Learning outcomes and their effects: Useful categories of human performance.

Abstract

The outcomes of learning are persistent states that make possible a variety of human performances. While learning results are specific to the task undertaken, learning investigators have sought to identify broader categories of learning outcomes in order to foresee to what extent their findings can be generalized. Five varieties of learning outcomes have been distinguished and appear to be widely accepted. The categories are (a) intellectual skills (procedural knowledge), (b) verbal information (declarative knowledge), (c) cognitive strategies (executive control processes), (d) motor skills, and (e) attitudes. Each of these categories may be seen to encompass a broad variety of human activities. It is held that results indicating the effects on learning of most principal independent variables can be generalized within these categories but not between them. This article identifies additional effects of each type of learning outcome and discusses the current state of knowledge about them. The question of understanding how human beings learn has been a central theme of psychological research since the time of the English associationist philosophers Hobbes, Locke, and Mill, and the experimental work of Ebbinghaus( 1913) in 1885. From that time until the present day, learning has been understood as a change of state of the human being that is remembered and that makes possible a corresponding change in the individual's behavior in a given type of situation. This change of state must, of course, be distinguished from others that may be effected by innate forces, by maturation, or by other physiological influences. Instead, learning is brought about by one or more experiences that are either the same as or that somehow represent the situation in which the newly acquired behavior is exhibited. Psychologists who have studied the phenomenon of learning have sometimes confined their observations to human Such learning was studied by the followers of the Ebbinghaus tradition and was usually referred to as verbal Verbal learning was studied by such investigators as Robinson (1932), McGeoch (1932), Melton (1963), Postman (1961), and Underwood (1957), among others. Many students of however, did not hesitate to study the behavior of animals as well as humans nor to relate the phenomena observed across the species gap. Pioneers in this tradition include Thorndike (1898), Guthrie (1935), Tolman (1932), and Hull (1943). Other differences in fundamental approaches to the study of human learning arose from points of view noted by Bower and Hilgard (1981) as empiricism versus rationalism, contiguity versus reinforcement, and gradual increments versus all-or-none spurts. These issues persist down to the present day and cannot be said to have been resolved in the sense of having attained a consensus of scientists. Perhaps, though, the most distinctive differences among studies of as reported to us by various investigators, are differences in the behavior-in-situation that identifies the new This is often referred to as the learning task, a phrase that implies that its specification includes both the external situation and the behavior that interacts with it. This tendency to identify learning with the situation is reflected in texts having learning as a subject, such as Hulse, Deese, and Egeth (1975), or Hill (1981). When Melton (1964) assembled chapters in Categories of Human Learning, they dealt with such familiar situations as the classically conditioned eye blink, operant conditioning of pigeons, rote learning of verbal associates, incidental learning of word pairs, and perceptual-motor skills Even when theories of learning are addressed directly, as by Bower and Hilgard (1981), we find the theoretical ideas tied to situations such as dogs salivating to the sight of food, pigeons pecking at circular spots, rats running to food boxes, or people learning paired associates. The advent of the cognitive of as represented in books done by Klatzky (1980), Bransford (1979), and Anderson (1980), among others, has broadened the situations employed for the study of Thus, we now have insightful studies of the learning of elementary arithmetic (Resnick & Ford, 1981), of constructing geometric proofs (Greeno, 1978b), of story comprehension (Stein & Trabasso, 1982), and of the prediction of rainfall (Stevens & Collins, 1982). Most surely, it is a welcome change to find investigators of human learning choosing schoolroom situations for learning or at least sitApril 1984 • American Psychologist Copyright 1984 by the American Psychological Association, Inc. Vol. 39, No. 4, 377-385 377 uations that have what might be called face validity with tasks encountered by students. The greater diversity of such situations, as contrasted with the narrowly denned learning of paired associates on a memory drum, is a welcome change. If there are cautions to be noted, they may be expressed in the hope that these new school-learning tasks will not themselves become frozen into narrow channels of study, so that we end up with the psychology of arithmetic learning, the psychology of reading learning, the psychology of geometry learning, and the like. I do not think this will necessarily happen. Nevertheless, in our enthusiasm for a newly found freedom from a set of traditional learning tasks, we should, I think, keep firmly in mind that a of learning seeks generalizations that are not tied to particular learning situations. The history of learning should help us remember this lesson. For many years, studies of paired associates sought to discover general principles about the learning of associations. As understanding increased, however, such studies came to be seen as dealing with a very particular kind of learning task called paired-associate learning. Many, perhaps most, of the results obtained apply only to that specific learning task. Should the study of learning continue to be situation bound? Of course, the conceptions of Skinner (1969) offer a way out. Those who view learning as a matter of arranging contingencies of reinforcement can demonstrate how that principle applies to virtually every situation. The case for application of reinforcement techniques as a way of arranging situations for learning is entirely convincing; it is indeed difficult to find contrary evidence. Yet the tendency of learning investigators to seek more detailed specifications for learning situations, from mazes to geometry, implies that reinforcement contingencies are not enough. Greater specificity continues to be sought in the description of the interaction between learner and environment—in the task, in other words. Students of learning phenomena continue to find dimensions of the learning situation that do not contradict the operation of reinforcement but that must be described in greater detail. This article was originally presented as a Distinguished Scientific Award for the Applications of Psychology address at the meeting of the American Psychological Association, Anaheim, California,