Week 9 - Instructional strategies for Affective learning and Problem-solving

Imagine yourself as an accountant and you are faced with an accounts related problem at work. Chances are, you would already have the solution to deal with the problem.

Now suppose someone else presents you with a financial problem, there might be some difficulty in solving the problem although the problem might be familiar or even similar to the ones you have been solving everyday.

This is an example of the limitations of cognitive strategies. As much as is about furthering your ability to apply previously acquired knowledge to solve unfamiliar problems, there are still areas that could not be conquoered.

Much of cognitive strategies suggest intuition as it involves a little element of risk taking. This is especially the case when there are other factors that are affecting the learning of cognitive strategies such as the structure, complexities and abstractness of problems.

As much as leaner’s have a pretty good grasps of cognitive strategies, there is a high chance that the might not be able to complete the tasks, which ultimately affects their feedback processes.

Moreover, individual differences tend to add to the confusion of difficulty level of the learning as each individual have different levels of prior knowledge with the subject in hand.

As such, at the end of learning, the tasks might still not be correctly completed, and yet the learner is already well acquainted with the problem solving skill.

Is this one of the reasons why Gagne does not treat this as a type of learning outcome?

Similarly, affective learning outcomes are not absolute. As such, learning outcomes should only be classified as desirable or other wise. There should not be a “right” or “wrong” answer due to the subjective nature of the problem.

This can be observed through the action verbs for affective outcome where they require a certain amount of prejudice or biases.

So once again, if problem-solving is not a learning outcome according to Gagne, can we say the same for Affective learning?
Seeing as both learning outcomes may not gurantee a correct completion of tasks.