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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.

Usually, children in the early grades must learn to direct their attention in response to verbal communications. Although a child may initially attend to a picture shown in a workbook, he must also learn to respond appropriately to such verbal directions as "Look at the upper part of this picture," or "Notice the letter under this picture." Oral or printed directions of this sort may come to control attention over the course of several learning acts. In some instances, however, special efforts need to be made to insure that this early phase of learning—attending—has itself been learned. As the learner gains in experience, the control of his attention by oral or printed directions becomes virtually an automatic feature of his behavior.

Perceiving. The attentional set adopted by the learner determines what aspects of the external stimulation are perceived. In other words, the registration of stimuli by the learner is a matter of selective perception. Guided by previous learning, by verbal directions, or by other cues, the learner perceives the words on a printed page, not the composition of the print and paper; he perceives the form of a printed triangle, not the thickness of its lines. Given a different attentional set for a different learning goal, he might attend to the type of print rather than to the words, or to the characteristics of the lines rather than the form of the triangle. His perception is selective, as determined by the attentional set which has been adopted, and the set in turn is influenced by directions which reflect the particular goal of learning. Of course, it is common for sophisticated learners to give themselves directions and thus control their own attention processes.

In order for selective perception to be possible, the various features of external stimulation must be distinguished or discriminated. Although many discriminations have been learned by the child by the time he attains school age, some may not have been, and this fact establishes the need for perceptual learning. For example, the child in kindergarten or first grade may not yet have learned to perceive a printed "d" as different from a printed "b"; they look the same to him. In hearing musical sounds, he may not yet have learned to discriminate the progressions sol-fa and fa-sol. Thus, before further learning can occur, the young child may need to learn to discriminate; that is, he must learn to perceive selectively the features of external stimulation which enter into other acts of learning.

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