study of teaching methods, including the aims of education and the ways in which such goals may be achieved. The field relies heavily on educational psychology, or theories about the way in which learning takes place.

In the act of teaching there are two parties (the teacher and the taught) who work together in some program (the subject matter) designed to modify the learners' behaviour (human behaviour) and experience in some way. It is necessary to begin, therefore, with observations about the learner, the teacher, and the subject matter and then to consider the significance of group life and the school. It will then be possible to consider the factors and theories involved in modifying a person's behaviour and understanding. These include theories of learning in education, of school and class organization, and of instructional media.

A child enters school with little if any attainment in written expression and leaves it capable of learning much from human culture. It was thought originally that this progress was just a matter of learning, memorizing, associating, and practicing. The work of psychologists has revealed, however, that the growth of the pupil's intellectual (intelligence, human) powers must include a large element of development through different phases, beginning with simple sensorimotor coordination; going on to the beginnings of symbolizing, helped by the growth of language and play; and then on to logical thought, provided the material is concrete; and, finally, in midadolescence, on to the power to examine problems comprehensively, to grasp their formal structure, and to evoke explanation. In his emotional life, the child progresses from direct, immediate, uninhibited reactions to more complex, less direct, and more circumspect responses. The physical growth of the child is so obvious as to need no comment. Any attempt to educate the child intellectually and emotionally and for action must take account of these characteristics. Education must pace development, not follow it and not ignore it. The components in the child's overall educational growth are physical and mental maturation, experience, formal teaching through language, and an urge in the learner to resolve discrepancies, anomalies, and dissonances in his experience.

What is required of a teacher is that he enjoy and be capable of sharing work programs with children, designed to modify their behaviour and experience. This means making relevant experience available to the student at the right time. The teacher must be mature, have humour with a sense of status, be firm yet unruffled, and be sympathetic but not overpersonal. With large classes, the teacher becomes a leader of a group, providing stimulating learning situations.

The subject matter taught also has a marked influence on the total teaching situation. It may be conveniently divided into broad headings of languages, humanities, sciences, mathematics, and arts. Although each group of subjects has something in common with others in terms of the demands it makes on the thinker, each area has also something quite specific in its mode of development. Languages call for verbal learning and production based on oral work, particularly during the early phases. The humanities call for an understanding of cause–effect relations of immediate and remote connections between persons and institutions and man in his environment. The sciences call for induction from experience, though deductive processes are required when the laws of science are formalized into mathematical terms. The humanities and sciences both depend on the ability of the learner to hypothesize. Mathematics calls for the ability to abstract, symbolize, and deduce. An interest in the formal and structural properties of the acts of counting and measuring is fundamental. Arts and literature call for a fairly free opportunity to explore and create.

A large part of the teacher's role is as a group leader, and the group life of the school and the classroom must influence the teaching situation. Group life shows itself in the dynamic structure of the class—including its manner of reaching group decisions, the hierarchy of its members, the existence of cliques and of isolated individuals—and in its morale and overall response to the school and the rest of the staff. The individual pupil also conducts himself under the influence of the group to which he belongs. His achievements and attitudes are subject to evaluation by the group, leading to support or ostracism, and he sets his standards according to these influences.

In many schools, the range of ages in any class is about one year, and the narrow range makes for some uniformity of subject-matter coverage. But in rural one- and two-teacher schools, groups of children may be heterogeneous by age and ability, and the mode of teaching has to cope with a number of smaller subunits moving along at different rates. The teacher's problem is to coordinate the work of these small, dissimilar groups in such a way that all get attention. Creative free activity has to be practiced by one group while another has more formal instruction from the teacher.

The effect of “streaming,” or “tracking”—that is, selecting homogeneous groups by both age and intellectual ability—has promoted much inquiry. The practice evokes extreme opinions, ardent support, and vociferous condemnation. The case for uniformity is that putting a pupil with his intellectual peers makes teaching more effective and learning more acceptable. The case against it draws attention to its bad effects on the morale of those children in the lower streams. This view supports the heterogeneous class on the grounds that the strongest are not overforced, and the weakest gain from sharing with their abler fellows. Experimental evidence on the problem is bewilderingly diverse.

The school community is housed in a physical complex, and the conditions of classrooms, assembly places, and play areas and the existence (or nonexistence) of libraries, laboratories, art-and-craft rooms, and workshops all play their part in the effectiveness of the teaching–learning situation. Severe restrictions may be caused by the absence of library and laboratory services.

The social forces immediately outside the school community also influence the teaching situation. These emanate from home, neighbourhood, and wider social groupings. Teaching is a compact among several groups, including teachers, students, and parents, in the first place, with youth organizations and religious and lay groups playing a secondary role. The overall neighbourhood youth subculture also sets standards and attitudes that a teacher has to take into account in his work.

The classification of the general objectives of teaching in terms of school subject matter is not sufficient to explain the ultimate ends of education. These include, essentially, the promotion of a well-integrated person capable of taking a responsible, active role in society. With such a purpose in mind, one may achieve more insight by choosing a psychological analysis of the objectives into the attainment of intellectual abilities and social insights ( cognition), the learning of practical active skills (psychomotor learning), and the development of emotions, attitudes, and values (affective learning).

Cognitive growth begins at the level of the infant school, with the acquisition of early language and numerical capabilities, and continues increasingly to dominate education to the secondary and higher levels. But the learner is more than an enlarging reservoir of information. With this acquisition goes a growing power to generalize, abstract, infer, interpret, explain, apply, and create. Cognitive training produces a thinker–observer aware of the modes of thought and judgment making up human intellectual activity. In the final stages, the teacher aims at a thinker, critic, organizer, and creator.

In the development of psychomotor learning, the teacher is concerned with the promotion of coordinated skills and their creative use. Instruction begins with the acts of handwriting and plastic art play, characteristic of earlier years of schooling. It includes painting, games, workshop skills, and practical science. It has a high prestige value among the pupils themselves and the wider community.

The permeation of emotional (emotion) learning throughout the whole educative process is not always obvious, in part because very often it is brought about incidentally. Teachers may be self-conscious and self-critical about the deliberate inculcation of emotional responses, which will provide the energy and a mainspring of social life. The acquisition and application of values and attitudes (attitude) are most marked by the time of adolescence and dominate the general life of the young individual. Theoretical, aesthetic, social, economic, political, hedonistic, and religious values pervade the school curriculum. Literature, art, the humanities, and religious teaching are all directly involved, and the teaching of science and mathematics can bring about a positive attitude toward cognitive and theoretical values.

A person's emotional structure is the pattern of his values and attitudes. Under the influence of instruction and experience, this structure shows three kinds of change. First, the pupil learns to select those situations and problems to which he will make appropriate emotional responses. Second, in general, an increasing range of situations includes happenings more remote from the learner. At first, emotions are aroused by situations directly affecting the child, but as he becomes more mature he is increasingly involved in affairs and causes far removed from his own personal life. Third, his repertoire of emotional responses gradually becomes less immediate, expressive, and linked with physical activity.

The scientific analysis of educative processes has led to a more detailed examination of the total act of teaching, which is intended to make the teacher more aware of all that is involved in a piece of instruction.

The complete act of teaching involves more than the presentation and development of lesson material. Before he embarks on a fresh stage of instruction, the teacher must be reasonably clear about two things: (1) the capabilities, achievements, strengths and weaknesses, background, and interests of his learners; and (2) the short- and long-term objectives he hopes to achieve in his lesson and series of lessons. These curricular strategies will have to be put into effect in the light of what is known about the students and will result in the actual tactics of the teaching–learning situation.

Educational (educational psychology) psychologists give much attention to diagnosing preinstructional achievements, particularly in the basic subjects of language and number, and to measuring intellectual ability in the form of reasoning power. There has been special emphasis on the idea of the student's readiness at various ages to grasp concepts of concrete and formal thought. Numerous agencies produce test material for these purposes, and in many countries the idea has been widely applied to selection for entry to secondary and higher schools; one of the purposes of so-called leaving examinations is to grade students as to their suitability for further stages of education. The teacher himself, however, can provide the most sensitive diagnoses and analyses of preinstructional capacity, and the existence of so much published material in no way diminishes the effectiveness of his responsibility.

In the actual instruction, a single lesson is usually a part of a longer sequence covering months or more. Each lesson, however, stands to some extent as a self-contained unit within a sequence. In addition, each lesson itself is a complex of smaller teaching–learning–thinking elements. The progress of a lesson may consist of a cycle of smaller units of shorter duration, each consisting of instruction by the teacher and construction by the learner—that is, alternating phases in which first the activity of the teacher and then that of the learner predominates.

The lesson or syllabus proper is thus not to be narrowly conceived of as “chalk and talk” instruction. It is better seen as a succession of periods of varying length of instruction by the teacher and of discovery, construction, and problem solving by the pupil. Although the student's own curiosity, experience, and observation are important, so is the cyclic activity of teacher and learner. The teacher selects, arranges, and partially predigests the material to be learned, and this is what is meant by guiding the learner's discovery and construction activity. It is a role the teacher cannot abrogate, and, even in curricula revised to give the learner greater opportunity to discover for himself, there is concealed a large degree of selecting and decision making by the teacher. This is what teaching is about.

Teachers must face the problem of how to maintain curiosity and interest as the chief motivative (motivation) forces behind the learning. Sustained interest leads the student to set himself realistic standards of achievement. Vital intrinsic motivation may sometimes be supplemented by extrinsic rewards and standards originating from sources other than the student himself, such as examinations and outside incentives, but these latter are better regarded as props to support the attention of the learner and to augment his interest in the subject matter.

At the end of the lesson proper or of any other unit or program of instruction, the teacher must assess its results before moving to the next cycle of teaching events. Assuming the occurrence of teaching–learning cycles of instruction-construction activity, it follows that there is a built-in process of frequent assessment during the progress of any period of teaching. The results of the small phases of the learner's problem solving provide at the same time both the assessment of past progress and the readiness for further development.

Progress over longer intervals of learning can be measured by more formal tests or examinations within the school or at local administrative level. Postinstructional assessment may have several purposes: to discover when classes or year groups have reached some minimum level of competence, to produce a measure of individual differences, or to diagnose individual learning–thinking difficulties. A wide variety of assessment can be used for this purpose, including the analysis of work produced in the course of learning, continuous assessments by the teachers, essay-type examinations, creative tasks, and objective tests. The content of the assessment material may also vary widely, ranging from that that asks for reproduction of learned material to that that evokes application, generalization, and transfer to new problem situations.

Educational organization rests to some extent on psychological views about learning, but explicitly it is concerned with the grouping of pupils for educational experience and instruction.

Pupils in general are organized by age into what are usually termed grades (graded school), classes, or forms. Each school is also usually either comprehensive (comprehensive school) (containing students pursuing various academic, commercial, and vocational curricula) or based on the so-called dual plan (containing only students pursuing a particular curriculum). In some countries, this dual system is actually tripartite: there may be schools for classical academic study, schools for technical or vocational study, and schools for more generalized, “modern,” diversified study. Whether comprehensive or dual-plan, schools frequently have some kind of streaming or multitracking whereby students are grouped according to ability so that there are separate classes for the less able and the more able.

Grading and streaming have recently come in for much criticism. There is a rigidity in the two systems that causes some educators uneasiness, particularly since total education is seen as more than achievement in school subjects. Some countries, notably the United States, have made a start in trying to solve this difficulty by introducing the nongraded school, in which grades are abolished and students are placed individually in “phases” for each subject, through which they progress at their own pace. A similar solution has been to ungrade students for certain basic subjects, such as mathematics and native language, but to have them rejoin their age peers for other school activities. In such systems there is, nevertheless, a kind of grading by intellectual ability, and egalitarians are apt still to be suspicious of them. There is scarcely any clear evidence of the effectiveness of the wholly nongraded system. It would seem probable that the optimum organization may be to combine grading with nongrading. Although this will involve constructing complex timetables, it will also offer the advantages of other, more rigid systems without introducing too many of their disadvantages. For one thing, retaining some grouping by age seems important as a link to extramural activities, in which age peers tend spontaneously to come together.

The modern interest in resources for learning has led to the concepts of general-purpose classrooms, open-plan teaching, and team teaching. The idea of general-purpose classrooms starts from the assumption that the school curriculum can be divided into a few large areas of allied intellectual interests, such as the humanities, languages, and sciences. The total resources available for teaching in each of these areas, including teachers, are then made available in one common teaching space, and ordinary classroom and lesson-period divisions disappear, to be replaced by a real mobility between teachers and learners as they make use of the different resources available, including library and laboratory facilities and various educational hardware (see below Instructional media (pedagogy)). In the infant and primary schools, similar ideas are introduced in the open-plan system. At both the primary and the secondary levels, however, there is insufficient evidence on the effectiveness of the systems. The attitude and action of the teacher remains the strongest factor, and he may still require some privacy for his teaching.

Team teaching represents an attempt to make better use of every teacher's potential in any subject area, to create a flexible learning situation, and to make nonstreaming more effective. The normal class of 30 pupils with an individual subject teacher is replaced by a larger group of pupils and a team of teachers, who pool their efforts. Although the team plan may take several forms, it generally assumes some variety of the following elements: (1) large-group instruction, in which the total complement of some 50 to 150 students in the program is periodically taught by one teacher (either the same teacher or several teachers in rotation) in a lecture hall; (2) small-group instruction, which alternates with large-group instruction so as to allow small numbers of students and a member of the teaching team to discuss, report, and exchange ideas; (3) independent study, whereby students are given individual projects or library work; and (4) team planning sessions, in which, daily or weekly, the teachers plan, coordinate, report on, and evaluate their programs. The presumed benefits of team teaching are that it makes better use of each teacher's individual interests and strengths; that it avoids unnecessary replication, particularly in such basic subjects as native literature, in which ordinarily several classes led by different teachers cover the same ground; and that teaching in front of one's colleagues is a beneficial practice providing some evaluative feedback. Also, it is said that the less able children do not feel so segregated as in ordinary streamed classes; although they may gain little from the large-group sessions and individual projects, they seem to make real progress in the small seminar groups, without becoming overaware of their more limited capabilities. The reasons for this are obscure. In any event, the most obvious advantage of team teaching is its flexibility, in affording a great variety of possible combinations of student groupings and of educational resources. The major problem is that team teaching cannot be used in all subject areas. Although it may be useful in such areas as the humanities and the social sciences, its provision for lecture-size audiences does not aid the teaching of such subjects as mathematics, in which there are too many individual differences in ability. The same is true of arts and other subjects. Furthermore, without expert leadership, seminars are apt to degenerate into scenes of rather woolly discussions.

The grouping of children by ability, though still practiced, remains a problem. Formal tests are used to separate students according to their ability, and many people feel that separations by such means are neither reliable nor socially desirable. Even with regard to separating the mentally handicapped (special education), there is growing opinion that wherever possible these children should be given basic instruction in special centres and remedial classes in schools for normal children. Handicapped and normal children would thereby share much of their education. Separation of the sexes is also declining in most countries, as the mixing of girls and boys comes to be recognized as healthy and socializing.

In general, instructional media are seen by educators as aids rather than substitutions for the teacher. A teacher spends a disproportionate amount of his time in routine chores—in collecting and assigning books and materials and in marking—that could be partly obviated if aids could be so constructed as to free him to concentrate on the central job of promoting understanding, intellectual curiosity, and creative activity in the learner.

In lectures and recordings, the teacher is able to set out his material as he thinks best, but usually the audience reception is weakly passive since there is not much opportunity for a two-way communication of ideas. Furthermore, in lectures, much of the students' energies may be taken up with note writing. This inhibits thinking about the material. Recordings enable one to store lecture material and to use it on occasions when a teacher is not available, but they are rather detached for young learners and seem to evoke better results with older students.

Language laboratories are study rooms equipped with electronic sound-reproduction devices, enabling students to hear model pronunciations of foreign languages and to record and hear their own voices as they engage in pattern drills. Most laboratories provide a master control board that permits a teacher to listen to and correct any student individually. Many are equipped to use filmstrips or motion pictures simultaneously with the tape recorders. These laboratories are effective modes of operant learning, and, after a minimum vocabulary and syntax have been established, the learning can be converted into a stimulating form of problem solving.

Useful visual materials include objects and models, diagrams, charts, graphs, cartoons, and posters; maps, globes, and sand tables for illustrating topographical items; pictures, slides, filmstrips, motion pictures, and television. Facilities include blackboards, bulletin boards, display cases, tables and areas, museums, flannel boards, and electric boards. Such activities as field trips and the use of visiting authorities (usually called resource people) are considered part of visual and observational programs, and even demonstrations, dramatizations, experiments, and creative activities are usually included.

In general, pictures and diagrams, fieldwork, and contrived experiments and observations are all used as concrete leads to the generalizing, abstracting, and explaining that constitutes human learning. To fulfil this function, however, their use must be accompanied by interpretation by an adult mind.

The teacher must offer careful elaboration and discussion, for children's and adolescents' powers to interpret and infer often go astray and thus must be carefully guided. Visual material by itself may even be a hindrance; a scattering of pretty pictures through a history text, for example, does not necessarily produce a better understanding of history. Similar difficulties are inherent in fieldwork—geographical, biological, archaeological, and geological. What is observed rarely gives the whole story and, in the case of archaeological and geological fieldwork, provides an incomplete picture of the past. The teacher must fill in the gaps or somehow lead his students to do so.

Reading and writing have formed the staple of traditional education. This assumes sophisticated language attainments and the capacity to think formally and respond to another mind, for a textbook is essentially a mode of communication between a remote teacher and a reader. The material in a textbook is a sample of a subject area, simplified to a level suitable for the reader. Because the sampling in both the text and the exercise might be haphazard, and there can be no feedback to the writer, the teacher has to take on the writer's responsibilities.

The large storage and calculating capacities of the computer suggest great potential for its use in the classroom. It can give instructions to the learner, call for responses, feed back the results, and modify his further learning accordingly. The computer can also be used to measure each student's attainments, compare them with past performances, and then advise teachers on what parts of the curriculum they should follow next.

In a fully computer-assisted instruction program, the computer takes over from the teacher in providing the learner with drill, practice, and revision, as well as testing and diagnosis. The form of the teaching may be simply linear or branching, or it can be extended to thinking and problem solving by simulation. The limitations at the moment centre on the learner's responses, which are limited to a prescribed set of multiple choices. Free, creative responses, which one associates with the best of classroom situations, cannot yet be accommodated.

The earliest mental-discipline theories of teaching were based on a premise that the main justification for teaching anything is not for itself but for what it trains—intelligence, attitudes, and values. By choosing the right material and by emphasizing rote methods of learning, according to this theory, one disciplines the mind and produces a better intellect.

In classical times, the ideal product of education was held to be a citizen trained in the disciplined study of a restricted number of subjects—grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy. The mode of learning was based on imitation and memorizing, and there was heavy emphasis on the intellectual authority of the teacher, as in the socratic method of question and answer. In later centuries, it was further taken for granted that the study of Greco-Roman literature and philosophy would have a liberalizing effect on the student.

In the hands of the Renaissance Dutch philosopher Erasmus and the Jesuit Fathers, this method of instruction took more sensitive account of the psychological characteristics of young learners. Understanding had to precede learning, and, according to the Jesuits, the teacher's first task was careful preparation of the material to be taught (the prelection). But even with this greater awareness of the learner's needs, the concept of mental discipline still underlay the whole process of instruction. Present-day critics of this classical humanistic approach would challenge the alleged power of mental discipline and the rather exclusive value of Greco-Roman thought.

The theory of learning involving mental discipline is more commonly associated with Aristotle's (Aristotle) “faculty psychology”, by which the mind is understood to be composed of a number of faculties, each of which is considered to be relatively independent of the others. The principle had its origin in a theory that classified mental and spiritual life in terms of functions of the soul: knowing, feeling, hungering, reasoning, and doing. From the Middle Ages to the early 19th century, the number of recognized faculties grew and included those of judgment, duty, perception, and conception. Since these were associated with certain parts of the cranium by the phrenologists, it was a natural step to assume that learning would consist of the exercise of these “parts,” or mental capabilities (though the education of the senses also had a role, in initiating the rational cognitive processes). Certain school subjects were thought to have particular value as agents for exercising certain faculties. Geometry trained the faculty of reason, and history trained the memory. School subjects came to be valuable as much for what faculties they trained as for their own intrinsic worth. This is the learning theory of formal discipline.

Psychological faculties, used as categories, no doubt influenced the study of so-called mental factors. When different cognitive tests are given and the results compared, similarities are found among all the tests and among smaller groups of them. The bases for the similarities are identified as mental factors, including the ideas of intelligence, reasoning, memory, verbal ability, number capacity, and spatial intelligence. The existence of common mental factors underlying different school subjects would support the idea of formal discipline and would lead to the notion of transfer of training (training, transfer of), by which exercise in one school subject leads to improvements in learning of another. The transferred elements could be common facts, learning habits, methods of thinking, attitudes, and values. Though much empirical research has been done on transfer of learning, it has yielded mixed results. Some workers hold that transfer has been possible only insofar as there have been identical elements, and even those who claim a transfer of methods generally insist that transfer has little chance of success unless it is actively explained and applied. Learners have to apply methods consciously to the new field in order to succeed. The opposing view would be that each subject is unique and requires its own mode of thought. A more realistic view may be intermediate—namely, that there is both a common and a specific element in each intellectual field, that mental discipline or transfer of training is to some degree possible but only insofar as the similarities and analogies are utilized, that the process is deliberate, and that a residue of specific subject matter remains in each field. This requires specific learning.

A few educational theorists view the education of the child as an unfolding process. The child develops inevitably as a product of nature, and the main function of the teacher is to provide the optimum conditions for this development. This leads to the theory that the child's experience is the essential thing. A Swiss educator, J.H. Pestalozzi (Pestalozzi, Johann Heinrich), was a leading theorist in this field, and his practical schemes were designed to provide the most appropriate experience for the child's development. In a sense, the modern revival of the potency of experience is an acknowledgement of the developmental element in learning.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Rousseau, Jean-Jacques) also started from the assumption that man conforms to nature. Since, more than Pestalozzi, he assumed the certainty of a spontaneous development of powers and faculties, he urged that any form of constraint was to be avoided. Thus it has been held that he saw man as a noble savage growing in isolation in a state of nature. But nature also means a social life. The consequences of Rousseau's basic view have been (1) a reduced emphasis on knowing and greater emphasis on acting and doing, (2) a promotion of positive interests in learning, and (3) an encouragement of the child to depend on his own resources. In their purest form, naturalistic theories are clearly inadequate in the modern world of technology, but their emphasis on spontaneous child activity, as opposed to excessive formal instruction, is a valuable component of the educational process.

Another theory assumed that human learning consisted essentially of building up associations (association) between different ideas and experiences; the mind, in accordance with the ideas of the 17th-century English philosopher John Locke, was assumed to be at first devoid of ideas. The 19th-century German philosopher Johann Herbart (Herbart, Johann Friedrich) made an important contribution by providing a mental mechanism that determined which ideas would become conscious and which would be left in the subconscious, to be called upon if circumstances warranted it. This was the mechanism of apperception, by which new ideas became associated with existing ideas to form a matrix of association ideas called the apperception mass. New ideas were thus assimilated to the old. A Swiss psychologist, Jean Piaget (Piaget, Jean), argued that such assimilation was not enough, that accommodation of the established ideas to the new experiences was also required.

In any event, ideas such as Herbart's were translated into a sequence of steps presumed to be required to carry out a lesson:

1. Preparation, whereby the teacher starts the lesson with something already known to the class

2. Presentation, introducing new material

3. Association, whereby the new is compared with the old and connected (the stage of apperception)

4. Generalization, whereby the teacher presents other instances of the new idea

5. Application, whereby the ideas are applied to further material, carried out by the child individually (a problem-solving phase)

Though these five steps give the teacher a clear role, they constitute a form of intellectual dominance and could lead to stereotyped lessons restricting the spontaneous creative learning by the pupil. Contemporary curricular revisions, on the contrary, aim at promoting pupil activity.

In the act of classical conditioning (Pavlovian conditioning), the learner comes to respond to stimuli other than the one originally calling for the response (as when dogs are taught to salivate at the sound of a bell). One says in such a situation that a new stimulus is learned. In the human situation, learning to recognize the name of an object or a foreign word constitutes a simple instance of stimulus learning. Such an event is called sign learning, because, in knowing the sign for something, a person to some extent makes a response to the sign similar to that that he would make to the object itself. Learning new vocabularies, new terms and conventions, or algebraic and chemical symbols all involve some degree of classical conditioning. It is thought probable that one trains the emotions in the same way, for a person may learn to feel pleasure not only when he meets the original situation causing the pleasure but also when he sees some wider context associated with it. This idea is important in school teaching and helps in a general way to explain children's positive and negative feelings toward school, feelings that may have arisen originally from difficulties in learning specific school subjects.

Operant, or instrumental, conditioning is so-called because, in making his response, the learner provides the instrument by which a problem is solved. This learning is more important to schoolwork, for teachers are concerned ultimately with drawing forth new responses from their students. Learning is active, and, after the early acquisition of vocabulary, terminology, and rules (by stimulus learning), the learner must use this material in problem-solving responses. By reinforcement (e.g., a reward), both sorts of learning can be combined.

Conditioning theories are not wholly adequate to explain school learning, since the learner is not simply a responder. Intervening between the stimulus and the response is the learner's total conscious structure, made up of the results of experience, previous teaching, attitudes, and his own capacity to comment upon and edit his own response. Simple reinforcement is also inadequate in that the stimulus and the response are not linked in an exclusive one-to-one basis. Several stimuli may evoke a single response, and several responses may be made to a particular stimulus. These form the behavioral bases for the formation of concepts and transfer effects from one topic to another. The two basic modes of stimulus-response learning provide a ground analysis of school learning, but the complexity of academic achievement calls for much elaboration on the simple model.

Cognitive theories are appropriate to the school situation, for they are concerned with knowing and thinking. They assume that perceiving and doing, shown in manipulation and play, precede the capacity to symbolize, which in turn prepares for comprehensive understanding. Although the sequence of motor-perceptual experience followed by symbolic representation has been advocated for a long time, Jean Piaget offered the first penetrating account of this kind of intellectual growth. His views have exercised great influence on educators.

Cognitive theories of learning also assume that the complete act of thought follows a fairly common sequence, as follows: arousal of intellectual interest; preliminary exploration of the problem; formulation of ideas, explanations, or hypotheses; selection of appropriate ideas; and verification of their suitability.

Teaching based on cognitive theories of learning recognizes, first, the growth in quality of intellectual activity and capitalizes on this knowledge by organizing instruction to anticipate the next stage in development but does not await it; otherwise there would be no instruction; i.e., instruction should pace development but not outstrip it. Second, it seeks to tune the learning situation to the sequences of the complete act of thought and to arrange, simplify, and organize the subject matter accordingly. Some educators emphasize strongly the arousal phase; in many modern science curricula there is, thus, the idea of inquiry training, which tries to arouse in the child a spontaneous rather than a directed interest. Other educators are concerned more with the middle intellectual phases of the thinking sequence—especially the playing with hypotheses or hunches and the working with organizing ideas and concepts.

Once started, the motivation of cognitive learning depends less on notions of reinforcement and more on standards of intellectual achievement generated by the learner himself. Accordingly, the learner may begin to have aspirations and to set himself future standards that are influenced by his past performances and those of his fellows.

Readiness theories of learning lean heavily on the concept of maturation in stages of biological and mental development. It is assumed that a child passes through all stages of development in reaching maturity. The teacher finds out what a child is ready for and then devises appropriate materials and methods. Much of the work on reading skills, for instance, makes use of the readiness concept. The Italian educator Maria Montessori (Montessori, Maria) claimed that “periods of sensitivity,” corresponding to certain ages, exist when a child's interest and mental capacity are best suited to acquiring knowledge of such things as textures and colours, tidiness, and language.

Insofar as Piaget (Piaget, Jean) offered a learning theory, it was based on the idea of readiness. But his approach to development does not overemphasize maturation and readiness, for he pointed out that, after the first few months of life, maturation is marginal in its effects, whereas experience is essential. Development through different intellectual phases, he believed, is necessarily coincident with relevant active experience; readiness is actively promoted, not passively entered, and the teacher must endeavour to be a step ahead of any particular level of readiness.

The second half of the 20th century saw a revival of the concept of the structured wholeness of experience, which Gestalt (Gestalt psychology) psychologists had first introduced early in the century. The whole of experience, in this view, is more than the sum of its parts. In educational terms, a new experience—such as a new historical text, an exposition in science, or a problem rider in geometry—begins by seeming relatively formless and unstructured. The learner, who does not yet know his way about the material, begins by seizing upon what appear to him to be important features or figures. He then reformulates the experience in these new terms. The insight gradually becomes more and more structured until finally he reaches an understanding or a solution to the problem. It may be that, in all these processes, the learner may try anything he can think of, usually in a haphazard way.

Piaget improved upon Gestalt notions by suggesting a thought structure of a more adaptable nature—one that becomes more differentiated and intuitive with experience. He listed three psychological properties of a structure: wholeness, relationship between parts, and the principle of homeostasis, whereby a mental structure adjusts itself to new experience by assimilation and accommodation. This kind of structuralism found quite independent advocates in other fields. In language, for example, an American, Noam Chomsky (Chomsky, Noam), believes that there are innate language structures in the young individual, just as Piaget insists that there are thought structures.

A belief in the structural nature of experience would conceive of the teacher as an encourager, example provider, coanalyzer, and cobuilder of mental structures that originate in the learner in a relatively undifferentiated state. The learner is assumed to be active in forming structures and to be making the best he can of the situation he experiences. The teacher's task is to help and moderate this process of the learner's active construction. This notion works easily and well with able children but entails careful selection with less able students.

Others have also stressed the structural nature of advanced cognitive learning. Each area of human knowledge, in this view, is said to have its own unique structure composed of its concepts and their relationships and its own basic modes of progress. It is suggested that teaching a school subject should not lead to too much tampering with the inherent structural order of the subject but should follow the structure and lines of development of the subject itself. Teaching should not be contrived and artificial. Thus, economics should be taught as an economist views it or physics as a physicist views it or language as a linguist views it. Although such ideas are generally attractive, they have not been widely translated with any success into actual school practice.