin, Orcutt &

Rosso, 2001, p. 8), a notion underpinning the Social Cognitivist and Constructivist orientations.
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Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) is included in the map as a philosophical influence

on Dewey and Humanism. He viewed “the goal of teaching (as) to arouse in the student a

passion to learn” (Davis, 2009, p. 134), proposing a pedagogy of “well-regulated freedom”

(Rousseau, 1888, para. 179). Darwinism is another philosophical influence, specifically in the

suggestion that societies evolve and that “one of the most important means for doing so (is)

education” (Berliner, 1993, p.12).

Other educational theorists within the Humanist tradition include Abraham Maslow

(1908-1970), “the founder of humanist psychology” (Merriam, et al., 2007, p.282), who created a

hierarchy of human needs which is widely used in various fields, including education (Kremer &

Hammond, 2013). He theorized the intrinsic human motivation to learn, with the ultimate goal of

self-actualization. Carl Rogers (1902-1987) is credited as the father of student-centred learning

(Merriam, et al., 2007, p.283), a concept which has informed Cognitive, Social Cognitivist, and

Constructionist orientations to learning.

Behaviorism

Behaviorism developed out of a desire to bring the study of psychology more in line with

positivist approaches to the natural sciences “which examined observable and measurable

phenomena” (Schunk, 2012, p. 72). Behaviorists viewed the mind as a “black box” (Wilson &

Peterson, 2006, p.2), or at least an unreliable source of empirical data. Merriam, et al. (2007)

present three ideas central to Behaviorism from an educational perspective: observable behavior

as the manifestation of learning, the role of the environment in “shap(ing) behavior”, and the

primary roles of contiguity and reinforcement in learning (p. 278). Mandler (2002) suggests that

the influence of Behaviorism was largely confined to the United States.

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The American psychologist B.F. Skinner (1904-1990) is the primary theorist associated

with the Behaviorist orientation in the concept map. His theory of operant conditioning is posited

on the notions that humans (in fact, all animals) learn behaviors through positive and negative

reinforcement (Schunk, 2012) and that “all behavior is learned” (Merriam, et al., 2007, p.280).

Behaviorism’s influence on education has been broad and enduring. Davis (2009) writes that it

“had become the dominant discourse” in education by the middle of the 20th century and is still

evident in the value placed on “clearly stated and measurable behavioral learning objectives,

unambiguous learning outcomes, (and) well-defined reward structures” (p. 88). Edward

Thorndike (1874-1949) is presented in the map as an influence on Skinner (e.g., Merriam, et al.,

2007, p.279) through his theory of connectionism, which proposed that learning occurs

incrementally through trial and error as “connections are formed mechanically through

repetition” (Schunk, 2012, p.73). The idea of sequenced curricula and structured lessons is based

on this idea that “(o)ne behavior leads to another” (Wilson & Peterson, 2006, p.2).

John Locke (1632-1704) is included in the map as a philosophical influence on

Behaviorism. He theorised that the newborn human mind is a tabula rasa, “a blank slate ready to

be inscribed and imprinted by encounters with the world” (Davis, 2009, p.89). Schunk (2012)

argues that all learning theories “deal with behavior” to some extent and that Behavorism should

be understood more as an orientation which “explain(s) learning in terms of environmental

events” (p.72). Davis (2009) adds that Behaviorism has contributed to learning theory overall by

virtue of “its acknowledgment of the roles of context and experience in learning” (p.90), themes

of importance in Social Cognitivism and Constructionism, for example.

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Cognitivism

The “cognitive revolution” began in Europe (Mandler, 2002) in the work of the Gestalt

movement in Germany and Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget (1896-1980). According to Hofer and

Pintrich (1997), Piaget’s developmental theory of genetic epistemology, a theory of how

knowledge grows in children, gained a foothold in the field of education in reaction to the

“dominance of behaviorism, which had removed knowing altogether from learning” (p.88).

Ertmer and Newby (1993) define the emergence of Cognitivism in the late 1950s as more a

matter of “de-emphasis” on observable behavior, and concerned “not so much with what learners

do but with what they know and how they come to acquire it” (p.51).

Piaget takes centre stage in Cogntivism for his continuing impact on educational theory.

His main contribution was to bring the mind of the learner into focus as the site of learning. He

theorized that learning in children involves a process of cognitive development in “a progressive

construction of logically embedded structures superseding one another” (“A brief biography”,

n.d., para.8). Cognitivism highlights the role of memory and of schema, in Piagetian terms “a set

of linked mental representations of the world…use(d) both to understand and to respond to

situations” (McLeod, 2015).

Educational psychologist Benjamin Bloom (1913-1999) is included among Cognitivists,

largely for his taxonomy (1956), which has proven a flexible and foundational model with

application across a variety of orientations and fields. It posits six progressive “cognitive

processes” presented as a pyramid: knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis,

and evaluation. David Ausubel (1918-2008) is highlighted for his cognitive theory of meaningful

learning which sought to explain “the connection between new learning material and related
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conceptual material that the learner already knows, and how it can be more easily stabilized and

assimilated into the learner’s cognitive structure“ (Ausubel, n.d.).

Social Cognitivism

Social Cognitivism evolved as a result of what has been termed a “social turn” in

educational theory, as well as other fields (Gee, 1999). Albert Bandura (1925- ) is the primary

theorist for this orientation in the concept map. His social learning theory posited that the role of

the social environment as “a potentiality” rather than a “fixed property” was as important to

learning as the cognition and behavior of the individual learner, and that these three act upon and

shape each other (Bandura, 1971, p.40). Social Cognitivism shares with Behaviorism an

emphasis on the role of the environment and with Cognitivism the importance of mental

processes in learning.

Bandura’s model of triadic reciprocity, in which the three aspects of behavior, cognitive

characteristics, and environmental events act as “interacting determinants of each other”, has

been particularly relevant to adult learning (Merriam, et al., 2007, p.290). Lave and Wenger’s

(1991) theory of legitimate peripheral participation, which draws on models of apprenticeship in

which “learning is an integral part of a generative social practice in the lived-in world” (p. 35),

falls within the Social Cognitivist orientation. An important notion within this orientation is

communities of practice as “an intrinsic condition for the existence of knowledge” (Lave &

Wenger, 1991, p. 98), particularly with regard to adult and continuing education.
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Constructivism

Davis credits mid-century philosophers such as Heidegger, Sartre, and de Beauvoir with

prompting an “interpretive turn” across disciplines and through which “discussions shifted

toward the ways that humans construe reality” (2009, p.99). Ortega (2009) stresses the

“inseparability of agent and environment, as well as the centrality of the social in understanding

all living agents” (p.217) in Constructivism. Constructivism goes beyond Social Cognitivism,

collapsing Bandura’s triad and theorising the “inseparability” and “centrality” of the social.

The main theorist chosen for the Constructivist orientation to learning is Soviet

psychologist and teacher Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934). Constructivist learning is defined as the

creation of meaning through “personal interpretations of the world based on individual

experiences and interactions” rather than the “transfer of knowledge from the external world”

(Ertmer & Newby, 1993, p. 5). Vygotsky’s socioculturalism is “not only a matter of interpretive

construction, but…radically collective and social” (Ortega, 2009, p.217). Schunk contends that

Constructivism is in fact less a theory than “an epistemology, or philosophical explanation about

the nature of learning” because it rejects the notion of knowledge as truth, instead “constru(ing)

it as a working hypothesis” (2012, p.230).

The critical philosophy of Michel Foucault (1926-1984) is highly relevant to

Constructivism as an educational framework, as its purpose “is not to search for truth” but

“instead, to provoke in us new questions about who we are and how we think” (Fendler, 2010,

p.6). From such an epistemological position, “there is nothing that can be known or understood

independently from the discourse that names and creates that knowledge” (Ortega, 2009, p.217).
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Central to Constructivism is the idea of learning as “a process of constructing meaning”

(Merriam, et al., 2007, p.291). A key aspect of Vygotsky’s sociocultural perspective is the

mediation of learning and all experience by sociocultural “tools”, language being “the most

important” of these (Ortega, 2009, p.219). Our understanding of the world, the meaning we

make, is “shaped by” these tools “acquired in the course of education” (Kozulin, Gindis, Ageyev

& Miller, 2003, p.4). In her comparison of Vygotsky’s and Piaget’s theories of education,

DeVries (2000) suggests that Piaget may also be relevant to the Constructivist orientation

because he “emphasized the central role of social factors in the construction of knowledge” (p.6),

hence the pink line connecting him to Constructivism in the concept map.

A Theoretical View of Communicative Language Teaching

Communicative language teaching (CLT) is a Constructivist approach to second language

acquisition (SLA) which “looks to both psycholinguistic and sociocultural perspectives”

(Savignon, 2002, p.1). It nevertheless contains aspects of Behaviorism, Cognitivism, and Social

Cognitivism, as illustrated in figure 2. All are situated within a Humanist field, as language

learning is “always transformative” (Ortega, 2009, p.250).

Figure 2: Illustration of nested theories of learning in communicative language teaching

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The hourglass lesson structure (figure 3) is used in CLT as a framework for developing

course materials and lesson plans. Two considerations frame the hourglass: First, “class

demographics” (“Lesson plan blueprint”, n.d.) which orient the lesson as learner-centred taking

into account sociocultural, developmental, and other attributes relevant to “meaning” and

motivation from the learner perspective; and second, the learning objectives as the expected

learning outcomes which can be assessed from a Behavioral perspective of what the learner

should be able to do at the end of the lesson.

Figure 3: The hourglass lesson structure. Source: AU TESOL.

The first two inductive phases of Language Presentation and Discovery should be

authentic from the Social Cognitive perspective of Ausubel’s meaningful learning theory.

Discovery corresponds to the Piagetian notion of schema and is Cognitive/Social Cognitive. The

student is provided a context and input designed for his discovery of the lesson’s object, its

meanings and uses. In the following Explanation/Modeling Phase the language focus of the

lesson, for example a grammatical structure, is highlighted and explained by the teacher to be
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sure the learners have “discovered” deductively the rules governing it as well as its

communicative uses.

The final phase is Practice, in which learners transition from controlled to semi-

controlled exercises before freer speaking, for example a role-play or open discussion. This final

phase moves from a Social Cognitive to a Constructivist orientation and is assessed from a

Behavioral perspective. Thus, a full range of learning orientations is useful in CLT, and a

Constructivist learning model can be seen to incorporate aspects of all five orientations.

Conclusion: Linking Theory to Practice

Learning theories are inter-related and enmeshed, especially when they are considered in

light of classroom practice, as figure 2 illustrates. The concept map demonstrates that learning

theory is a work in progress. Wilson and Peterson (2006) assert that all theories “are based on

limited information”, they “are conjectures and assertions based on empirical research” and

learning theorists “are constantly interrogating their theories” (p.3). In explaining the map, it was

sometimes difficult to decide on one learning orientation for one particular theorist, and the

process of constructing the map allowed the connections and influences of various threads and

thinkers to be visualized.

An understanding of a range of theoretical orientations, as well as an appreciation of how

and why theories develop and evolve in the world and in time, is necessary. No single theory can

provide a complete picture of practice. Ertmer and Newby (1993) contend that educators “cannot

afford the luxury” of limiting themselves to just one theoretical orientation (p.45). Teachers test

theory and formulate theory every day in their practice while trying to support learners and solve

problems in their classrooms. Hammond, et al. (2001) cite Barth’s (1990) assertion that all
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teachers are “theory consumers” as well as “theory makers” (p.19). “The body of work” of

theorizing researchers provides educators with “more tools and resources to do this classroom

theorizing and inquiry” (Hammond, et al., 2001, p. 45).

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