Educational Technology

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Sunio, Joan D.

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BSIE-AE-3A

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Robert M. Gagné

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Robert Mills Gagné (August 21, 1916 – April 28, 2002) was an American educational psychologist best known for his "Conditions of Learning". Gagné pioneered the science of instruction duringWorld 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 [reference?].

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.

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Biography

* 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]

* Scholarship to Yale University. Received A.B. in 1937.

* Graduate work at Brown University, where he studied "conditioned operate response" of white rats under various conditions as a part of his Ph. D. thesis.

* First college teaching job in 1940, at Connecticut College for Women. His initial studies of people rather than rats were interrupted by World War II.

* First year of war, at Psychological Research Unit No. 1, Maxwell Field, Alabama, where he administered and scored aptitude tests to choose and sort aviation cadets.

* Second year of war, at officer school...