| Robert Mills Gagné | |
| Birth Date: | 21 August 1916 |
| Birth Place: | North Andover, Massachusetts |
| Death Place: | Signal Mountain, Tennessee |
| Field: | Psychology, educational psychology |
| Known For: | Conditions of Learning |
Robert Mills Gagné (August 21, 1916 – April 28, 2002) was an American educational psychologist best known for his Conditions of Learning. He instructed 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.
His work is sometimes summarized as the Gagné assumption: that different types of learning exist, and that different instructional conditions are most likely to bring about these different types of learning.
Robert Mills Gagné was born on August 21, 1916, in North Andover, Massachusetts. In high school, he decided to study psychology and be a psychologist after reading psychological texts. In his valedictory speech of 1932, Gagné professed that the science of psychology should be used to relieve the burdens of human life.[1]
Gagné received a scholarship to Yale University, where he earned his A.B. in 1937. He then went on to receive his Sc.M. and Ph.D. at Brown University where he studied the conditioned operate response of white rats as part of his thesis.[2]
His first college teaching job was in 1940, at Connecticut College for Women.
His initial studies of people 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.
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.[3]
Gagné's wife, Pat, was a biologist. They had a son, Sam, and daughter, Ellen. His non-professional pursuits included constructing wood furniture and reading modern fiction. In 1993, he retired to Signal Mountain, Tennessee, with his wife. Dr. Gagné was known to base his foundations on behaviorism.
Gagné's theory stipulates that there are several types and levels of learning, and each of these types and levels requires instruction that is tailored to meet the needs of the pupil. The focus of Gagné's theory is on the retention and honing of intellectual skills.[4] The theory has been applied to the design of instruction in all fields, though in its original formulation special attention was given to military training settings.[5]
In 1956, Gagné devised a system of analyzing different conditions of learning from simple to complex. According to Gagné, higher orders of learning are built upon the lower levels, requiring a greater amount of previous knowledge to progress successfully; final capability is analysed as comprising subordinate skills in an order such that the lower levels can be predicted for positive transfer of higher level learning.[6] The lower four orders focus on the behavioral aspects of learning, while the higher four focus on the cognitive aspects.[7] In his original study on instruction, Gagné attributed individual differences in learning.
When objectively analyzing the conditions for learning Gagné says, "Since the purpose of instruction is learning, the central focus for rational derivation of instructional techniques is the human learner. Development of rationally sound instructional procedures must take into account learner characteristics such as initiate capacities, experimental maturity, and current knowledge states. Such factors become parameters of the design of any particular program of instruction."[8]