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1.1
Learning: definition and theoretical core
references
Learning
, according to the de nition proposed by the psychologist
Ernest Hilgard,
is an intellectual process through which the individual ac-
quires knowledge about the world that he subsequently uses to structure and
guide his behaviour in the long run
.
Learning may be the result of spontaneous processes, as occurs in
children, such as with language, or it can be induced and guided
through outside teaching. Psychology and pedagogy are often con-
cerned with the learning processes, producing many and different in-
terpretational theories on learning, classi ed according to the great
schools of psychology of the 20th century. The main theoretical cores
in the research on learning are the behaviourism, the cognitivism
and the constructivism.
Behaviourism
is based on an association-like concept, considering
learning as a result of new combinations between stimuli and be-
haviour in response to stimuli. In this approach there is a learning
concept of summative type, which considers the subject as essentially
passive. What is being learned is a copy of the presented stimulus
therefore learning can be measured, on the one hand, by comparing
the behaviour acquired after the learning situation to the previously
presented one, and on the other hand, it can be evaluated according
to the criteria of quantity and accuracy of performance.
The authors of reference of the behaviourist approach are J.B. Wat-
son, I. Pavlov, E. Thorndike, B. Skinner.
The
cognitivist approach
moves away from the behaviourist models
shifting the focus away from the concept of association to that of an
active subject in working out the surrounding reality, better revealing
the internal processes of preparation and representation. If in the
behaviourist perspective learning is studied through the manifested
behaviour and treated as a “unitary” phenomenon, in the new cog-
nitivist perspective we notice a fragmentation of the scope of inquiry
and learning is rede ned in relation to the different cognitive com-
ponents involved. In particular, there is a strong association between
the study of learning and the study of memory, because, in order to
learn, you rst need to know how to encode, store, integrate and re-
member a set of information. So, since the information are processed
rst by the senses and then by memory, the projection of the training