Intellectual Skills
Intellectual skills, formerly known as procedural skills, is the most clear-cut way to identify the learner’s preparedness. They include concepts, rules and procedures (Gagné, 1984). Rules and concepts are typically derived from simpler rules and concepts. In simpler rules and concepts lie the essential prerequisites for learning new intellectual, more complex skills. Intellectual skills are involved in the application of real-world scenarios (Gagné, 1984); it is knowing how to do something.
Verbal Information
Verbal information, or declarative knowledge, is seen when the learner is able to declare or state what he or she has learned. Declarative knowledge is made up of organized and meaningful categories that can be recalled in a variety of ways by the learner (Gagné, 1984). In this category, previously learned information aids the learning of new information (Gagne, 1980); it is the organized body of knowledge that we acquire.
Cognitive Strategies
Gagné defines cognitive strategies as enabling learners to “exercise some degree of control over the processes involved in attending, perceiving, encoding, remembering, and thinking” (Gagné, 1984). In other words, the student employs personal ways to learn, think, guide, and act. Instructional design which promotes internal and external learning activities is the core of Gagné’s cognitive perspective (Richey, 2000).
Motor Skills
Simply put, this learning involves seeing how the learner is able to carry out steps of a motor performance, or procedure, in proper order; it is the combining of part-skills (Billings & Halstead, 2012; Gagne, 1980), or hands on nursing skills. When gradual improvements in the smoothness and timing of the movement are gained through practice then the skill is defined as a motor skill (Gagné, 1984).
Attitude
Attitudes are inferred internal states that cannot be observed directly and sometimes described as having emotional and cognitive components; they influence behavior (Gagné, 1984). It is the attitude, or bias, that affects the learner’s action toward something or someone.
These five learning outcomes, each requiring a different type of instruction, can be a useful guide for instructors. Instructors can creatively incorporate these learning outcomes in their problem solving strategies that engage higher levels of thinking. Varying the conditions of Gagné's five types of learning can increase learner outcomes.
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