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Apprehending Phase

The motivated learner must first receive the stimulation that will, in some transformed way, enter into the essential learning incident and be stored in his memory. He must, in other words, attend to the parts of the total stimulation that are relevant to his learning purpose. If he is listening to an oral communication, he must attend to its meaning as a set of sentences, and not to its cadence, accent, or musical quality. If he is reading a textbook, he needs to attend to its prepositional meaning, and not to its style of print or arrangement on the page. If he is observing a picture or demonstration, he must attend to the events and objects displayed, but not to their unessential features.

Motivation Phase

It is a truism that in order for learning to occur, one must have a motivated individual. But there are many forms of motivation, some of which are relevant to learning and instruction, and others which are not. For the promotion of learning, we must deal primarily with incentive motivation, a type of motivation in which the individual strives to achieve some goal and is in some sense rewarded for reaching it. His action is proceeding toward an achievable goal. Incentive motivation is involved in many school and classroom situations. The student who has begun a project on Greek sculpture wants to achieve the goal of completing it. The student who has begun to solve simultaneous algebraic equations wants to be able to do all such problems correctly, that is, to attain an answer which will "check out." The youngster in the first grade wants to learn about the strange new shell his classmate is showing and describing, because he can then ask a "good" question about it or perhaps later tell his parents about it.

Let us look more closely at the events, both external and internal, that transpire when learning takes place. There is, of course, a moment in time when the learner's internal state changes from not-learned to learned, which we will call the essential incident of learning. However, this incident is preceded by certain events that lead up to it and are no less fundamental to the total learning act. The essential incident is also followed by other events, also parts of the total act, which have to do with the execution of the performance that learning has made possible. Considering a single act of learning as a whole, then, it is necessary to describe a set of events that occupy at least a number of seconds and sometimes several minutes.

As indicated by the model introduced, learning recurs as a result of the interaction between a learner and his environment. We know learning has taken place when we observe that the learner's performance has been modified. At one moment in time, for example, a child may not be able to point to the correct article of furniture when we ask him the question, "Where is the credenza?" When we then indicate the credenza to him together with its name, we provide the opportunity for the interaction called learning to take place. Later, we ask the question again, and the child now identifies the object. By means of this set of observations, we see the change in the child's behavior, and we make the immediate inference that learning has taken place.