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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.

The typical series of events that constitute a single act of learning. This figure outlines eight phases into which a single act of learning may be analyzed. Each phase has been given a name, and under each phase name appears a box identifying the principal process considered operative during that phase. What we have done, in short, amounts to two things. First, we have spread out the internal processes of learning, as implied by the structures a single chain.  Second, we have considered each of these processes as a phase of an act of learning and given them appropriate labels. These labels (motivation phase, etc.) serve to relate the internal processes to the external events that constitute instruction; that is, they provide names for the total set of events (internal and external) that must be considered to take place during each phase of learning.

The phases of learning cannot necessarily be easily observed under everyday circumstances. Special experimental controls and specially designed learning situations are necessary in order to study any one or any combination of the phases in terms of its separate effects on the learning act. Such study, of course, is often the purpose of scientific investigations of learning.

Another caution needs to be made in interpreting the information. This is the fact that the learner is not aware, and apparently cannot be aware, of most of the processes of learning. Introspective accounts of what is happening internally during an act of learning have not been successful in revealing these processes. Usually, the learner's reports of his own processes are quite uninformative. It needs to be borne in mind that the processes and phases outlined result from many years of controlled observations of people who are engaged in learning, followed by rational construction of "what must be going on." These conclusions could not have been reached by a learning investigator examining his own mind.