UNIVERSITY OF CALOOCAN CITY

Graduate School

Discussant: Eric D. Casañas

Course: MAED
Subject: PSYCHO – PHILOSOPHICAL FOUNDATION OF EDUCATION
Course Code: MAED 303
Date: October 10, 2020
Professor: Dr. Arnold M. Arenas

Title: CONTRIBUTION OF AUSUBEL, BLOOM

AND GAGNE
(Relationship of Education and Psychology, Contributions of the Schools
of Psychology to Education)

I.OBJECTIVES:
a) Identify the significant contributions of Ausubel, Bloom and Gagne to the
fields of educational psychology
b) Discuss the educational psychology theories that Ausubel, Bloom and
Gagne had pioneered
c) Know the impact of these educational theories in the teaching and
learning process

II. LEARNING CONTENT:

DAVID PAUL AUSUBEL (October 25, 1918 – July 9, 2008)

He was an American psychologist. He was born on October 25, 1918 and grew
up in Brooklyn, New York. He was nephew of the Jewish historian Nathan
Ausubel. Ausubel and his wife Pearl had two children.

His most significant contribution to the fields of educational psychology, cognitive

science, and science education learning was on the development and research
on "advance organizers" (see below) since 1960.

MAED 303 – PSYCHO – PHILOSOPHICAL FOUNDATION OF EDUCATION

Education

He studied at the University of Pennsylvania where he graduated with honors in

1939, receiving a bachelor's degree majoring in psychology. Ausubel later
graduated from medical school in 1943 at Middlesex University where he went on
to complete a rotating internship at Gouverneur Hospital, located in the lower
east side of Manhattan, New York. Following his military service with the US
Public Health Service, Ausubel earned his M.A. and Ph.D. in developmental
psychology from Columbia University in 1950. He continued to hold a series of
professorships at several schools of education.

Psychiatrist

In 1973, Ausubel retired from academic life and devoted himself to his psychiatric
practice. During his psychiatric practice, Ausubel published many books as well
as articles in psychiatric and psychological journals. In 1976, he received the
Thorndike Award from the American Psychological Association for "Distinguished
Psychological Contributions to Education".

ADVANCE ORGANIZERS
An advance organizer is information presented by an instructor that helps the
student organize new incoming information.This is achieved by directing attention
to what is important in the coming material, highlighting relationships, and
providing a reminder about relevant prior knowledge.
Advance organizers make it easier to learn new material of a complex or
otherwise difficult nature, provided the following two conditions are met:
1. The student must process and understand the information presented in
the organizer—this increases the effectiveness of the organizer itself. [6]
2. The organizer must indicate the relations among the basic concepts
and terms that will be used.

Types

Ausubel distinguiushes between two kinds of advance organizer: Comparative

and expository.

1. Comparative Organizers The main goal of comparative organizers is to

activate existing schemas. Similarly, they act as reminders to bring into the
working memory of what one may not realize is relevant. By acting as reminders,
the organizer points out explicitly "whether already established anchoring ideas
are nonspecifically or specifically relevant to the learning material" (Ausubel &
Robinson, 1969, p. 146). Similarly, a comparative organizer is used both to

MAED 303 – PSYCHO – PHILOSOPHICAL FOUNDATION OF EDUCATION

integrate as well as discriminate. It "integrate[s] new ideas with basically similar
concepts in cognitive structure, as well as increase[s] discriminability between
new and existing ideas which are essentially different but confusably similar"
(Ausubel, 1968, p. 149).
An example of a comparative organizer would be one used for a history lesson
on revolutions. This organizer "might be a statement that contrasts military
uprisings with the physical and social changes involved in the Industrial
Revolution" (Woolfolk et al., 2010, p. 289). Furthermore, one could also compare
common aspects of other revolutions from different nations.

2. Expository Organizers "In contrast, expository organizers provide new

knowledge that students will need to understand the upcoming information"
(Woolfolk et al., 2010, p. 289). Expository organizers are often used when the
new learning material is unfamiliar to the learner. They often relate what the
learner already knows with the new and unfamiliar material—this in turn is aimed
to make the unfamiliar material more plausible to the learner.
An example which Ausubel and Floyd G. Robinson provides in their book School
Learning: An Introduction To Educational Psychology is the concept of the
Darwinian theory of evolution. To make the Darwinian theory of evolution more
plausible, an expository organizer would have a combination of relatedness to
general relevant knowledge that is already present, as well as relevance for the
more detailed Darwinian theory.
Essentially, expository organizers furnish an anchor in terms that are already
familiar to the learner.
Another example would be the concept of a right angle in a mathematics class. A
teacher could ask students to point out examples of right angles that they can
find in the classroom.[6] By asking students to do this, it helps relates the students
present knowledge of familiar classroom objects with the unfamiliar concept of a
90 degree right angle.

Criticism
"The most persuasively voiced criticism of advance organizers is that their
definition and construction are vague and, therefore, that different researchers
have varying concepts of what an organizer is and can only rely on intuition in
constructing one-- since nowhere, claim the critics, is it specified what their
criteria are and how they can be constructed" (Ausubel, 1978, p. 251).
In a response to critics, Ausubel defends advance organizers by stating that
there is no one specific example in constructing advance organizers as they
"always depends on the nature of the learning material, the age of the learner,
and his degree of prior familiarity with the learning passage" (Ausubel, 1978,
p. 251).

MAED 303 – PSYCHO – PHILOSOPHICAL FOUNDATION OF EDUCATION

Another criticism of Ausubel’s advance organizers is that the critics often
compare the idea of advance organizers with overviews. However, Ausubel has
addressed that issue in saying that advance organizers differ from overviews "in
being relatable to presumed ideational content in the learner’s current cognitive
structure" (Ausubel, 1978, p. 252).
Thirdly, critics also address the notion of advance organizers on whether they are
intended to favour high ability or low ability students. However, Ausubel notes
that "advance organizers are designed to favour meaningful learning.." (Ausubel,
1978, p. 255). Therefore, to question whether advance organizers are better
suited for high or low ability students is unrelated as Ausubel argues that
advance organizers can be catered to any student to aid them in bridging a gap
between what they already know and what they are about to learn.

ROBERT MILLS GAGNÉ (August 21, 1916 – April 28, 2002)

He was an American educational psychologist best known for his Conditions of

Learning. He pioneered the science of instruction during World War II when he
worked with the Army Air Corps training pilots. He went on to develop a series of
studies and works that simplified and explained what he and others believed to
be "good instruction." Gagné was also involved in applying concepts of
instructional theory to the design of computer-based training and multimedia-
based learning.

Gagné's work is sometimes summarized as "the Gagné assumption". The

assumption is that different types of learning exist, and that different instructional
conditions are most likely to bring about these different types of learning.

In high school at North Andover, Massachusetts, he decided to study psychology

and perhaps be a psychologist after reading psychological texts. In his
valedictory speech of 1932, he said the science of psychology should be used to
relieve the burdens of human life.[1] He had a scholarship to Yale University, and
received A.B. in 1937. In graduate work at Brown University, he studied
"conditioned operate response" of white rats under various conditions as a part of
his Ph.D. thesis. His first college teaching job was in 1940, at Connecticut
College for Women.

His initial studies of people rather than rats were interrupted by World War II. In
the first year of war, at Psychological Research Unit No. 1, Maxwell Field,
Alabama, he administered and scored aptitude tests to choose and sort aviation
cadets. Thereafter, he was assigned to officer school in Miami Beach. He was
commissioned a second lieutenant, and assigned to School of Aviation Medicine,
Randolph Field, Fort Worth, Texas.

MAED 303 – PSYCHO – PHILOSOPHICAL FOUNDATION OF EDUCATION

After the war, he held a temporary faculty position at Pennsylvania State
University. He returned to Connecticut College for Women. In 1949, he accepted
an offer to join the US Air Force organization that became the Air Force
Personnel and Training Research Center, where he was research director of the
Perceptual and Motor Skills Laboratory. In 1958, he returned to academia as
professor at Princeton University, where his research shifted focus to the learning
of problem solving and the learning of mathematics. In 1962, he joined the
American Institutes for Research, where he wrote his first book, Conditions of
Learning. He spent additional time in academia at the University of California,
Berkeley, where he worked with graduate students. With W. K. Roher, he
presented a paper, "Instructional Psychology", to the Annual Review of
Psychology.

In 1969, he found a lasting home at Florida State University. He collaborated with

L. J. Briggs on Principles of Learning. He published the second and third editions
of The Conditions of Learning.

Conditions of Learning, by Robert M. Gagné, was originally published in 1965

by Holt, Rinehart and Winston and describes eight kinds of learning and nine
events of instruction. This theory of learning involved two steps. The theory
stipulates that there are several different types or levels of learning. The
significance of these classifications is that each different type requires different
types of instruction. Gagné identifies five major categories of learning: verbal
information, intellectual skills, cognitive strategies, motor skills and attitudes.
Different internal and external conditions are necessary for each type of learning.
For example, for cognitive strategies to be learned, there must be a chance to
practice developing new solutions to problems; to learn attitudes, the learner
must be exposed to a credible role model or persuasive arguments.
Gagné suggests that learning tasks for intellectual skills can be organized in a
hierarchy according to complexity: stimulus recognition, response generation,
procedure following, use of terminology, discrimination, concept formation, rule
application, and problem solving. The primary significance of the hierarchy is to
identify prerequisites that should be completed to facilitate learning at each level.
Prerequisites are identified by doing a task analysis of a learning/training task.
Learning hierarchies provide a basis for the sequencing of instruction.
In addition, the theory outlines nine instructional events and corresponding
cognitive processes:

1. Gaining attention (reception)

2. Informing learners of the objective (expectancy)
3. Stimulating recall of prior learning (retrieval)
4. Presenting the stimulus (selective perception)
5. Providing learning guidance (semantic encoding)

MAED 303 – PSYCHO – PHILOSOPHICAL FOUNDATION OF EDUCATION

 6. Eliciting performance (responding)
7. Providing feedback (reinforcement)
8. Assessing performance (retrieval)
9. Enhancing retention and transfer (generalization)
These events should satisfy or provide the necessary conditions for learning and
serve as the basis for designing instruction and selecting appropriate media
(Gagné, Briggs & Wager, 1992). Application
While Gagné's theoretical framework covers all aspects of learning, the focus of
the theory is on intellectual skills. The theory has been applied to the design of
instruction in all domains (Gagné & Driscoll, 1988). In its original formulation
(Gagné, 1 962), special attention was given to military training settings. Gagné
(1987) addresses the role of instructional technology in learning.

BENJAMIN SAMUEL BLOOM (February 21, 1913 – September 13, 1999)

He was an American educational psychologist who made contributions to the

classification of educational objectives and to the theory of mastery learning. He
is particularly noted for leading educational psychologists to develop the
comprehensive system of describing and assessing educational outcomes in the
mid-1950s. He has influenced the practices and philosophies of educators
around the world from the latter part of the twentieth century.

Bloom was born in Lansford, Pennsylvania, to an immigrant Jewish family. His

parents fled a climate of discrimination in Russia. Bloom's father supported the
family as a tailor.

Bloom studied at Pennsylvania State College and was awarded his bachelor's

and master's degree by 1935. He wished to study under Ralph Tyler, a
progressive educator, so he enrolled in the doctoral program in education at
the University of Chicago and assisted Tyler with the Eight-Year Study, which
evaluated alternative methods of school assessment.

Bloom earned his doctoral degree in 1942 and became a member of the
University of Chicago's Board of Examiners.

In 1956, Bloom edited the first volume of The Taxonomy of Educational

Objectives: The Classification of Educational Goals, which classified learning
objectives according to a rubric that has come to be known as Bloom's
Taxonomy. It was one of the first attempts to systematically classify levels of
cognitive functioning and gave structure to the otherwise amorphous mental
processes of gifted students Bloom's Taxonomy remains a foundation of the
academic profession according to the 1981 survey, "Significant Writings That
Have Influenced the Curriculum: 1906–81" by Harold G. Shane and the National

MAED 303 – PSYCHO – PHILOSOPHICAL FOUNDATION OF EDUCATION

Society for the Study of Education. Bloom's 2 Sigma Problem is also attributed to
him.

Aside from his work on educational objectives and outcomes, Bloom also
directed a research team that evaluated and elucidated the process of
developing exceptional talents in individuals, shedding light upon the phenomena
of vocational eminence and the concept of greatness.

Bloom's taxonomy is a set of three hierarchical models used to classify

educational learning objectives into levels of complexity and specificity. The three
lists cover the learning objectives in cognitive, affective and sensory domains.
The cognitive domain list has been the primary focus of most traditional
education and is frequently used to structure curriculum learning objectives,
assessments and activities.
The models were named after Benjamin Bloom, who chaired the committee of
educators that devised the taxonomy. He also edited the first volume of the
standard text, Taxonomy of Educational Objectives: The Classification of
Educational Goals.

III. REFERENCE/S:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_M._Gagn%C3%A9
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Ausubel
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Bloom#:~:text=Board%20of
%20Examiners.-,Works,be%20known%20as%20Bloom's%20Taxonomy.

VIII. ABOUT THE DISCUSSANT:

I graduated from the University of Caloocan City
with the degree of Bachelor in Elementary
Education. Have been teaching for more than a 15
years from both private and public schools. An
assigned Guidance Teacher of our school,
Caloocan North Elementary School. Performing
this task is quite challenging on my part since I
don’t have a formal knowledge or study about
guidance and counseling. However, with the help
of various capacity building seminars I attended I
was able to carry out its duty. Furthermore, with the
knowledge I gained for this subject (PSYCHO–PHILOSOPHICAL FOUNDATION

MAED 303 – PSYCHO – PHILOSOPHICAL FOUNDATION OF EDUCATION

OF EDUCATION) somehow gives me an opportunity to capacitate myself even
more.

MAED 303 – PSYCHO – PHILOSOPHICAL FOUNDATION OF EDUCATION