Talking about learning processes, in 1975 R M Gagne, a American educational psychologist, characterised the one so called “chain of learning”, by which people acquire and interact new information with their new environments.
This method can be applied to all kinds of learning in any environments they are taking place under a chain of events, like this:

Gagne’s Learning Chain
- Motivation: The first thing must be occurred in your mind as soon as you’re going to learn something. To learn effectively, you have to want to learn. It’s too simplistic for people to ignore anyway.
- Perception: It means learning objectives, by make clear about what is to be learned.
- Acquisition: This may be conscious or unconscious process by which the learner can gain the information during learning time after having established a perception of what need to learn. Searching more information, raise questions for the lectures are listed as examples.
- Retention: Retaining, the way to remember what you have learned, so the learners can transferred their lessons from short team memory to long term memory. It’s rather closed to the next step, recall.
- Recall: It’s not easy to recall something in your memory since you need to refresh to get more information day by day. For this reason, Gagne advised that we have to able to recall the peaces of information in regular time after having retained learning.
- Generalisation: Make what we having learned become value by bring them to our lives, in practical situations that appropriate.
- Performance: Closed to previous step, we need to be able to put it into practices.
- Feedback: After having make effort to learn something new and put into practices, now is the time to check out if the learning is really effective. This can be by getting the reaction of those who around you, then continuously to build on what you have learned.
16/03/2010 at 7:34 pm Permalink
Is there any other learning method that we should know :P ?
16/03/2010 at 8:25 pm Permalink
Another theory that i can recommend developed by Kolb.
He said learning process is just a circle which is on-going and continuous: experience - reflection - conceptualisation - application. It’s also said this method is now widely used because the learning circle can become bigger and bigger while Gagne’s is such a chain of events.
Anw, i prefer the 1st since it’s easy quality controlled.