• Concepts are concerned with grouping things into categories. What?
• Procedures are concerned with how to do something. How?
• Principles are concerned with predictions and explanations. Why?

Many topics can entail all 9 of these kinds of learning. For example, learning what "mastery learning" is could entail learning to apply a concept, apply a procedure, apply a principle, understand a concept, memorize a concept, and so forth for all 9 types. This is very important to understand, because students have trouble when we teach one kind of learning but test for another, such as teaching them to memorize the concept but asking them to apply the principle on a test. But this distinction is not just helpful for deciding what to teach (and test), but also for deciding how to teach it. Each of these kinds of learning requires quite different methods of instruction.

To summarize, the following are some important distinctions to remember. The rest of these modules will help you to understand and apply them.

Affective Learning
Physical (or Motor) Learning
Cognitive Learning
Memorizing Information
Understanding Relationships
Applying Skills
Classifying concepts
Using procedures
Using principles

  

• What is the purpose of instruction?
• Challenge: How to make good instruction?
• What are the relevant kinds of learning?
• Levels of Cognitive Learning
• Application-level learning
• Synthesis
• Self-Test