From Conditioning to Connectivism: How Learning Theory Developed

Ivan Pavlov published his findings on this reflex-based learning procedure in 1897 while studying digestion in dogs, discovering that a neutral sound could come to trigger salivation once repeatedly paired with food.

B.F. Skinner formalized this account of consequence-shaped behavior across the 1930s to 1950s, building on Thorndike's earlier law of effect and delivering programmed instruction through his own teaching machines.

Frederic Bartlett's 1932 book Remembering first showed that people reconstruct memories by fitting them into existing mental structures shaped by prior experience, rather than retrieving them directly.

Lev Vygotsky developed this idea of the gap between what a learner can do alone and with guidance in the early 1930s; it reached English-language readers only posthumously, in the 1978 book Mind in Society.

A committee chaired by Benjamin Bloom first published this hierarchy of cognitive learning objectives in 1956, ordering thinking skills from simple recall through to complex evaluation and creation.

Albert Bandura's Bobo doll experiments of the early 1960s showed children imitating an adult's aggression toward an inflatable doll with no reward of their own involved; he formalized the theory in 1977.

Malcolm Knowles introduced this theory of adult learning into English-language education from 1968 onward, though the word itself had been coined earlier, by the German educator Alexander Kapp in 1833.

Developmental psychologist John Flavell introduced this term in the 1970s for awareness of one's own thought processes, later divided into metacognitive knowledge and metacognitive regulation.

Jerome Bruner and colleagues introduced this term in a 1976 study of mothers helping young children solve a construction puzzle, building directly on Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development.

Howard Gardner first proposed this theory of eight distinct intellectual abilities in his 1983 book Frames of Mind, challenging single-score IQ models of intelligence.

John Sweller developed this account of working-memory demands in the late 1980s from research on problem solving, distinguishing intrinsic, extraneous and germane cognitive load.

George Siemens proposed this theory of learning for a networked digital age in a 2004 blog post, published as an article the following year, and tested it directly in 2008 by teaching an open online course to more than two thousand participants worldwide.