Gagne's Nine Events of Instruction

Gagne's Nine Events of Instruction is an instructional design framework developed by educational psychologist Robert Gagne, most fully set out in his 1965 book The Conditions of Learning, proposing a sequence of nine external instructional events that a teacher or course designer should provide to support the internal cognitive processes a learner needs to move information into long-term memory. The nine events are gaining attention, informing learners of the lesson's objective, stimulating recall of prior learning, presenting the new content, providing guidance for learning, eliciting performance through practice, providing feedback, assessing performance, and enhancing retention and transfer through varied practice and application. Gagne grounded the sequence in his broader theory that different types of learning outcome, such as verbal information, intellectual skills, cognitive strategies, attitudes and motor skills, require somewhat different internal conditions to be learned, and the nine events framework has remained a widely taught reference model in instructional design and teacher training for structuring an individual lesson from opening to close.