Control of Student Mediating Processes During Verbal Learning and Instruction

Abstract

The general thesis of this paper is that the activities the student engages in when confronted with instructional tasks are of crucial importance in determining what he will learn. The alternative is to view the student as a passive receptacle whose learning and performance are directly determined by input variables. In the latter view, long the dominant one in psychology as well as in education, the function of the educational researcher is to develop what Rothkopf (1965, 1968) calls a calculus of practice. However, if the student is inevitably an active agent in his own learning, it is important to consider an approach in which the emphasis is upon discovering ways of managing the student activities which give rise to learning.