Aspects of an Educational Learning Theory

Abstract

Contemporary cognitive science has created the possibility of an educational learning theory closely related to existing cognitive theories but operative at a higher level of description. Issues that must be addressed in developing such a theory are: How much of the external world should be included in cognitive descriptions, how to avoid degenerate functionalism, what needs explaining by an educational learning theory, and what its units of analysis should be. It is proposed that a constitutive problem for educational learning theory is the explanation of difficult learning. A unit of analysis called a contextual module is proposed and applied to this problem. An advantage of contextual modules is that they treat environmental situatedness as an emergent property resulting from reasonably well understood processes.