Appraisal theories (Roseman and Smith, 2001) are psychological theories exploring how humans evaluate situations along a number of appraisal dimensions, many of which compare the situation to the current goals. We report on the application of appraisal theories to focus the learning of policies in complex domains via Soar 9’s built-in reinforcement learning mechanism. In addition, we describe h...

Faculty members in higher education are involved in many instructional design activities without formal training in learning theories and the science of instruction. Learning theories provide the foundation for the selection of instructional strategies and allow for reliable prediction of their effectiveness. To achieve effective learning outcomes, the science of instruction and instructional d...

BACKGROUND Online educational interventions to teach evidence-based practice (EBP) are a promising mechanism for overcoming some of the barriers to incorporating research into practice. However, attention must be paid to aligning strategies with adult learning theories to achieve optimal outcomes. METHODS We describe the development of a series of short self-study modules, each covering a sma...

Theories of associative learning are concerned with the factors that govern association formation when two stimuli are presented together. In this article we review the relative merits of the currently influential theories of associative learning. Some theories focus on the role of attention in association formation, but differ in the rules they propose for determining whether or not attention ...

Vocal learners such as humans and songbirds can learn to produce elaborate patterns of structurally organized vocalizations, whereas many other vertebrates such as non-human primates and most other bird groups either cannot or do so to a very limited degree. To explain the similarities among humans and vocal-learning birds and the differences with other species, various theories have been propo...

To develop intelligent systems to support collaborative learning (CL) is especially challenging in view of knowledge representation. Current knowledge concerning CL is based on various learning theories, which are always expressed in natural language and are particularly complex given the context of group learning where the synergy among learner’s interactions affect the learning processes and ...

This report presents current learning theories that relate to multimedia use. It is important to understand how these learning theories apply to the instructional environment that faculty find themselves teaching in today's classroom. Textual information is often presented concurrently with visual information, but the way they are presented can improve or hinder the learning process of novice s...

Knowledge’ is one of the main results of software engineering, software projects and software process improvement. During software engineering projects, developers learn to apply certain technologies and how to solve particular development problems. During the process of software improvement developers and managers learn how effective and efficient their development processes are, and how to im...