Showing papers on "Meaningful learning published in 1967"

The Basic Unit in Meaningful Learning: Association or Principle? (Set-Function Language)

Abstract: Theoretical development in educational psychology has been extremely slow. One major reason has been the typically imprecise definition of independent and dependent variables in research on meaningful learning and teaching. Such research can bear only an ambiguous relationship to theory. Similarities and essential differences often go undetected. As McDonald has put it,2 "Conceptual clarity means (a) specification, stated in terms as nearly operational as possible, of the behavior involved in a task or method; (b) some delineation of the range of phenomena included and excluded; and (c) precise description of the appropriate tests." Stating research objectives and defining variables in unambiguous terms, however, is not sufficient. The teaching-learning process has all too frequently been studied in terms of administrative variables, such as class size, grade level, and teaching experience. The variables chosen must have broad explanatory potential, not be merely symptomatic of and inextricably related to the question at hand. Theory development depends on much more than mere fact finding. To provide a substantive base for their research, educational psychologists have frequently resorted to the languages, paradigms, and theories of the mother science of psychology. Mediational elaborations and operant conditioning paradigms of the stimulus-response (S-R) language and more general, but less well-specified, cognitive theories have been popular. Each approach has important limitations. From one point of view,