Learning Pyramid

The Conscious Competence Learning Model dissects the development from being unskilled to being skilled into four discrete stages: unconscious incompetence (learners are unaware of the area of skill and/or their incompetence), conscious incompetence (develop an awareness of lack of skill or understanding), conscious competence (develop some level of fluency), and unconscious competence (able to use the skill without thinking about it).

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs categorizes and ranks human needs, based on the assumption that more basic needs must be met before on will be motivated to achieve higher-level needs. The model culminates with self-actualization, an excellence-oriented “metamotivation” mode that can only be engaged if all more basic “deficiency needs” are met.

Learning Styles Theories comprise dozens of discourses that purport to characterize and categorize ways that individuals take in information. The most popular versions focus on diverse perceptual preferences (e.g., hearing versus seeing), modes of engagement (e.g., active doing versus passive watching), and format of information (e.g., concrete versus abstract), but the spectra span such concerns as social structures, affective settings, and time of day.

Within Developmental Discourses, learning is understood as a recursively elaborative process rather than a linear accumulative one. Most Developmental Discourses focus on how learners’ key habits of perception and interpretation change amid predictable sequences of biological, psychological, and emotional transformation.

Folk Theories exist within every realm of human engagement. They are, in effect, uncritical and often-indefensible principles of action and interpretation that are woven through everyday language and broad cultural sensibilities. In effect, most of the past 150 years of research into learning has been focused on exposing Folk Theories and exploring more conscious and scientifically robust alternatives.

The DIKW Pyramid is a catch-all description of several models explicating the relationships among data (symbols, signals, unprocessed facts), information (useful, meaningful data), knowledge (information synthesized over time and across contexts), and wisdom (know-why, an extension of know-how).

Cognitivism is explicitly developed around the metaphor “brain as computer.” It thus focuses on how information is acquired, processed, and organized. Learning is seen in terms of integration of new information into existing structures through processes of internal codification.