Gagne identifies five major categories of learning:

• verbal information: facts of knowledge
• intellectual skills: problem solving, discriminations, concepts, principles
• cognitive strategies: meta-cognition strategies for problem solving and thinking
• motor skills: behavioral physical skills
• attitudes: actions that a person chooses to complete

Learning tasks for intellectual skills can be organized in a hierarchy according to complexity:

• stimulus recognition,
• response generation,
• procedure following,
• use of terminology,
• discriminations,
• concept formation,
• rule application, and
• problem solving

Each different type requires different types of instruction. The theory outlines nine instructional events and corresponding cognitive processes:

1. Gaining attention (reception)/show variety of computer generated triangles
2. Informing learners of the objective (expectancy)/pose question: “What is an equilateral triangle?”
3. Stimulating recall of prior learning (retrieval)/ review definitions of triangles
4. Presenting the stimulus (selective perception)/ give definition of equilateral triangle
5. Providing learning guidance (semantic encoding)/ show example of how to create equilateral
6. Eliciting performance (responding)/ ask students to create 5 different examples
7. Providing feedback (reinforcement)/ check all examples as correct/incorrect
8. Assessing performance (retrieval)/ provide scores and remediation
9. Enhancing retention and transfer (generalization)/ show pictures of objects and ask students to identify equilaterals

Reference

Conditions of learning, Robert Gagne. In InstructionalDesign.org. Full text available here/ For more click here  or here or search: Gagne, R. (1985). The Conditions of Learning (4th.). New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

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