In Comparing Pedagogical Stances I set out the defining elements of four 'learning theories':
- Traditional (A mix of Behaviourism and Information Processing)
- Individual Constructivist
- Social Constroctivist
- Sociocultural
In another post (Analysing 'learning theories') I identified strengths and weaknesses of each of these four pedagogical stances.
This post builds on that, arguing that sociocultural theory provides the best explanation of how people learn. The case for this rests on three points:
- The first is scope. Sociocultural theory can absorb the insights of the other three theories without being contradicted by them. It does not deny that:
- reinforcement shapes behaviour - it contextualises this within communities of practice.
- learners bring prior knowledge — it deepens this by noting that prior knowledge is always socially and culturally situated.
The reverse is not true: neither the Traditional stance nor either form of Constructivism can absorb Sociocultural theory's insights about situated cognition, identity, and tacit knowledge.
- The second is the transfer problem. This is the most telling test. A theory of learning that cannot explain why learning so often fails to generalise has a critical weakness. Sociocultural theory predicts that learning will not generalise, whilst none of the other three theories can account for the failure of transfer between contexts.
- The third is explanatory breadth. Sociocultural theory accounts for the widest range of learning phenomena:
- formal and informal learning,
- expert practice,
- cultural variation in what counts as learning,
- the development of identity through participation,
- the existence of knowledge that cannot be made explicit.
None of the other theories comes close to this range.
None of this means that sociocultural theory is complete. Its relative silence on the mechanisms of conceptual change is a genuine limitation. A full account of learning would probably need to include an explanation of the 'internal mechanisms of learning'. However, it is the strongest single framework that we currently have.
It is worth being explicit about what this argument is, and what it is not. It is an argument about explanatory power - about which theory best accounts for the phenomena of human learning as we observe it empirically and philosophically. It is not an argument that every school should adopt a sociocultural stance. That is a different issue. A school might legitimately conclude that its values and purposes are best served by a different stance. However, acknowledging this is quite different from pretending that all four theories explain learning equally well. They do not.