Learning and Instructional Theories

This chapter covers the concepts of learning and instruction as well as the main scientific approaches to these concepts. It will also distinguish the concepts of education and instruction, for these concepts, though related, have different meanings. Education is concerned with the formation of the character and instruction has to do with the acquisition of instrumental and disciplinary knowledge. This chapter deals mostly with theories of instruction because the formation of character, although always present in any educational act, will not be the object of analysis. But a theory of instruction must be closely related to a scientific theory of learning. What gives theoretical and scientific consistency to a theory of instruction is its deep rootedness in a scientific theory that explains how human beings learn and develop. For this reason, this chapter also addresses the main scientific approaches to learning and describes how they support different instructional theories: the behavioral, the cognitive, and the situated learning approaches.

Competency Equilibrium and Instructional Scenarios' Quality

This chapter focuses on the quality of instructional scenarios. An instructional scenario is a particular kind of aggregated resources composed of learning objects (LO) or resources, actors and activities according to an Educational Modeling Language (EML) such as the IMS Learning Design or the TELOS Scenarios Language (TSL) both presented in Chapter 8. Among the factors which permit the production of “good” scenarios, one of the most important is the use of Instructional Engineering methods. The case of the MISA method was presented in Chapter 8. Another alternative was presented in Chapter 9 where the elaboration of the scenarios is based on the use of patterns directly in link with the type of cognitive skill aimed by the scenario. Another working example to improve scenario quality was conducted by Psyche, Bourdeau, Nkambou & Mizoguchi (2005) where learning and instructional theories guide the use of IMS Learning Design educational modeling language. In the present chapter, another alternative for quality scenarios is developed: scenario validation driven by the competencies which are associated with the scenario and its components.