The foundation of Learning Design and Technology is rooted in the sound theoretical understanding of human learning, a subject about which we are constantly learning. The challenge “Apply systems thinking to instructional design and performance improvement projects” is shown in my final paper, “Designing with the Theories: Six Perspectives on Teaching How to Make Great Pie Crust.” The paper was written during my first class (EDCI 531, Learning Theory and Instructional Design) in my MSEd program at Purdue University and it made a lasting mark on me. The assignment required me to take on concrete task, in this case, making a pie crust from scratch, and provide instruction from six different theoretical perspectives, ranging from behaviorism to constructivism. The paper explores the merits of each perspective and examines the perspective’s methods which are appropriate to teach the instructional content.

Humans are learning constantly, about myriad things in myriad ways. However, not every learning context and learning content is suited for every delivery method. It is for this reason that an instructional designer should be knowledgeable about a variety of theoretical perspectives and the strategies, methods, and techniques that align with those theories. A skilled and practiced instructional designer is able to breakdown the design process into its constituent parts and choose a theoretical perspective that best serves the content, learners, and instructional project overall. This paper demonstrates the breakdown of the learning content and analyzes it piece by piece to determine how each theory would view instructional process. Instead of choosing a new learning activity for each theoretical perspective, the same learning activity (teaching how to make great pie crust) was applied to each perspective, allowing the strengths and differences in each theory to be highlighted and utilized.

Notably, included in the paper is one perspective that is not a theory, but is rather a framework: Gagné’s Nine Events of Instruction. Robert Gagné was an influential figure in psychology and the study of human learning. In his Nine Events of Instruction, we are provided a reliable framework, rooted in Cognitive Information Processing (Schunk, 2020), that engages learners and enhances learning, retention, and application. This paper dives into how Gagné’s Nine Events of Instruction could be applied to teaching a small group of teen/adult learners how to make great pie crust.

This paper represents a great deal in my journey through not just graduate school, but my ever-continuing pursuit of learning. One of the reasons I wanted to attend graduate school for Learning Design and Technology was to augment my understanding of theoretical and foundational instructional design ideas. The class that birthed this paper was focused entirely on learning theories, so the paper represents a renewed passion for the theoretical underpinnings of the field, as well as the practical impacts that theoretically sound design choices can make.

The creation of this paper pushed me to thinking of instructional design theory as a continuous system of sorts, where the theories themselves are related, often growing from their relationships to each other and branching off from each other’s ideas. But the theories are also unique and have distinctive features, making some more suitable for certain projects, as shown in how each can be applied to even the simplest of concrete tasks, like making great pie crust. As I move forward academically and professionally, I know that my own learning will never be complete. The theoretical foundation of our field is one of the things that attracted me to attending graduate school and it is one of the things that I will continue to study once completing my degree. The knowledge that there are multiple ways to learn and teach is a fascinating idea and it’s one that I will never stop learning about myself.

Schunk, D. H. (2020). Learning theories: An educational perspective (8th ed.). Pearson.